How to use a gap year to pivot and rebuild your career

Yuqi Hou went from Goldman to startup PM to 20 months of figuring it out. Here's what she learned.

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people with unconventional paths.

📣📣 TAKE MY CAREER EXIT QUIZ 📣📣

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while (or even if you just found me), there's a good chance you're thinking about making a career move. After talking to hundreds of you about your career transitions, I started noticing the same 4 patterns. I turned it into a 2-minute quiz that tells you your exit type and what to actually do next.

What's your exit type? →

---

“I Was a Harvard Grad and Goldman PM. Now I’m Unemployed and in the Woods. How Did I Get Here?”

This was the title of the viral YouTube video that introduced me to Yuqi Hou. We have a lot in common — left prestigious jobs, started creating content, and building in public. I’ve been following her ever since so asking her to share more her story and how she “figured it out” felt like a long time coming.

Yuqi spent five years at Goldman, moved to London as a Senior PM at a unicorn startup, got laid off, and grew a YouTube channel to almost 10,000 subscribers while figuring out what she actually wanted. She just moved to San Francisco for a developer community role at an AI startup.

We talked about how she went from optimizing for prestige to building a career on her own terms, how she leaned into creative pursuits like content creation and novel writing, and what 20 months without a job taught her.

She shared what her dad used to tell her, “Why are you so stressed out at work? If you don’t like it, quit. You can always find another job.” It took getting laid off, a 20-month gap year, and moving across two countries before she finally believed him.

Getting into Goldman (and then wondering what’s next)

Hannah: You started at Goldman right out of Harvard. What were you looking for in that first job?

Yuqi: Prestige, status, and to be amongst my peers. A lot of people I admired in college were getting internships at Goldman. For me, it was a way to feel like I was at a peer level with them. If I wanted to come and chat with them and feel like I’m at the same level, I felt like I needed to have that internship. And it’s Goldman. You kind of wonder what it’s like really on the inside. If I had a chance to find out, I wanted to find out.

Hannah: You started as a program manager, then moved into developer advocacy and product management. How did those shifts happen?

Yuqi: I was very lucky. My first year I had an internship in UX, then I met a bunch of PMs that summer. When I came back full time in PM, my manager left, so I had this new manager who was doing something totally new. It was just me and him. He spun up a data business and needed somebody to do anything and everything, which meant I was doing product, developer advocacy, all of it. I got to try out a lot of different roles.

My advice to everyone is: if you can join a startup within a big company, that gives you a lot of flexibility to try things you might not normally get to, because you have some stability but also some room to experiment.

Hannah: When did the “prestige halo” fall away?

Yuqi: Pretty early on. Once I got there, I realized I hadn’t thought about what would happen beyond Goldman. It was like, this is the pinnacle, so I will stick and be stable. I didn’t even think there were other levels beyond where I was.

I got promoted early, got my bonus, and the question of “what’s next” just kept coming up. I tried having a life outside work, and that just made the difference between work and what I found interesting even more apparent. I wanted to bridge that gap.

Hannah: How so?

Yuqi: After work, I started writing a novel. And I realized I was basically two people. Nine-to-five Yuqi and then creative Yuqi outside of work. I just think life is easier when things flow into each other. Like right now, I go to tech events and get ideas about events I want to put on, which helps me in my day job. If I’m writing outside of work, that helps me communicate better at work. Everything compounds.

Whereas if you’re doing completely different things outside of work than you do at work, you’re not compounding anything.

The startup, London, and what broke

Hannah: What made you leave Goldman for Jellysmack?

Yuqi: Jellysmack was one of those big, unexpected moves. I found it through Indeed. I didn’t know anything about the company. I was just blind applying to a lot of places because after six years at Goldman, I’d lost a lot of confidence in my ability to do something outside of it. When you’re somewhere that long, you almost wonder, is this the best I can do?

Jellysmack was one of the first companies I applied to. The interview process was quick, I liked all the people, and the most important thing was it was creative. Their users were all YouTubers. I was thinking about how to build products for YouTubers to make more videos, make them faster. That really led to wanting to do YouTube myself.

