Join the Operating by John Brewton Community
For Strategists, Founders, and Operators Building Companies That Endure
This year, Operating by John Brewton has explored the history, strategy, and future of the world’s greatest companies.
We’ve analyzed Andrew Carnegie’s unprecedented wealth accumulation during the Industrial Revolution, examined Andy Grove’s execution frameworks that built Intel, dissected Walmart’s strategic repositioning from wage suppression to worker investment, and studied Zapier’s remarkably flat organizational structure.
We’ve explored how AI is flattening organizational hierarchies, traced the intellectual thread from Schumpeter’s creative destruction through Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma to Thiel’s zero-to-one framework, and applied Porter’s Five Forces to modern operating challenges.
Today, I’m excited to formally announce the paid subscription tiers that make this deep research possible, and invite you to join a growing community of operators, founders, and strategists building the companies of tomorrow.
Why Paid Subscriptions?
This newsletter has always been about rigorous research into how companies actually work. That takes time, hours spent researching and connecting patterns across decades of corporate strategy. Paid subscriptions enable me to dedicate more time to the research you value, while building something more valuable than a newsletter: a community of operators learning from history and one another.
What Paid Subscribers Get
📬 3x Weekly Operating Notes
Short, actionable insights on corporate strategy, operating excellence, and business history delivered to your inbox. These aren’t surface-level takes—they’re the product of deep research into how companies actually operate, compete, and win.
📊 Epic Operating Resource Articles
Exclusive access to comprehensive case studies and frameworks that connect historical operating models to modern challenges. Think articles like the Carnegie-Sloan-Grove comparative analysis: deep-dive resources you can reference and apply to your own operating challenges.
💬 Paid Subs-Only Chat & Operating Working Group
Direct access to me and a community of operators tackling real challenges. This is where the conversation goes deeper—where you can test ideas, get feedback, and learn from peers who are in the trenches building and operating companies.
🎙️ Quarterly Live Operating Q&A
Community working sessions where we break down current strategies, dissect operating decisions, and answer your questions in real-time. These sessions are about applying historical lessons to present-day challenges.
A Recent Example: “The Optimization Company” Series
Just this week, I published a comprehensive analysis that exemplifies what paid subscribers get: “The Optimization Company”—a deep dive examination of Amazon’s transformation strategy from Q4 2023 through Q2 2025.
The free article provided rigorous analysis of Amazon’s financial performance: operating margins quintupling from 2.4% to 11.5%, $118 billion in annual capital expenditure (40% increase), free cash flow compressing 60% from $50 billion to $20 billion, and internal projections to avoid hiring 600,000+ workers by 2033. It included five custom data visualizations showing margin expansion across segments, automation economics, the capital intensity trade-off, and workforce projections. Readers got a complete picture of what Amazon is doing and why Wall Street reacted with confusion—sending the stock down 8.3% despite a 26% earnings beat.
But for paid subscribers, the story went deeper.
I created three exclusive companion pieces that placed Amazon’s strategy in the context of business history’s greatest operators:
“When Amazon Channels Carnegie: Capital Intensity and the Competitive Moat” – How Andy Jassy’s $118 billion capex strategy directly mirrors Andrew Carnegie’s 1870s-1900s industrial playbook: vertical integration, relentless self-disruption, treating fixed assets as continuously depreciating infrastructure, and achieving 79% cost reduction through obsessive capital deployment. This piece showed how capital intensity creates time-based moats competitors cannot cross—a lesson as relevant today as in the age of steel.
“Alfred & Amazon: When Structure Becomes Strategy” – A deep-dive into how Amazon’s business segment model reflects Alfred Sloan’s “coordinated decentralization” that built GM into the world’s largest corporation. This wasn’t just history—it was a masterclass in how organizational architecture itself becomes competitive advantage, how to balance autonomy with control, and how cross-subsidization from high-margin businesses (AWS at 38% margins) enables transformation investments that would destabilize less sophisticated organizations.
“Only the Paranoid Survive: Amazon’s Strategic Playbook from Andy Grove” – An exploration of why Jassy announced layoffs and massive automation investments while reporting record profitability. The answer lies in Andy Grove’s Intel doctrine: strategic inflection points are visible before they’re urgent, and companies that act from strength rather than crisis define markets. This piece revealed the operating principles behind Grove’s memory-to-microprocessor pivot and showed how Amazon is executing the same playbook in real-time.
Together, these four pieces represented over 15 hours of research-driven analysis, connecting 150 years of business history to a current strategic inflection point. Paid subscribers didn’t just learn what Amazon is doing, they learned why it works, how it’s been done before, and what principles they can apply to their own operating challenges.
This is the kind of work paid subscriptions make possible: not just commentary on current events, but rigorous synthesis of business history, financial analysis, and strategic frameworks you can actually use. Every major piece I publish follows this pattern, comprehensive free analysis that stands on its own, plus exclusive deep-dives for paid subscribers that provide historical context, strategic frameworks, and actionable lessons.
For Operating Founders: An Even Deeper Partnership
If you’re currently operating a company—whether you’re a founder, CEO, or in an operating leadership role—the Operating Founder tier offers something unique:
🤝 Quarterly 1:1 Operating Sessions with John
Four 30-minute private sessions per year to work through your specific operating challenges. Think of these as strategic operating sessions where we can discuss your actual challenges, apply historical frameworks, and think through decisions together.
This tier is designed for operators who want more than content—who want a thinking partner familiar with how the greatest operators in history approached similar challenges.
The Investment
Monthly: $17/month
Annual: $95/year (save 54%)
Operating Founder: $550/year (includes quarterly 1:1 sessions)
The annual plan offers significant savings and is the choice of most committed subscribers—a full year of research-driven insights and community access for less than the cost of two business books.
What This Means for Free Subscribers
Free subscribers will continue receiving thoughtful, well-researched content. I’m not putting everything behind a paywall—this newsletter has always been about sharing knowledge, and that won’t change.
What paid subscriptions enable is more: more depth, more frequency, more interaction, and a dedicated space for serious operators to learn together.
Join the Community
Operating companies is one of the hardest, most consequential things humans do. Whether you’re building a startup, running a division of a Fortune 500, or studying business strategy, you deserve access to rigorous research and a community of people taking the work as seriously as you do.
That’s what this community is for. I’d be honored to have you join us.
Thank you for supporting this work. For those who’ve already upgraded to paid—thank you for making this possible. For those considering it—I’m excited to go deeper with you.
- John 🤓🙏🏼
P.S. If you’re on the fence, start with the free Amazon series and see if the depth and rigor resonate. Then imagine getting that level of analysis 3x per week, plus exclusive deep-dives, plus direct access to the community. That’s what you’re subscribing to, not just content, but a fundamentally different way of understanding how companies work.
