The senior people who run Smarty. Each one has built and run real things in the real world. They use the platform you'd want — they made it, they ship on it, and they're accountable for what comes out the other side.
Most AI services are built on a fantasy: that the model can do the work, end-to-end, and the human is just there to clean up the edges. We've been building on AI long enough to know it's not true yet — and to know which parts of "yet" are short and which are long.
The short parts are getting shorter every week. The model is faster than the person at drafting, summarizing, retrieving, and routing. We lean into that. Every operator on our team uses AI for the things AI is now better at than they are.
The long parts are the ones that matter. Knowing which client wants what kind of email and when. Knowing when a vendor is bluffing on a quote. Knowing which board member needs the ask pre-flagged and which one wants to be surprised. Reading the room. Making the call.
That's what an operator brings. The AI does the work that scales. The operator owns the work that doesn't. You get both — accountable to one person.
Six years running ops at a YC-backed SaaS through scale. Ran the team that runs the team. Now does the same for the bench of operators that runs Smarty.
Built and sold a coaching platform; worked with founder coaches for ten-plus years. Knows the vertical from inside.
Four years EA to a Tier-1 VC partner; ran ops at three early-stage funds before Smarty. Has read every LP letter format that exists.
Senior consultant at a top-three strategy firm; spent four years writing the slides nobody reads and learning what makes the ones people read different.
VP Marketing at a Series-B fintech through their launch; ran content, brand, and growth from a team of one to a team of nine.
Senior product engineer at two scaled SaaS companies. Shipped three internal AI tools that ended up used company-wide. Builds the tools she'd want.
Every Smarty engagement has one operator who owns it. They know the business, the priorities, the people, the history. When something needs judgment, they make the call. When something can be delegated, they delegate to AI, to a tool we built, or to the right specialist on the bench. The client always knows who's accountable.
For each new engagement, the operator maps the client's existing workflows, identifies what should be AI vs. tool vs. human, and writes the SOPs the rest of the team executes against. The first few weeks of every engagement are mostly system design — and that work compounds for the rest of the relationship.
Operators don't just plan. They draft the email, run the QBR, file the invoice, brief the board, debug the workflow. AI handles the volume. The operator handles the moments where being wrong is expensive — and is in the platform every day to catch what AI missed.
When an operator finds a workflow that should be a tool, they file it. When a tool ships, every operator on the platform gets it. The bench gets sharper every week — because the people running the bench are the ones building it.
Every operator has been in the seat at a real company — usually a senior role at a startup, fund, or scaled business. We don't hire career consultants or full-time freelancers. We hire people who've owned outcomes.
Operators use AI for everything it's good at and refuse to trust it for what it isn't. Both halves matter. The over-eager prompter and the AI-allergic skeptic both fail in this seat.
The work is mostly communication: with clients, with vendors, with the AI sub-agents on each task. People who can't write a clear paragraph or run a clean meeting can't do this job.
Operators run engagements without their client in the room. We hire for the trait that makes someone's boss say "I never have to check their work."
We hire operators slowly and pay them well. The bar is high, the work is real, and you'll spend most of your day owning outcomes — not in meetings about owning outcomes.
Apply to be an operator