Plus, the team was split across the US, London, and Paris. I really wanted to travel, and I thought this job would help me get to London and Paris. Which it did.

Hannah: You moved to London for this role. Was that planned from the start?

Yuqi: Not really. I threw out “I’m willing to relocate” as a Hail Mary because I was getting laid off at the time. During the layoff meeting, it was my HR and my head of product in a room, and I got the news, and I said I’m willing to relocate. Two weeks later they said, okay, let’s do it. I thought I was going to Paris. They said London. I took it because when else am I going to have the chance to live abroad?

I actually learned from this that I enjoy building a social circle from the ground up. I started from zero in a new country. One of my first videos was “How to Make Friends in London: 9 Places to Find Friends.”

The gap year (that turned into 20 months)

Hannah: When you got laid off from Jellysmack, what did you think the time off would look like?

Yuqi: I thought I would do something like 12 apps in 12 months. Ship something every month and it would tell me if this is the direction I can go. But instead I spent so much time with friends and family. I went on a month-long trip to China with my family because I decided family is super important. I wanted to reconnect with my dad’s side of the family. That was worthwhile because now I have the sense that I’ll go to China every couple of years and stay better in touch with extended family.

Hannah: How long did the gap end up being?

Yuqi: Twenty months. Eighteen months of that was the true gap, and two months was intense job search. I was lightly job searching at the beginning because in London you need a work visa, so that was always in the back of my head. I was very conflicted about whether I should commit to the UK or come back to the US.

Hannah: What did the gap year teach you that you couldn’t have learned while working?

Yuqi: The confidence of knowing I’m going to be okay. I spent 20 months figuring it out, and now that I have a job, I realize this thing that was very scary to me at the time, taking a career break, I wasn’t even going to allow myself to do it. The only reason I did was because I got laid off. I wouldn’t have quit on my own because I had no confidence that I could figure it out or even get a job afterwards.

My dad used to always say to me, “Why are you so stressed out at work? If you don’t like it, quit. You can always find another job.” Very chill, very grounded. I just didn’t believe it, even though I knew logically I could probably get another job. But now I feel that confidence. I get what my dad was saying.

Hannah: For people worried about the financial side of taking time off, what do you know now that you didn’t then?

Yuqi: I didn’t know that I could take even more risk. I was really worried about burning through rent money, but now I know so much more about how much I can stretch my savings. I didn’t calculate my runway before I started. I only got on top of my personal finance because I started making YouTube videos about it and had public accountability to give people updates on my real-time experiment.

YouTube and building in public

Hannah: How did you go from wanting to ship 12 apps to making that first YouTube video?

Yuqi: YouTube was something I started probably one or two months before I got laid off. I was building an AI assistant for content creators and felt like I’d get more understanding if I just did it myself. So I made my first video. Didn’t do anything. Two months later, got laid off, and I thought, I have no excuse now.

I started documenting what I was making, put it out, and realized making products successful takes ongoing effort. So you know what’s easier? Vlogging. That was the thing I could keep consistent at more than building apps.

Hannah: You had a video blow up. What was that experience like?

Yuqi: I felt so much more self-conscious after. I was trying to maintain consistency between videos, and whatever I talked about needed to come on the same topic so people understood where I was going.

Initially I was making videos about how to find your social circle, my hobbies, trying tennis, travel, surfing. I stayed away from sharing a personal story for a really long time. Then one of my early commenters asked, “Can you tell me why you started this gap year? You’ve talked about it but never shared why.” That’s when I went into my history. That was the video that blew up.

I’m so glad I started out with the random videos, though, because I had proof that I was more than prestige and names. I wasn’t just banking on brand names.

Hannah: How did creating in public change how you thought about what you wanted to do next?

Yuqi: I’d consider myself somebody who builds in public and shares in public more than a content creator. At some point I started doing content full time and realized I was making content about the process of being a content creator, whereas I want to just be doing things, like traveling or building a community, and sharing what I’m learning from that. The documentation is a byproduct. The main thing is living a life worth documenting.

