Nathaniel Manning, Kettle COO on Climate Risk Insurance

Michael Koenig: Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal Chief Operating Officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and crazy stories. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and I'm excited to welcome our guest Nathaniel Manning, co-founder and COO of Kettle, a company that uses deep learning to reshape the reinsurance industry to better balance risk for a changing climate. Nathaniel has a long career of founding and leading companies, including Fellow Robotics, BRIC, the largest provider of public Wi-Fi in Africa, and Ushahidi, the world's largest open-source platform for crisis response. Along the way, He worked on furthering clean energy as part of the Clinton Climate Initiative at the Clinton Foundation. And Nathaniel was part of the Obama administration's first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, where he was special advisor on open data at USAID, the world's premier international development agency, where he then went on to become chief data officer. With that kind of track record, it's safe to say that Nathaniel puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to creating technological solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. Welcome, Nathaniel. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to have you on.

Nathaniel Manning: Happy to be here.

Michael Koenig: Thank you. So I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that the work you're doing and continue to do has a profound impact on the world. And I'm not trying to, you know, embarrass or anything like that. I mean, so many people strive to do what you're doing. Where does your drive and ambition and altruism come from? Like, what was your path to creating so many innovative projects and companies?

Nathaniel Manning: First, thank you. Um, I appreciate that. Uh, and, and ultimately, and it comes from— I, I think I have a very hard time just like getting up and getting excited unless I feel like it's, uh, it truly is— I'm working on something that's making an impact, right? Like, I, I'll Maybe it's not, it's not that interesting to answer. I just, I think I get bored if I'm just crunching for money or some other— I've just always been inspired by something, you know, that feels like it's really going to help a lot of people. And the, I mean, the other answer to that too, to be backing up a kind of a ways back, was I was in university studying a bunch of different stuff, you know, it's Good time to do that. You get to check all these different classes out. And I ended up spending, you know, in early life, you don't care a lot about like, what are the big questions in life? What, you know, so I studied a lot of philosophy. I studied a lot of religious studies. And I ended up really focusing a lot on Eastern religious studies. Ended up going and spending 3 months living in a monastery, in a

Michael Koenig: So I'm not going to lie, prior to preparing for this, my familiar with reinsurance was surface level at best. And I'm guessing that I'm not the only one. So can you give us a high level of what it is and how you ended up in the business? Like, help us piece together what it is that Kettle does and how it does it.

