First-principles operating firm
I make a company AI-native and accelerate its growth, running the first-principles change playbook from inside Elon’s companies.
01 / The model
A founder knows their product better than anyone. Turning it into a company that grows fast is a different craft, and a relentless one. I take a real operating seat and bring that intensity: get to ground truth, challenge every assumption, raise the bar, and move at a pace most companies have never run at. Depending on where the company is, I build the commercial and operating engine, fix it, or accelerate it. That can be a founder turning a working technology into a company, or an established company that has stalled in scale-up. It is demanding, and it is how a company finds a gear it did not know it had. Then the team keeps running at the new pace.
I can put a rocket on the back of a great founder. Jorge Milburn
02 / Track record
First employee in Spain and Portugal, then ran the automotive business across EMEA, then Global Head of Growth on a direct board mandate.
Productivity per FTE up 3 to 5x. A 300-person direct team, around 2,000 indirect. Model Y became the best-selling car in Europe.
VP of Sales, then EVP of Sales and Operations at the humanoid-robotics company.
Embedded as commercial lead and strategic partner to the founder-CEO of a vertically-integrated European energy-hardware company. Sales roughly doubled in six to eight weeks, by simplifying and deleting. Building the operating system that replaces a fragmented third-party stack, so people and AI agents run the company from one system.
03 / How I think
A company is a set of forces. Every team, every process, every system is pushing in some direction. When they point different ways, the work cancels out and progress stalls. Most of the job is getting them aligned behind one clear goal. Some forces are dragging backward and need to be turned around. Some are missing and need to be built. Pointed together, the same company travels much further on the same energy. At my current client, that alignment roughly doubled sales in six to eight weeks.
04 / The method
One sequence, run on every process, programme, and bet. The order is the point.
Get to ground truth.
Walk the floor, read the raw data, talk to the people closest to the problem. The algorithm only works on what you have actually seen.
Challenge every requirement.
Do we even need this step? No sacred cows.
Delete what isn’t needed.
If in doubt, cut. You can add it back if something breaks.
Simplify what survives.
Every remaining step at its simplest form.
Accelerate the cycle.
Make what’s left faster.
Automate last.
Automating a broken process just breaks it faster.
05 / The arc
The arc is cumulative. Each stage depends on the one before it landing.
Start
Walk the floor and fix the foundations: the team, the pipeline, the numbers everyone trusts.
Ramp
Build the operating engine. The work that was stuck starts moving.
Sharpen
Run the algorithm at scale, and put AI into the core of how the company runs, so a smaller team runs a bigger company.
Scale
Growth stops depending on headcount, and the pace holds after the build.
Full intensity through the build, to deliver the bulk of the impact. Then I stay close, as a fractional executive or board member. By then I know the business from the inside, and I use that to help with the decisions, the hires, and the next stage of growth.
06 / About
I’m Jorge Milburn. I was born in Uruguay and I’m based in Amsterdam. I studied economics at St Andrews, then spent a decade learning to scale hard companies: nine years at Tesla, from the first person on the ground in Spain and Portugal to Global Head of Growth, then commercialising humanoid robots at 1X.
I’m a builder by instinct. As a kid I took apart RC cars to see how the actuators connected. I’m not an engineer. What I bring is the craft of turning a working technology into a company that grows fast, and the agency to do it from inside.
I work with a few companies at a time, deeply. I also co-own and help run Physical Studio, a physiotherapy practice in Amsterdam, so I build and run businesses with my own hands.
Ride the wave,
or be out-built.
07 / The thesis
The story of human progress is the story of technology: each wave of better tools raised how we live and what we can do. We are in the fastest wave yet.
Technology is how life gets better.
The gains in health, food, energy, and knowledge came from better tools. Optimism is the rational position.
The biggest opportunity, and the biggest risk.
AI resets what a company can do, and what its competitors can do to it. Every company chooses. Standing still is the risk.
Speed is the differentiator.
How fast you put the tools to work, and the change that takes.
The most important thing is to do.
Actions create new information. Failing accelerates learning.
The world of atoms still holds.
The most durable value is in companies that make and move real things. AI makes them faster.
Europe can build.
Great companies are built in Europe too. The talent, the engineering depth, and the resilience to build through hard cycles are all here.
08 / Fit
Get in touch
Tell me what you are building and where it is stuck.