📽️ Join Marina Nitze, former Chief Technology Officer of the VA, and Nick Sinai, former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, as they share powerful insights from their book, "Hack Your Bureaucracy" on the stage at Prodacity. This discussion uncovers practical tactics for navigating and transforming some of the most challenging bureaucratic environments.

Marina Nitze (00:16):

Great to be here today. I'm Marina. I used to be the Chief Technology Officer of the VA, and these days I'm a crisis engineer at a partnership called Layer Aleph.

Nick Sinai (00:25):

Hi everyone. Nick Sinai. I'm with Insight Partners, a large venture capital and private equity firm, and actually do a lot of national security investing these days. I spent almost six years in the Obama Administration and was the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer.

Marina Nitze (00:40):

So we wrote a book called Hack Your Bureaucracy. It's 56 tactics for getting things done in some of the world's worst bureaucracies. If you are familiar with Frank Sinatra's song, "My Way," he sings, "if I can make it here in New York, I can make it anywhere." And our premise is if these bureaucracy hacks worked in the White House, the VA, and the Department of Defense, they're going to work anywhere. And so we want to share a few stories with you today.

(01:02):

The first tactic I'd love to talk about is "Using the Bureaucracy Against Itself." So Nick and I have had the great privilege of working with some of the best technical talent in the country. First through the Presidential Innovation Fellows, which is how Nick tricked me into coming into the government, and then by creating the United States Digital Service. And a really consistent theme was often that some of its top talent in the country or in the world would come in and believe that their mission was to blow up the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was something to go around, to avoid, to escape. And that's not how Nick and I believe that it works. And that's not how we've seen people be successful at getting things done in large bureaucracies, or bureaucracies of any size. Bureaucracies change all the time. If you think about it, people's pay bands change, strategic plans change, leadership changes, and if you can learn the natural rhythms of your bureaucracy, you can actually change it in a way that makes the least risky, highest reward path for everyone else, to do the thing that you want them to do.

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Nick Sinai (02:07):

We called the book Hack Your Bureaucracy, but that's two almost negative words. People think hack sometimes as a pejorative, and I certainly hear bureaucracy being slinged around these last couple days as a negative. But we see hack as a clever way to do something, not only to advance your code into production, to ship your product, to get a policy launched, an initiative launched, but also to make those systemic changes. So it's not just your thing, but it's how do you make the organization better off? And from a bureaucracy perspective, we see it very much as a neutral term. That is if you read a little bit about bureaucracies, which we did prior to writing this book, it's very much about hierarchy, officialdom, wisdom, but also constant process, right? And so bureaucracies exist in all size organizations, in both public and private sector, and it's fundamentally about a standard way for organizations to bring their expertise and have a consistent experience for consumers, customers, stakeholders. And so, we tried to find bureaucracies or places that weren't a bureaucracy.

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Marina Nitze (03:17):

Yeah, it took us to a co-op grocery store in Berkeley, California. Spoiler alert, still a bureaucracy. So, a big request I would get constantly when I have new hires coming in at the VA was what if we just get a waiver for the bureaucracy? What if Secretary Bob or President Obama writes a little memo that says FAR and FedRAMP and all those things, they don't apply to us. We're going to have a waiver. And that doesn't work. And I know that doesn't work because this is a picture of me with President Obama giving me this waiver. This is a cabinet meeting for the VA. A cabinet meeting is not a place that Chief Technology Officers are supposed to be. I was there because he was really mad at me for not having gotten an ATO in nine months at that point. I don't know that he was quite sure what an ATO was, but nine months seemed like a really long time and I was in a lot of trouble.

(04:08):

And I had rehearsed this explanation of risk and incentive frameworks and I was going to be like, "but then there's this ISA MOU that I just have to sign and I just needed, it's one person in Texas to do it," blah, blah, blah. And he heard me and said, "I want to help. How about I record a video on YouTube that tells everybody that they have to give you this approval?" And you guys are all familiar with that page of FedRAMP where it says, "did the President of the United States say on YouTube that you don't have to do this?" And then you click yes, and then you get your FedRAMP certification at the printer and you mosey on along. So firsthand experience does not work. What actually works is using the bureaucracy against itself, figuring out what were the forms, the policies, the procedures that would get me through to my ATO.

