My guest today is Manik Suri, co-founder of Therma, a company using sensors to monitor refrigeration across the food and healthcare cold chain. Manik has moved from a finance career at D.E. Shaw, to policy work in the Obama White House, to building startups, and he traces each of those turns back to a search for inner alignment. We talk about risk, mission-driven work, and where the confidence to change direction actually comes from.

Top Insights

  • At a college book talk with Senator Orrin Hatch, Manik was thrilled just to get his copy signed, while his classmate Pete Buttigieg followed up to push the senator on his disagreements and ended up building a relationship.
  • He walked away from a lucrative, fast-rising job at the asset-management firm D.E. Shaw in early 2009 with no next step lined up, because the work no longer matched who he wanted to become.
  • Being in Mumbai during the November 2008 terrorist attacks, staying at the JW Marriott as a jeep fired shots into the lobby, sharpened his pull toward public policy and governance.
  • His 2011 White House internship on the National Economic Council, during the debt-ceiling standoff, showed him how completely policymaking depends on politics.
  • Meeting Beth Noveck and reading her book Wiki Government led him to co-found The GovLab at NYU, which he calls an accidental entry into tech.
  • CoInspect, built to fix broken inspections, became Therma, and only after businesses bought it to cut food waste, energy waste, and refrigeration downtime did the team realize they had built a climate company.

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Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: This is Khurram with Khurram's Quorum. My guest today is Manik Suri, the co-founder of Therma, which is building cold chain management technology. Manik's work has taken him all over the globe, from the private sector to the public and back. So I think Manik has some really interesting insights, and he's cultivated a confidence in his own sense of direction. Here's Manik. Well, hey, Manik, thanks for taking the time to talk.

Manik Suri: Good to be on. Khurram, it's a pleasure.

Khurram Naik: Well, we were talking last time, and the anecdote that I was taken with, so you've known Pete Buttigieg since college, right? And you were talking about a book signing that you both went to, and the very different outcomes each of you took from it. I thought that was a great story and a really interesting takeaway. So Manik, tell us about that book signing, and tell us about this history with Pete Buttigieg.

Manik Suri: Yeah, absolutely. I've known Pete almost 20 years now. He was a year older than me in college, a friend, and someone I think of as a mentor. He was focused on student politics, and we were both very active in the Institute of Politics at Harvard College, the IOP, as it's called, a group of aspiring politicos, if you will. Pete ultimately ran the student version of the IOP, but he was someone I met socially and then got to work with and got to know through a number of organizations: the IOP, the political review, the College Dems. And then later in life, I was excited to support him when he ran for mayor of his hometown, and then of course when he ran for president, I helped a little bit on his campaign over a year and a half with his national team. One thing that stood out for me was his willingness to always put himself out there, take risks, and be willing to face rejection. We were at a book talk for the IOP book club, and there was an illustrious guest, Senator Orrin Hatch, giving a talk on a book he'd written. Most of us were just in awe. We were like, wow, a sitting senator is chatting with us, and we're 20 years old, and here we are asking him questions. I think it was the Kirkland common room or the Eliot common room, one of the houses in the college. And I remember coming away just excited that he had signed my copy of the book, which we all got as part of the book club. Pete, on the other hand, felt it was important to follow up with him and push him on some issues he didn't agree with. He actually ended up reaching out to the senator's team, and I think had a follow-on conversation and meeting with them, and ended up building a relationship with them, as I understand it. But the point, what I took away, this is almost 20 years ago, is a kind of willingness to put oneself out there even when others might not. That speaks to a kind of inner confidence and an inner sense of purpose and direction that I've seen in many of my peers and people I admire who've had outsized success and are doing great things in the world. It's something I've tried to develop and cultivate, a willingness to face one's fears of failure and rejection, which I think are really hard to grapple with, both as a lawyer and as a South Asian American. I think they are cultural as well as reinforced in certain communities and professions. And so yeah, it's something I've admired about him for a long time.

Khurram Naik: So what's an example of doing that, something you did to say, okay, I'm going to up my risk tolerance here and just stretch myself a little bit?

