Did “operator” leak into SV discourse from special forces terminology or is it unrelated?
Noting a microtrend of militarized larp-talk leaking into civilian life. Uvalde cops not the only ones playing dress up.
Newbie OODA fans also seem to gravitate to larp-talk over concepts
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Fwiw, the closest pacifist civilian translation of “OODA loop” is “mindfulness” not “tacticool larp”…
Not just my opinion. agreed with me on this once when we chatted about this ~10y ago
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Trying to think of other examples. There’s a breed of executive that affects a whole style/persona with military overtones. Often from ops side with some insecurities on creative vision side of leadership traits. Usually no military background, but definite military affect.
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Huh, would not have guessed
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Replying to @vgr
Oh man the film industry is chock full of this stuff. Terms like bogie, basecamp, comms, company move, saying “copy that” over radio, calling regular household items like clothespins “c-47s”. The list goes on and on
kincadeproductions.com/glossary-film-
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Used to be ~6-7y ago, but it started turning into a term of approbation a few years ago. I suspect the task of deploying unnecessarily huge piles of capital due to overcapitalization made operator personalities attractive.
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If you need to experiment with 50 scooters in 2 cities to figure out the market, you want a classic 2005 style founder. If you want to carpet bomb 50 cities with 10,000 scooters with no clue how to make it work, because SoftBank gave you too much MbS money, you’re an “operator”
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Replying to
Empirically it seems to have emerged due to the increased crossover between investors and management. Rise of blurry positions that are sort-of-CEO sort-of-Board-Chair sort-of-Investor. The actually managing the org part is called “operations”.
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