A Gen Zer drained her savings building a startup. A 6-figure job at Meta helped her start over — then she quit.
· Business Insider
Alyson Isaacs
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- Alyson Isaacs joined Meta with about $200 in savings after running a startup.
- She shared how she prepared to return to entrepreneurship while working in Big Tech.
- Isaacs resigned from Meta last year — and shared advice for others weighing a career change.
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.
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Isaacs shared how she decided to take the leap back into entrepreneurship — and offered advice for others facing a similar career crossroads.
Business Insider is speaking with workers who've found themselves at a corporate crossroads — whether due to a layoff, resignation, job search, or shifting workplace expectations.
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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.
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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