Manik Suri: I've upped my risk tolerance in several ways since then, and my wife can tell you all of the heartache and headache it's caused. But a couple of examples stand out. I left my job to go down an uncertain path right out of my first role post-college. I was working at a well-regarded asset management firm called D.E. Shaw, getting paid well, learning a lot. I worked for the guy who ran the fund, who was a terrific mentor. And I decided to leave, even though I was growing in the role and getting a lot of outside responsibility, because I wanted to change paths. I wanted to work closer to governance and public service, work that had a little more connection to my own long-term goals around social impact. I had no idea what I was going to do when I left. I just decided I would change paths. And so leaving that job mid-stride was the first significant risk I took. I ended up going back to law school a year later, and that took me down a different path for a few years, moving into legal policy and the intersection of law and policy. For a bit I thought I might actually work as a lawyer, but I ended up taking another risk and deciding to start up after law school. So that would be the second big professional risk I took. Those two stand out in terms of career. On the personal side, I think the biggest risk I took was asking my then girlfriend to marry me, which was hard for me. I had met her when I was very young, and I was scared of getting married. The idea of committing and being in a single long-term relationship as a young person was really intimidating to me in my 20s. Meeting at 18, you often don't realize how quickly life moves forward. And I think when we finally had the conversation, for me it was a real risk, an inner risk, to take the plunge and move into a more committed relationship. So yeah, those are some of the risks that stand out.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, those are all very interesting stories. Let's take the asset management company, D.E. Shaw. Like you're saying, you were international, you were in Shanghai and Delhi, I think. And it sounds like an incredible experience. So what was the inflection point for you? What was the moment you said, okay, I really do need to change something? Because that's not an easy step to take. And you'd already taken, maybe this is some of the context, it's already such a risky, extraordinary move to make that international leap. So you already knew that much about yourself, and that's some context to help you at the next jump. But it's a jump to leave something that's going well for you. Because I think that's the true definition of opportunity cost. My definition is taking something that's good and saying, hey, I want better. And it's really hard to leave something that's good. So I'm always fascinated with people who make those calls, and I just want to find as many examples of those and share them as much as I can, and learn from them myself. So tell me about how you decided to go from good to maybe something better.

