SFG12 - Nat Manning, CEO of Kettle

Nathaniel is the co-founder and COO of Kettle, a machine-learning-powered reinsurer that protects people from increasing climate change crises. Nathaniel previously led Ushahidi, the world’s largest open source data platform for crisis response. There he helped scale the Ushahidi platform to over 200 countries gathering over 10M first hand reports. Previous to that he was a Presidential Innovation Fellow for Open Data, and then the first Chief Data Officer of the US Agency for International Development, where he helped open up and analyze large data sets for humanitarian response. He has been part of the founding teams of technology startups like BRCK and FellowAI and is on the board of Project Wayfinder.

Nathaniel joins me today to discuss his path from Ushahidi to forming his own company, Kettle. We learn more about crowdsourcing information and why Ushahidi’s timing was fruitful. Nathaniel shares with us the types of funding that Usahidi looked into and the benefits and pitfalls of each. I ask him for his input on how would he change the funding system for tech nonprofits. Nathaniel speaks to how his time with the government at USAID prepared him for the CEO role at Ushahidi. We also learn about Nathaniel’s passion for insurance and the beauty of insurance in its purest form.

“That's the impact you're really making is that sort of financial safety net there to let people who get hurt from these, acts of God, whether it's a hurricane or a fire, which, like I said, sadly, or there's only more and more of that they're protected, and that our communities are protected.”

 - Nathaniel Manning

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• How Ushahidi fostered creativity amongst the employees
• The challenges of running a big tech non-profit 
• Building business development teams
• Dealing with misconduct in leadership as a CEO

Connect with Nathaniel on Twitter or Kettle’s website and his own personal website 

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