Nathaniel Manning: For sure. So yeah, I'm the COO and co-founder of Kettle, which is a, uh, a reinsurance startup, um, or a reinsurtech. People like to say insurtechs, but we are Tech, we think of ourselves kind of as double helix of bringing in reinsurance experience and technology and specifically kind of focused on machine learning. And the question, you know, what— well, let me start with what reinsurance is. So, reinsurance, as you said, most people probably have never heard of it. But what it is, the way I like to think about it is it's the safety net below the safety net, or it's that kind of, it's that second parachute. How it works is it's insurance for insurance companies. What that means is it's really insurance for catastrophic level risk. For an example, maybe you have a home and you buy home insurance and that home insurance covers pretty much anything that could go wrong. There's thousands of things that could go wrong with your house. Your roof leaking, someone robbing it. And also it getting burned down in a wildfire or hit by a hurricane, right? That's who you would go to file a claim and get your house rebuilt. Now, those primary insurers, they're covering all of those things that could go wrong with your house. And just like with us, it doesn't make sense for us to keep the value of our home in a bank account, we buy an insurance policy. It actually doesn't make economic sense for them to keep the value of all of these homes in the event that a, that one, that like 1,000 of their homes get taken out at once by a wildfire or a couple or tens of thousands by a hurricane, they take out an insurance policy, same exact way for these catastrophic level risks or what we call tail risks. Now, the thing that's happened, there's been a 3x increase in billion-dollar catastrophes due to climate change over the last 15 years. And so there's there's more and more of these happening. And so insurance companies buy those policies, those catastrophic level risk policies from the reinsurance industry. And then we can go deeper and then reinsurance buys more insurance. It keeps on going, which is where it gets pretty fun. But that's more or less what reinsurance is. And I think you also asked in there kind of how I got into this, right? And so, I spent the first chapter of my career working on trying to reduce emissions, right? So actually, I went, sat on that cushion for a while, came back. I think I, you know, watched The Inconvenient Truth and like took some classes in environmental studies and was like, this is the problem of our generation is climate change. So I was set out from college, I was like, I'm gonna go figure out how to do my part in reducing carbon emissions. And That's what I worked on for the first 3 to 4 years. And then I had a kind of moment where I was like, unfortunately, it feels like we kind of failed as a species doing this. So people are going to get hurt. And then I started working on crisis response software, as you heard a bit about, and as you mentioned, and I— people are going to get hurt, so we're going to need to do more. And in that work, working on this software, I got more and more introduced to insurance companies because who is interested in crisis response data and software were insurance companies. Also, when I was in the government, was opening up datasets from USAID and humanitarian response, also had insurance and reinsurance companies interested in that data and just got kind of turned on to it. And I had sort of two realizations. One was, in this, if you look at a crisis and you were to graph suffering over time, there's this big spike at the beginning. You know, you're trying to triage and save lives, right? Get people to hospitals, get people food and water. There's tons of donations, it's in the media, and that kind of happens for about 2 weeks, and then it sort of tails off. You might notice it's like doesn't get covered in the media anymore. But in most, like, of that immediate medical needs are get, get taken care of and triaged. But then you have this long tail of people just kind of rebuilding their lives and trying to get back on track. And it's really just people, their communities, and their insurance companies working together. And I had this thought was like, maybe the, the, the area under the long tail is just as big as the area under the spike., right? And I was building this kind of software, working on the area under the spike and was just inspired by this long tail, this idea, and got kind of obsessed with insurance. And the last thing was with insurance that I thought was so cool was like, it's this, what is insurance? It's really this beautiful thing, although everyone's experience of it is usually terrible. You mention it to anyone, their eyes either glaze over or they have some story about how terrible it was working with an an insurance company, but what you're really doing is everyone's pooling their money together, right? And saying like, "Hey Michael, if your house is the one that burned down, I'll give you a 10th of a percent towards you rebuilding. And if 1,000 other people do that, you're good. And I know you will do the same for me next year if it's my house that burns down." And then that's a really beautiful thing. And what happens then in the middle is just a big data science problem. To figure out how much everyone should pay. So that's what got me obsessed and how we ended up here.

Michael Koenig: So the insurance industry, like Nationwide, Geico, all of these really need you to give that speech so people stop hating them. No, it's actually quite beautiful. You're taking on the job of essentially underwriting all these catastrophic risks. And your startup, with— while you have venture financing from incredible investors, is rather limited. How, how do you underwrite it? And then is it a bet on your tech being better?

Nathaniel Manning: Good question. So there's two parts to that. So the first is, yeah, you're right. So we've been lucky to raise some really great seed and Series A level rounds, and now we could, you know, ensure probably 4 houses in Palo Alto, right? So like, that's not actually how— so how does that work? So we actually act in a very much like a dealmaker. What we call in the industry is our work is transferring risk to the people who want to hold it in the most intelligent way. Maybe the best analogy for this audience is it's somewhat fairly similar to being a VC actually with LPs. So when you take money from a VC, often they have their own GP commit, right? But then there's also probably 90% or more of what they're investing is somebody else's money. It's actually very similar, folks, to who we approach. It's endowments, it's family offices, it's pension plans, big pots of money out there who are looking for a diversified portfolio of returns. So we offer an uncorrelated from the stock market, equities market type of return because if the stock market crashes, it shouldn't technically have any bearing on whether or not there's more or less wildfires or hurricanes, right, and or other types of perils. And that's kind of our, one of our customers. It's a marketplace, you know, we're giving them a return and they're providing capital and then we put some in alongside them so that the incentives are aligned. And actually, this is kind of key to our model in that a lot of the folks in the startup space who have moved into this area take what is classic sort of a SaaS approach, right? And our take is, Well, that's not great because a couple of things. One, it's just not as big of a market. So like what we always say is like, if you could, if you really developed a model that you think could trend gold prices, why would you sell that to hedge funds for $10,000 a month? Like, wouldn't you put your money behind it if you really believed in it, right? So that's one angle. And then two, yeah, it means that we're actually putting our money where our models are right alongside. Our investment capital and saying, hey, you know, we'll, we'll take the losses if we're wrong with you. And, uh, so that's, that's essentially how we, you know, get, get a hold of that model. I think there was a second part of your question there. You're saying, do the models need to be right? That's right. And the answer is long and short is yes. That's what gives us competitive advantage. Um, the whole— and I can get into the reason why we think we are, how it is, but the, the essentially is like, we think we're more right than anybody else out there kind of competing in this, which gives us the ability to get much better returns and bring and offer essentially other key things, offer much lower pricing for the app. Because insurance, let's be face it, you all bought insurance, you buy the cheapest one if everything else is held constant. So like, we are like, hey, we can come out and say, hey, we can write this for much cheaper, you know, than kind of the current market price.

