Anna’s Blog

….was one of the comments on my post where I praised the guy who took Bolt to court for unlawful dismissal, won the case, and went public with it.  Ouch. And yet, worth taking seriously, is this how it reads? Because I am not praising fighting the company for the sake of fighting.  I am however praising that someone…

… , building my own thing. That’s 330 days out of my 365 days entitlement. I am on a clock now! Let the countdown begin.  Let me be as open as I can. Day -90: months before my end date, I already knew I was being let go. I started building a tech startup.Day 158: I started posting about…

Turns out, being laid off has started to feel like another Tuesday for many people. So weird and sad that it has gotten so normalised in Europe and this does not sit well with me. Why? What happens in layoffs stays behind closed doors. In Germany, we don’t know how companies communicate and execute layoffs – and what consequences…

So you know how you sometimes start doing something on the side because you have things to say and experiences to share? Like a blog or something? This is how my baby Pollo Digital started at the beginning of the year. I shared about layoffs in Germany and how asymmetry in knowledge puts immigrants at a disadvantage – and…

Having built my own business for almost a year now, I am really starting to understand where my weaknesses were as an employee.It is hard to teach someone strategic thinking, patience and effective communication when the employee’s mindset is limited to “my role.” I thank every manager who helped me develop in that sense.But no manager can replace the…

They don’t. They do – if you are a product. But as a human being, you are fluid and flawed. So I have a dilemma – I want to help people show up authentically on LinkedIn and reach whatever it is they want to reach. Mostly: land a job or build a better presence as a founder. On the…

Hear me out:  In employment, you can hold one of two positions. → Proactive – choosing roles you enjoy and that serve your career, leaving when a job stops serving you. → Passive – staying because you’re scared you won’t find anything else. Or other reasons. But the bottom line is fear. You’re scared to leave. The second one…

Because it is built on US cultural assumptions – low-context self-expression, individual visibility as virtue, speaking to strangers as normal. For someone wired for high-context communication, collective loyalty, and earned visibility – it doesn’t just feel uncomfortable, it feels wrong at a value level. I’m a russian socialised founder living in Berlin – and I did wonder why it…

A friend who has been running a business for many years said: stop applying for things. Either you’re building or you’re not. I applied for an accelerator recently. And a grant. And I thought about how strange it is that we hand other people authority over our lives and then act surprised when they use it. We wait for…

I’m catching up with regular business today after disconnecting from work and LinkedIn for 1.5 weeks. I did my monthly task – checked my LinkedIn stats (impressions, saves, followers…) for March. I did well for myself. Except – it felt so off. It did not feel good to analyse the data, at all.  On top of that, I saw…