Anti-social social distancing
Read to the end for an interview with the co-founders of Kinnos, an innovative company in the disinfection space. You’ll hear their thoughts on Covid-19, what they’ve learned about running a company, the importance of advisers and mentors, and the science behind their product.
What is the job?
Chief of Staff at Kinnos
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Chief of Staff
Why this is a great job
An incredible team with an important - and timely - mission. Here’s your chance to jump on board and help them grow to the next level. They also just closed on a round of funding.
The nitty gritty
Company website: www.kinnos.us
Location: NYC
Who you’d be working for: Jason Kang (interview below!)
About Kinnos
Kinnos is a venture-backed company that protects patients, healthcare workers, and the general public from infections. Kinnos has created an award-winning and patented colorized disinfection technology called Highlight® that is revolutionizing how people use disinfectants to protect themselves and others, and is used internationally by hospitals, humanitarian agencies, and first responders. Kinnos has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare.
The Job’s Mission:
The Chief of Staff serves as advisor, counsel, and aide to the CEO to drive the Company’s priorities forward. The CEO is looking for someone who wants to commit to growing within the role over the long-term to engage in day-to-day responsibilities as well as longer strategic projects. The ideal Chief of Staff is: always seeking to learn new things and grow as a person, is obsessed with efficiency, likes to mix outside-of-the-box thinking with analytical, data-driven processes, and has low ego but is able to act as a leader and hold others accountable.
Key Activities & Responsibilities:
Organize and prioritize key information, issues, deadlines, and decisions
Evaluate and develop business opportunities to grow revenue and increase operational efficiency
Work together with the CEO to strategize and develop presentations for internal and external meetings
Act as a sounding board and thought leader for the CEO
Monitor key performance indicators and streamline communication and priorities for the company
Take ownership of tasks and projects that span across multiple departments
You offer:
Bachelor’s in a quantitative field of study is preferred, MBA is a plus
Prior experience working directly with an executive team is a huge plus
Start-up experience or project management work at a top consulting/finance/tech company is preferred
Comfortable in a start-up environment making things happen with minimal guidance and limited resources
Highly proactive and knack for picking up new things quickly
Strong analytical, financial, and management fundamentals, data-driven
Strong believer in honest and open communication while maintaining high integrity
We offer:
Close involvement with the inner workings of an exciting, early-stage startup!
The opportunity to lead your own projects and directly interface with the executive team
Passionate and close team with a healthy work culture
Competitive salary, commission, and opportunities for equity
Flexible vacation policy
Health, vision, dental, and life insurance
Monthly MetroCard and the ability to live in NYC
An interview with Jason Kang and Katherine Jin, Co-Founders of Kinnos
On starting Kinnos
We started Kinnos back in 2014 when we were undergrads at Columbia in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Columbia brought in nurses and doctors to talk about problems they were facing and one of the major issues was that ineffective disinfection and human error were literally killing them, and they wished they had a way to see what they were doing. That's how we came up with the idea for colorized disinfection — basically colorizing existing disinfectants so you can visualize coverage and then having the color fade to approximate when the surface is safe to touch. Originally, this started off as more of a project, but about 2 months in, the Fire Department of New York asked us to do a demo for them and became our first customer. Two months after that, we won the USAID Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge, which gave us over half a million dollars of grant funding to deploy in Liberia and Guinea. At that point, it was pretty clear that we should really go for it.
On the science behind Highlight, their product
The formulation is proprietary, so we can't go into the secret sauce that's necessary for everything to work, but we can tell you that the chemistry is completely safe, non-toxic, and doesn't affect the efficacy of the disinfectant. Our advisory board includes key opinion leaders in infection prevention and the healthcare industry, and let's just say the demand for a colorized disinfectant is decades old. People have been working on it, but couldn't figure out how to get a color to last in a product when you manufacture it, and then get it to fade only when you use it. So one of the interesting things that we did, which we've patented, is creating a point-of-use additive. With Highlight Powder, you add it to a bucket of bleach and then you can use it to spray down HazMat suits, walls, floors, and so on. The color will last in the bucket for up to five hours, but it'll fade after about three minutes once applied on the surface. Getting that separation of time was really hard and a real technical achievement. For our Highlight Wipes product, the chemistry only gets applied as the wipes go through our lid device. That way, we have much more control over the intensity of the color and the color fading reaction time.
