The Founders Offering Their Employees 7 Weeks’ Mandatory PTO

On the In Her Shoes podcast, host Samhita Mukhopadhyay talks to founders about the most important decisions they’ve made for the health of their businesses — and for their employees and communities, too. This week, she’s joined by Chani Nicholas and Sonya Passi, co-founders of the astrology app CHANI. Partners in business and in life, Nicholas and Passi managed to turn CHANI into the second-largest astrology app on the market despite prioritizing sustainable, slow growth and never once taking VC money. The magic’s in their community-driven business model, which includes heaping benefits on employees and channeling money to FreeFrom, their nonprofit supporting survivors of gender-based violence. To hear more, listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also read highlights from the interview below.

On offering a generous benefits package:

Sonya: When you join our team, we are invested in you from day one. Our intention is not work you to the bone, you leave, we replace you. We’re really wanting to hire people that will be with us on this journey and build that expertise and community internally that we are espousing externally. So what that means is we have to pace ourselves. And what Chani and I know as two people who have such extraordinary creative appetite that we could (to our detriment) keep working and keep creating is how important and necessary rest is to fuel our creativity. As we learned this for ourselves, as we learned what rest did for our own brains and our own capacities and our own health and our own balance, we wanted it for our staff. No company is more productive because they work a full 52 weeks a year versus a company that works 45. It’s just not true. I think the reason we are able to put out beautiful offerings is because we have built cycles of rest into our actual business model.

On FreeFrom, their nonprofit organization:

Sonya: We’re working to transform the way that our society addresses gender-based violence. One in three women and one in two trans people in the U.S. will be subjected to gender-based violence in their lifetime. And right now, we basically just have Band-Aid solutions to the problem: restraining orders, shelters, temporary access to public assistance. And we sort of treat it like we do any humanitarian crisis: short-term relief at a moment of acute crisis, and then “good luck.” FreeFrom is repositioning it as is a systemic economic problem, which demands that we address it as an economic problem that has economic causes, that has economic consequences, and that we expand the continuum of support for survivors.

On measuring success:

Chani: It’s more than investing money somewhere. It’s more than giving money. It’s really about investing time and talent and in community mutual aid and sharing, right? If this election cycle and this incoming administration is going to teach us anything, it’s that we are our best thing. We are all we have. We are what we have. We are what we need to invest in. And we are what is going to keep us safe. Read any ancient tale about anything to do with greed and true abundance and happiness in life — it’s never gonna be the person who has everything that is the happiest. It’s gonna be the person who knows how to share things and knows how to be a neighbor and is willing to learn or to try to experiment. The world will make you terrified of being generous and terrified of sharing.