Manik Suri: Absolutely. Taking myself back to 2008, I made the decision to leave in early 2009. A lot of things happened in 2008, the year I was really grappling with life arc and career path. And I'm not sure, Khurram, that good and better are the words that come to mind, but more, I'd say, aligned. An inner alignment. Whether a path is good or not is really a matter of an inner compass, as opposed to an objective reality. So for me it was a question of whether the path I was on was aligned with who I wanted to become. And I remember, three things stand out for me from that year. I was on a flight between Singapore and Delhi with my boss at the time, who is now a friend and mentor and one of my investors in the startup I run. And he said to me, you should look at your boss's boss. If that's a job you want, then you're on the right path. And if that's not a job you want, then you should think about what else you might want to do. That really stood out for me. I grappled with the question of whether I wanted to become a global asset manager. His boss was David Shaw, who had started one of the most successful hedge funds in the world and is now a philanthropist applying supercomputing to human problems at scale, mostly in healthcare. I really admired David, but I didn't think I wanted to become David. The second thing that happened was that a number of my friends from undergrad at Harvard College had gone to work for Senator Obama when he was running for office. They worked on the Obama campaign in 2007. And I had listened to Senator Obama speak in San Francisco. I'd actually been at an event he spoke at, and I heard him speak on TV. And I read both of his books, The Audacity of Hope and his earlier book, Dreams of My Father. Something about him spoke to me as a new voice, a new way of approaching politics. I'd applied to law school in college and deferred, and I'd been deferring year after year at this point. And something about Senator Obama, his inner resolve and his willingness to try to remake politics with more integrity, and what I took as a sort of audacity and idealism, really resonated. I joke that I'm of the West Wing generation as opposed to the House of Cards generation. I watched a lot of West Wing. I've also watched a lot of House of Cards, but I was much more inspired at that time. And so I saw a lot of my friends working on his campaign, and when he ended up winning in a historic election, that really inspired me, the idea that there was some opportunity to do good in and around government. The third thing that happened in 2008 was, in the week of Thanksgiving of '08, I was living in India at the time, working at D.E. Shaw, helping to build private equity teams and invest in the country. My parents and brother came to visit me from America. They decided to come because I was busy with work, so they thought they'd come to Delhi, where I was based. And we decided to go and visit some family we had not seen very often who were based in Mumbai, in Bombay, that week. We rarely go to Mumbai. My family's largely from North India, from Delhi. My parents came to America in the early 80s. My brother and I would go back every year to visit my grandparents in Delhi, but we almost never went to Mumbai. This was only the second time we'd been to Mumbai as a family, and it was because it was Thanksgiving. We decided to take a couple of days off around the holiday, and we went to stay towards the end of that week. At the last minute, my mom, who was a Marriott rewards member, said, let's stay at the Marriott, I have points. And I was going to book us at another hotel where I had points, especially through my time at D.E. Shaw, the Oberoi. The day we ended up getting to Mumbai was the 25th of November. The next day we were going out and touring the city, and that evening we came back to have dinner. My parents were tired because they'd just come from the US, so we ended up staying in. My brother wanted to go out. He was three years younger than me. He wanted to go out and see some of the nightlife, maybe go out for drinks. We were thinking of going down to the Taj Hotel to a nightclub there. We didn't, because my parents were tired, so we decided to stay in. And that was the night when there were a series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai across the city. It was a terrible experience for everyone I knew who was in the city and in the country at the time. We watched it on live TV. At one point I think a jeep drove by the JW Marriott where we were staying and actually fired gunshots into the lobby. My brother and I went outside trying to see if we could find an escape route to the beach for my parents, in case the attacks hit this hotel, which was an American-owned hotel, and we were all US citizens. It's hard to describe the intensity. I wrote a piece a year later in Foreign Policy about living through it. I'd studied international relations in college, and my master's was in IR as well, at Cambridge. And as I reflected over the month and a half, two months after that day, we ended up thankfully being safe. There were no attacks in the hotel. Many people were hurt or killed, including many Americans and British and Australian and Israeli passport holders, not to mention scores of Indians. But I came away at the end of that year thinking a lot about the kind of work I wanted to do, the kinds of problems I wanted to work on. I realized I wanted to get closer to public policy and governance, and to understanding what we could do at the policy level and at the human level to try to make a difference. And I realized, as I looked at the role I had, a really successful investment fund that was scaling across the world, that it wasn't going to get me there. And so it was a few things that year that led me, in early 2009, to sit down with Lou, my old boss at the time, and tell him I wanted to go in a different direction. And he was super supportive.

Khurram Naik: That's obviously a pretty crazy story. So moving into foreign policy, or policy, was more in alignment with your values. And so that was step four. So then you're in that policy world, but you felt like there was still some further alignment to be had. Talk about that.

