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I’m a 6-time surrogate who wasn’t fulfilled in my finance career. I quit to start a surrogacy agency and make more money now.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

For years, I balanced two very different worlds.

By day, I was climbing the corporate ladder, eventually leading large operational teams at companies like Bank of America and later serving as a senior executive overseeing multimillion-dollar programs.

Outside the office, another calling was quietly shaping my life: surrogacy.

I spent years climbing the corporate ladder

My time at Bank of America culminated in 2014, when I led a 100-person team as vice president of program operations. I thrived in the fast-paced corporate environment and felt challenged every day. I next worked as the chief project management officer for a finance company and, at a consulting firm, managed technology projects with an operational lens.

My background as a state-qualifying debater and my natural inclination toward systems and structure made my work intuitive. Much of my time at BofA was spent rebuilding inefficient programs and redesigning broken processes. By every traditional measure, I had “made it,” but something from my past kept pulling me away.

While my career was stimulating, I found myself still chasing fulfillment.

I was 26 when I delivered my first baby for another family

I became a surrogate for the first time after having three children of my own and while attending night school to become a nurse, which was my career plan before BofA.

As an adopted person, my definition of family had always been broader than most. When my brother came out as gay, I vividly remember the day he confided in me that one of his greatest fears was not being able to become a parent. That moment left a lasting impression.

For me, becoming a mother had come easily — but I knew that wasn’t true for everyone. I wanted to help people like my brother experience the life-changing joy of parenthood. I loved being pregnant, met all the medical criteria, and applied to be a surrogate.

Over the next 13 years, I carried six children for three families

I helped expand two families through egg donation, and completed my own family — with my IVF-assisted daughter — at 37.

Carrying another person’s child is as intimate as you might imagine. Every intended parent I met was kind, generous, and deeply invested in the process.

What troubled me was the industry itself. I often saw surrogates treated as a means to an end, with inconsistent support and lax standards. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been approved for as many journeys, or as close together, as I was.

Yet despite those flaws, my experiences with third-party reproduction — witnessing new parents hold their babies for the first time and knowing people like my brother had options — affected me in a way I couldn’t shake.

After each journey, I felt called back. Despite my corporate success and the joy I found in motherhood, that pull only grew stronger. After a particularly grueling year in my consulting job, I decided to act on it and quit.

I started my own surrogacy company

In 2019, after years of envisioning what an ethical surrogacy agency could look like, I launched Alcea Surrogacy. My goal was to create a company that prioritized transparency, care, and integrity for everyone involved.

At the time, my children were 1, 13, 17, and 20 years old. Balancing their needs while launching a business felt like climbing a mountain in heels. I often rocked my youngest to sleep while answering client emails late into the night.

As the business grew, I strategized in the quiet hours, a toddler on my lap, while I spoke to clients on two hours of sleep.

The early days were unforgiving

Starting a business is never easy, and launching one during a pandemic made it harder. In 2021, I was flying back and forth between my home in Texas and New York before officially relocating my family there in 2022. I faced skepticism from an industry wary of disruption and judgment from people who didn’t understand my choices. I didn’t let that deter me.

Alcea has since grown into four channels: a referral network connecting surrogates and intended parents with ethical partner clinics; Alcea’s core surrogacy services; a private client division supporting high-profile families seeking discretion; and a philanthropic program assisting intended parents with financial need.

We’ve grown to 23 employees and $5 million in annual revenue, and I’ve surpassed the highest corporate salary I ever earned.

Some things just feel like kismet

From day one, it was clear that the combination of empathy, systems thinking, and grit I’d developed in the corporate world would serve me well as a founder. My healthcare background, repurposed for leadership and project management, taught me how to streamline processes, manage people, and anticipate challenges — lessons that proved invaluable in navigating the complex surrogacy landscape.

Launching Alcea wasn’t just a professional risk; it was deeply personal. I promised myself I’d always put my family first, but I also refused to let fear or expectation dictate my ambitions. Returning to work days after deliveries, breastfeeding while speaking with clients, and managing a growing business while raising four children taught me that determination, focus, and grit can overcome almost anything.

I haven’t found work-life balance, but my career satisfaction is immense. If I say I’ll do it, I’ll do it.




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My Airbnb made me $2,300 a month and was almost always booked. Nightmare guests made me quit hosting.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Wendy Martin, 50, who chose to delist the Airbnb on her property near Dayton, Ohio, after bad experiences with guests. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We purchased our property from a family member who was already doing Airbnb.

