The Moment I Noticed the Pattern

Last summer, I was in a room in Palo Alto helping a seed-stage startup pitch VCs at a demo day. I wasn't the founder. I wasn't the engineer who'd built the agent. My job, officially, was Strategy and Operations intern. But the thing I'd actually spent the summer doing was running 18 client feedback calls, turning three of them into signed MVP agreements, and convincing one anchor client to release 300 live accounts for testing. By the time we got to the investor pitch, my job was to take all of that and turn it into a narrative: here's the traction, here's the competitive position, here's why this is ready. We closed a $3.5M seed round a few weeks later.

Somewhere in the middle of that pitch, I had a strange thought: I've done this exact job before. Not the AI agents, not the SaaS renewals. The job underneath the job — finding the overlap between what one side needs and what the other side can give, building something concrete enough that both sides will sign it, then explaining to a skeptical room why it's real. I'd been doing that, in different clothes, for six years.

Five Jobs That Were Secretly the Same Job

I started a company before I understood what any of this was called. In my last two years of undergrad, I bootstrapped a SaaS tool that gave enterprises workflows to manage their channel partners — literally a partner relationship management platform. I was 20 years old building software to help other people run partnerships, without clocking that the muscle I was developing — figuring out how to structure a relationship so both sides keep showing up — was the actual skill, not the software. We got to 10 customers and $50K in ARR before I sold it at a 6x multiple and went to work for someone else.

At Tagteam, a computer vision startup, I was technically "Operations and Solutions Lead." What that meant in practice was defining how we'd enter new markets — which meant customer segmentation, competitor analysis, and partnership prioritization, then actually launching operations in Korea and Indonesia on the back of those partnerships. I commercialized solutions by shaping deal structures, not by writing code.

At Resource Global Professionals, I was a solutions consultant, which sounds like architecture work, and some of it was. But the $9.3M in annual revenue behind my name existed because I was in rooms defending pricing against C-suite pushback — translating what we could build into something a buyer would actually sign.

At Deloitte, I was staffed on agentic AI transformation, which sounds like the most technical job on this list. The part I was best at, and the part that grew our practice to $8M, was qualifying 15 opportunities across government and financial services clients and turning the ones that mattered into business cases that a client's leadership would actually fund. The AI was the product. The business case was the job.

And then Pareto Agent, where the pattern finally got loud enough that I couldn't ignore it.

What the Pattern Actually Is

Lay those five roles side by side and the job titles stop mattering. In every one of them, the work I gravitated toward — and the work that produced the results worth putting on a resume — was the same three moves: find where two parties' interests genuinely overlap, build something specific enough that both sides can commit to it, and defend that commitment to whoever's skeptical, whether that's a client's CFO, a partner's legal team, or a room full of VCs.

That's not consulting, exactly, though I've done a lot of consulting. It's not sales, though I've negotiated plenty of deals. It's not strategy in the abstract, though I'm specializing in it at Kellogg. It's strategic partnerships — the function that exists specifically to sit at the seam between two organizations and make sure the seam holds. I spent six years doing that function under five different job titles before I had a name for it.

There's a version of this essay that frames the realization as sudden — the demo day, the lightning bolt. It wasn't, really. It was more like finally being handed the right label for something I'd been pattern-matching against for years, the way you can recognize a face long before you remember the name. Founding Vency Tech taught me what it feels like to be the smaller, hungrier side of a partnership, needing the bigger company to take a chance on you. Every role since has taught me what it takes to be on the other side of that table, structuring something the smaller, hungrier company can actually build a business on.

Why This, Why Now

I went back to school to specialize in strategy because I wanted the formal vocabulary for what I'd been doing by instinct — and because I wanted to be deliberate about the next version of this instead of discovering it five jobs from now. Strategic partnerships roles are where that vocabulary gets used daily: not writing the strategy and handing it off, but being the person who turns a strategic rationale into a signed, working relationship between two companies that otherwise had no reason to trust each other.

I don't think I decided on this career so much as I finally read the data I'd already generated. The roles were never really about SaaS renewals, or underwriting workflows, or IT asset governance. They were about the agreement underneath each of those things — the part where two sides decide to actually work together, and someone has to make that decision hold. I want to be the person who makes it hold, on purpose, as the job, instead of as the thing I kept doing on the side of five other jobs.