My First Job In 6 Years
Try to ask freelancers or entrepreneurs about being employed again. Many will tell you that they couldn’t really imagine being employed again even though being employed meant better income than their existing business. However, it doesn’t always have to be that way and this story is a small proof of it.
I spent more than half of my professional life as a freelancer or entrepreneur. It was late 2012 when I was last employed as a production director at one of the biggest digital agencies in Slovakia. My first major task was to introduce proper processes into my department and save one big project that was dragging on for over a year (if I remember right). I was freelancing for around one year after this job and then went into my own startup in late 2013.
In the Startup Spotlight
As the finalists of Startup Awards in 2013 in Slovakia, we quickly received a lot of attention from the community and became one of the rising stars of the newly forming startup scene in the country. A new venture capital fund picked us and one other startup as the first two startups to invest in out of over 200 applications. So we had seed funding, a lot of passion and energy, and were on a mission to fix mental health care in the US (my cofounder was a research psychologist who lived in Texas). These were exciting times! We already had a good product team in Slovakia, so we hired only a small business team to help us sell our product in the US.
Long story short… Even after the second seed round we weren’t able to get enough traction to be able to raise Series A to start the typical hockey-stick growth. However, we found a partner with a small team operating in Australia. Our first major customers signed with him and overall the whole Australian market looked a lot more promising than our efforts in USA.
I almost burnt out three times while working on my company (quite a paradox considering that we were running a mental health tech startup, right?) and there was also no way for me to support the team in Australia. So I decided to leave the day-to-day executive and find a job. My wife got a new job in Vienna at around the same time so the timing couldn’t have been better.
Because my CV was shouting “This is an entrepreneur!” instead of showing me as an ideal candidate for a corporate job, my options narrowed down quite a bit. However, I also preferred working at a startup so I looked up the top Austrian startups and scanned them for open positions. That’s how I found the product owner position at mySugr! I don’t remember whether mySugr was the first startup I checked or not. But I was interested in the company because I had known about them since they won the Pioneers festival pitch competition in 2012. Plus, it is also a healthcare company.
So I Applied
Everything has gone very smooth since then, at least from my perspective. The first interview felt like a love at first sight. I loved the energy, passion, as well as knowledge that I saw in the company. I think that it took Marlis (our head of product who was interviewing me) and I less than 10 minutes to start laughing and turn the interview into a great chat about building products and sharing our experience. I was hooked. I had the other round of interviews the week after and started working only a few weeks later. It has been four months since I started working, and I’m writing this text while I’m on vacation!
You know, I didn’t really know what to expect from being employed again after 6 years. I joined mySugr because I felt that the company also puts a lot of effort into the personal qualities of individuals, not only the skills. I was hoping to find a startup mindset, while having the luxury of being under the wings of a corporation (mySugr was acquired by Roche in 2017). I didn’t have any expectations because I couldn’t have any. I started focusing on how can I help the company instead of what can the company could do for me. Looking back, I believe that it was a good decision because my team has already achieved some amazing things and some others are planned for early next year. Everyone has been so supportive and helpful, it took me a very short time to become one of them. I found great people that I like working with and that I look forward to seeing again after I’m back from my two-week long vacation.
Of course, having a job is different than running your own company. There are strategic decisions that everyone has to follow, and not everyone can directly influence. With that in hand, though, there comes less stress and responsibility because I have a product that I’m responsible for and other topics such as sales, marketing, or hiring that don’t really have to worry me too much. As a product owner, of course, I need to be involved to some extent, but that’s exactly what I like. I am lucky to have an amazing team that doesn’t need any hand-holding, leadership that trusts and supports what I do, and to be able to spend more time with our product stakeholders to support them in what they are going after. This involves for example the diabetes coaches in better coaching people with diabetes or our sales team in selling our product to the payers and healthcare providers all around the world. All while impacting the lives of so many people and making diabetes suck less.
So if you are an entrepreneur or freelancer considering a change, don’t worry. As you can see, having a job can really be fun, and mySugr is a good place to be in. It does not matter where you come from, there are people from all around the world in our Vienna headquarters. Why don’t you check out our open positions and send us your CV?
Actually, why don’t you check it out if you are simply considering a change? It won’t cost anything and I’m sure that my colleagues will take a good care of you.