The owners enjoyed it and were pretty successful at it. They made us quite a deal on the property, so we decided to go ahead and just keep it as an Airbnb.

It’s a small single-family home. It was built in 1910 as the original home on the property while the family was having the main house built.

It’s really close to the back of the main house. If I were in my home office and there were people in the living room of the Airbnb, I would be able to tell you what they looked like, so it’s a little bit awkward to be like a traditional rental.

So we thought Airbnb, with people who were here short-term coming and going, would be a really great way to give us a little bit of extra money.

It has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half bathrooms, and probably about 1,300 square feet. It has a full kitchen, washer, and dryer.

It’s located on our six-acre property, so people have full use of the trails and the woods, and we’ve got a little stream, and they can feed the fish in the koi pond.


A koi pond.

A koi pond on the property.

Courtesy of Wendy Martin



We are within 20 minutes of four or five different colleges. We’re 15 minutes to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. We’re an hour to Columbus, Ohio, and an hour to Cincinnati — so the location is great.

We don’t get a whole lot of vacation rentals, but we get a lot of people coming to visit family or military PCSes, and a lot of college graduations and new student drop-offs and parent weekends — things like that.

From about March until the end of December every year, we’ve had almost no weekends open.

The previous owners had great success with it, and they met some great people, so we decided that we would continue doing that. We eventually re-listed it as our own after we bought the property and have been running it ever since. We’ve been hosting for about two-and-a-half years now.

Bad experiences with guests made us leave the platform

I’m taking the property off Airbnb for a few reasons.

Primarily, I was recently diagnosed with a mild form of leukemia. It’s not nearly as scary for me as it is for some people, but we don’t know when I might get sick, and at some point, I’m going to be too sick to actually run the Airbnb.

But in two-and-a-half years, we’ve had three really terrible experiences — and two of those were the same guests. This was probably the first time that it was frustrating for me to be a host.

Once, we had guests stay here for five days, and the two guys just hung out. They brought a couple of big, stinky dogs, because we allow pets with no pet fee, and they were basically just slobs. For some reason, they drove up the driveway all the way up into the yard on the grass.


A yard on an Airbnb property.

Martin’s yard.

Courtesy of Wendy Martin



They didn’t break anything or trash the house, but the house was pretty gross after they got out of there, so it took us a while to clean. A few months later, I didn’t realize the same guest who had booked before was booking the house again.

Three days before he showed up, I realized, “Oh my God, this guy again?” So that was frustrating.

Another time, a guy said he and his friends were coming to stay. They stayed for like 10 days, and they trashed our house. I mean, just filth. Food wrappers stuffed under mattresses and behind beds. They had dumped a pot of cooked food in the flower bed in the front yard. They melted a remote control.

Given the extra cleaning and the damage that they did, I filed a reimbursement request with Airbnb for $160. I sent all the documentation.


A living room.

The living room.

Courtesy of Wendy Martin



I wasn’t asking for an exorbitant amount. And then they just paid me $10 total for a remote control. I would’ve rather they sent me $0.

[Ed note: When reached for comment about Martin’s complaint, Airbnb said, “We thoroughly reviewed the photos submitted, as we do with all host damage claims, and partly reimbursed the host for the damage found. We value our hosts and do our best to support them throughout their hosting journey.”]

After that, my husband and I made the decision that maybe this isn’t going to be for us. My daughter and her girlfriend and their best friend live nice and close. They’re in their mid-20s, living in college apartments, so we agreed to let the girls come rent it.

We’ll make about half the money we would normally make, but I now no longer have to be a cleaner. I don’t have to replace all the snacks and water. I don’t have to worry about replacing linens or towels or providing shampoo or any of that other stuff.

Going forward, I’m going to rent to my daughter instead

We don’t use smart pricing — I just charged $125 a night and a $75 cleaning fee. If people stay for more than seven days or more than 15 days, then I’d give them a 10% or a 15% discount.

For a weekend stay, we’re usually clearing about $325 for a two-night stay — and that could be one person, or it could be six people because we allow up to six, and we don’t charge extra for anybody.

We’re not a tourist town, so for the people we’re serving, we’re fulfilling some kind of need for them. People do not come to Dayton, Ohio, to hang out and live their lives.

