How the COO of Mati saves 50 hours per month with Double

“I always faced the dilemma of choosing between my right and left brain, but landed in a career where I get to use both all the time,” says Meghna Mann, COO of Mati. “Running operations at a fast-growth startup brings all of the pieces I was looking for together: people and a growing team, processes, business foundations, and turning our company into a well-oiled machine.”

Throughout her career, Meghna has been obsessed with impact:

For me, it’s about maximizing both personal and company impact. When your personal values align with the vision of a company, that’s when everyone achieves the most impact—and that’s what happened for me at Mati.

With a background in sustainable investing and a vested interest in her home country of India, Meghna joined Mati because of its mission: to help drive financial inclusion and access to products and services in developing regions through seamless user identity verification. By diving deep into regional compliance and data privacy, Mati removes the headache of dealing with local bureaucracy and allows companies to focus on serving their users through trust-based services. It provides companies with identity verification, credit checks, biometrics, and more to make trusting users easy.

As COO of Mati, Meghna’s responsibilities are broad—both as a function of the role and the stage of the company. After closing their Series A in late 2020, operations have become much more important to the overall success of the organization. To that end, Meghna focuses on enabling teams to optimize for growth by overseeing Legal, People, HR, and Business Ops departments. She also drives more general parts of the organization’s growth, like culture building and company communications.

“I think about operations as internal products that help our organization and team thrive,” she says. Depending on the business’ needs at any given time, her team’s priorities might shift, but she remains focused on leading and empowering them with the skills, tools, and systems they need.

In 2020, when Mati closed its Series A round of funding, planning for 2021 was underway, and the holidays were fast approaching, Meghna realized that she wasn’t maximizing her impact because of many of the daily tasks that took up her time—and didn’t leverage her strengths.

“As part of the 2021 planning process, I realized there were a lot of things I could entrust someone else with to maximize my personal impact—and help Mati get to the next level,” she says. What’s more, her needs were immediate and urgent enough that going through the process of hiring someone would take too long—she needed a long-term solution, fast. Finally, Meghna didn’t know the full scope of what an assistant would take on, she just knew she needed to be proactive before her workload got out of control.

The worst thing you can do is hire someone and underutilize their talents. I wanted a way to dip my toe in the water of having an assistant and go from there.

In her day-to-day work, Meghna was looking for help with:

• Switching context: “Context switching can be the most challenging part of my job and, yet, it’s where I thrive. I know the importance of focus time and building my days around different modes of thinking, so I wanted someone who could help me reap the benefits of having such a wide range of priorities without the fatigue of moving between them.”

• Having a pulse on every level of the company: “I’m an in the trenches kind of leader—if my teams are struggling, I’ll jump in to support them—but that’s not always the best use of my time. I needed someone who would help me pull back a bit and lean into the trust I have for my teams.”

• Maximizing her day-to-day schedule: “At a startup, the key is knowing which fires to let burn out and focus on the ones that really matter. I wanted someone who would help me build time into my day to reflect, plan, and execute based on when I’m optimized for those different kinds of work.”

Meghna also wanted an EA who was adept with technology and internal tools and would be a culture fit with Mati. “I needed someone comfortable with change and a fast-paced environment because of how quickly we’re growing,” she says. And because of the nature of Mati’s work—in the data privacy and security space—Meghna’s EA would need to uphold the highest levels of integrity and confidentiality.

So Meghna turned to FemStreet, her community of female founders and funders, for advice. Someone suggested Double as a way to support her (and it was a way to support a female founder). When she learned that Double would make bringing on an EA easy, quick, and secure—every Double signs an NDA and uses third-party encrypted tools for managing sensitive data—she was sold. Meghna’s Double, Court, started the first week of January.

Meghna started by handing off tactical things like scheduling, email follow-ups, and providing context ahead of meetings. Court quickly took on more responsibilities across the organization, including supporting employee engagement for the global team. She helped Meghna ship gifts to employees in over twenty countries and provided support in the search for a post-pandemic office space. She plans employee offsites and supports the People Operations team with their tech tooling.

Court is also involved in Mati’s talent coordination and recruiting process, helping Meghna and the Talent team run recruiting end-to-end, from candidate management to scheduling interviews.

Court runs our recruiting process like a sales pipeline—that’s how buttoned-up she is. Recruiting can be so time-consuming, but Court makes it easy—I know that candidates are having a great experience with her.

Because Court hit the ground running as a Double, she’s been able to maximize her impact—and therefore Meghna’s impact, too. And because of the range of work Doubles provide, her scope has expanded to meet Mati’s needs as the organization grows.

Since bringing on her Double, Meghna hasn’t looked at scheduling once, freeing up a more than 50 hours per month to focus on strategic work. “The tactical stuff just takes so much less time now and everyone—myself and Court included—understands context more quickly,” she explains.

Overall, Court helps Meghna focus on what matters, which brings more balance into her days and helps her tackle the most important work at hand. “My Double helps me craft my days and weeks the way I want to so I can stay proactive instead of reactive,” she says. She also provides support as a literal ‘double,” in case Meghna can’t be there.

Having someone who can jump on things when I’m running behind, sick, or absent, is priceless. My Double enables me to do more because there’s so much behind the scenes I don’t have to get involved with—she’s my superpower.

Not only does Meghna maximize her impact with her Double, she’s also a better leader to her teams. “As a company scales, you have to throw your team in the deep end and trust them—I believe that’s the most compassionate thing you can do for their long-term growth. My Double helps me be less in the trenches while still providing me with visibility into what’s going on, which helps me empower my team to take ownership and grow.”

And her Double acts as connective tissue between Meghna and other Mati executives. Court now supports the entire Mati leadership team, which helps provide context and connectivity across different functions.

Having a Double has helped Meghna move from reactive to proactive and truly maximize her impact and drive organization-wide cohesion, context, and growth. “To me, there’s nothing more rewarding than seeing how my work contributes to people doing the best work of their careers,” Meghna says.

Having a Double enables me to focus on serving my team and ensuring that we’re all maximizing our impact as individuals and as a company.