Michael Koenig: So this seems like a non-trivial problem to take on with very big implications if you do get it wrong. With startups, there's so much the mentality of this iterative approach to cranking out that first MVP, minimum viable product. How do you approach something like that in this space?

Nathaniel Manning: Well, the first thing we did was build an MVP, as you would say. So we built a version of the product that allowed— and built a visual layer of it as well to be able to communicate it. And you run a portfolio test through it. So you essentially run through example real portfolios of homes and try to calculate out what your losses would be. And so like the first year we went out and actually, and you're looking at your fire prediction, we ran our model and we're like, then at the end of the year, look back and the key numbers from that year where we predicted You know, the thing to know about fires is there's— this is one of the reasons why it's a really good machine learning, uh, data problem— is that there are tens of thousands of wildfires a year in California, but 14 of them cause 98% of the damage. And so we're actually really good at putting out fires generally as, as people, as humans, and not all of them turn into these huge ones you see in the news that cause a lot of problems. Um, The question is which ones will and where will that happen, right? And so of those 14 largest ones, we were able to predict all 14 of those in the sort of 20% riskiest areas of the state. And what we do is our underwriting guidelines are like we don't write in the top 25% of risky areas. So we wouldn't have actually gotten hit by any of those, which is a really good thing, you know, so that in our example, so we start off with that. And then the next year, we actually get some real deals that we quote. Some of them get bound and really get put into production and have real customers. Other ones don't. But we get to kind of run all of those and see how those delivered in the market with real numbers behind them. What were the returns for those investors? Were we wrong? Did we have high losses? Did we not? Right? That just builds kind of further confidence in the models. But it is one of those things that you have to continually be right and it just takes some time eventually where folks are really like, "Okay, you've put it in, you've taken people's money, you've given them a return for a couple of years in a row. Now we think you've really got it." But build, build as much trust and, um, as possible, uh, and, and, and just be as transparent as possible with, with everything, uh, and how we're, we're determining, uh, the risk and our view of risk.

Michael Koenig: That's remarkable. And let's switch gears here. Let's talk about your role as COO at Cattle. What does it look like? What areas of the company are you focused on?

Nathaniel Manning: One of the ways I see the COO role, particularly in startups, at least how I've played it, are two parts. One is it's a— I think you're sort of a— I often think about the team like a puzzle, right? And each new person, you have to kind of figure out the outlines of their skills and knowledge and what they're good at. And I think the COO particularly is sort of the puzzle piece to the rest of the executive team. Like whatever is like the negative space to the rest of the executive team strengths is another sort of way of saying like an executive jack of all trades. And I think that's pretty accurate, right? Like for me at least, I like that because I get to learn new things all the time and I get to jump into different stuff. That's kind of the way my brain works. You know, in early days I was doing all the finance work and now like we're able to hire a CFO who's been the CFO of a public reinsurance company. And like, I don't— that's what he does that now. Like, and I get to just sit back and learn. I don't sit back, but I get to like lean in and learn because those models look a lot better than my funny models from the first few years and budgets and things. So that's fantastic. You know, same kind of thing actually at the beginning, I was helping write, you know, our regulatory policy to get our MGA passed in Bermuda. Bermuda. And now, like, we have people that have done that many times, and other, you know, and I don't need to be the one to do that as much. Um, today, uh, then one thing that I've kind of continued to do and been a key part of my role is kind of, uh, is one, telling the story, and two, um, and, and fundraising. Um, three, I think, is, uh, I think always kind of being in a C-level leadership role, the most important thing is like decision-making and proof of just continually good decision-making. I think that's just a big part of my work and job. And then the last one is, you know, internal team management and constantly thinking about scaling team growth. How are we going to do that? How do we put systems in place that allow for that? There's a great blog post written, I think, by, I think he's the former, or currently, maybe still the CTO of Palantir called Old Guard, New Guard that I look at a lot because it's like, as you think about, okay, like here's all that kind of energy from the beginning days and then you start hiring these people that have been like, well, I've been the CFO at a big public reinsurance company or like I was a senior staff engineer at Google for the last 10 years and this is how we did it there and you should do this. And we're like, Well, we're building the plane while we fly it, so let's go implement that now and do it together. So that's that kind of stuff. So internally looking at thinking about scale and systems and implementing, and then externally it's, you know, being a core part of the fundraising part of the team.

