Why You Should Become an Operator: The Corporate Job Rebrand
How We're Building the New Corporate Future
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I grew up in an entrepreneurial household. My parents were building an industrial distribution company (I don’t think “scaling” was even in the vocabulary back then). One of my earliest memories is of the day my father came home excited that the company was making the jump to start selling cutting tools in addition to the sandpaper and grinding on which its early success had been predicated. I was the only first grader at my school who knew what a carbide insert was.
Building a business was all consuming. Every vacation, road trip, and weekend was fair game for work and talk about work. I listened intently and gradually learned to become part of the conversation. It was how I felt I belonged in my family. It has much to do with whom I am today.
Growing up watching a business run made economics sense in college. The microeconomic small business lens inspired my most imaginative graduate school questions. It’s ultimately why, with the encouragement of a professor and a good friend, I joined, learned, operated, optimized and then sold that business with my family over a thirteen year window.
I was a student at Harvard when Facebook was founded. I obsessively read Isaacson’s biography of Jobs like the Bible it was to all of us, and I became a devoted student of the new markets and companies that Silicon Valley spun up, mostly in the aftermath of Apple’s creation of the App Economy and Uber’s creation of the Gig Economy. It was a wonderful bit of history to experience in real time.
My industrial distribution company was definitely not a startup, but we were doing the same thing. The vocabulary was different. Small business had been rebranded in the mad dash to capture venture capital dollars. We didn’t have “product-market fit” or “blitz-scaling” in our lexicon; we just called it “get the renewal,” “land the new contract,”and “put out the fire.” We didn’t “iterate” or “pivot,” we adjusted our approach when something wasn’t working. If we were “crossing the chasm,” no one told us not to look down. We didn’t have founders, co-founders, or equity partners. We had me, my mother and father, a Senior Management Team (consisting of people who never been on one of those before), Inside Salespeople, Pick-Pack-and-Ship Specialists, and Inventory Management Analysts. We had teams who solved problems and then tried to build systems that would redouble those efforts.
Sell more stuff. Grab more margin. Build a better company.
Same Dream, Different Structure
The main differences were speed and capital structure. We didn’t have access to the steroids of venture capital cash, so our growth happened over decades instead of years. We had to be profitable year-over-year or the bank might not want to keep extending us our loans. That journey taught me everything today’s “operators” at venture-backed startups are learning: how to build systems that scale, hire and develop talent, manage cash flow, navigate competitive markets, and create lasting value.
My parents achieved their dream in industrial distribution over 45 years. Today that timeline seems impossible (unless your Jensen Huang), but operators are pursuing the same dream at venture-backed companies. Can you name me a startup team member who wouldn’t be thrilled by the prospect of the company becoming sustainable for 45 years?
Same dream.
Different logo. Different vocabulary. Different capital structure.
Same work.
What’s Actually Changing
The generation claiming to reject corporate America is actually participating in the largest corporate formation boom in history. We’re not leaving Fortune 500 companies. We’re building the next Fortune 500. We just call them “startups” because it sounds better.
Traditional corporate bureaucracy is collapsing under its own weight. Amazon just announced plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs, targeting massive automation of operations, and one in five U.S. employers plans to slow hiring in the second half of 2025. 177.444 layoff have been announced by Fortune 100 companies so far this year. The New York Times reports companies are adopting “AI-first” approaches, evaluating whether AI can do white-collar work before recruiting humans. Those reports that AI-Transformations aren’t succeeding seem to be wrong.
McKinsey’s 2024 Future of Work report projects that up to 30% of current work hours are automatable due to AI and generative technologies by 2030. Entry-level roles face displacement, but there is surging demand for operators who can leverage AI, scale systems, and drive execution.
Harvard Business Review research further confirms that venture capital firms now actively seek operator talent because operators bring systematic value-creation and organizational learning to every stage of company growth.
The Operator Advantage
Operating in today’s venture ecosystem offers something my parent’s generation couldn’t have fathomed: multiple at bats with asymmetric upside. Work with three to five startups over a decade, and you’re building a portfolio of equity positions with meaningful upside. Studies find that professionals starting at fast-growing startups quickly see salaries overtake corporate peers, with faster career progression and richer learning.
