An interview with Sharon Winter, Vice President at Atomic
Sharon builds companies at Atomic from the 0–1 phase leading teams from idea to product-market fit. Before joining Atomic, she started eight companies across multiple industries, with two exits, and one company that achieved $4 million ARR in its first year of operations. Sharon studied industrial and robotics design and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon, before launching into her journey of building companies in parallel.
Here, she gives her perspective on the importance of Atomic’s business operations (BizOps) function and what it takes to succeed as “central command” working with her and Atomic’s team of builders.
Want to join the team? Apply now!
What is the business operations (BizOps) role at Atomic?
The person in this role is really the lynchpin to our 0–1 building team in helping us take a business from an idea to product market fit and then transition it into a full-time team’s hands. Being a BizOps team member is a lot like being a founding team member because you’re involved in every aspect of company building across multiple functions, from product building and research to engineering and design. It’s a great way to get hands-on experience in entrepreneurship because you’re part of a team of serial entrepreneurs who guide you along the way.
How does the BizOps role work?
You are deeply involved in three or four of Atomic’s new companies, and you’re paired with an Atomic VP and a Founder In Residence (FiR) who will work with you throughout the entire process and guide you along the way. There are four main areas that you’ll focus on:
Idea Validation: Identify key metrics and perform first-hand research to test ideas with everything from customer interviews and surveys to shadowing industry experts.
Project management: You’ll coordinate the entire process from idea to finding product market fit. That includes testing and validating concepts through developing business models and partnering with Atomic’s engineering, design, growth, and finance teams.
Assembling teams: You will learn how to assess each startup’s talent needs and help identify and recruit early team members. Being involved from the ground up means you know where the challenges lie and what talent profiles will best suit each company. You will advise the recruiting team on the skill sets needed that will maximize each company’s chance of success.
Discovery: In the process of testing ideas, we frequently uncover additional untapped “white spaces.” You will be in a position to identify the true opportunity, which is often different from what we started with, and you will have the chance to pitch the idea back to our Investment Committee.
What do you want people to know about the role?
This is a great role if you’ve always wanted to start your own company but maybe you don’t have the right idea yet. The BizOps role is one of the best positions to see what happens behind the scenes of company building here at Atomic. Day to day, you work with a VP and a founder in residence, and you are part of a very close-knit team, but you also get to know everyone at Atomic because you’re managing projects across so many areas. So, for example, you’ll meet with growth marketing one hour; the next, you’re trying to solve a challenge with the engineering and design teams. We’re a very flat organization, so everyone rolls up their sleeves to help each other.
What’s it like to build at Atomic?
The ultimate goal is to get to product-market fit faster, so we spend most of our days validating ideas, building products, and testing product-market fit.
I like to start off using a beginner’s mindset, which helps you see a problem from a whole new perspective. I ask what may seem like very basic questions, “Why are we solving this problem in the first place?” and “why are we targeting this specific profile of customer?” The key to every successful product is that you are solving a real customer pain point.
After a few rounds of “problem validation,” the team may come to a few possible solutions, where we’ll build a roadmap and strategies and go through rounds of ideation. I think about testing distribution very early on. We’ll also go through a preliminary product exercise where we identify potential challenges and how to solve them.
What makes a good BizOps candidate?
We look for people obsessed with building with a track record of building products and businesses from scratch. We love people who get excited by hard problems and are willing to walk through walls to find solutions. Starting new companies defies the laws of physics; it takes massive dedication and resilience to build something from nothing and turn it into a revenue-driving business.
Many of our BizOps crew have been early founding team members, or they have built their own tech-driven businesses. We love people who know how to build using no-code/low-code, whether it’s to create a mobile app, a chrome extension, or automating Google sheets.
What’s a typical day in the life like for a BizOps team member?
Taken from the page of a BizOps team member’s calendar.
7:00 AM: Wake up, travel to and back from HIIT workout class in Miami. Check Emails and respond to Slack messages
8:30 AM: Carpool with Rustin to Wynwood — catch up on hack-y growth strategies and startup news
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM: Heads down, prep for client meeting with Jack at 3 PM
9:45 AM – 10:00 AM: Water-cooler conversation about using generative AI in healthcare with Phil, VP of Healthcare
10:00 AM – 10:30 AM: 1–1 with one of our Founders in Residence on how to test a new prototype we’ve been working on together
10:30 AM – Noon: Working on data wrangling with Python notebooks for a prototype B2B product we are working on
12:15 – 12:45 PM: Rooftop lunch with BizOps team after picking food up from The Taco Stand
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Advisory call with the CMO of a large B2B marketing company to understand the gap in the market for our product-market fit
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM: Plan the engineering work with our newest Engineer in Residence. Prioritizing product features and what I’ll be putting together before sending them off to her.
2:30 PM – 3:00 PM: Plan the week for the Go-to-Market with Ben Matlin, CRO and Operating Partner at Atomic, and another of our FiRs. Lay out high-level strategies on metrics for the next round of funding and the critical KPIs needed for it.
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM: Head down, organize, prototype, and research new B2B marketing ideas to drive our custom pilot projects
4:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Call with our third-party data vendor with questions and problems for the week
5:00 PM – 5:30 PM: Call with candidate interested in BizOps at Atomic
6:00 PM: Boxing at the park with team — hang out with the team mascot, our colleague’s dog Millie
