Nice to meet you! I'm Cass. I'm an operator and strategic doer, and for the past 15 years I've been leading teams and complex projects to drive business and social impact. As a former teacher, researcher, and humanitarian, I care deeply about impacts on people and about real outcomes. I bring relentless learning and do-whatever-it takes, problem-solving attitude to meeting business goals. Currently, I am Director of Operations at Thesis, where I started out as a project manager and now lead a team dedicated to delivering HR and business operations services to teams and internal startups. Some of our people-focused accomplishments so far have included growing headcount to meet scaling needs post-raise and consistently scoring 9/10 on our fully-remote onboarding process. Our Operations Team members at Thesis are startup generalists and so our other accomplishments have included backstopping our founders and leaders to help enable teams to meet critical launches or raises. I have also led operations at Saddle Finance, focused on scaling the company and building a product function, and have been operations leader at the Crypto Research and Design Lab where I coached design researchers and coordinated on-time and on-quality delivery of a suite of research papers to the World Economic Forum. Prior to this, I was a Research Advisor at the Women's Refugee Commission, where I managed multi-country research studies, funded by the UN, Gates Foundation, and others, evaluating the effectiveness of health service delivery and cash transfer programming to protect women and girls forcibly displaced by conflict. In this role, I traveled almost monthly to regions affected by conflict in order to speak with women, girls, and service delivery workers about their experiences and to achieve ambitious data collection goals in difficult contexts. Additionally, I was a Research Manager at the International Rescue Committee, where I lived in rural Sierra Leone following the Ebola virus epidemic for 1.5 years working in partnership with local government and community leaders to rebuild schools, retrain teachers, and assist parents to return their children to school. My very first profession was as a teacher of English/English as an Additional Language/English Language Arts, and I have taught learners in the U.S. and Turkey between the ages of 5-50. I got my BA in applied linguistics from Georgetown University, and my MA in international development policy from Columbia University. In between this, I was awarded and completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Turkey from 2012-2013.