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- Gap year. In 2018, Ania Smith and her husband quit their jobs at Airbnb and Glassdoor, respectively, to take an adult gap year. They pulled their three kids—then 6, 8, and 10—out of school in the Bay Area’s Marin County and enrolled them in school in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Smith and her husband studied Spanish and took up horseback riding, drumming, and dance.
Six years later, Smith is back in Silicon Valley as the CEO of TaskRabbit. She isn’t sure if she would be in the role today without her gap year, but she’s certain the experience shaped her perspective on work and life.
“We had crazy jobs before we left,” says Smith, who led host services for Airbnb. Rather than pursue the digital nomad lifestyle, “we wanted to choose time away from work to have time to breathe, reflect, and reevaluate—to think about whether we wanted to come back to the tech industry, to Silicon Valley, or do something else altogether with our lives.”
They saved for years to pursue their plan, which was intended to give the parents breathing room and help their kids build resilience in a new environment. (Smith moved to the U.S. at age 12 from Poland without speaking English.) During their gap year, the couple considered everything from relocating to the smaller tech hub of Park City, Utah, to switching industries and moving to Smith’s home state of South Dakota. “We would spend hours debating these topics—what we want out of life, what our goals are, what would make us happy,” Smith recalls.
A year later, they wound up back where they started—with a few minor, but meaningful, adjustments. They moved from Marin to Oakland—still in the Bay Area but a “very different environment,” Smith says. Smith’s husband pivoted from sales operations to finance. And Smith wound up as director of courier operations for Uber. “I decided that I actually really loved working in tech,” she says. “So it’s about having the confidence that this is the right choice, instead of always thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’”
The gap year also set her on the path to obtain a CEO job. “It gave me a better perspective on what I want—and a much better plan for what I needed to do to get there because I had the space to think about it,” she says.
Today, she says the experience influences how she approaches leading TaskRabbit, the freelance labor marketplace owned by Ikea. “We’re more empathetic, and it helped us be more open to new ideas and new experiences” rather than taking the easier route of “stay[ing] in the status quo,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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