Michael Koenig: Let's talk about decision-making. Amazon has a saying where leaders are right. So much of what you talked about as far as decision-making goes is making those right decisions and being able to continuously demonstrate that. Do you have a framework or a set of guidelines that you use to make decisions, and can you maybe tell us a little bit about it?

Nathaniel Manning: Hmm, that's a great question. Um, Well, I wouldn't— there are some that are implemented in a company where there's like, particularly like for us in our current business, like clear underwriting ones, like to— and this actually isn't me, but like to document, like to break our own underwriting guidelines, we need like the CEO, the chief underwriting officer, and the executive committee chairman all who have like combined 30 years of underwriting experience to agree. So like, that's like kind of a, like, if we're gonna go, I mean, if we're gonna go against our model, we need these things to all agree. Good, good things to have in place. In addition to that, you just got like your all of the different decisions. I know for me, personally, and thinking through, you know, whether to hire somebody, whether to fire somebody, whether to raise now or later, or things like this, whether to work with this partner, whether to adopt this kind of policy or that kind of policy. I think my process, so for me, I think there are like, so you mentioned the Amazon thing. I think, you know, for me, the way I work, and I'll just talk about this, and I think everyone works differently, but for the way I work is, I really like building a council of experts and equals in many ways, but also being clear that like of whose clear decision it is. And so, and actually like one of my favorite things is we actually have, it's not a, one day someone should build this into an HR SaaS tool in my opinion, it probably does exist, but like we have a spreadsheet and I've actually run this at every company that I've worked at. It's called the Responsibilities Decision-Making Doc. And it's a little different, it's different than Asana, it's different than tasks and sprints. The best way I've heard it explained, our Chief Product Officer told me this was like, it's a, when you ask the question, whose job is that? Or whose decision is that? It should literally be listed there and it should be written explicitly. And so it's also like, whose fault is it if it didn't work? Like it's a responsibility. And so like payroll goes out on time, has my name next to it. One day it'll be, you know, we'll have someone else on it, but like, and a lot of things just work really well and I don't have to worry about that. But if payroll didn't go out, like it'd be my fault. Right. Or if we didn't get, you know, our decks to our board on time for our board, it'd be the CEO's fault or, you know, and like we'd actually discuss that or is it my job or is it him? We kind of did it together. But like there needs to be one person's name next to everything and it's actually like there's like 400, 500 lines on there, right? And actually one of the key things I've built into, we talk about corporate structures, one of the things I love is a couple of sayings. One is evolution by design. So I actually require every quarter, us, every team to go back to this doc and sort of update it and say, hey, I, you know, I don't want to be in charge of tweeting anymore. Can somebody else take that on? Or like, or be able to say, hey, we have all these new things that got added. Can we— and it's too much, like we need to hire for it, or there's these things and there's no one else, they're empty and they need to get done. It's not a task, you shouldn't be able to cross any of these out. It's like something that has to continually be happening or a decision that has to get made. And in many ways I think about it, it's like every— you write all these great JDs and go out and hire someone for them and nobody goes and looks at them afterwards, right? It's like all— and the most important about The best part about a JD is not the title, it's all the bullet points at the bottom. So it should be these, like, all of the bullet points from every JD across the company should kind of be here and talking about how they interact with each other and what teams they sit on. And, um, so this is structured by teams, um, and we update it, uh, and then kind of falls into two other sayings that I've always put into everything around kind of COO work. One is structure without bureaucracy. People hate bureaucracy. People really want to know what they need to get done, what makes a difference, and what they should be focused on. And then the third is making the implicit explicit. Like a lot of times where the problems happen, it's just like something that often like in that old guard, new guard thing is something that was sort of implicit. And then, you know, just got kind of built in and eventually you need to actually document it, write it down and make it explicit so that people understand that. This is all to say that my process of decision-making is one, for me, is like actually having it documented in, in here and, and clear that like what we have in here is like, this is this person's decision. So it's my decision on whether or not we get to hire somebody or not, but I need to take input from these 6 people, right? Like each of the leaders of these teams. And so, I like working that way, taking input from many people, hearing people's different opinions, but then ultimately, it's clear who in the room has to make the decision and that's what goes.