So, typically, the people that are coming here are the same people that we would have coming if it were our family, and it was important to me that we provided someplace nice that people could also afford, without it being so cheap that we were getting guests who just showed up and trashed the place.


A kitchen.

The kitchen.

Courtesy of Wendy Martin



We’ve hosted people who have unfortunately lost family members in tragic accidents, or we had one repeat guest who came because her dad was in assisted living, so she would come for the same long weekend at the beginning of every month for nine months, and she stayed with us every week or every month.

We had six bookings going into the new year already — mostly in March and April — so I reached out to each of them, explaining that I had to cancel their stays.

We’ve met some really cool people who have stayed with us multiple times, and it kind of sucks to take that option away from them.


The exterior of a home.

The front of the Airbnb property on Martin’s property.

Courtesy of Wendy Martin



Normally, we bring in about $2,300 a month on average. But we’re going to charge my daughter and her roommates about $1,300 a month — and that includes all utilities.

But they’re also going to be doing some yard work, which will save us some additional money. So I think it’ll all end up coming out in the wash because we don’t have to provide linens and snacks, and I don’t have to pay somebody to come clean.

Once I’m healthy again and they decide to move on, then likely we will go to something like Furnish Finder and do something a little more long-term where I can have a little more control over it.

Axel Springer, Insider Inc.’s parent company, is an investor in Airbnb.




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Jacob Zinkula

A Gen Zer took a 6-figure job at Meta to rebuild her savings. Then she quit and returned to her dream.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

When Alyson Isaacs joined Meta in 2022, she only had about $200 in her savings account. A six-figure salary offered a chance to rebuild her finances, but her ultimate goal lay outside Big Tech.

After college, Isaacs “completely drained” her savings on a startup she’d co-founded, and found herself grappling with her next career move. After weighing her options, she decided to follow the advice of a mentor: go to “startup rehab” — in other words, take a full-time job.

“You can always get a job at a Big Tech company,'” said Isaacs, who’s 28 and lives in San Francisco.

About four months later, she landed a product manager role at Meta in the company’s Quest for Business virtual reality division. But her entrepreneurial itch never left, and she eventually began mapping out the best path back into the startup world.

“There are ways you can be entrepreneurial,” she said of working at Big Tech, “but it’s very much not the same.”

Over the past year, I’ve interviewed more than a dozen workers who, like Isaacs, chose to quit their jobs at major employers — in some cases without another role lined up. While some eventually landed at another large company, others stepped away from the corporate world entirely — joining a smaller business, launching their own venture, pursuing a career pivot, or focusing on personal priorities like parenting.

They’ve become outliers in an economy where workers are quitting at one of the lowest rates in the past decade — a trend driven by a hiring slowdown that’s left some clinging to their jobs with few appealing alternatives. Those who have called it quits told me they did so for a mix of reasons: concerns about job security, shifts in workplace culture, entrepreneurial ambitions, or a desire for more meaningful work. In short, they wanted greater long-term agency over their careers.

Isaacs shared how she decided to take the leap back into entrepreneurship — and offered advice for others facing a similar career crossroads.

Preparing for a return to entrepreneurship

After leaving her post-college startup, Isaacs took a month to reset. She then spent two months interviewing at smaller companies to fine-tune her résumé and sharpen her interview skills. Eventually, she applied for a role at Meta and landed the job. She moved from the Berkeley area to San Francisco and started in May 2022 — about a year after graduation.

While Isaacs didn’t have firm plans to return to entrepreneurship, she knew that if she ever went down that path again, she’d need to be financially prepared for life without a steady paycheck. So she started living well below her means, including living in a less expensive area, going to a basic gym, cooking at home, and avoiding shopping sprees.

“I saved so hard because I knew that this wasn’t going to be the end game for me, and I wanted to start my own thing again eventually,” she said.

Isaacs also prepared for a potential return to entrepreneurship by spending about five hours a week angel investing, which involved scouting and backing startups. After about a year of saving, she began making a few investments, each under $10,000. She said the experience helped her build a network in San Francisco’s startup scene and spot gaps other entrepreneurs could exploit — insights that helped shape her own business ideas.

The final phase of Isaacs’ preparation was soaking up everything she could from her time at Meta, including transitioning to a product manager position at Instagram — one of Meta’s subsidiaries — in 2024. She said the roles gave her knowledge and experience that entrepreneurship alone couldn’t provide.

