At the end of April, I will be leaving my current role at Bus.com to work on my own project full time.
The decision to leave was a painful one. I love the company, the people who work there and its mission to connect mom & pop shops with their consumers. My time at Bus was one of tremendous growth both personally and professionally. I was able to develop and refine my hard and soft skills, take on projects that I never would have had a shot at in the corporate world, and have the kind of impact on the business I thought would take me years to achieve in my career. The people I met and built strong relationships with during my time there are sources of inspiration for me, and I know that they will continue to move the bus forward.
So…why gamble and bail on that kind of experience?
The short answer is: the COVID-19 pandemic.
I loved the first month of remote work. If you’ve worked with me before, then you know that I am NOT a morning person. Rolling out of bed 15 minutes before my first morning meeting was everything I could have hoped for, but better. I found that the absence of distractions and interruptions inherent in an office meant that I could better sustain deep, focused work. I was always home, always comfortable, and I could even work in my backyard as the Montréal winter came to an end.
After about a month, though, I started noticing things that were bothering me, things that I’m sure many of you have felt as well.
For one, I started missing my daily interactions with my co-workers. I felt distant, disengaged, and disconnected from an office culture that used to make me excited to go to the office everyday. I realized that my interactions with my co-workers were becoming more and more transactional, and I was getting less of the collaborative buzz that came from working with them side-by-side. Then it hit me that my office work routine actually worked better for me: I would get to the office later in the morning, and work later in the day. Plus, going to the office made for a clean break between work and the rest of my life. During remote work, the line between work and home was becoming so blurred that I started to feel like I was always stuck somewhere in between the two. With all of that, the Zoom fog and the screen fatigue, the perks of Work From Home didn’t seem so compelling anymore.
And I was bored. Really bored. I used to take advantage of Montreal’s fantastic cultural and nightlife scene at least a few times a week, and all of that evaporated in March 2020. By the end of April, I half-jokingly texted a friend of mine with a simple question: “You want to start a business?” Bored out of his mind as well, he eagerly accepted. We spent a few weeks kicking different ideas around until he went on a rant about his remote work experience and it hit us that many in our network were experiencing the same issues and tensions.
We figured that the mechanics of managing a team and an organization had been transformed overnight, with no time for adequate preparation and adaptation. We decided that we were going to build Anjara, a remote manager coaching tool for better connecting managers with their remote team members and giving them visibility on how everyone was doing when remote, so they could make better management decisions (needless to say, we’ve refined that mouthful of an idea since). Those first few months after we settled on building Anjara were exhilarating: even if it was just an abstract idea at that stage, it was so exciting to be actually working on something related to the future of work! The world changed in 2020, and we committed to trying to shape that change for the better.
I’ll be sharing more of our journey in the coming weeks and months as Anjara grows, but I will say this: we are a small team of 3 with a big vision, and we’re just getting started 🚀🚀🚀
