For OPERATORS

Take a Leading Role in Tomorrow’s Industrial Startups

Join a collective of experienced executives, entrepreneurs, and experts contributing to high-impact industrial and hard-tech ventures, on boards, operator boards, and selective investment opportunities.

Why Join Operators?

A Parallel Career Path
that makes a difference

Operators get access to meaningful work with ambitious founders, execution roles, and the opportunity to contribute where experience matters most, without leaving their full-time careers.

  • Contribute to Innovation

    Use your experience where it genuinely moves the needle. Operators help founders solve technical and commercial challenges across sectors like maritime, ocean, energy, and industrial tech.

  • Stay Current and Connected

    Work alongside other experienced operators, stay close to new technologies, and expand your network through real startup involvement, not hypothetical discussions.

  • Earn Through Contribution

    Operator roles come with aligned incentives and a structured execution model — not loose advisory work. You contribute through defined goals, real outcomes, and value that founders actually feel.

What You Can Do

Become An Operator

How It Works

A Simple Path to Start Working With Startups

Qualify

Tell us about your background and expertise. We look for at least two of six criteria, ensuring every operator adds value.

Get Matched

We match you to boards, operator boards, and investment opportunities based on experience, industry fit, and founder needs.

Contribute

Take on a well-defined operator or board role with clear goals, milestones, and incentives, fully aligned with founder success.

Who We Are

Meet The Team
Behind OPERATORS

We’re a small team with deep experience across our focus industries, supported by a growing collective of qualified Operators. Together, we bring the structure, governance, and execution standards that make this model work.

  • Portrait of a middle-aged man with a shaved head wearing a white collared shirt, smiling softly, against a light blue background.

    Nicklas V. Fursund

    Founder & CEO

    Serial entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience in maritime, energy, and supply chain.

    Started with a corporate career leading business units, then moved to the strategy office, global fuel reduction, and MD of Regional Operations in MAERSK.

    Built startups, made mistakes, learned, and grew into helping others succeed.

    Partner at RAINMAKING, where we invested in 950+ startups and helped them scale. Co-founded Motion Ventures, a VC fund backed by industrials.

    Worked with 50+ industry corporations on innovation. Former advisor to BCG, McKinsey, and Kearney.

    Educated at Wharton, IMD, CBS, and INSEAD, with three board certificates - most recently in board leadership from DTU (Technical University).

    LinkedIn
    Email

  • A man with a beard and tousled hair wearing a light blue button-up shirt, standing in front of a wooden and textured wall background.

    Rasmus Borgstrøm

    Partner of OceanTech

    Innovation leader and startup growth advisor working across ocean, climate, and frontier technology.

    Built and led ventures, shaped corporate innovation, and supported founders in achieving funding, product validation, and commercial traction. Learned as much from setbacks as from the wins, shaping a hands-on and grounded approach to advising founders.

    Former CEO of a satellite-powered geospatial scaleup and VP of DHI’s Innovation Lab. Holds DTU’s startup board education and maintains strong ties across the blue investor and innovation landscape.

    Committed to accelerating technologies that deliver measurable climate and ocean impact.

    LinkedIn
    Email

  • A man wearing glasses and a light shirt stands with arms crossed, smiling slightly, against a plain light background.

    David Lusztig

    Venture Partner

    Commercial–technical operator with 15+ years across SaaS, PaaS, maritime tech, fintech, and enterprise software in regulated digital markets.

    Started in high-performance commercial environments across EMEA and APAC, progressing from media buyer to leading revenue, GTM, and product–commercial functions in fast-scaling SaaS/PaaS organizations.

    Built, funded, and exited multiple ventures, gaining end-to-end founder experience and applying those lessons to help startups achieve traction, validation, and scalable sales systems.

    Served as Executive Director of Diize BV, a corporate spinoff backed by Wilhelmsen Port Services AS and Royal Vopak NV, leading commercial strategy, GTM redesign, product–market alignment, investor engagement, and fundraising in maritime software.

    Works with founders, commercial teams, and corporate stakeholders to design GTM, pricing, revenue architecture, and enterprise sales engines across complex and regulated industries.

    Educated in Business (IUPUI, USA), Law (University of Miskolc, Hungary), and Full-Stack Web Development, with negotiation training from Harvard Business School.

    LinkedIn
    Email

  • Portrait of a young man with short brown hair, wearing a white dress shirt and navy blazer, against a gray background.

    Vasily Ryabov

    Partnership & Research Associate

    Vasily works at the intersection of SaaS, maritime innovation, and international development.

    He spent three years working and travelling across West Africa on innovation and sustainable development projects, and later helped deliver European-led initiatives focused on practical implementation rather than policy slides. That field experience still shapes how he thinks about constraints, incentives, and what it actually takes to make change stick.

    He has worked in both technical and humanitarian organisations – from Microsoft to the Danish Refugee Council – giving him a broad, grounded view of how governments, corporates, NGOs, and startups each approach risk, funding, and decision-making. That mix allows him to “translate” between very different stakeholders in complex projects.

    Today, he combines this perspective with his research at Denmark’s Technical University on how advisory boards actually work in practice. The gathered insights allow him to build solutions that make structured support measurable, comparable, and genuinely useful for founders who want to understand how to win.

    LinkedIn
    Email

What OPERATORS Say

Trusted by Operators Worldwide

  • Large blue opening quotation mark symbol on a transparent background.

    No large investment has ever given me product-market fit. I cannot possibly have all the competencies I need on payroll - I need sparring and help on demand from people who are financially incentivized like me.

    Ocean Tech Founder

  • Large blue opening quotation mark symbol on a transparent background.

    It’s like a fund of time! Unlike anything else I’ve seen, giving me competence and market access on demand, while pushing the cost to exit.

    Maritime Founder

  • Large blue opening quotation mark symbol on a transparent background.

    I guess working with individuals as Advisors is nothing new, but hard to get value from. To plug into a structured way of doing it as a complement to my Board, can give me the speed and ease to get results.

    Supply Chain Founder

Not Sure Where You Fit?

Let’s Figure It Out Together

Share your background and interests, and we’ll help you understand where you can contribute most effectively, boards, operator boards, or investment.

Reach out directly via email:
Gaia@operatorscollective.io

Come and visit us:
Hojbro Plads 10, 1200, Copenhagen, Denmark