“Traditional entrepreneurship was just flying by the edge of my seat and seeing what worked,” she said. “But I needed that level of expertise to go farther in my career.”

The question was when to make the leap and leave Meta. Isaacs said the death of her father in 2024 weighed heavily on her thought process.

“That really triggered this thought in my brain of, ‘Is being a product manager at a Big Tech company what I want to do for the rest of my life?'” she said. “And the answer was resoundingly no — I wanted to do something on my own and prove myself.”

By mid-2025, Isaacs found herself thinking more and more about a startup idea in the consumer AI space — and struggling to focus on her job at Meta. On July 1, she resigned; the next day, she began working full-time on her startup, which she described as an “agentic AI solution for personal wellness.” The company is currently in stealth, meaning the team isn’t publicly sharing full details while the product is still in development. She said she and her two co-founders are testing the product with users and plan to open a pre-seed funding round in the spring.

Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads

Advice for others weighing big career moves

Isaacs said she knows many people might hesitate to give up a Big Tech job. But she believes some underestimate their chances of finding a new role or building something themselves — and end up stuck in jobs they don’t enjoy.

“It’s kind of like dating,” she said, adding that if you anticipate a bad dating pool, “you’re going to stay with your bad ex.”

Isaacs said she wasn’t worried about resigning from Meta, in part because she’s a “super optimist” about her career. If her startup doesn’t work out, she’s confident in her backup plan — the same one she relied on after her post-college startup opportunity fell through.

“Leaving Meta wasn’t scary for me because I was like, ‘I can always get another job in Big Tech,'” she said.

Isaacs has a few pieces of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs. She recommends connecting with as many people as possible who are relevant to the venture you want to pursue — and looking for ways to help them, whether through angel investing, advising, or offering support.

“You kind of create this flywheel of people helping you if you help other people first,” she said.

Additionally, even if your end goal is to build a business, Isaacs said having experience at a big-name company can give you valuable credibility as an entrepreneur.

“I needed to be undeniable as a founder, and having a big-box name brand on your résumé gives you that undeniability,” she said.




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I was sick of never seeing my 6 kids. So I quit my Amazon job to become a tulip farmer.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andrew Miller, 50, in Mount Vernon, Washington, the owner of Tulip Valley Farms. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I remember the moment I looked around my office and saw only performative culture staring back at me.

Between 70-hour workweeks that started at 4 a.m. and growing disagreements with how the company was being run, I knew something had to give.

It wasn’t hard work that scared me. Before corporate life, I spent 14 years in the Air Force and National Guard.

But as my family grew, I started questioning the path I was on. I’d never been deployed, but I knew it was likely. With two autistic children at home, my family needed me present. After leaving the military, I landed a corporate role at Amazon.

It went well for a while, but I was rarely seeing my family, and it wasn’t the life I’d envisioned. I realized that while some people live for their role, my most important job was being a dad — I have six kids.

So, in 2015, I quit my job at Amazon. My wife, Holly, supported my decision, knowing that I was completely drained and losing my sense of purpose.


Andrew Miller and his wife Holly on Tulip Farms in Washington.

Miller’s wife, Holly, supported his decision to leave his job.

Provided by Andrew Miller



We also decided it was time to move back to Washington, where we both grew up.

Skagit County is a place where your kids can run down the trail to a relative’s house if they don’t like what you’re serving for dinner.

It’s also home to an annual tulip festival that’s been held for over 40 years.

Finding my calling back home

I took a strategy role with the county’s economic development team, working on growth and equity.

Skagit sits at the intersection of outdoor recreation, tourism, and agriculture — yet while the county once had about 4,000 acres of tulips, that number had dropped to roughly 500. I knew we needed a new model, or this county wouldn’t be the home of tulips anymore.

I came up with an idea and went for it. I decided to buy a tulip farm and reimagine what it could be — not just a working farm, but a place people wanted to hang out.


Andrew Miller is holding a sheep on Tulip Farms.

Miller’s focus wasn’t just on growing tulips; it was about the farm experience.

Provided by Andrew Miller



Lessons on buying a farm

In 2018, I bought my first farm. In the months leading up to the purchase, I quickly learned that many agricultural problems are really business problems.

The questions weren’t just about growing tulips; they were about the experience: How many tulips could we grow? What kind of customer experience could we create? And how should we design the layout of the fields for tourists?