Michael Koenig: What would it take for us to get you to maybe open source those templates?

Nathaniel Manning: Oh, sure. I'm happy to share them with you.

Michael Koenig: They're very useful, yeah.

Nathaniel Manning: Open source fanatic. So I'll send them over. It's basically an Excel spreadsheet. It's not, it's not rocket science. Um, but, uh, I'm happy to share those decks. I, uh, I have some half-written blog posts somewhere along the way of how these things should be implemented. Maybe one day I'll turn them into better, more published, polished blog posts for folks. But, um, they don't work for everyone, but I find them useful.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so much of building companies can be piecing things together, especially in the early days where if you have those resources, while they may not be 100% perfect for you, they're a good jumping off point and you can iterate on it, things of that nature. So it seems like as I think about the work that you do and the work that you have done, the stakes are maybe a, a bit higher than, I guess, say, someone who is working on the world's, I don't know, next great box subscription of salmon-flavored vegan cat food. And I mean, you know, all due respect to cat enthusiasts out there, does that cross your mind? And if it does, how do you manage that?

Nathaniel Manning: I find it to be a fuel, really. You know, I think maybe a different personality or different would find it stressful. Sometimes it is, you know, sometimes the pressure does feel like a lot, but generally it's an inspiration. We had our team retreat, which we were lucky enough to do the first time in person, actually, because we started the company only a bit before COVID And one of the things we did was kind of go around and ask folks, why did you decide to make this investment? I actually like that language, invest your work into this company, because some people are coming from places where they can make a lot more money. Even though we're trying to make great returns, like some people are coming from being a hedge fund and like, yeah, they might all work out in 5 to 10 years from now, but like for right now, they'd be making a lot more money at the hedge fund. I'll be honest. And so, and going around that, like the really clear themes or One, impact, like doing something that makes a difference. And actually, two was like, it's the people around you, you know, and getting to work with all these brilliant people. And yeah, so like, I think, and the third was kind of getting to be part of a startup and that kind of experience of building something, right? And I think those really made sense to me. Those are my 3 for sure. And they all kind of like weave together. So I think that sort of that pressure, that impact work and the stakes, I think of as very much a fuel. And then hiring, that's who gets attracted to work here. So I think a lot of us feel that way.

Michael Koenig: So I think anyone who talks to you, reads about Kettle, reads about what you've worked on in the past or listens to this, more or less, maybe has to stop and think, what am I doing with my life? And how should I maybe evaluate what I do in the future to have the type of impact on humanity that you are having? Again, I'm not trying to butter you up or anything like that. What I am interested in is What's worked for you in terms of organizing your thoughts to really systematically think about tackling huge problems like you are?

