I quit my first corporate job at 19. Everyone called me crazy, but starting young helped me find my values.

I think that, at that point, I didn’t really understand myself.

Testing my career

I felt like I really needed to explore and try out different options to see what resonated with me.

After that accounting experience, I co-founded an education startup at 19, running global career boot camps for university students. That ended up being a seven-figure business. I was 24 when I exited it.

At that point, I thought about whether I wanted to join a company like Facebook or Google, but something I really wanted to do was to learn five languages in a year.

It was 2019, there was no Covid, and there was no such thing as remote work, or it was very, very rare, and so working at Google or Facebook would limit my freedom.

I ended up choosing to work for a very young startup, and I helped them raise their Series A.

It was minimal pay, but it meant that for that year, I could travel and work remotely. I ended up meeting my husband at a hostel in Singapore.

We went together to 17 cities across 9 months, and I took Spanish and Korean lessons.

Finally, I pitched my own role at a Chinese cross-border digital marketing agency — again, a completely different industry from what I’d done before. But it fulfilled my curiosity because digital marketing gives a lot of exposure to wider companies and people.

Values guide my career

I’ve definitely had periods where I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence, especially when I switched from a startup to a Big Tech company.

I didn’t know whether it was possible to get the job, scope, pay, and experiences I was looking for.

Whenever I start a job, I list all the experiences that I want to learn from it. Before I joined Stripe, a startup, or my current company, I knew there were certain skills I wanted to get out of those roles.

I left Stripe after two and a half years because I felt like, in that specific role, I had learned everything that I had set out to learn.

I don’t have any regrets.

I have no certainty about what I want to do in the future.

But, to me, understanding what my values are makes me feel like this is the person I want to become and will be in 10 years, regardless of what I choose to do.

I know that if I have this North Star metric and that is my compass — do my actions match up to those values — I know I’ll be OK in 10 years’ time. I’ll be a curious creative, and have a strong relationship with freedom.