(04:55):

There were about a million of them on this particular process, but a couple examples: one was our Inspector General told us that we could not use cloud computing, which we believed was important so that our website didn't have business hours. But they said we couldn't do that because you couldn't put the cloud in an evidence bag. And so the first thing is to be mad and like, "god, they're so stupid, and grrr." And instead, we had lunch with them every day for two years and got to understand more about what their process was. And their business process was when they had to do an investigation, they would walk into someone's office, they would pick up the server, they would put it in an evidence bag, they would walk out. They could not imagine how they were going to do that if the server was somewhere that they could not touch.

(05:39):

I cheekily made cloud shaped sugar cookies, put them in evidence bags and handed them out at the office holiday party. That somehow did not convince them either. But what did was showing them how they could do their investigations better without having to literally do heavy lifting, right? You can use CloudTrail from the comfort of your home office if you want even, and do investigations even more easily and readily. And to this day, the highlight of my career is the day that the Inspector General wrote a memo saying that they preferred logical access over physical access for conducting their investigations. But to Bryon's point yesterday about sharing the real stories, that took two and a half years. There were also questions on the form like, "did I Marina jiggle the doorknob of Amazon Web Services to make sure that it was locked?" I tried answering that a lot of ways.

(06:27):

I was like, metaphorically, I did jiggle the doorknob by doing these other things and I tried, not applicable. I tried leaving it blank. It kept getting kicked back, kicked back, kicked back, and finally it occurred to me maybe I should understand where the form comes from. It turns out the form itself was overseen by four people who when I went to talk to them, were like, "oh, we can change that. We'll just remove that question entirely for the cloud." When you have that kind of power in a bureaucracy, you might want to change a couple other questions on the form. So then when I was changing it anyway, it was like, "hey, does your thing have business hours?" Can't pass go anymore. "Is your server in a mop closet underneath a fire sprinkler with no backup, as a hypothetical example?" Maybe you shouldn't be able to move forward in this approval process. And so when we change those forms, as many of you who are working with the VA today now know, we have ATOs and a continuous ATO, which is absolutely mind boggling to me from back then. So look for ways to use the bureaucracy against itself. Change the forms, change the policies, change the practice guise, whatever it may be, so that the easiest thing for people is to sign that ATO paperwork and not to fight you over jiggling doorknobs.

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Nick Sinai (07:35):

Can I just say one thing before we move on? Is we start a book with the story because this is such a powerful epiphany, that the leader of the free world, that Commander In Chief is offering to record a video to encourage employees in the VA to approve a process. And it's Marina's epiphany that President Obama, as thoughtful and powerful as he may be, could not fix the VA. It was up to her ,and all of her colleagues, and the existing employees of the VA, to make that change. And so it's that message of "no one else is coming to save you. The president of the United States cannot save you." It really was up to Marina and her colleagues.

(08:20):

"Pilot is the Password." I think at Prodacity, you probably have to take a shot every time we talk Kessel Run, but I did include the story of Bryon, Enrique and Adam and team in the book.

(08:39):

And the Kessel Run story is very much of a pilot, not pilot in the Air Force sense, but a pilot in terms of, "hey, instead of trying to reimagine the entire AOC, let's do this little tanker refueling app, and let's get that live and let's show the Air Force that this is a new way." And so this is a super powerful tactic that we're big fans of, regardless of whether you are in policy, in product, in software development, wherever you are. And oftentimes it is just starting with a spreadsheet. Just getting people collaborating, because oftentimes organizations have these 10 year plans. There's some new capability that will be in acquisition. "We're going to do this new thing." I mean, that was part of the story of the AOC, was this was a multi-year kind of traditional system, and yet there was a way to start small and build momentum. And there was a great post on LinkedIn the other day about this idea of quick wins versus small wins, but long-term focus. And I think having a small pilot that actually shows progress, that shows people what you're talking about, and then gets some additional momentum for that long-term win.

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Marina Nitze (09:59):

Yeah. Third story I'd love to share is "Find your Paperclip." So, also in the spirit of transparency, when I started at the VA as Chief Technology Officer, you might think that I had some kind of responsibility, or money, or resources of any kind, but I showed up and was told my job description was to redefine the art of the possible for how America honors and serves its veterans. I had a $0 budget, I had zero headcount. Nobody would invite me to their meetings because I had just been auditing the VA's use of technology from the White House for the last six months, which made me very popular. I tried to buy a dry erase board for my office, and was told that my $99 annual office supply budget was insufficient to buy $105 GSA dry erase board, and if I brought one from home, I would be in violation of OSHA and probably some other things, so I couldn't do that either.

