Meet Anya Smith

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anya Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Anya , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

My resilience stems partly from natural aspects of my upbringing. My parents divorced when I was young, and my mother moved to the US, leading me through about 7 different schools across 3 countries before graduating high school at 16. Facing new schools and languages taught me to adapt, though this wasn’t presented as something special but rather a normal part of my upbringing. I came to normalize being able to adapt and challenge myself.
With greater awareness, I saw how my work ethic, requesting more responsibility, and taking risks propelled my career from randomly starting in recruiting to leadership positions at companies like Booking.com, Amazon, and Meta. Each career move involved converting contract roles to full-time positions, seeking growth opportunities, and leaving stable roles for contracts with risks but growth potential.
At Meta, I found myself plateauing and eventually imploding, feeling like nothing was ever enough. Despite achieving everything I thought I wanted (amazing family, house, job), I constantly chased the next thing without contentment. I knew there had to be another way and dabbled in meditation.
After my first maternity leave, I pursued my MBA, a lifelong dream (both my Russian parents had master’s degrees, and as a child, I assumed I would too). I worked on my MBA online while working full-time at Meta and raising my child. When presented with an opportunity for technical specialization after passing a coding class, I decided to pursue an MS degree as well. During this program, I welcomed my second son and pivoted to a technical role at Meta.
This experience taught me there’s NEVER a perfect time for anything, but when you prioritize a big goal, you can achieve it by breaking it down. My MS experience showed me it’s never too late to learn something new and gave me confidence that I could learn anything with time and support, the most valuable part of the whole experience.
After being laid off from Meta, I finally listened to my gut and tried entrepreneurship, creating a podcast from scratch despite no prior experience. Through trial and error, I interviewed incredible purposeful entrepreneurs worldwide, expanding my connections and sense of possibility. The podcast ranked in the entrepreneurship space and led to speaking at an international podcasting conference.
Eventually, I felt the need to pivot again, which led to creating my startup, SelfFull, capturing all my life experiences. My MS and podcast inspired me to create an intelligent system helping people on their self-discovery journeys. Further refinement led to SelfFull, focusing on empowering coaches and coaching programs with our intelligent platform.
The startup journey continues testing my resilience, with everything before helping me stay grounded. Life has taught me that resilience comes from cultivating an inner foundation, understanding what truly matters, what drives you, and being able to slow down and center instead of living in a reactive, stressed state.
Looking back, I find resilience in seeing the beautiful flow of events, both empowering and challenging, that even in their darkest moments prepared me for something better ahead. This has helped me build not only resilience but also trust that everything works out for the best (not necessarily what I want, but rather a higher sense of best).

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m a former tech professional, a mom of three crazy and lovable boys, and the founder of an AI startup. SelfFull is a B2B SaaS platform that serves as the “Netflix of personal development” in the $43B coaching industry. Our AI platform learns each program’s unique methodology, providing intelligent support between sessions while tracking engagement and ROI in one unified system.
What I love about what we’re building is that I’m surrounded by and connected to groups of amazing coaches. I’ve seen firsthand how powerful transformation is possible through this work. My personal value is believing that inner growth is what truly helps you feel real success, so helping coaches is a way to support that growth in others.
I’m slightly obsessed with learning how to create value for coaches and their programs, and I speak with my amazing clients almost daily. I also LOVE building something new and cannot express how exciting it is right now to build with both the accessibility and affordability of AI and the innovation it allows.
I learned on this journey that to be a founder, you don’t need to be the best engineer or tech worker. Instead, you need to see the bigger picture, have a way to inspire others, connect with people, and build trust and quality relationships. It’s the personal soft skills that really help drive the business since a startup cannot succeed alone if it doesn’t create the right human connections to support it.
What’s exciting is that we started incubated at Harvard Innovation Labs and at the Techstars Boston Pre-accelerator 2024. Now, less than a year later, this idea has gone from a concept to a real startup with paying customers and a brand new beta we’re building. We have partners around the world who are helping bring this idea to life.
It’s thrilling for us to provide value in this space that doesn’t currently exist. While we’re starting with coaches and coaching programs, we see the learning and data we build from this initial group driving broader applications around personal growth and customer loyalty.
On a personal note, I’m also using this startup journey to learn to stay grounded and keep in check what really matters to me and why I’m doing it. I know what it’s like to focus too much on money and external success, and my focus now is to grow a business while helping others and letting that be the foundation of my drive.
I believe that if I help my customers succeed and focus on helping others with what I do, the best success will be possible. It’s also a personal challenge where I’m learning to trust life more and see what happens when I give up trying to always control everything out of fear. So while I’m helping others empower their transformation with SelfFull, I’m also honoring that journey in my own life.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Looking back, the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in my journey were:

Knowing that you can learn anything if you break things down into smaller goals and persist in learning. If you don’t give up, you can’t fail. I’d advise those early in their journey to get curious about what helps you personally learn better and faster, and how to bounce back when things don’t work out. Discover your unique learning style and adapt your approach accordingly.
Who you surround yourself with will influence what you think is possible. As early as you can, start connecting with people who inspire you or those who are doing what inspires you. The more you’re around people who are doing things you want to do, the more normal and achievable those things will become. There are billions of people out there, and many will be happy to share advice and support if you ask respectfully and show patience. Not everyone will reply, but getting through those “nos” will show you it’s not that big of a deal.
Ask yourself what you’re truly chasing and why. Most people learn this after burnout, but at some point, you realize you need to question your pursuits. You’ll never be happy if you keep training your mind to never be satisfied with what it has right now. Each time you get more money or reach some goal, it never provides that long-term happiness you thought it would. It’s powerful to start asking what success would look like to you personally if it were a journey enjoyed every day. Can you find appreciation and happiness today and throughout the journey you’re pursuing right now, not just at the end? Realize that happiness is an inner state, yet we try to attain it by chasing external things instead of questioning why we don’t feel happy on our own and what’s causing us to give up our happiness. We actually have a choice to not surrender our happiness and instead choose to be open and non-judgmental.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

Right now I’m working on our first paid product for SelfFull while simultaneously starting to fundraise. It’s both an exciting time when things feel real and a moment when your fears and inner doubts test you and try to hold you back. This is where my experience with my inner foundation and resilience help me the most.
I’ve learned to trust, reflecting on my past, that even when challenged and when “bad” things happened, they ultimately led to something better. Ultimately, this path, no matter where it leads, has helped me grow personally and professionally so much and has expanded my network tremendously. Regardless of what happens, I am richer because I embraced this experience.
I’ve also learned what it’s like to build something you truly believe in and to partner with clients in a way where you’re slightly obsessed about building something that truly helps them. This focus helps me when I have doubts and fears because I can refocus on the purpose behind supporting my clients and my team and showing up for them.
We still have a lot of uncertainty and experimentation ahead, and startups are inherently risky. But from my life lessons, I’ve learned to trust in my ability to learn, to know that we are capable of more than what we think is possible right now, and to trust that life is guiding us in the best possible way (not just the way we think we want). So I am immensely grateful and excited about what’s next for SelfFull, and I invite anyone who wants to explore and support our journey to connect.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Anya Smith, SelfFull Inc.

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