Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Tubi CEO Anjali Sud wants all eyes on the free streaming platform, a former Neuralink employee says she was fired for being pregnant, and TaskRabbit’s CEO shares lessons from her ‘adult gap year.’ Have a great Tuesday!
– Gap year. In 2018, Ania Smith and her husband quit their jobs at Airbnb and Glassdoor, respectively, to take an adult gap year. They pulled their three kids—then 6, 8, and 10—out of school in the Bay Area’s Marin County and enrolled them in school in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Smith and her husband studied Spanish and took up horseback riding, drumming, and dance.
Six years later, Smith is back in Silicon Valley as the CEO of TaskRabbit. She isn’t sure if she would be in the role today without her gap year, but she’s certain the experience shaped her perspective on work and life.
“We had crazy jobs before we left,” says Smith, who led host services for Airbnb. Rather than pursue the digital nomad lifestyle, “we wanted to choose time away from work to have time to breathe, reflect, and reevaluate—to think about whether we wanted to come back to the tech industry, to Silicon Valley, or do something else altogether with our lives.”
They saved for years to pursue their plan, which was intended to give the parents breathing room and help their kids build resilience in a new environment. (Smith moved to the U.S. At age 12 from Poland without speaking English.) During their gap year, the couple considered everything from relocating to the smaller tech hub of Park City, Utah, to switching industries and moving to Smith’s home state of South Dakota. “We would spend hours debating these topics—what we want out of life, what our goals are, what would make us happy,” Smith recalls.
A year later, they wound up back where they started—with a few minor, but meaningful, adjustments. They moved from Marin to Oakland—still in the Bay Area but a “very different environment,” Smith says. Smith’s husband pivoted from sales operations to finance. And Smith wound up as director of courier operations for Uber. “I decided that I actually really loved working in tech,” she says. “So it’s about having the confidence that this is the right choice, instead of always thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’”
The gap year also set her on the path to obtain a CEO job. “It gave me a better perspective on what I want—and a much better plan for what I needed to do to get there because I had the space to think about it,” she says.
Today, she says the experience influences how she approaches leading TaskRabbit, the freelance labor marketplace owned by Ikea. “We’re more empathetic, and it helped us be more open to new ideas and new experiences” rather than taking the easier route of “stay[ing] in the status quo,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Monkey business. A former Neuralink employee is suing the company for allegedly firing her in 2022 because she was pregnant. Among other claims, Lindsay Short says she was forced to work with herpes-infected monkeys that scratched her. Neuralink has yet to respond to the lawsuit. Coins2Day
- At attention. Tubi CEO Anjali Sud says the free streaming platform is poised to draw people away from streaming competitors and social media platforms. The company is appealing to creators through its “Stubios” platform, which allows Tubi members to vote on projects from YouTube or TikTok creators that Tubi will fund. The Verge
- AI aid. Miki Tsusaka, president of Microsoft Japan, thinks generative AI will help the country continue to grow by supplementing its aging population. Tsusaka said she’s especially keen on exploring how the tools can help train the country’s women with new skills. Coins2Day
- Gender exchange. The number of companies listed in Hong Kong with all-male boards is half of what it was two years ago, when the stock exchange introduced a rule mandating that firms have at least one female board member. That's according to Bonnie Chan Yiting, the first woman to lead the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. South China Morning Post
- Access in Africa. Sixty-six million women in Africa now use modern contraceptives that last longer and can be kept secret from their partners. That's double the count from 10 years ago. New York Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Bumble Inc., the parent company of Bumble, appointed Elizabeth Monteleone as Chief Legal Officer.
ON MY RADAR
TikTok lifted this family out of public housing. See their life before and after Washington Post
Aryna Sabalenka will miss Paris Olympics over tennis schedule concerns: ‘It’s too much’ The Athletic
Sabrina Carpenter gave us the song of the summer. She’s got a plan for all seasons Rolling Stone
PARTING WORDS
“Women turned out in the midterm elections and said, ‘This is enough.’ And we've gotta do it again.”
— Melinda French Gates in a new interview announcing she will vote for President Joe Biden