(10:55):

So I'm sitting at my desk alone, no one will talk to me. I have literally nothing except a pile of paperclips. And it reminded me of this story that some of you may have heard, about this blogger named Kyle, who took a literal red paperclip, and through a succession of barters, traded it for a house that he subsequently lived in. So I'm staring at my pile of paperclips thinking like, "ooh, can I trade this for literally anything?" when the head of the executive secretary pool popped her head in my office and said, "hey, Marina, have you seen Green Pack 42?" And I said, "I don't know what that is, but I have nothing else to do, so I will come help you look for it." So we wandered around, for any of you that had been at VA headquarters, this 12 story, fairly wide office building, looking for a green Pack 42, and all a Green Pack is a green file folder with the number 42 written on the front.

(11:40):

And when other agencies or members of Congress would write an official letter to the VA, our official response would circulate through clearance in the building in this green folder. And it quickly became apparent to me that all the executive secretary team ever did, was wander around the building looking for green folders. This being the VA, on the eighth floor, while looking in a closet, I found a box of barcode scanners and thought, "ooh, what if I printed a barcode on the front of these folders so that people could check them into their desks?" And exec sec would always know who had the folder last. So I wrote the world's smallest Ruby on Rails app that Friday, printed some barcodes, and presented it to them, not really thinking a lot of it besides trying to find some way to be useful. And then suddenly you heard this "boop" happening all around the building as people were checking in their folders. I called it Folder Finder because I like alliteration and my maiden name is Marina Martin. So I was alliterative at the time, but they called it "M-Boop," M for Marina and "boop" for the sound that it made when people were checking in their folders. And I had unwittingly just unlocked this huge pile of political capital with some of the most important people in any agency, which is the Executive Secretary pool. Fast forward a couple of months, there was this thing called healthcare.gov you probably all heard about. It went super well. [Audience laughing]

(12:59):

Guess who was slated to launch the next federal website after healthcare.gov? It was the VA. Which at the time, for those of you that have been around the public sector a little bit, the VA, we were trusted to do nothing. We were only on the front page of the newspaper for horrible things, just consistently every day. We were constantly in trouble. We weren't trusted to do anything. And so we were going to launch the first website after healthcare.gov, and the White House was like, "hell no, you are not." And there was a room of people that were trying to performance test this new website. It was called the GI Bill Comparison Tool. And it would let a veteran enter their military service and figure out how many dollars of higher education benefits they would be eligible for depending on which chapter they picked. And if you pick the "wrong chapter," you're out tens of thousands of dollars that you can't ever get back, so it's pretty high stakes.

(13:47):

And so they learned from healthcare.gov that maybe you should load test things, which is good. They load tested it, and it crashed at EIGHT users. Not great. And you know who was in that room? Someone from the Executive Secretary Pool who said, "Marina can print barcodes, maybe she can save this tool." I don't know. So, she came to me, I came to them, and I kind of looked at it. It was basically a calculator. It didn't require any personal information, it didn't require login, it had been crazily over-engineered on servers and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, alright, I could put this on GitHub Pages, which is free, because the office of the CIO, where Nick had been, had published some written documents on GitHub Pages. So I was like, "oh, OMB already uses this tool so it's definitely approved" and also it's free because remember, I have no money and no resources at all.

(14:43):

And so myself and a couple of Presidential nation fellows rewrote the tool over a weekend in the most basic JavaScript on the planet, put it on GitHub Pages, they tried performance testing GitHub Pages - that didn't go so well because it crashed the performance testing computer. And the White House...I to swear on my non-existent firstborn that it would be fine if it launched. President Obama announced it. It did not crash. And now the VA had like, "whoa, we had a win for the first time ever." And I was able to funnel that a little bit forward into some more political capital by launching what is now va.gov for those of you there at the VA. But at the time, again, I couldn't have my own, I couldn't take over va.gov. There were too many people with vested interests. I had to buy vets.gov and have a separate site over here.

(15:32):

I had...at that point, I learned you could have a purchase card. So I had $2,999, which meant I was like, "oh, I could buy Heroku, a little bit of Heroku for a website." And I filled out the paperwork there, it asked how I knew it would scale, and I said, because Heroku hosted the official Miley Cyrus fan club, which was approved, I will say, so sometimes give it a shot on the answer. So fast forward a bunch of paperclip trades. When I left the VA, I had a team of 75. I had many millions of dollars of budget. And today, those of you that work with Lighthouse and Charles Worthington, they have actual responsibility and took over all of va.gov, which is pretty cool. And all of that started with a paperclip. So look for your paperclip.