To prepare, I raised capital with friends and spent six weeks shadowing an 85-year-old Dutch farmer who had been growing tulips since 1984. He and his wife told me they had turned down 16 other buyers before choosing me. He died shortly afterward, and after his death, I moved forward with taking over the farm.

My former business partner and I bought the 30-acre property for $1.6 million, including both the land and the business.

In those first months of farm life, my approach was pure curiosity.


Andrew Miller is pointing at tulip bulbs.

Miller raised capital with friends and spent six weeks shadowing a farmer.

Provided by Andrew Miller



Bumps in the road

Then the pandemic hit, just 10 days before opening.

We pivoted to flower shipping, and eventually added you-pick experiences once restrictions eased. From what I could see, no one in Skagit County was doing that.

I’ve learned that I tend to learn things the hard way. My daughter even bought me a pen that reads: “Maybe I like doing it the hard way.”

The fresh approach worked, but my business partnership didn’t. After differences in vision, we split, and I went on to buy a second farm: Tulip Valley Farm, which I still run today. I bought it from a 70-year-old potato farmer with hazelnut trees.

He believed in my vision.


Andrew Miller and his family on Tulip Farm.

Miller and his family on Tulip Farm.

Provided by Andrew Miller



Building a new career and a legacy

Today, my 23-year-old son can operate a forklift, which he learned when he was 15. My sister runs business management and communications.

I still work from 5 a.m. until bedtime, but now I’m home. I’m serving my community.

I’ll walk into Costco, and my kids will scatter when someone recognizes me from the farm. My family is happy to know we can take three weeks off in the summer because of how hard we work the rest of the year.

They’ve seen the strain, the kitchen-table meetings, the risk of starting from scratch. I want them to see that.

Healing in the soil — for us, and for guests

Today, the farm is flourishing. Visitor numbers have doubled year over year for the past three years. We design the fields not just for farming, but for connection — proposals, photos, moments people want to share.

In a world where we are gagging for meaningful in-person experiences, people are drawn to farms. I get it. As someone with PTSD from my former career, I can also affirm that dirt therapy is the best therapy.

Being able to shape your own environment and build your own future is essential.




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They quit, traveled, and rethought their lives — meet the adults taking gap years

by with No Comment Xpandfy

In my early 30s, I was working long hours as the editor in chief of a magazine, juggling deadlines and the looming “should we have kids?” question — all while feeling completely wrung out. I drafted a resignation email.

When my boss called me in, she surprised me: “Take some time off,” she said. “Come back to manage a new launch later this year.”

My plan for a year off collapsed into two months.

It began quietly in India at a yoga retreat near Kerala and ended with an adventure in Indonesia, climbing Mount Bromo and motorbiking through Yogyakarta.

It wasn’t a true gap year, but it was long enough to reset. The next year, I stepped into my boss’s role, leading the creative team I’d almost left behind.

That experience made me realize that time off doesn’t have to derail a career — it can redefine it.

I wasn’t a student with few obligations or a 20-something who hadn’t settled on a career path. I was an established professional stepping away when the stakes were high.

Extended time off can carry long-term costs — lower earnings, disrupted savings, slower compounding — but for some, the benefits outweigh the risks.

David Burkus, an organizational psychologist and author, began researching sabbaticals in 2015.

“People report better mental and physical health, increased confidence, and a greater sense of purpose after an extended break,” Burkus told Business Insider.

He also notes the benefits for employers: Teams cross-train, share knowledge, and become less dependent on a few “indispensable” people.

Paid sabbaticals are still a rarity in the US. Society for Human Resource Management data showed that 5% of companies offered them in 2019, rising to 7% by 2023.

And despite employers not rolling them out broadly, employees are increasingly seeking time off. In SHRM’s 2025 benefits survey, leave was the second-highest priority for workers — trailing only health benefits — for the fourth year in a row.

A peer-reviewed study published in the Academy of Management in 2022 interviewed 50 professionals who had taken extended time off. All interviewees said they came back as better leaders.

DJ DiDonna, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and coauthor of the study, says everyone he interviewed wished they had taken one earlier.

DiDonna told Business Insider that the best times for a sabbatical often coincide with natural life transitions, like a honeymoon, a newly empty nest, or the “twilight career” stage before retirement.

This collection brings together people who took that pause at different ages, for different reasons, and for vastly different lengths of time.

If you’ve taken an adult gap year yourself, I’d love to hear from you at akarplus@businessinsider.com.




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