About
Mara Quinn
Operator-turned-writer. Essays for people who have to make decisions on incomplete information and live with the result.
I spent most of the last decade as the second person at companies you’ve probably never heard of — first as Head of Operations at a healthcare scheduling startup, then as COO of a vertical software company that was either a brilliant wedge strategy or a terrible idea, depending on the quarter. I left full-time operating in early 2024 to write more honestly than I could when I was inside.
The essays here are written from the operator’s seat, not the strategist’s. I’m more interested in what actually happens on a Wednesday afternoon than in frameworks that hold up on a slide. If a piece works, it should make you feel slightly worse about a decision you’re currently making, and slightly better about your odds of recovering from it.
What I write about
Operating, not operations
How decisions actually get made inside a small company — the meetings, the artifacts, the rhythms, and the parts that never make it into the postmortem.
Hiring, honestly
What I got right, what I got wrong, and what I’m still not sure about after fourteen senior hires and several I’d like back.
The second year
Year one rewards founder energy. Year two punishes its absence. Notes on the years where the company stops being a story you tell and starts being a thing that has to work.
Boring infrastructure
The case for choosing tools, processes, and people you won’t have to write a postmortem about. Restraint as a strategy.
Writing has appeared in
- The Generalist
- Stratechery
- Every
- First Round Review
- Lenny’s Newsletter
“The only operator newsletter I forward to other founders without flinching. The version of these essays the rest of us are too tired to write.”Hana Park Founder, Atrium · ex-VP Eng, Stripe
“Three of these essays have ended up as agenda items at our leadership offsite. Mostly because they were less wrong than what we’d been telling ourselves.”Daniel Okafor CEO, Northstar Labs
Working together
I take on a small number of advisory engagements each quarter, mostly with seed and Series A companies trying to figure out how to operate without sliding into theatre. If that sounds like you, the shortest path is usually email.