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Nick Sinai (16:14):

It was consolidating over a thousand websites into a single one, going from effectively being a VA-centric website, and a VA-centric organization, to being more Veteran-centric and really putting veteran needs - and I love the story of starting with a little flanker project, this little innovation thing that people let Marina do in the corner, partly because va.gov was so complicated, and had so much challenges, but also because it let her move faster, prove a better way of working, and then ultimately under her successor, that reverse merger that took over va.gov and now provides a better experience for all Veterans.

(16:59):

"Find the Doers" is another tactic we talk about. This was actually a tactic - we had a whiteboard in the White House with a bunch of tactics. We talk about them in the book and find the doers is fundamentally in any organization, there's a lot of talkers, right?

(17:17):

And I was actually a professional talker. I was middle management in a lesser policy council inside the presidency. If you wanted something to really get done, you had to make it the National Security Council job or make it the idea of OMB, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where the CTO's office was, wasn't exactly known for its juice. Fut if you wanted to be effective inside of the presidency, inside of the White House, you really had to find the people who were doing the important work inside of the agencies. And that wasn't always, and it usually wasn't, the secretary, the administrator, the assistant secretary, et cetera. It was the actual doers. And finding them, understanding them, and building authentic trust and reciprocity, and just building a real relationship with them, was a way to get real stuff done. Because administrations get into this point of view where like, "hey, we're going to publish this big policy. All these Executive Orders..." and Executive Orders are not self-executing. Take it from me as someone who's had the Department of Defense slow walk or ignore Executive Orders that I helped write. I have a pretty good idea that you have to find the doers who are doing great work, amplify their work, codify their work, and celebrate it.

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Marina Nitze (18:47):

So "Strangle the Mainframe." Who is familiar with this concept? Yeah, so Martin Fowler created it. It is actually not about strangling human beings to murder them. It is about murdering fig trees...just because some people find it a violent analogy...it's only fig trees that are hurt in the process. And so my company, my crisis engineering firm, our number one, two and three source of business is people that are trying to replace their mainframe and failing. Because everybody's in some sort of 10-year digital modernization, blah, blah, blah. And it never fully works because they're always trying to do a big bang tenure. They're going to understand every last nuance of the mainframe, and they're going to capture them in Excel spreadsheets very carefully. And then they're going to put them in statements of work very carefully, and then magic. And so what does work though, is strangling the mainframe, which is taking off one piece at a time.

(19:36):

My preferred analogy here is not Martin's fig tree, sorry, Martin...is actually Harry Potter. If anybody has not seen Harry Potter to the end, I'm about to give you a very big spoiler so cover your ears. So what do they do in Harry Potter? Voldemort is enemy. Voldemort is the mainframe. They're trying to replace Voldemort - rip and replace - for six and a half books. They go right at him with your 10-year legacy, big bang waterfall mainframe modernization project. In the course of that, there's billions of pounds of muggle property damage. Most of Harry's family dies, and Voldemort is stronger than ever. What actually works is finding Voldemort's horcruxes. You take just a little snake here, and a little tiara there, and then at the end Voldemort is this weird little alien thing and you can just bop it. So looking at whatever big project you were doing, and what are the discreet pieces that you can take off of it? It was absolutely our plan for taking over...reverse merging...I like that term, va.gov where we couldn't go at it because it was too big and people would just stop us. They wouldn't even let us into meetings, let alone deploy code to it. And to deploy code to va.gov at the time, you had to go through the change control board, which met quarterly.

(20:48):

And so instead, we did the GI Bill Comparison Tool. So the first thing that we put on our new website was the GI Bill Comparison Tool because they already liked us, and they trusted us ,and there was no PII and there was no account. And then they had a friend at VBA that was at the time the Office of Economic Opportunity, and they had a Presidential mandate to put some employment resources for Veterans online. And we paired up with them and we put it online. In the course of that, we saved VA $27 million in duplicative contracts that I then got some of the cost savings for. So now I went from having $2,999 to like $7 million, which is a lot more money. And then we did it business line by business line, such that you can do almost everything on va.gov today, and that's only over a 10-year timeframe. And the VA has 83 different benefit lines.

