My Career – Part 23: Joining Nuna

My experience joining Nuna was so bizarre and unexpected that I figured that it warranted its own chapter.

In October 2021, I decided to leave Niantic after a phone call with Piaw. Piaw then sent two emails introducing me to the engineering manager at Nuna and to a recruiter at Aurora. Nuna’s response was instantaneous – I was on a call with them later that afternoon.

I never really interviewed with Nuna, which kind of freaked me out. I had “interviews” with various people (including the CEO of the company), but they didn’t really ask me any interview questions. Most of the discussions were them telling me about Nuna and how I’d fit in. They gave me a very good job offer exactly one week after Piaw sent them the introductory email.

Aurora moved a little slower, but not much. The difference was that Aurora actually interviewed me, and those interviews were interesting. I was applying for a security position (I’m not a security person, but I’ve always been “security adjacent” and they said it’s easier to train me to be a security guy than the other way around). Some of the interviews were kind of fun. I especially liked the one line C function where I had to tell what it did and find the six bugs. Aurora gave me a very good job offer about one week after Nuna had.

I decided to go with Aurora because:

I really liked working with Piaw (although working with my other friends at Nuna was almost as good).
I had a better sense of the engineering problems that Aurora was trying to solve.
I felt like Aurora knew me better – they actually evaluated me, whereas I wasn’t sure if Nuna really knew me and I was unclear of their expectations.

For the rest of this story to make sense, I need to provide some information about Nuna. Nuna was founded by Jini Kim and David Chen. Jini’s younger brother (Kimong) is severely autistic and had severe seizures. As her immigrant parents did not speak English very well, Jini had to navigate the Medicaid system (at the tender age of 9) to get her brother the help that he needed. Nuna is Korean for “big sister”.

Since then, she has been very passionate about fixing the US healthcare system in any way possible. When the healthcare.gov website was created and was riddled with errors, she was one of the small team of people personally called by President Obama to fix it. She worked in this capacity for 6 months and significantly reduce the site’s error rate (she was referred to as the “queen of errors”).

John Doerr is widely regarded as one of the top technology venture capitalists in the world, having provided capital for Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, drugstore.com, Amazon.com, Intuit, Macromedia, and Google. In 2024 he was listed number 68 on the Forbes 400 list. His passions today are addressing climate change and fixing the US healthcare system. John became an investor in Nuna and he is actively involved in running the company. Piaw spent time talking with John (including sailing on his yacht), and Piaw described him as probably the best salesman in the world.

At the time I was hired, Nuna’s entire focus was promoting value based health care, which is a very complex problem as each insurance company generally creates their own programs and every program is usually very different. Supporting value based healthcare programs is a very IT intensive task.

When I told Jini that I decided to take the job with Aurora, her quote was “That’s not good. Can you join a phone call with John?” How do you answer that? On one hand, I was utterly surprised and flattered that a person of John’s reputation would care about me one way or the other (I’m a solid engineer, but uninteresting to the average billionaire). On the other hand, I knew that if I accepted the call, I’d probably take the Nuna job (as I had little chance of being unpersuaded by the best salesperson in the world). In the end, my intrigue got the best of me.

Jini set up a call that happened almost immediately. It was a Friday night, and the zoom call lasted one hour. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but John is an extremely nice, sincere, and wise man! He didn’t talk too much – he mostly asked me questions and spent the hour getting to know me. He asked if my wife was available to join the call, but she was teaching piano at the time. As jobs impact the entire family, he suggested that we talk again in the morning when my wife was available.

The next morning my wife, daughter, and I joined John and Jini on zoom for two more hours. It was mostly discussion around value based health care and how Nuna fit into it. There was no hard sell, but we definitely had a real conversation. Every now and then he’d interrupt my stream of consciousness to insert an insight, and I could never argue with it.

Towards the end of our chat, John asked me to enumerate my top concerns and I admitted that I feared that Nuna didn’t really know me very well and I wasn’t sure of my role or expectations. Jini then surprised me by telling me all about myself. They may not have seriously interviewed me, but as they were in the process of hiring several other people from Niantic (including my boss), she did have some very serious conversations with them about me.

She said two big things:

My superpower is documenting systems and nothing is documented at Nuna and nobody knows how any of it works. She needs me to document everything and to get everybody on the same page.

Nuna was currently supporting several partners, but each had their own system and it was very expensive to scale. She wanted me to help Nuna scale massively.

John then gave me an updated job offer with even better numbers and suggested that we talk again on the next day (which was Sunday). I asked when on Sunday, and he said anytime that I wanted. I suggested that perhaps his and Jini’s time were also valuable and that I didn’t want to interfere with any plans that they might have. He admitted that his daughter was flying in the next day and that he would like to spend the afternoon with her. I suggested that we meet in the morning. I still don’t understand why a man of his reputation and accomplishments would spend any time with me – let alone why he would prioritize time with me over his own daughter (but I was flattered).

The new numbers were nice, but what honestly sold me on Nuna was learning that Jini did understand me and what I could do for the company. The next morning I accepted the offer and John insisted that we have a toast.

He also invited my wife and I to fly down and to hang out with him on his yacht (which used to be JFK’s favorite boat), but we never followed up as we didn’t want to impose. I did get to sail on his yacht a couple of times on some company outings, however.

John also has 6 floor seats at the Chase Center, and I was invited to attend four Golden State Warriors games, including the 2022 season opener with the Warriors vs. the Lakers (e.g. Steph Curry vs. Lebron James). As the Warriors were the 2021 champions, I also got to witness the ring ceremony from the floor.

My son is a huge Golden State Warriors fan, and Jini was able to arrange for us to catch a game together. This was the second time in my career that my job earned me street cred with my kids (the first being when I brought home the XBOX One two days before everybody else).