Manik Suri: Yeah, absolutely. I worked as an intern in law school, my first summer of law school, in the White House in President Obama's administration, on the National Economic Council team, the NEC, working on economic policy. Right where I thought I wanted to be, working on policy in the federal government, exactly what I'd hoped I'd get to. And that was the summer of 2011. That was the summer that the political gridlock in DC got to an all-time worst, I think, by many accounts, including by President Obama's recent autobiography. He talks about 2011 as a turning point. That was the year when Congress couldn't agree on raising the debt ceiling, which was essentially an unobjectionable bipartisan issue that had been successfully resolved for several decades without issue. They'd always raised the debt ceiling, and the threat was to degrade the sovereign credit rating of the country. Politics were that bad that Republicans wouldn't agree to raise the debt ceiling, for a number of reasons. There was a lot of political brinksmanship going on. I was working with an impressive team of policy leaders: Mike Froman, who was a classmate of President Obama's at Harvard Law, who I got to know, who had also worked in IR, had a PhD and a master's in IR from England, kind of similar interests, IR and JD background; I worked with Daniel Gray and Brian Deese, who is now running economic policy as the director of the NEC under President Biden. They were incredibly talented policy minds, but no policy could get passed. There was no ability to actually make change, because there was so much political gridlock. And that's when I started to realize how political policy is. Prior to that, I had really not understood how dependent on politics policymaking is. And at the same time, right as I was starting to see how the sausage gets made, so to speak, I met a woman in DC, Beth Noveck. Beth was the deputy CTO, chief technology officer, of the country. She was working under Aneesh Chopra, who was the first CTO of the country. President Obama had created an office of the CTO for the first time. Beth likes to joke that she's a recovering lawyer herself. She had gone to Harvard undergrad 10 years before me, and Yale Law, and taught herself how to write code before it was cool, in the early 2000s. And she'd written a book called Wiki Government, Wiki Gov. She was doing a talk about her book. The thesis of her book was that network and data technologies were transforming social and commercial life, how we dine, how we date, how we engage in everyday activity and commerce, but law and government, two of the largest sectors of the economy and two of the most important, were still largely run like it's 1950. And she surmised that there was an opportunity in that void to bring better technology to bear on regulatory, compliance, and governance workflows. I read the book, I listened to Beth talk, I thought she was really inspiring. And I got to know her. I went to meet her, we had a couple of lunches and coffees, and then she invited me to join her to start a center at NYU, where she was teaching, called The Governance Lab, or GovLab. And I decided not to pursue the traditional policy route and become a policy advisor at the NEC, which was what I was planning to do. Instead I joined Beth to start the GovLab, as a co-founder at NYU. And that was my path into tech and entrepreneurship. It was kind of accidental. It was really being in the right place at the right time and meeting someone who was truly inspiring. I thought Beth was one of the most impressive and interesting interdisciplinary thinkers I'd ever met. She has an ability to connect concepts between domains that's rare. She was both a lawyer and a policy wonk, but also a technologist and entrepreneur, a kind of social entrepreneur, if you will. And so we started the GovLab, and we brought in a third co-founder, Aaron Cohen, who is now my co-founder at my company. Aaron was teaching at NYU at the time. He's almost 20 years older than me. He'd been a serial entrepreneur in the technology world. He'd worked in tech since the mid 90s, worked on four tech startups, had two successful exits. He was teaching at NYU at the time, and Beth called us the private sector guys. I had a background in investing and finance, Aaron had a background as an entrepreneur. And so we joined her to start this think tank, to bring technology into governance, regulatory, and compliance workflows, trying to help bring some of the great network and data tools that were remaking our world into some of these large sectors that were still pretty legacy. And I thought it was a continuation of my inner journey. It was really an inner process of trying to find more and more alignment and find a way to do work that both resonated with my values and played to my skills. And so that's how I ended up being a co-founder of the GovLab, and that's what led me down the path of GovTech and RegTech, and now into what we're building today.

Khurram Naik: So I'm kind of curious. Now that you're down this path of entrepreneurship, raising capital and doing all the things in that capacity, what are the ways this path differs from the D.E. Shaw route? Because it seems like you could say, from the vantage point of your former collaborator, she might say, oh, that's all the private world. She might lump it all together, since you two were the private sector people. So where are the ways in which this is further alignment? Because it seems like at some point you were in this world of commerce, something that was about making money. So tell me about the ways this is similar to or a departure from that previous world.

