Operator

“I think operator was just kind of below threshold in terms of the model capabilities. It was a cloud-based system that operated with computer use. It was slow. It wasn't fully accurate. It was like pretty painful to use. Some people got value, but it really wa…”

“The way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess. The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator, entrepreneur, Is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a we…”

“Usually when, you know, you're mentored by an operator, they're super strong technically, and, you know, they're going to be able to help you basically do what they did. But if you want to help someone play to their strength, then that's a little bit of a diff…”

“A lot of value gets created in companies. I think when you have like founder energy and like a really strong operator if you have only founder energy, you know, sometimes it's a little erratic and things go wrong. If you have only operators, I think you can ha…”

“Hey, this is a Bad setup for investors. Because we're reliant on operators to bring us the investment, we're not controlling our funnel of sourcing. Then we're giving up upside if things go well.”

“People that get health and safety right tend to be the best operators long-term.”

“As long as it's repeatable and reliable forecasting of how long, how much notice do I have to give it, because everything has notice, how long can I run it, And then, what do I need to know about it afterwards, and when can I run it again? That's what they nee…”

“And I think the more dangerous investors I've seen are people who come from capital and think they can operate and that can be very toxic.”

“Because we had been working on computer usage, but I think it was hard to finally get the model to actually, without like the multimodal capabilities to really support it, like you couldn't have something like Operator when it launched.”

“The more important of the two for any success, like getting from zero to one is the operator. But then I think the ceiling of your possible success is a function of the conceptual thinker.”

“I signed up for the 200 dollar a month plan from OpenAI to be able to try out operator, and I unsubscribed. I think it's useful but I definitely am gonna wait it's like 20 dollars a month of value for me, not 200”

“And so I think as that starts to happen, I would really expect that this year you're able to use operator or whatever the equivalent agent is to start booking flights and doing a lot of these more mundane tasks.”

“Operator and deep research seem more like prod like a party trick than an actual application right now. And I guess it might be useful in some maybe obscure data entry case, but These companies are already using, like, macros and robotic process automation, an…”

“And then we're also launching our computer use tool. So this is the tool behind the operator product in ChatGPT. So that's coming to developers today.”

“Operator actually uses a different approach. They use VNC.”

“I think it's going to be really hard for a company like OpenAI to do things like support CAPTCHA solving or like have proxies. Like, I think it's hard for them structurally. Imagine this New York Times headline, OpenAI CAPTCHA solving. Like, that would be a pr…”

“Operator is mesmerizing. And useless. Deep research is fantastic.”

“Yeah, I think I mean, it's only a matter of time, by the way, before operator adds voice anyways. They won't have to stitch it together with other voice agents.”

“The biggest problem in the creator economy is like operators. It will continue to be the biggest problem. Like, people are growing and getting more opportunities than they can handle.”

“Unconventional Oil wells, they produce relatively small volumes of associated natural gas, and they produce it for a relatively short amount of time. The volume decreases quite rapidly, as does with oil, right? And so they don't have, the operators don't have …”

“That's part of the reason why I think that operators are not necessarily the best investors.”

“I think it would be better and more interesting if it were because I think that most of the advice that I've gotten the most out of is from existing founders or former founders or operators. Like they're the ones that have lived in those shoes. They're the one…”

“It's probably as a whole super overrated for creators, but I think it's okay. I think it's underrated for like operators. I think it's a cool opportunity for like the operator to like start something cool.”

“Pretty early on, you've got to also go and balance the board of investors with operators, because sometimes the conversation can become really very financial. It becomes very investor centric as a board conversation versus company centric. And a board is reall…”

“And I think what's actually interesting is there's some operators that are very good at their operating job that I think would be worse founders than some bad operators. Right. And I've like found this. So let me explain that a little bit further. There are pe…”

“You have to hire an operator, i.e. If you're serious about it, you need someone to kind of lead. If there's no owner, nothing will get shipped.”

“To be a good operator, you have to really stay on one thing with a kind of a singular focus for a prolonged period of time, and you also have to deal a lot with people, and I'm not really a people person at the end of the day.”

“You're a spectacular investor of half your companies create, you know, create value, which means half your companies don't create value, and that hit rate If you're batting 500 as an operator, you're an ex-operator.”

“That's something that you're definitely going to see coming up in the next year is, is creators themselves creating kind of like their co-founder relationships and then finding an operator to be a third co-founder.”

“I think the biggest mistake operators make when they give advice to founders is it's purely out of the lens of their experience in the environment and the circumstances with the tools and the capabilities that they had available to them. And all those macro th…”

“I think the biggest mistake operators make when they give advice to founders is it's purely out of the lens of their experience in the environment and the circumstances with the tools and the capabilities that they had available to them. All those macro things…”

“And the best starters typically aren't the best operators.”

“If they start solving your problems, they're, it's a really good indicator that they're a good operator.”

“This is why I actually think this is a better path than what used to happen, which is all the great operators turned into VCs, but to capitalists, right? And there you're like pretty disconnected from the ops. I think this advisory type path, I'll leave the cr…”

“So even before choosing the partners that you want with you around the table, my number one advice would be to think what VC, what advisor, what angel, what operator has the network that I need to actually unlock some customers.”

“The operator is excellent at scaling teams, driving cross-org alignment, and unblocking execution. And the operator superpower is communication. On the other hand, one of their challenges is actually original product insight.”

“It is nearly impossible for an operator to solely or mainly bring your product to product market fit. Now, it can happen, but it's extremely rare, and you should not bank on it.”

“Having somebody on your board, a coach, a mentor, somebody who's helping you formally to think through those issues from a lens of, I've done this, and I know what it takes to get from 50 to a hundred, to a 152 hundred million in revenue, it's very different t…”

“I think we are working with almost 30,000 customers globally. We are working with almost 800 operator, plus two 60 operator as a direct partner.”

“The two spots are kind of six months in and two years in. At the six month in mark, it's kind of, what am I doing exactly? Especially for a lot of people that come into venture, they show up for their first Monday or whatever, and they literally have nothing t…”

“The other hump comes around two years in where most people after, you know, long operating careers, it's kind of a relief not to have to like drive and make decisions every day and be in that machine. But after a couple of years for a lot of people, that charm…”

“When you're a board member, you're asked to approve Or advise on the basis of having about 10% of the data you're used to having as an operator.”

“That operators don't make good VCs. That's what I believe. I think it's really tough to have two CEOs in the boardroom. I think CEOs, when things work well for them, they're so used to repeating that, and sometimes it can work for another founder, but it's oft…”

“Just because, you know, you were an operator in X space doesn't make you the greatest investor in that space”

“If you're an operator at an interesting, you know, hot tech company, it's fairly easy to become a scout for a VC fund.”

“So, I mean, I think the whole operator is going to go away over time, like with cloud, with tools like... Yeah, I think it's going to, I think, like, we're going to go towards a world where a lot of that stuff is autonomous.”

“When you get to know operators, they're incredible entrepreneurs that have been trained up, But thrown into battlefield situations where it's like my training didn't tell me about that, and they are constantly problem solving and creating new things and using …”

“I mean, I would say that this is the biggest difference between a venture capitalist and an operator. You have to figure out how to spend the most amount of time with the companies that need you least, and the least amount of time with companies that need you …”

“Being a board member for somebody who's been an operator, the hardest thing to do is to realize that you're not in charge anymore.”

“When an operator approaches a mountain in his path, his immediate thought is like, how do I scale it or tunnel through it or walk around it? But the presence of the mountain is an immediate challenge that an operator's mind starts spinning on how to solve that…”

“Hiring operators is really difficult in particular, because their networks tilt more senior.”