Elton Rivas

I've built operational infrastructure from scratch across almost every environment you can name. I co-founded One Spark, which grew into the world's largest crowdfunding festival — 320,000 attendees, $3.25M in facilitated investment, government partnerships, and a five-year roadmap that included London, São Paulo, and Tokyo. I built the centralized ops backbone across seven subsidiary companies at Interline Brands, a $1.4B national distributor with 90+ facilities. I founded Semi Exact, a vertically integrated manufacturing company, and led it from a $65 hand bender to $3.9M in revenue before a successful exit.

The pattern across all of it is the same: go where the complexity is, build the infrastructure that doesn't exist, and make it work at speed. Whether that's standing up a crisis protocol during a facility fire, restructuring sales territories across a national distribution network during a housing crisis, or getting six autonomous general managers running on a shared operating rhythm within six months — the work is always about connecting strategy to execution inside complex, multi-stakeholder environments.

“Operations is not overhead. Operations is the product.”

Right now, I'm building what I think comes next: a multi-agent AI operating system that applies the same principles I've used across every organization I've led — clarity, ownership, decision rights, feedback loops, and the judgment to know when to override all of it. The technology changes. The operating principles don't.

The Arc

Not a resume. A narrative of building operational infrastructure at increasing scale and complexity.