Nathan Maton Community at Khan Academy

If you're fortunate enough to bring Nathan into your professional fold, make sure your professional fold has plenty of sandwiches. Because, friends, Nathan has a hunger. I've seen firsthand how he sets his sights on an outcome, gnashes his teeth, and like a matador with paella on the brain rushing a bullfight, spins his cape to produce results. Likewise, facing even the most disoriented of groups, I've seen him communicate and coordinate his way to wildly effective brute force results. When Nathan's gut grumbles -- beware!

I really enjoyed working with Nathan! I was new to community management and he taught me a lot. He is a very friendly and organized person who manages to keep people busy with a good athmosphere even in difficult times. My whole Gameful experience was really positive. For that, I have to give credit to both volunteers I managed and Nathan who was managing me!

I had the opportunity to work with Nathan on our first DCGames Festival – he proved to be an excellent organizational thinker and executor. His diligent fundraising and extensive contacts in the field enabled us to raise the funds needed to run the festival. It was a pleasure working with him.

Nathan was very valuable in helping us with research around a number of educational game projects we are working on. He has a great passion for games and impact and is connected to numerous interesting project and organization in the impact game sector. Enjoyed working with him.

Nathan is one of those people who make you wonder how he does it all.
Over the course of the past year, as Outreach Director for Roosevelt Institution at NYU, Nathan helped transform the club into an even more dynamic student club, recruiting new members, and forging new liaisons with other clubs and New York City based organizations.
Besides this, Nathan has been a full time student at NYU completing a self-designed major, a Reynolds Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship, has interned in a number of well-respected organizations, and is a rock climber in his spare time.
I believe Nathan is able to do this because he combines incredible drive and creativity with excellent organizational skills and reliability.
One of Nathan's most impressive qualities is his ability to come up with an idea, and then take that idea and actually bring it to fruition. For example, Nathan had a seed of an idea to hold an event discussing the intersection of business and philanthropy. Before long, Nathan had already scheduled meetings with partner organizations, booked the facilities (which required no small amount of bureaucratic wrangling), and reached out to other student clubs.
Nathan has always been the one on top of all club-related business, no matter how large or small. He seemingly never forgets a task that needs to be accomplished. He is also very savvy about using the internet to connect to other people - Nathan is always sharing interesting links to what he's reading or watching online. Through his drive and determination, he has motivated his fellow officers to do better and taken the club to a new level.

As Chief Operating Officer of the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), I supervised Nathan’s work as our summer 2009 communications fellow and developed a deep respect for Nathan’s personal and professional habits. CAF is a strategy center for the progressive movement that offers message development and framing around current political issues, so our communications capacity is central to our mission. The length of the summer fellow position is only a few months, yet he contributed to our communications work in a far more substantial way than his short tenure would suggest.

From the start, Nathan impressed me with his ability to manage a diverse set of tasks while simultaneously taking initiative on projects he was assigned to lead. As one of his primary responsibilities, I asked him to identify new ways for us to create political discourse online. He produced a report that suggested actions I had not yet considered such as creating specific participatory features on our website and more clearly defining our target audience. Throughout the summer I relied on him when I needed a quick but thorough work product, even when I knew he was juggling projects from the web, development, and research departments.

His friendliness and professionalism made it a pleasure to work with him. The day he started working with us was the first day of our annual national conference, a hectic time to say the least, yet Nathan successfully dealt with often ill-tempered media contacts and I was proud to introduce him to my colleagues at other organizations. He was punctual, reliable, responsible and intelligent. Throughout the summer he would drop by my office to share his thoughts on speeches and conferences he attended. We had long discussions about the state of health care reform and he even showed me a few tweets I had not seen about the issue. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations and learned from them.

Nathan was flexible when a project had a setback. For instance, when the head of our organization made it clear that he didn’t want to tweet, Nathan quickly moved to get the rest of our team on social networks instead. Nathan also impressed me by how quickly he redirected our online outreach efforts from unsuccessful activities to more promising strategies. He helped us focus on two social networks instead of seven, and pushed us to focus and refine what we already had in place rather than extending ourselves into new technology. Since projects rarely go as planned, this kind of adaptability and creativity is necessary. I’m confident Nathan has the ability to creatively solve any problems he confronts.

It has been a pleasure to participate in the development of this bright student deeply committed to creating more space for political discourse. I would not hesitate to hire him again.

Sincerely,

Brian D. Albert
Chief Operating Officer