Manik Suri: Absolutely, Khurram. It's a question and an area I've spent a lot of time thinking about as an adult. And I've come to realize that it's hard to lump. It's easy to oversimplify and to see the world in large buckets of activity: public sector, private sector, service, commerce, philanthropy, profit. But actually, the specifics matter. And understanding the relationships between sectors, between modalities of operating, between ways of marrying different institutional requirements and incentives with human objectives and values, can lead to a lot of creative intermediate paths that are neither one nor another fully. So the path into becoming a tech entrepreneur was really gradual, in building the GovLab and helping Beth get it off the ground. One thing I realized, along with my co-founder Aaron, was that it was very hard to recruit incredible technical talent, great engineers, great designers, great product managers, to work for any sustained period of time. Most people wanted to work at Facebook or Google or Netflix. And when we talked about solving broken workflows around public health, or rulemaking, or permitting for municipalities, or parcel plotting for the local land department, or tax assessment for the city assessor, most technical leaders and technical talent we spoke with said, that sounds great, good luck with that. We're happy to donate a few hours here and there. And what we realized was that if we wanted to harness the human capital that was taking technology and making it ubiquitous and transforming our world, we needed to create a structure that could attract exceptional engineering, exceptional design, exceptional product leaders. And that's something I spent a lot of time talking to a number of folks about, both on the private sector side and the public sector side, as well as in between. I spoke with folks at Code for America in government, at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and in the private sector at venture capital firms and PE firms. And what became clear was that it was going to take a number of models to effect change. Our goal was to bring technology to bear on broken workflows where we could improve how government works. That was really the point of the GovLab, trying to improve how government works and make it both more effective and also renew faith in public institutions in the process. The idea is that if government works and meets the needs of the citizenry in delivering public goods and services, that's a long-term way to reestablish and renew faith in government. And Aaron and I left to start a company, whose first product is called CoInspect, collaborative inspect. We chose to start CoInspect to focus on one broken workflow, one very specific workflow that was really flawed, which was a workflow I'd experienced firsthand in my last year of law school. In my third year at Harvard Law, I'd gone out in the field to build cases with city inspectors. It was a housing law clinic, around tenant eviction defense. And part of the work involved building cases around field inspections of the built environment, looking at potential consumer protection laws that could be applied to make colorable defenses for tenants to help them remain in their homes, but also to ensure their rights were protected, and if they had to leave, that they got just compensation. What we saw, myself and my fellow student attorneys, was that the workflow around inspections was extremely broken. It was very inefficient, a lot of pen and paper, clipboards, inspection logbooks, people carrying around binders of legal code. It was very non-systematized, very ad hoc. Different inspectors would interpret codes differently. Enforcement was very varied. And as a result, the entire edifice of regulation and compliance was questionable. We saw this not just in housing, but in food and in sanitary codes in general. That was in Boston, which is a pretty well-resourced part of the country. And what we realized, Aaron and I, when we were looking at workflows we could build technology around, was that we were looking for broken governance workflows that were scalable and commonplace, because those are the kinds of problems technology is best suited to solve. Immediate, obvious, straightforward, but very scalable problems. And inspections met all of those criteria. It's a workflow that's done millions of times a year in every industry, from barber shops to nail salons to nuclear power plants to bridges and dams and homes and restaurants. They all get inspected. And the code enforcement and compliance is notoriously fraught with challenges. It's been documented and well written about. There's a lot of rent-seeking, a lot of inefficiency, and many cities and towns are behind on their code enforcement. It's a source of woe and problem both for businesses and for consumers. Businesses have to grapple with the cost of compliance, with ever-changing rules and regs, and with the need to keep up. And particularly as the regulatory environment has shifted, there have been new regulations in food and pharma and accessibility that have caused businesses to really have to take a look at their compliance protocols. Around the same time as we were looking at inspections really closely, Chipotle had a food safety crisis. Chipotle, the fast casual brand that many people at the time loved, struggled with a series of food safety events that caused a major brand challenge. They lost 42% of their market cap. Revenue fell by a third, because of a series of potentially preventable food safety and quality issues that caused a number of