Varsha Venugopal

And I found all of that around managing large programs and budgets and hiring staff quite useful and very relevant to a lot of the work I'm doing now.

I mentioned earlier, I know 80,000 Hours and the Center for Effective Altruism have been quite focused on the role of operations and organizations.

And I think CE also recommends ops as one of the first hires.

And I completely agree with that.

And I think there's a lot of learning there.

I think I was asking my co-founder this question earlier.

I think my knowledge of the development space and the key players involved has been quite useful for us to navigate our conversations.

And I think what I hear from her is that I'm able to get the big picture fairly quickly and get

a clearer understanding of how we could fit in with other peer organizations or even with the government and what their expectations could be.

And I think some of that comes from the experience of having worked in that space.

So I think for Suvita and probably the same for a lot of non-profits, the kind of operations role we've been looking into, it can take on a lot of bandwidth that can otherwise be spent on other areas such as programming and hiring itself.

So for us, operations has been a lot to do around administration, registering in the UK, for instance.

It's not a one-off process.

There's a fair degree of back and forth with our legal advisors and getting it to that point.

Also developing some of those systems around safeguards and hiring and a lot of it around right now we are working through the US and UK and India.

So just in terms of transferring money and what does that mean in terms of exchange rates and how do we make sure we are within loss while we do some of this?

It's something I just want it to go away and not deal with and having somebody who is on the ball with that is hugely valuable.

We, again, went through a fairly rigorous process in terms of test tasks to ensure they had that attention to detail and could also do some kind of whiteboard syncing.

I think my one broad lesson coming out from our hire so far is that someone who's worked in a startup environment and kind of that white space is able to take something

some of this on fairly quickly and run with it in a way that somebody who has been embedded in larger institutions or in a single kind of culture finds harder, whether it's a question of, you know, quick pivots or just being able to produce the first draft of something on how to take forward is just something they have done before and they're able to wrap their head around faster.