(21:37):

We also saw a lot of success with this - usually my clients are under NDA, but one that named us publicly was Governor Newsom during the height of the pandemic, when California was facing an unemployment claims backlog that they estimate would take 48 years to work down, which is a really long time. We used the strangler pattern to get that down to 60 days. And they completely worked through the backlog. And that was really looking at what are...it's the pareto principle...what are the one or two main pain points? One of them being 99% of the calls, assuming you could even answer them, were people trying to check their claim status. And we pulled a CSV off the mainframe once a night, put it on a cloud computing based page that could take people compulsively refreshing all day because that's their behavior when you're desperate, and you're trying to get a claim status, and you don't have a login. And we just found a very simple way to get that up in about a week. And that plus some adoption of NIST standards around identity verification, meant that we knocked 48 years down to two months. Meanwhile, they had been on year 11 of their mainframe modernization project. So finding ways to strangle the mainframe and do piece by piece is the way, the only way, frankly that I've seen successful and I think that truly resonates with this crowd.

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Nick Sinai (22:49):

So bureaucracy hacking is a team sport. I think we can all appreciate that. One of the sayings we had was "Cultivate the Karass." Now Karass is a term in Kurt Vonnegut's book, Kat's Cradle, he talks about God putting people on earth for you to find and band together. We have a more secular version of it. So our definition of a Karass is really those people inside and outside of your organization who you can band together to make impact. And so, one of our colleagues, Jake Brewer, he was tragically killed in a bike race when he was at the White House, and he had this sticker of Cultivate the Karass, and it's something that has always stuck with us. And there's two kind of fun stories here. One is the "Grilled Cheese Club," Marina.

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Marina Nitze (23:41):

Yeah. So at VA, we called our Karass the Grilled Cheese Club. We would get together, definitely not use George Foreman grills to make grilled cheese because that would violate fire codes, and definitely not drink red wine out of Dixie cups because that is not an appropriate thing to do at work. And we would invite anybody, janitorial staff, legal, HR, procurement, anybody that was even vaguely interested in what we were doing, to come to our Grilled Cheese Club. We would give demos, and we would talk about what we're up to next, and ask for advice. And it very often...somebody would be like, "oh, there's this bucket of money that someone can't spend. You should go talk to them about seeing if you can pair up" or "make sure you put that privacy statement on there because when Helen sees this, if that privacy statement isn't exact, she's going to tie you up and all this..." whatever.

(24:20):

Not only did that help give us a lot of input from different people around the organization, but it also created more advocates for us because the laws of physics meant myself and my teammates could only be in so many places at so many times. And a natural course of when you're trying something new or innovative, is people would be like, "well, Marina was skipping the entire ATO process. She's not even filling out that blah, blah, blah....'" And someone would be like, "actually, I saw her on Friday at Grilled Cheese Club and she had an ATO tracker. She is going through the process." And that kind of advocacy really, really helped to keep us on track and not from getting too sideswiped.

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Nick Sinai (24:55):

One of the things about a Karass is it really ought to be from different functions, different parts of an organization. If you're a bunch of developers and you're hanging with only developers, you're really not appreciating HR, and legal, and all of those other things. So I think in that example, Marina was really able to find informal ways to communicate information and build those kinds of relationships. The other fun story is the Security Guards.

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Marina Nitze (25:25):

Yeah, so I mentioned how as we were building vets.gov at the time, the next tranche was the employment team, and they were able to recoup about $27 million of duplicative contracts. But to do that, I was going to have to move a thousand HTML articles off the existing websites and onto our new platform. And that doesn't sound super hard, but I was alone, and I had two weeks and I did not...I was like, "there's no way I can do this in time. How am I going to get $7 million of recoup cost if I can't move these thousand pages?" And I was telling this to Simon, the Security Guard on the 12th floor when it occurred to me that Simon had a computer and a little bit of time on his hands, and I said, "hey, Simon, how would you like to learn HTML?" And he was like, "ooh, yes, I would be very interested in that. I will come at lunch."

(26:13):

And he came at lunch and he came with the Security Guards from the other 11 floors, and we had an HTML crash course. I mean, you just needed little stuff, right? You were moving text over. And my gosh, you'd go to every floor, and they were still doing their security job, but you'd see them typing and moving the articles. I beat the deadline, got $7 million, which again, I had $3,000 before that. So holy ****. And all of them then quit the VA for IT jobs. So, that is certainly my favorite Karass story because who would've thought that the way that the Chief Technology Officer of the largest civilian agency gets her first budget is through 12 Security Guards, but that's how it happened.