consumers to get hurt and caused an uproar in the public. And we were looking at markets we could build CoInspect for, and we had not thought about food at the time. But restaurant chains and restaurant owner-operators started contacting us: could we use your compliance tool, this collaborative inspect tool you've built, for food safety and quality management? And that's how we ended up starting to scale in the food industry. That was in 2015 and into 2016. And so we started down the path to build a compliance and regulatory management tool using best-in-class practices around technical-led product development, trying to use what we think of as well-established startup principles like Lean and Agile development, trying to get out of the building. I read every startup book I could find, from The Hard Thing About Hard Things to The Lean Startup. There's just a range out there. I tried to steep myself in startup lore, and we started building technology. We started building a mobile app, then a structured database on the backend. Then we started scaling it, adding geolocation, language translation. And along the way we started scaling into what became a farm-to-fork quality and safety management platform. And we ended up raising capital from what I think of as mission-driven venture investors that wanted to build and scale a company trying to improve health and safety, and do it in a trillion-dollar industry, the food industry, that's largely using outdated technology tools. And that's really how we became a technology company. That was phase one. Our second phase is a new product, a second product we built called Therma. And Therma has taken us from being a safety company to becoming a sustainability company. That happened in year four. We built Therma thinking we were building it for food safety. That's where we started, in the food supply. We built it as a sensor-based platform to monitor refrigeration, temperature, and holding conditions for food products. And what we discovered was that businesses wanted it not just for compliance and to improve safety standards, but to catch refrigeration issues and refrigeration downtime. For them, the bigger ROI was around avoiding food waste, not having to throw product out, and around energy savings, being able to optimize the refrigeration settings. And then lastly, around not having refrigeration go down, being able to catch downtime events before they happen. Refrigeration is an expensive asset, and having it go down can be both service-disruptive and reduce the asset lifecycle. And as we started building the second product, Therma, this IoT-enabled monitoring solution for smart refrigeration, what we discovered was that the reasons businesses started buying it, food waste, energy waste, and refrigeration downtime, were actually major drivers of global warming. We had no idea we were building a climate company when we started working on Therma in the summer and fall of 2019. It was going to be our second product around safety and quality management. And what we've discovered over the past year and change, as we've scaled Therma into the world, is that it's become a smart cold chain platform across the refrigeration cold chain. We're now deploying it in restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets, manufacturing plants, as well as in the healthcare supply chain, which has gotten a lot of attention in 2020 with a completely unexpected world event, COVID-19. COVID-19, and then the vaccine development and vaccine delivery that's come on the back of that, has required significant improvement in the cold chain. The cold chain, or the refrigeration infrastructure layer that covers the whole world, is a largely legacy industry, a 100-plus-year-old industry with very limited innovation and a lot of loss of product, of energy, and of refrigerants. And so CoInspect has become Therma. We still have our CoInspect product. It's now become part of the Therma brand. And today we work on safety and sustainability. It's still an early-stage company. We're 60 people, based in the Bay Area, but the journey continues, as we keep trying to find alignment with problems that matter and vehicles to solve them. So coming back to your question, Khurram, when Aaron and I look at ourselves as entrepreneurs, I think of myself as trying to work on problems that have public import, that are in service of the public good, but trying to improve those problems using whatever tools are at our disposal. In this case, we have human capital and financial capital in the form of early-stage innovators, early-stage maker-doers, and early-stage investors that want to see those products proliferate in the world. Everyone around the table, from our team to our investors, is mission-driven. That's a pretty significant filter we have. And I think there are a lot of people we've discovered who work in the quote-unquote private sector but who do care about bending the arc, so to speak, of history toward justice and a more just world, and doing that on a plethora of issues. We're working on safety and sustainability. Those are two pretty significant issues in the food and climate and public health world we live in, but they're not the only ones. But that's how I've made my peace with moving back into the private sector. It feels very different from the work I was doing as a hedge fund asset manager. It's a very different approach, a very different modality. Still leveraging the private sector, its incentives, its ability to harness human talent and quickly scale it, but doing it in service of something larger than just profit.