Promotion happens on ability, not seniority. My graduate professor’s recommendation that I go to work for my family’s business was backed by his assuredness of the influence and learning opportunity I would have in a small, growing organization. He was right. You can reach senior leadership in your late 20s or early 30s, roles that took decades to attain in traditional corporate structures. After startups find product-market fit, operator talent is crucial as headcount and complexity explode.
Portfolio careers, switching between companies, sectors, and capital structures, are rising fast. More than one-third of professionals now report multiple income streams, and portfolio careerists earn on average 30% more than their single-firm peers. For ambitious operators, optionality and compounded learning trump single-firm loyalty.
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The AI Amplification Effect: Why Elite Operators and Education Matter
This is where the future truly diverges from my parents’ era. The reason? AI amplifies the performance gap between star operators and everyone else.
A centerpiece of my thesis is substantiated by new Wall Street Journal coverage of Texas A&M Professor Matthew Call’s research. His recent peer-reviewed study in Human Resource Management finds that AI tools are not great levelers. Instead, they create a star system: “stars” extract disproportionate, compounding value from AI, while the average user sees more modest gains.
Why does this happen?
Domain expertise: Elite operators use better prompts, critically evaluate AI outputs, and integrate results more strategically.
Systematic work habits: Operators routinely bring structure and discipline to their work, so they create “multiplicative” (not just 20–40% additive) productivity with AI support.
Early experimentation and autonomy: High-status performers receive freedom to innovate with AI, building unique workflows that further differentiate their output from the average.
Call’s paper details the “AI-specific Matthew Effect”—observers attribute great AI-augmented work from stars to innate skill, while average workers’ similar output is credited to “AI did it.” This compounds both reputation and opportunity gaps.
Moreover, Brookings Institution research confirms that companies integrating AI are hiring more college-educated and postgraduate workers, while non-college employment shrinks. AI skills command 23–36% wage premiums, and the underlying cognitive adaptability needed to exploit AI’s full potential correlates with strong educational foundations.
This is a crucial, research-backed nuance: elite education and systematic operator skills are not just nice to have, they are the foundation for exponential leverage in the AI workplace. AI magnifies cognitive and structural advantages, driving widening gaps in performance and value capture.
The Three Operator Paths
The Stage Specialist: Expert at taking companies from one milestone to the next—building frameworks and repeatable systems, favored by venture investors for pattern recognition and speed.
The Long-Haul Operator: Grows with an early-stage company, evolving into executive leadership and becoming irreplaceable thanks to deep institutional knowledge.
The Portfolio Operator: Strategically directs operational expertise across several companies, leveraging personal AI tools for portability and autonomy and building a diversified portfolio of equity stakes.
Each route leverages operator strengths, and in an AI-accelerated economy, systematic execution and elite credentials multiply impact, mobility, and long-term wealth creation potential.
Build Your Portfolio Career
After thirteen years operating and then selling a company, my biggest lesson is that operators (those who combine education, discipline, and curiosity) will thrive fastest. The WSJ and Call’s research provide an urgent, evidence-based warning and opportunity: the age of AI is not leveling the playing field, but cracked it open for those prepared with the right skills and credentials.
You get to do the work I did in a very traditional environment (build systems, develop people, solve real-world problems), but now you should aim to do it across multiple companies, at higher velocity, and with better upside. The real risk is standing still.
The traditional corporate job is evolving. But operating itself is more valuable than ever, especially for those willing to learn, systematize, and leverage what these new computers we call AI are offering.
Don’t mourn the corporate ladder. Build your portfolio.
Become a star operator, and operate your career to the edge of what’s possible.
- john -
If you’d like to work together, I’ve carved out some time to work 1:1 each month with a few top-notch Founders and Operators. You can find the details here.
John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
There’s definitely a paradigm shift happening. Reading this took me back to my own evolution, from property manager to developer, then investor and asset manager. It aligns closely with the portfolio manager perspective you describe. I can relate to many of the parallels you mentioned.
Great story about your journey and your parents’ experience. You were clearly educated both by the academy and by the street.
This is a really insightful take on the rebranding of the corporate future and how the core work of a small business operator has just been given a shinier, venture-backed vocabulary.
I especially appreciated the distinction you made about the AI amplification effect.
Excellent read. It really shifts the perspective on what a "startup" really is.