Nathaniel Manning: So a couple, a couple of things. One, as a piece of advice to figure out what problem matters to you, to whoever this listener is or things that I think as a process-wise, it's very helpful to find some quiet time, to be honest. Get quiet. I like walks in the woods. It's like my My partner, my wife loves to swim and we both meditate, but there's other things as well. But I think that's where often you have to get quiet enough because our brains are smart and active and will logically kind of play stuff out. But I think first get quiet, then go whiteboard and list stuff and make to-do lists. And see what comes out of the quiet. And then one of the ways to check that, um, one of our, actually our very first investor in Kettle, uh, I'll name check him because he deserves it, is a guy named Ryan Delk. He co-founded, he founded, uh, Primer, which you can check out. But he, um, another, another entrepreneur, founder, and you know, he spent many many coffees and early breather rooms, like kind of just like having him just go through bad decks with me and bad ideas literally for years. And many thanks that he did that. But ultimately, when he kind of like— one of the things he said in one of those conversations was when I was trying to figure this out and even trying to figure out if I wanted to go do this thing, was he was like, well, look, man, you really have what I look for. I always want to be like— I love finding the folks who are like you know, pre-pre-seed, like earliest, like just ideas and help me out. And he's like, and I look for kind of founder market, founder product market fit. Like, and I thought he's like, he's like, you just clearly have this, like, this is like, this is very aligned to you. And I thought that was, it was really helpful in making these decisions. And I think that's kind of a way to check once you get quiet and look at things and things like, do you, does this Do you objectively kind of see that founder market? And like, one example, like one of the products we tested way before we got to where we are, early stage, pre-incorporation, you know, this is a great story, I think it was fun, but like we, you know, I wanted to start an insurance product and company. And so what I did was interview good UX design, interviewed tons of people and asked them, you know, what's something that you've spent a lot of money on that you didn't expect to in the last few years? And yeah, I, I'd kind of worked internationally and so I had kind of one community there and then I have obviously kind of a community of people and friends and colleagues in the US, which is a certain kind of, uh, uh, at a certain wealth bracket and a certain kind of like, you know, a certain age. Uh, and I'm curious if you can guess what the number, what the answer was in that.

Michael Koenig: Insurance.

Nathaniel Manning: It doesn't matter. Like some sort of catastrophic event. Well, actually, what came out was like, it is for some, but like the thing that most people spent in this kind of many hundred person user survey was, was on fertility, on IVF, right? Because obviously, I'm like in my mid-30s, and like a lot of my colleagues are all kind of in that, and they're all in the, they're all working professionals. And so, yeah, had. And so from that, we were like, oh, that's actually that, that is an insurance product doesn't really exist well. There isn't a way to go kind of buy this, you can only get it by working at Google or Facebook or some of these big companies. And so, but then ultimately, like, you know, did a little bit of testing and then had that check moment where like, this isn't the right founder-market fit. I'm a dad, I'm a guy, I should not be the person selling this product, right? Like, even though it's something that should exist in the world and my data says it should, and kind of got back to that, like, If you draw the line through, this climate work has been something that's been driving me since I was 20 years old. I need to get back to that. This is very, very early stages, 4 years ago of testing. But I don't know, this is kind of a story where you're like, well, actually in some ways the data was all there, but personally wasn't the right thing. And ultimately when I looked at it, I was like, yeah, I don't know if I would want to wake up and work on this all day long in 5, 6 years from now anymore.

Michael Koenig: Very interesting. It, it's almost everyone has a passion, maybe education, maybe nutrition, maybe cat food like we talked about.

Nathaniel Manning: Yeah.

Michael Koenig: And it's sort of evaluating, uh, how can you approach that? How can you solve the problems associated with it in a way that is unique to your, your skill set, that founder product market fit, which I love, by the way. Um, yeah, it's a nice new spin on product market fit. So this is one of my favorite questions, and, and we're nearing the end, don't worry. So we've had, in the COO seat, we've all had those moments where you have a new problem. Or actually, this would be for, for any founder or, uh, any leader. We've all had some sort of problem that we haven't seen before and you've literally thought, "Well, never thought I'd see that." Do you have one that comes to mind that you can share with us?