Khurram Naik: So what's interesting about that path is that there's some serendipity involved, but you were largely heading in the right direction. And it's interesting when you say mission-driven, because the mission changed over time, as you saw these new doors open up. So how do you think about it? When you look back and you're really getting this traction, what do you attribute the sources of that traction to? Things like being mission-driven, picking the right technical problem. How do you think about those so that you can replicate that? Because by now you've worked on several different kinds of things. So I'm interested in teasing out the lessons learned from these different categories of problems you solve, to figure out what Manik has discovered for himself, or maybe for others, for how to set out in a promising direction. How do you pick problems and directions for yourself, directions that, in your own lexicon or construct, are aligned with yourself?

Manik Suri: Yeah, absolutely, Khurram, I appreciate the question. I think it's a really thoughtful question. A few reflections, a few thoughts around that. I think being mission-driven, though it's a much-used and often hackneyed phrase, is about motivation, and a metaphor I've been using recently is: what kind of fuel are you burning? Are you burning renewable, or are you burning carbon-based fuels? To me, mission-driven is about what gets you up every day, what gets you going, and trying to burn clean, trying to burn renewable fuels that are self-generative, that create their own energy source for you. Direction is a totally different matter. You can put that engine in service of that fuel and run in any direction, from working in philanthropy, to doing service on the ground as a healthcare worker, to being a product manager helping to deliver more effective FEMA relief through a FEMA website, to a whole range of ways you can make a difference. Many climate activists, or folks working in government, are mission-driven. I think the specific direction one takes is often only partly in our control. We think it's always in our control, and then when you look back, hindsight makes life make sense in the rear-view mirror. When you look at the arc one's life has taken, I've been privileged in many ways. My parents came here as immigrants. They dedicated much of their life to ensuring that my brother and I, I have one brother, had every opportunity they could make available to us. And though we didn't have much money growing up, we did have a lot of support and encouragement around living fully and living larger than ourselves. My parents made sure we traveled a lot. We went back to India a lot to visit family and see the country. I think having a sense of perspective around the opportunities and privileges of living and growing up in America gave me a desire to do something larger than just myself. And part of it might have been ego and ambition. Certainly I think ego and ambition are part of my motivation set. And definitely when I was younger, I wanted to make a name for myself. I remember coming into college thinking, oh, I really want to prove myself here. Probably I wasn't alone coming into Harvard College with that desire. And the more I've gotten to know about myself, the more I've realized that I feel most motivated and most alive when I'm working with and around people who are motivated by something larger than themselves, whether it's in government, or in a nonprofit like GovLab, or in a mission-driven startup like Therma. In all of those settings, I found it's the orientation of a certain type of person that I keep gravitating toward. And I think that has been a real privilege, getting to choose where I work and who I work with. So I would encourage anyone who's listening, who's thinking about their own choices, to find your own, find what fuel helps you burn clean. What motivates you from within, that gives you a sense of renewable energy every day, that doesn't feel like it's only in service of how others see you or in service of power and prestige, which are always there and always enticing, but which I think can be false. They don't necessarily burn as clean. The other thing about direction I would say is that I've been very fortunate to have serendipity. I think serendipity is part of life, being in the right place at the right time, or being in the right inner space at the right time to be open to ideas. I would never have met Beth and chosen to work with her on the GovLab if I wasn't curious and questioning. I don't think I'd ever have left finance to go back to law school if I hadn't been curious and questioning and talking to folks. I certainly wouldn't have started a startup if I hadn't been open to and keeping myself looking out for ideas and opportunities. And the last thing I'll say around this is that at some point, in this last phase, I decided to stick with one thing. I decided to stay with entrepreneurship. I'd moved in my 20s between finance and then law school and briefly government and then into GovTech and CivicTech, as the space was called, Civic Technology. And many times I've thought about other things I could do, policy, or going back to being an investor. My sister-in-law just joined the Biden White House as an associate counsel, and I really admire many people working in the federal government and in policy roles. But I decided to stay with this path, because at a certain point, one can be more effective if one can move a ball forward for some period of time in a given direction. And so we've started to get traction with CoInspect and then Therma, and it's making a small dent in a small corner of the universe, but it's a positive dent. It's trying to make our food and our health better and safer, and do it in ways that are pro-planet. And I think that by staying with one thing for a while, opportunities start to manifest. Therma would never have been possible if we hadn't stayed with CoInspect for nearly four years. We would never have discovered the pain point that led us to build the second product, that led us to raise capital around Therma. And I think that's a theme I've seen in many people I admire, that they are both listening for and looking for opportunity, and serendipity thus makes itself a part of their journey, but they also know at times when to stay with something and really see it through. And it's that tension, I think, that one sees in really successful careers. Certainly in the people I admire, I see that, this creative tension between those two.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, that's interesting. And when you listen to your story, it sounds like at these different transition points, they're very driven by people. You're either inspired by someone like Obama, or you're inspired by Beth, and these people inspired you and pulled you in some direction. And there's also a story about partnerships and the partnerships you developed. And I wonder if this partnership you have with Aaron was the kind where it was a renewable source of energy for you, that kept you motivated to keep on working for several years, keep on plotting along. So can you talk a little more about the people dimension? Are people your source of renewable energy, and what does that look like for you?

