Operating Partners · Issue #364 · Membership Prospectus · February 2026
Operating Partners is the paid tier of Yeu Tre Tho — a research desk, an audio library, and a private channel for the people who own decision quality at scaling B2B teams. Renewed at 91% across nineteen consecutive quarters. Reviewed, never auto-renewed.
Annual · $240/yr · Reviewed within 5 business days · No auto-renew
Membership / Definition
Operating Partners is built for a specific kind of reader: the ops lead, chief of staff, or product manager who treats how their team decides, meets, and ships as seriously as what the team ships. People who already know that how is a competitive moat, and that moats have to be maintained.
It is not a community in the Slack-and-celebrate sense. There is no leaderboard, no "weekly prompt," no engagement metric to optimize. It is three things, stated plainly:
That is the membership. It is small on purpose. The cap is 1,500; we are at 1,400 as of February 2026, and we will close the cohort rather than dilute it.
What's Inside
Weekly Drop · Tue 06:00 GMT
The full essay in your inbox before your first standup. The 30-minute audio lands at 12:00 GMT for the afternoon commute. Average issue length: 5,400 words. Average listen: 31 minutes. Average open rate across the last 26 issues: 51.2%, verified by independent ESP audit (Nov 2025).
Full Archive · 364 Issues
Eight years of continuous publication, zero off-weeks — including through two recessions and one global supply chain collapse. The Operating Systems series alone has been cited by Harvard Business Review (March 2023), The Atlantic's Work in Progress column (July 2022), and a 2024 Stanford GSB case study.
Research Desk · 4 Business Days
Submit a research request — a benchmark, a teardown, a vendor landscape — and our 3-person research desk returns a written memo within four business days. AI is not used in editorial production; every claim is checked against a primary source, and we publish a corrections log the same week an error is flagged.
Private Thread · Email, Not Discord
A low-traffic, email-based thread for the 1,400 members. Founders Mae Kowalski and Diego Ferreira read every message. Posts are tagged and archived in the searchable library. There is no public Discord, no #general, no reaction emojis.
By the Numbers · Audited where claims are made
1,400
Operating Partners members, capped at 1,500
91%+
Renewal rate, 19 consecutive quarters
4d
Turnaround on reader-submitted research
98.4%
Forensic-grade transcript accuracy, Q1 2024 audit
104,000+ free subscribers · $2.7M FY2025 revenue · 63% gross margin · Bootstrapped, no outside capital · Trusted by ops leaders at Notion, Linear, Mercury, Vanta, Webflow, and 2,300+ other B2B teams.
Operating Partners · In Their Own Words
"I cancelled four Substack subscriptions the week I joined. The Tuesday essay replaced my Tuesday-morning reading block, and the 30-minute audio replaced the two strategy podcasts I had been half-listening to on the way to the office. The first thing I asked the research desk was for a teardown of our QBR cadence — they came back in three days with a memo I still hand to new directors."
"Issue #271 — 'The Meeting Audit That Saved $4.2M' — is the single most photocopied document in our ops team. We use the meeting-cost template on the first page as a hiring-loop artifact for every new senior PM. It is not a generic newsletter. The authors have held P&Ls. The numbers are real numbers from real companies. That is the difference."
"What sold me was the corrections policy. Every claim links to a primary source, and when one is wrong, the correction runs in the same week. I had never seen a B2B publication take that seriously. Twelve months in, I have used the private thread twice — once to benchmark our vendor onboarding against three other members, once to ask Mae a direct question about how she staffs her research desk. Both replies came back inside a day."
Apply · Operating Partners Cohort 14
Applications are reviewed in the order they arrive. We return a decision within five business days. If accepted, you will receive an annual invoice — there are no auto-renewals, no surprise charges, and no engagement-bait onboarding sequence. The membership is a $240 annual subscription billed once a year, cancellable at any renewal.
Questions before you apply? Write to [email protected]. The Lisbon office is at Rua da Boavista 84, 1200-067 Lisboa, Portugal — but every conversation happens over email.