(26:53):

Next tactic is "Looking Between the Silos." This is my absolute favorite out of all 56. It's one that I use constantly. I've had a million stories, but I will tell one from the VA fairly quickly. And the goal of looking between the silos, is to follow an actual process from start to finish. And I mean a real process, a real ATO application, a real approval, a real claim. And I know Bryon has some amazing stories of doing this to get to continuous ATO, and that's another, to me, example of looking between the silos. Because we all know silos, right? They're defended. It's almost like they've got century guards posted outside that are there to defend against change or people coming to look in. But the handoffs between the steps between the departments, often nobody's looking there at all, and there - often making a change there can be nearly effortless sometimes because nobody is paying attention and nobody is defending it.

(27:39):

The craziest story I had around this, when I was flying around the country following the VA Disability Claims process, which at the time, took four and a half years, on average, to work down. And I would follow it and a Veteran, with their permission, to their medical exam, and the doctor would write this eight-page, very detailed, medical report. And I asked that doctor what he thought happened next, or he or she, and they said, "oh, I expect another, more experienced, even better doctor will read my very detailed report, and they will make a nuanced, complicated decision about how disabled this Veteran actually is." Then I actually went to what the next step in the process was. And there is a person, who has no medical training of any kind whatsoever, who is looking at a calculator made out of Visual Basic in the 1990s.

(28:21):

They asked them to input two numbers. Those two numbers are basically never in the eight-page medical report. And that means that that person then sends the Veteran back for an additional exam, where there's another eight-page essay, and it just kept looping and looping. I brought these two teams together in one place, and I had them just demonstrate their steps to one another. And people lost their freaking minds. And what that drove is those doctors were never going to write another eight-page essay again because they saw it was not going anywhere, and not only that, causing harm later. And we ran a really successful pilot where we actually gave that Visual Basic Calculator to the doctor and were able to process claims in the same day in our pilot in Salt Lake. For different reasons that didn't end up - the VA is still not using that, but it worked. If anybody is ever working on this now, it worked and it had an ATO.

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Nick Sinai (29:10):

Okay, "Make the Bureaucracy Work for You." We tell the story in the book about Rohan Pavuluri. He was one of my students. He was at Harvard College. And so, he comes to office hours. I'm an Adjunct at the Kennedy School there, but I have a few precocious college students. He knocks on the door and he says, "hey, professor Sinai," which I always get a kick out of. And I'm looking around and they're like, "hey, professor Sinai, I'm here for office hours. My parents are here because it is parents' weekend. Can they just wait outside?" And I was like, "your parents are not waiting outside. Come on in." And so we sat down and we were having chit-chat. It was parents' weekend, and suddenly Mrs. Pavuluri interrupts and she's like, "professor, my son cannot drop out of Harvard. Please tell him to stay." And he had been working on a social impact startup, a nonprofit startup called Upsolve to help low-income Americans with bankruptcy.

(30:14):

Bankruptcy is actually complicated. It's actually kind of costly to file. And so a lot of low-income Americans are trapped in bankruptcy, often due to medical debt and other unforeseen circumstances. He was really passionate about this idea and was thinking about dropping out of college, and maybe he had blamed me, or his mother had assumed that I was encouraging such behavior, and I assured her, of course, he should continue with his studies. And he ended up using the bureaucracy, using the organization of Harvard, Harvard College, Harvard University, Harvard Kennedy School, reorganized his studies, did independent studies, and every class he took, every resource that he went after, and he won various awards, was funneled into this nonprofit. So this nonprofit, Upsolve, which he was the Executive Director and Co-Founder of, has helped extinguish over $700 million of debt from low-income Americans, a lot of it medical debt. And it's a great example of how Rohan was able to use the bureaucracy of a large academic institution that, if you figure out the authorities, if you figure out the ways that it work, and you build authentic relationships with the people that work there, including lowly Adjuncts, you're able to find ways to make the bureaucracy work for you. So I really liked Adam's talk yesterday because he said, "we have to assume that we're going to have middle managers, and how can we leverage them in new ways?"

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Marina Nitze (31:49):

Yeah, great. Well, those are just some stories. We'd love to talk to you more, and please come to the book signing. If you happen to already have our book, we have stickers too - you can take home and stick into your book. Us and the Corporate Rebels. So, thanks so much.

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