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After 3 tech layoffs, I knew I had to lean into being a founder

by with No Comment Xpandfy

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, I started teaching myself design for tech, because it seemed much more lucrative. From everything I’ve ever heard, you go into the corporate world — that’s how you have a comfortable life.

I got a syllabus from an online boot camp, but I couldn’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, “Well, I’m going to have to pretend I’m a senior designer.”

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’d run it by the tutor, just praying that I didn’t get busted. I caught on quickly, and it was fine. I did that for a couple of years.

The layoffs

Eventually, there was a lot less work. So, I started panicking.

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.

People talk about corporate life and how that gives you security. In my experience, you’re handing over your control, your finances, your future — and it’s still a gamble. I can’t live my life constantly betting on somebody else and somebody else’s company.

I’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’d have some security.

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.

I was like, “Now what am I going to do?” They’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.

Doubling down

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.

People talk about entrepreneurship and say, “Oh, it’s so risky.” Well, it isn’t. If you have the product, I like to think of it as a calculated risk. At this point, if I’m being honest, it was the only way I could think of making money, as I could not get a job interview.

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’m convinced that because she was so strong, she has something to do with how this is working out.

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’s just crazy because it’s been such a little amount of time.

When I got the next shipment of mats, I hadn’t had an interview in tech for a year. With my business, I was profitable from day one.

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’t know if I’m ready to give up control of anything right now, just because of how everything has gone.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.




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Women at the top are exhausted and burned out, according to a McKinsey and Lean In report

by with No Comment Xpandfy

Women are hitting the top of the corporate ladder only to find something waiting for them: exhaustion.

According to a report published Tuesday by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, a nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, burnout among senior-level women is the highest it has been in the past five years.

Around 60% of these women said they have frequently felt burned out at work in the past few months, compared with 50% of senior-level men, per numbers from the “Women in the Workplace” 2025 study.

Women who are newer to leadership roles are feeling the strain more acutely. Among senior-level women who have been at their companies for five years or less, 70% reported frequent burnout, and 81% said they are concerned about their job security.

“These high levels of concern align with research that shows women often face extra scrutiny when they’re new to organizations and have to work harder to prove themselves,” the report said, adding that Black women in leadership face exceptionally high burnout and job insecurity. “In contrast, when women and men in leadership have longer tenures, their levels of burnout and job security are quite similar.”

The report, an annual study of women in corporate America, surveyed 9,500 employees across 124 companies between July and August. The study also includes interviews with 62 HR executives and company-reported data from 124 organizations that together employ about 3 million people.

LeanIn.org launched a study with McKinsey in 2015 to track how women progress through the corporate pipeline and where companies fall short. The group is named after Sandberg’s 2013 book “Lean In,” which sparked a national debate about women’s ambition, leadership, and workplace equality.

This year’s findings paint a bleak picture for women at the top. Senior-level women who are hesitant to advance their careers say they see a steeper path forward compared to their male counterparts. Eleven percent of senior women who don’t want to advance say they don’t see a realistic route to promotion, compared with 3% of senior men. And 21% say more senior-level people look burned out or unhappy, nearly double the share of men who say the same.

It’s not because women are less committed — the report found that women and men are equally locked in. What differs is the desire to keep climbing, per the report.

The data shows a clear ambition gap: 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level, compared with 86% of men. That gap is widest at the beginning and the top of the pipeline — 69% vs. 80% at the entry level, and 84% vs. 92% among senior leaders.

This is the first time in the report’s 11-year history that women have shown lower interest in promotion than men, it said.

This gap in ambition to advance falls away “when women receive the same career support that men do,” the report added. In other words, companies are responsible for creating the burnout problem for women.

“This is only happening in the companies that aren’t doing the right thing when women get the full support and the same stretch opportunities. They’re not leaning out at all,” Sandberg said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg Television.

“What’s happening is that women face more barriers at every level of the career,” she added.

More companies are cutting back on DEI and support for women

Even as companies say they are committed to diversity and inclusion, at least one in six have reduced the teams or resources behind those efforts, the report said.

About 13% of employers have pulled back or eliminated women-focused career-development programs, and another 13% have cut formal sponsorship programs, which play a key role in helping employees advance, it added.

“Women overall are less likely to have sponsors — and this really matters. Employees with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without,” the report said.

The report also found that companies are rolling back remote and flexible work options, which can hinder women’s ability to stay and advance in their careers. One in four has scaled back remote or hybrid work arrangements, and 13% have reduced flexible working hours over the past year.

At the same time, the report said that women who work remotely most of the time are “less likely to have a sponsor and far less likely to have been promoted in the last two years than women who work mostly on-site.” Meanwhile, men receive more similar levels of sponsorship and promotions regardless of their work arrangement.

At the entry level, a stage where advocacy and visibility are essential, women are also less likely than men to receive stretch assignments and other opportunities, the report added.

Last year, the “Women in the Workplace” study found that more women were advancing to senior leadership roles. By 2024, women held 29% of C-suite roles, up from 17% in 2015.

However, progress fades at the entry and management levels, per the report. “For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2018, 79 women were promoted. And this year, just 81 women were,” it added.




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