Developer community and moving to San Francisco

Hannah: You recently moved to SF for a developer community role. For people who don’t know, what is that?

Yuqi: Developer community is a subset of developer relations. Dev rel is anything you do for a company that faces and supports developers of your product. A lot of people are probably more familiar with developer advocates, who write the guides and technical tutorials and give talks.

Developer community is putting together rooms where developers can talk to each other and the company, and creating a way for people to get into and use the product through their relationship with each other. I do a lot of meetups, hackathons, and moderating our Discord.

I work at an AI infrastructure company, so everyone who uses it is basically a developer.

Hannah: How did everything you were doing during your gap year lead you to this role?

Yuqi: The through line for me has been bringing people together and forming relationships. At the beginning of my gap year, I was thinking, I really want to invest in my friendships, my relationship with my family.

Towards the end, I was like, I really need a community to help me because I’m 18 months in and I feel a little lost. I need people who are similar to me. If we’re all independent builders, we can support each other and I can learn from them.

So I started hosting meetups for creators and solo founders. That community was really helpful because there were people who’d gone through the exact same thing. Plus, I just love solo founders. Every solo founder I’ve met has been a really amazing person.

I was also making tech maps of different cities, mapping interesting tech companies and startups in DC, London, and SF. Those did really well on LinkedIn. It made me feel more connected to the tech community in the cities I was in and gave me a better understanding of which companies were interesting.

If you’re job hunting, I say to everybody, make a tech map.

Walking away from product management

Hannah: PM is often touted as the ultimate tech role for a lot of people. What was it like to walk away from that?

Yuqi: I did wonder, is this the right decision? But I knew during my interviews. I did not want to continue cold-applying to product jobs. The interview process is very case study heavy now. That’s a big reason I never went down the consulting or pure finance path either. I didn’t enjoy the case study interview. I only got into product before they did case studies.

The interviews I enjoy are the ones where I just vibe better with the person I’m talking to. That’s all I can say about it.

The “9-to-5 door” and what’s next

Hannah: You once said on YouTube that going back to a 9-to-5, that door feels closed. Now you have a full-time job at a startup. How do you think about that?

Yuqi: I didn’t join a 9-to-5. I joined a 9-9-6. I’m putting in so many more hours just because I think about what I need to do for this job outside of the job. I enjoy putting on events and bringing people together. I go to a lot of tech events for fun anyway. I probably would have been showing up to community events even if I wasn’t in community myself.

And it really did feel closed at the time. If I was applying to any jobs when I made that video, I would have felt a personal block. You know when you logically know you need to do something, and you try to go through with it, and you just feel dread? I did not want to go through with those calls.

Hannah: I’ve been someone at different points who’s said a 9-to-5 is not for me. And I stand by that. I think the nuance is that neither of us has a true 9-to-5 where we clock in and clock out and don’t think about it again. It’s a flywheel with the rest of our lives.

Yuqi’s advice for people feeling stuck

Hannah: For someone feeling stuck, burnt out, not sure what to do next, what would you tell them?

Yuqi: Everybody is at their own pace. I took seven-plus years before I took this break. A lot of people feel this pressure, like I need to have it figured out sooner.

For me, it took 18 months to figure out what I wanted to do next. In fact, I didn’t really figure it out. I just felt ready to start applying to jobs, which I didn’t feel before. Then through the process of elimination, applying to many jobs and having many different interviews, I landed on developer community.

What helped me was being around people who I admired and aspired to be like, who showed me all these different paths I could take and who made it seem like, okay, I can have a salaried job, but still have a lot of freedom and be expressive and be myself.

Connect with Yuqi on YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram!

---

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• WTF is a portfolio career?

• Don’t let the machines do the living

• [Podcast] Stop rambling: the 3-2-1 speaking trick that makes you sound like a CEO

Jobs & Resources

• ❓Take my career exit quiz

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube