How Do You Say Goodbye to a Job That Gave You Your Firsts?

We don’t talk enough about a particular kind of grief that comes with leaving a place where you grew up professionally.

Not the grief of being fired or laid off but the complicated, bittersweet ache of choosing to walk away from something good because you know somewhere deep in your bones, that staying would mean stopping, and stopping would mean you'd never discover who else you could become.

In tech jargon, I'd describe myself as the zero-to-one (0 →1) hire at Fertitude, I joined when the company was still a collection of ideas across docs, folders and prototypes. Two years and eight months later, I'm finally passing the torch to the one-to-ten (1 →10) hire, the person who will take what we've built and scale it.

The Message That Changed Everything

In 2022, Kieva (Fertitude’s CEO) would reach out to me on LinkedIn, Instagram and even via email for a Marketing Associate role.