Manik Suri: Absolutely, Khurram. When I was young, I used to love reading biographies and autobiographies. I just really enjoyed reading about people and how they lived their lives. People who were historically great, or renowned, or revered or respected for some reason, whether it was scientific accomplishment, political achievement, philosophical inspiration, or just activism. And I've often sought to find living examples of people I could meet and touch and know in the flesh and blood, actual humans, as opposed to these ideas of people I read about. I've always looked for and sought out mentors, but also living embodiments of values. I find that's a way of anchoring myself, looking for people I admire, trying to find ways to be in their orbit, to do work around what they're doing, or at least to bend my own arc in service of the kinds of causes they're working on. I would say that's absolutely true of Senator, then President, Obama. That was a force in my life that bent my career and took me in a different direction. Beth was another example of someone who had that kind of role, and Aaron has influenced me a great deal. He's been a serial entrepreneur, and he really helped me examine the entrepreneur's path and realize that one could have a positive impact socially in the process of building an enterprise, and doing it as an entrepreneur. And so I definitely sought out people and sought out their stories, and tried to surround myself with people I admire, or at least get close to people I admire. And I think partnerships, I absolutely feel that teams and partners, both personal and professional, are vital in life. I've known my wife now 20 years, which is a long time for a 38-year-old in this generation. She's my best friend. She's seen me through every phase of my life, and I'm very glad for it, because I've always felt I have this ballast, this support. I like to make long-term relationships. I try to meet people I really admire or like and resonate with, and keep them in my life and stay in their life. So Aaron I've now known for almost 10 years, and the journey, at least as an entrepreneur, is so lonely and so intimidating and so filled with failure, that if I didn't have partners, personal and professional, I'm certain I would have quit every other day in the many years of the journey. It's very humbling, like many paths in life are humbling. But I do think partners not only provide an intellectual and literal dimension of depth and heft, but also, more importantly, provide a kind of emotional sustenance and a reminder of who we are, that helps us separate ourselves from our work, so that we don't over-identify and think that just because our work is a struggle, we ourselves are unworthy and failing. And that's been really valuable for me, having partners, both personal and professional.

Khurram Naik: And I know we're wrapping up on time, but here's one thing I want to ask you. Someone listening to your story might hear the word Harvard a lot and say, wow, this person has all these connections, these people who had some sort of Harvard Law connection, and I didn't have that connection. So, you've by now seen a lot of people who are able to build relationships effectively, you've been in very people-driven fields. What are the lessons you've extracted that you think are of general use to people, for ways to think about how to drive forward if they're relationship-driven? What are the things they can employ?

Manik Suri: Yeah, absolutely. I've met a number of people who have said that without pedigree, without prestige, it's very hard to succeed. I really reject that view. I completely disagree with that mindset. I think that can be self-serving and also fatalistic, in a way self-defeating, and it's certainly an opinion that many elites have. I think regardless of whether you have access to certain networks, or have gone to a certain type of school, or have a certain degree behind your name, the first and most important task is to find your inner motivation. What is it that gets you going, and where is it that you find your source of motivation and energy? I think that is the first and most important thing, because from there a sense of self-confidence, a willingness to put oneself out there, a willingness to create opportunity by taking risk, all stem. And many people who go to elite schools never have that. And so they never seize upon the opportunities they could, or take the risks and have the outsized success and impact they could have. On the flip side, many people who don't have a Harvard degree, or two Harvard degrees, or whatever elite education we might all want for our children or for ourselves if we could be lucky and privileged enough, there are many examples of people who not only succeed but lead without it. And so I would say it's a real privilege if you do have access to networks, both educational and professional, and you should take advantage of those if you do, you should build community and try to get to know people. But much more important than the specific school or the specific network you start with is developing a sense of inner confidence and inner motivation, and then putting that out there, showing up in the world. If there's one thing I could say to a younger version of myself, if I could go back, I would say fear of failure and fear of rejection are maybe among the most human feelings and the most common and deep insecurities we all have. Don't let that fear stop you from showing up in the world, whatever that means. Show up, put yourself out there, build community, work on problems you care about, and the rest will follow.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, I love that. I think you definitely didn't take the easy path or the tracked path. And I think it would have been very easy to, because so many peers would have. So I think it's admirable that you really went against a set career and worked to find your own path. So I think there's a lot of cool lessons there. Well, Manik, there were a lot of great ideas here. I love the renewable energy source idea, I'm thinking about that one. Thanks for taking the time to share your story.

Manik Suri: My pleasure, Khurram. It's a pleasure, and thanks everyone for listening, and I hope we get to meet.

Khurram Naik: Thanks, man.