I quit my job in higher ed. Now I’m a tech startup cofounder.
The burnout started with the pandemic.
I guess I’m part of the Great Resignation.
I was a Student Services Manager at Stanford when the pandemic started. On a Friday the 13th, my boss told our Student Services team to take our laptops home “just in case.” That weekend, I canceled my son’s birthday party “just to be safe.” That same weekend, my sister was furloughed from her job, my husband and I both were officially ordered to work from home, and my childcare center closed. All for “just a few weeks.”
We all know how that turned out.
So I hired my sister to watch my 3 year old son and infant daughter. She came over every day while my husband and I learned how to work from home on the fly, all 5 of us squeezed into a 900-sq-ft apartment. The main room functioned as home office, daycare, living room and dining room. We had 5 monitors, 2 laptops, and a desktop were constantly whirring. The heat from the electronics left us sweltering as spring turned to summer. The pings from new slacks and emails blended with the Daniel Tiger theme song.
I was often on zoom calls 6 hours a day, sometimes sitting at the jury-rigged workspace sprawling across most of our dining room table, sometimes logging in from my laptop on my bed. I was trying to pivot an entire academic program to virtual learning, plan online commencement, support my distressed students, welcome a new incoming academic class…oh yeah, and keep my children alive, my marriage functioning, and still find time to have a good cathartic cry a couple times a week.
Working from home got better. We bought a house (with air conditioning!). Our childcare center finally came back just when my sister had to go back to work in fall 2020. The physical experience of working became bearable, and I expected to rediscover why I had ever agreed to do this crazy job in the first place.
But that didn’t happen.
The burnout outlasted the virus.
The pandemic laid bare everything that was broken and dysfunctional about my job in Student Services and higher ed more broadly. The University is made up of a hundred siloed working units and thousands of siloed egos. It can feel impossible to implement anything across these boundaries. And when your whole job is about synthesizing all the University policies and processes for a specific cohort, sometimes you can go a little crazy.
Suddenly, I realized what I was doing was just a job, not a career. There was no purpose in it for me anymore. As I’ve written about before, I am an incredibly lucky person. My husband is a software engineer who loves his work and makes enough to pay the bills. I don’t need a job for a paycheck. I have the freedom to do work that matters TO ME.
But I still cared so much about my students. I couldn’t abandon them during the ongoing pandemic crisis. So I stayed.
I told myself it would be better when campus finally reopened for real in fall 2021. The work-from-home revolution was a silver lining for lots of folks during the pandemic, but not for me. I craved face-to-face interaction. I was sure if I could just reconnect with the community, everything would get better.
And it was better! But it wasn’t enough.
I was still crying every week. I was still exhausted. Worse, I was actively furious all the time. I was spending my life and all my energy building backdoors and shadow systems to guide students through opaque bureaucracy. It felt like the decision makers had no idea what was happening in their own classrooms and dorm rooms, let alone out in the real world. I was still helping students, but instead of inspiring me, it fed my anger as I raged on their behalf.
The rage made me worse at my job. It made me worse as a mom. It made me worse as a person. I needed to take a step back — ALL THE WAY BACK — to heal.
So I quit.
I gave the department 4 months’ notice and promised to stay through our busy admissions process. I wrote documentation like a maniac and trained my replacement for 6 weeks. I cried at my goodbye party.
I took some time all the way off. I did the laundry and learned to cook a little and went on long walks. I panicked about what to do next, but I did not regret leaving.
And then, I did something super relaxing, you guys. I cofounded a tech startup.
And I started something new.
I cofounded Kronistic, an AI scheduling assistant that automatically schedules and reschedules meetings.
Kronistic’s AI brain is being built by one of my former colleagues, a Stanford professor. He and the CTO needed a nontechnical partner to bring Kron to the world. They asked me if I wanted to join the team. Talk about lucky!
Now it’s fall and the prof is back on campus, but I am not. I’m the CEO of Kronistic. Do I know anything about tech? Or startups? Or business? Not yet. I’m an English major who worked in academic administration for 11 years. But I scheduled an awful lot of meetings in those 11 years, and I know how much better my life would have been if I had had Kronistic.
So I’m going to learn as I go. And I’m going to share what I learn here on this blog. Let’s see what it takes to go from zero-to-CEO.
Do you have resources — blogs, YouTube videos, books (my favorite!), classes — that could help me learn how to Do All The Startup Things? Please share them!! If they are helpful, I will likely blog about them here in the future.