Nathaniel Manning: Yeah. So this was a little ways back. I was the COO at Ushahidi at the time. And we did not expect this, but we had our— someone brought a harassment claim against our CEO at the time, and it was not something that me or the board had ever kind of had to go through before. It ended up kind of going online and having like, there's a lot of activists. This is actually kind of pre-MeToo in the United States, but it was this in Kenya, actually, which is where the organization was based. And there was a lot of activist attacks on the organization. Look, ultimately, like, the CEO was way out of line and was let go and fired, as he should be in this case. But it was— I had to basically— So what happened was, like, it's kind of happened, and then you had to kind of follow the law, and the board had to, like, have a hearing and follow and go through everything, and this took some time. And I kind of had to step in to lead the organization and we couldn't talk about it publicly yet and kind of had to do everything. Then it went public, kind of got leaked to the press and all that was happening while the legal part was trying to wrap up. The whole time it was obviously extremely difficult for the victim. And having to just manage that entire thing, I became the person talking to the press. Wrote up all of the public statements. But most importantly, I think really that moment when it kind of like went public and was really hard on our team because the team was being sort of dragged through the mud, but the team had no idea of what had happened. This was not a culture Everything, it was unfortunately an incident and a person. And really, you know, having to go through and talk to every one of our funders, every one of our customers, and most importantly, every single person on the team, and to spend as much time. And I kind of said it was like doing kind of a very intense, not like listening deep dive tour, and just giving as much space to every single person on the team as possible, letting them share their own thoughts. We held a lot of team circles, just letting kind of like people share and not allowing back and forth, just allowing people to kind of get what they wanted off their chest. And ultimately, the thing I'm most proud of actually in my whole kind of career to this moment was that nobody quit during that time, and it was really hard on everybody. And actually no funders quit us either. And look, like there's absolutely things that could have been done better by the organization, but like, I think ultimately I am proud of how the organization handled all of the different competing difficult parts of that experience. And then I had to, you know, then I took over the organization afterwards and fully, I was kind of co-running it, but then and tried to kind of rebuild.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, that's, that's remarkable. A lot of the time, so much of what we talk about on Between Two COOs, this is sort of a recurring item, is leading through moments of crisis. What worked for you as a guide to help your team make it through that, to give them focus and acknowledge the feelings that they're having, acknowledge what everyone is going through here? How did you keep everything together as a leader? How did you steer the team through a tremendously stressful period.

Nathaniel Manning: Yeah. Um, I mean, I think actually one of the key things was in that word that you were just saying was acknowledgement. It was a lot of making the space to acknowledge, you know. I think like, actually remember one of my teammates at the time was speaking about the whole thing, and this has stuck with me. I love this saying. He was just like, you know, you learn everything important in life by kindergarten, like treat each other kindly and with respect. Um, and, uh, yeah, and that, like, he's like, that's all you really need to know from there, right? And, and so I think there was probably some more to that, but that was the one that I think, you know, was really important. And, uh And I, and that was, I think, a key part of it was, you know, like, you know, versus the opposite of that, you know, getting in trouble when you're sort of a teenager and like kind of trying to hide it and acknowledge it and look at it directly, try to acknowledge, make the space for it. I mean, that's what I just remember was like literally being, I mean, we were an open source remote company for the most part. So like just being on the phone, about a third of our team was in Kenya. I flew there directly once it kind of happened. And then just really acknowledging, communicating, not a lot of it too, like stuff you learn from like couples therapy. It's like, don't just be defensive, listen, nonviolent communication, like acknowledge, respect, you know, and then all that important work. So that, I think that was a big part of it. And, you know, and also kind of another thing I think was bringing back to, I think that's one of the important parts of having culture and history in organization, kind of like, was be able to be like, hey, let's all remember like who we are and what our culture is and like This was an incident, it was terrible, it was a thing, it was one thing, but like this doesn't get to define everything, right? It doesn't get to define all of us and we don't need to take that on. We can move through this and there's a lot of good here. And let's remember who we really are.

Michael Koenig: That's amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that.

Nathaniel Manning: Happy to.

Michael Koenig: I'm not sure whether I want to ask this, but I saw that you skipped out on a meeting with President Obama when you were a Presidential Innovation Fellow because it conflicted with your honeymoon. Why not make a trip to the Oval Office part of that honeymoon?

Nathaniel Manning: Hmm. Oh, man. The tougher, you know, conflicting moments in life. I, uh, so the story is, uh, was I was on my honeymoon in New

Michael Koenig: Um, yeah, President Obama definitely owes you one, and he'll never hear this, but President Obama, if you do, please come visit me.

Nathaniel Manning: Uh, Nathaniel too, but yeah, yeah, my office isn't in Noble, but I'm welcome— you're welcome to come by anytime, man. Um, I had a great time working for you.

Michael Koenig: Well, Nathaniel, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Where can people go to keep up with you?

Nathaniel Manning: Twitter's probably the easiest these days. It's @natpmanning, M-A-N-N-I-N-G. Kettle's over there at Our Kettle, O-U-R-K-E-T-T-L-E. That's both at Twitter and our website if you want to kind of see what we're working on and learn more about it. Fantastic.