Pula

JOB DESCRIPTION

Title: Chief of Staff

Location: Nairobi, Kenya 

About Pula: 

We work in 13 countries across Africa and Asia, and in 2020, we facilitated crop insurance cover to over 1.7 million farmers across Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Zambia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Malawi. Since raising our Series A our operations have expanded globally including now Asia and Latin America.

Pula is fast-paced, constantly adapting to new opportunities and challenges. We are a high-performance, multi-cultural team. We expect our team to value performance, results and professionalism.

At Pula, we are: 

• Obsessed with results: We are responsible for our future and therefore we get things done!
• Connect the Dots: We continuously identify different customer needs & business problems and build solutions that deliver value.
• Have a Can do Attitude! We dare to do things differently to make things work.
• We have each others’ back: We look out for each other & we share high quality, timely feedback that makes us better.

What you will be doing: 

Your job is to make the most of the Co-CEOs time and effort. You will manage their schedule, helping to decide priorities and making sure things happen and are followed through to completion. With a thorough understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish, you’ll plan and manage complex trips to interesting places in a way that anticipates needs and furthers the mission. You’ll be part of conversations with a wide range of government officials, investors, social entrepreneurs, funders, thinkers, and doers of various stripes who meet and collaborate with the Co-CEOs. Your main mission is to meet the needs of the Co-CEOs, but sometimes you’ll work with others on the team to help pull together and coordinate various events and side projects.

This is a chance to be at the center of a thriving network of people working to make a difference in the world. The job would be a great fit for someone eager to absolutely kill it in the role in return for the opportunity to learn about – and play an important role in – the world of social entrepreneurs and high-impact start-ups. 

Who you are: 

Your background is not really important to us, as long as you will excel at the work and thrive in the role. To do that, you’ll need to understand the work we do and be committed to the mission. 

And in this particular job, you need to be:

• very organized, obsessed with details, and good with people.
• habitually and instinctively helpful
• able to anticipate needs and adjust plans on the fly
• hard to rattle and ready to laugh.
• a decent writer and good communicator
• able to make others feel comfortable.

You won’t enjoy this job if you need a lot of structure and day-to-day management. The managing style around here is pretty loose and you’ve got to be a self-starter, able to work well when everyone’s out and about. While you’ll get all the help you ask for, we need a problem solver, someone you can hand off a job to and know that it will be taken to completion. You are needed and will be highly appreciated. Above all, you must be enthused about an active support role.

BASIC RESPONSIBILITIES

• Fundamentally know what’s going on and make sensible decisions that further the mission.
• Coordinate and schedule lots of meetings/calls across many time zones and continents.
• Manage changing and competing priorities.
• Trip planning and booking – plan, coordinate, and arrange complex international itineraries, including flights, lodging and site visits in foreign countries as well as domestic travel for conferences, board meetings and personal travel/appointments.
• Request and ensure that meeting prep materials are in hand.
• Take and keep clear and concise meeting notes.
• Process the Co-CEO’s expense reports and bill pay.
• Figure out why the damn internet (or iphone, or laptop, or…) isn’t working – or find someone who can.
• Work on side projects with other teams  when required

What you need to have to be successful: 

• Black-belt organizational skills.
• Requisite technology skills to accomplish the above.
• Significant experience managing something relevant to the above.
• A relevant graduate degree is nice; a Bachelor’s degree is required.

To learn more about Pula:

• TED Talk: Crop Insurance, an Idea Worth Seeding
• New York Times: He Grew up on a Farm. Now, He Helps Protect Them
• The Economist: The Poor, Who Most Need Insurance, Are Least Likely to Have It