{"id":40767,"date":"2025-12-14T10:21:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T10:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/after-3-tech-layoffs-i-knew-i-had-to-lean-into-being-a-founder\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T10:21:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T10:21:34","slug":"after-3-tech-layoffs-i-knew-i-had-to-lean-into-being-a-founder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/after-3-tech-layoffs-i-knew-i-had-to-lean-into-being-a-founder\/","title":{"rendered":"After 3 tech layoffs, I knew I had to lean into being a founder"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/693c530664858d02d216b98b?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Kelly Withers\"\/><figcaption>Kelly Withers<\/p>\n<p>Courtesy of Kelly Withers<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>After multiple tech layoffs, Kelly Withers focused on her yoga mat startup, Carmu.<\/li>\n<li>She had intended for the company to be a side hustle, but doubled down on it after the layoffs.<\/li>\n<li>Withers is reluctant to seek outside funding because she doesn&#039;t want to give up control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kelly Withers, 36, who lives outside Detroit and is the founder of Carmu, a yoga mat startup. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>About seven years ago, I was in my 20s and getting divorced. I was a single mom to a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old, with no outside help. I had no place to live and no full-time job. So I started coming up with ideas as fast as I could. How am I going to take care of these two kids? I felt alone.<\/p>\n<p>At that time, I was doing photography to help restaurants build their brands. Then I went to a yoga class. When I walked in, every person had the same mat and the same outfit. I started thinking about my mom and how she raised us to be individuals and stand out. I had this idea that since I was designing so many things already, I would go home and try to design a mat so I could feel more like myself when I went to class.<\/p>\n<p>About a week before I went to place my order for all the mat designs, the pandemic hit, and I was back to square one. I also lost my photography clients, because restaurants were shuttered. I panicked because I had two tiny humans relying on me.<\/p>\n<p>So, I started teaching myself design for tech, because it seemed much more lucrative. From everything I&#039;ve ever heard, you go into the corporate world \u2014 that&#039;s how you have a comfortable life.<\/p>\n<p>I got a syllabus from an online boot camp, but I couldn&#039;t afford it. So, I bought a book on every topic. Then I hired a tutor for 30 minutes at a time to go over my work and my portfolio, to make sure I was doing it right. He worked at Microsoft. He told me how much money I would potentially make as a junior designer. I remember thinking, &quot;Well, I&#039;m going to have to pretend I&#039;m a senior designer.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Pretty much on my first interview, I got a corporate job doing UX design as a lead designer. I was bullshitting, so it was a little nerve-racking. Whenever I had a project, I&#039;d run it by the tutor, just praying that I didn&#039;t get busted. I caught on quickly, and it was fine. I did that for a couple of years.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>The layoffs<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Eventually, there was a lot less work. So, I started panicking.<\/p>\n<p>I found another job, so then I had two. Sure enough, about a month later, layoffs hit, and our whole team from the first job got wiped out.<\/p>\n<p>People talk about corporate life and how that gives you security. In my experience, you&#039;re handing over your control, your finances, your future \u2014 and it&#039;s still a gamble. I can&#039;t live my life constantly betting on somebody else and somebody else&#039;s company.<\/p>\n<p>I&#039;ve always been into design. I want to build something tangible. I ordered about 250 mats to start. The idea was that I would continue working in tech, and then I would soft-launch these as my side hustle. That way, if I ever got laid off again, I&#039;d have some security.<\/p>\n<p>The day my yoga mats got delivered to my house, I got laid off. I looked at it as a sign: Go all in. You have some savings. See what you can do. Within about a month, I sold out.<\/p>\n<p>I was like, &quot;Now what am I going to do?&quot; They&#039;re made outside the US, so it takes a while for them to get here. I took the few mats that I had left and reached out to style editors.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Doubling down<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>I took the rest of my savings, and I bought 1,000 mats. It was a scary moment because I was living off those savings, too.<\/p>\n<p>People talk about entrepreneurship and say, &quot;Oh, it&#039;s so risky.&quot; Well, it isn&#039;t. If you have the product, I like to think of it as a calculated risk. At this point, if I&#039;m being honest, it was the only way I could think of making money, as I could not get a job interview.<\/p>\n<p>The company is named after my mom, Carolyn Mulligan, who passed away 10 years ago after she was hit by a car on her bicycle. She had just been on my mind, and I&#039;m convinced that because she was so strong, she has something to do with how this is working out.<\/p>\n<p>The day I launched, in May, I sent out this post on Instagram to announce it. My friend called me and said to open up Vogue. Hailey Bieber was on the yoga mat in the magazine. About a week later, GQ wrote about Carmu. From there, it was just enough leverage where I could take it all over the place. We got into Goop, and we got into Anthropology in Europe. It&#039;s just crazy because it&#039;s been such a little amount of time.<\/p>\n<p>When I got the next shipment of mats, I hadn&#039;t had an interview in tech for a year. With my business, I was profitable from day one.<\/p>\n<p>The big question now is whether I want to have outside investment or do it myself. I believe I could find outside investment. Have I been traumatized in handing over control of my life to other people? Yeah. I don&#039;t know if I&#039;m ready to give up control of anything right now, just because of how everything has gone.<\/p>\n<p><em>Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at <\/em>tparadis@businessinsider.com.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kelly Withers Courtesy of Kelly Withers After multiple tech layoffs, Kelly Withers focused on her yoga mat startup, Carmu. She had intended for the company to be a side hustle, but doubled down on it after the layoffs. Withers is reluctant to seek outside funding because she doesn&#039;t want to give up control. This as-told-to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}