On the broader vision for Kinnos
Our goal is to turn Highlight into the standard of care around the world and prevent unnecessary infections. Our technology overcomes language, education, and training barriers and takes completely untrained people and enables them to be disinfection experts: all you have to do is make sure everything's colorized and once the color is gone, you're done. One of the really amazing things about the technology is that it's so visual. It instills confidence in the people doing disinfection, that they're doing the best job possible every single time, and provides peace of mind to people whenever they see the color. We're both empowering the people who are doing the cleaning and protecting the people who are benefiting from it.
Why they're hiring a Chief of Staff now
We just closed a new venture-backed round of funding and we're looking to grow the company rapidly. We're on the cusp of launching a new product in hospitals and we're building out the team (sales and marketing, operations, R&D). There are so many projects that require attention, so having a generalist who is excited to focus on company-wide vision and tackle some of those projects would be awesome. We've seen the immense amount of value that a Chief of Staff can provide at other companies and want to tap into that at Kinnos.
On the culture at Kinnos
Company culture is really important to us. First and foremost, we see each other as individuals, as opposed to 'resources'. We try to make it easy for other people to do their job. We've put a lot of thought into building a supportive and open culture. We like when people are honest and open and encourage everyone to speak up if they think someone's wrong.
Jason: Katherine's done a fantastic job at creating a really solid company culture. We really care about each other. It's important that everyone feels like they're co-founders, that they're part of the larger mission. Part of it is trusting each other and giving ownership over responsibilities. For example, our first two employees Sarah and Aaron, started out as research scientists focusing only on the chemistry, but now they're also working on our IP portfolio, doing sales calls, leading manufacturing and engineering efforts, and more. We like the idea of having people lead their own projects and being able to grow within their roles and develop new skills. The other part of it is keeping everyone in the loop on how our technology is being used and making sure that everyone feels like their work is directly contributing to making an impact on society.
On what they've learned from running the company
Katherine: The number one lesson that I've learned is that you're never correct. Many times, I've looked back and thought to myself 'Now I understand, I have to do this one specific way. I've solved this problem.' Then a couple of months later I'll learn that the way I need to tackle the problem is completely different. I've been humbled by this journey. I used to take failures very personally, but now I know that you have to roll with the good and the bad and when the bad happens all you can do is just keep pushing forward.
Jason: One of the big ones is that a lot of decisions that you make are done with 51% confidence. There's always a huge lack of information. Sometimes have to do it and then see what happens, and then improvise from there. The important lesson from that is to have a low ego, ask for help, and find mentors and advisers that you can call anytime and brainstorm with. Also, that everything costs more and takes longer than you think.
On the importance of advisers and mentors
We've been very intentional about building an advisory board and proud to have well-known, accomplished people as advisers. Most importantly, they're all there for the right reasons. When we were first starting the company, there were a lot of people who wanted to "help" but charge like $500 an hour for that help. People on our advisory board have never asked us for anything, they were just genuinely passionate about the mission, and so it felt really good to give them equity and ask them to formally join the advisory board.
Another big help was bringing on advisers that were serial entrepreneurs. It's so nice to be able to talk to someone who's in the weeds with you and has gone through what you're going through but like two years ago. As a first-time founder, having a network of other founders is super important.
On COVID-19
The outbreak has definitely increased awareness of the importance of infection prevention. We've seen a lot of inbound interest and have been able to deploy some of our product to China and chatting now with potential partners for the response domestically. It's been interesting to us that, for a long time, most of the attention and resources in the healthcare space has been focused on diagnostics and treatments, rather than prevention. It makes sense though because prevention is much less tangible - if you're doing your job right, nothing happens. Prevention requires effort and long-term maintenance, but people are finally realizing that having that infrastructure is really important. I think we're at an inflection point in the field of infection prevention, and we're aiming to make Highlight part of the standard moving forward.
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