The Jobbatical story

Jobbatical started from a simple question: How can we replicate the success of Silicon Valley anywhere in the world? 

I started asking myself that question during my morning runs in Mountain View, where I was attending Singularity University. It didn’t take me long to connect the dots: It’s not that people in Silicon Valley are smarter than anywhere else. Smart people traverse the globe to get to Silicon Valley because of what’s there already. Then they build industry-changing companies that more people want to join. And so the cycle continues. 

I wanted to show these people that there are visionary founders outside Silicon Valley, exciting cities where amazing companies could be built. I wanted to show that if knowledge is spread more evenly across the planet, innovation can come from anywhere.  

With my founding team, we first set out to do this by helping people find their dream jobs abroad. But then we discovered that the biggest problem in international hiring isn’t the jobs part. It’s the paperwork. That’s when we pivoted to relocation and immigration. At our core, nothing changed: We’re still taking down borders every day. It’s just that now we can do that at scale, empowering employers from across the globe to relocate their international employees at the click of a button.

From pivots to pandemics, the key to turning some of our biggest challenges into hockey-stick successes has been our team, diverse by design from day one: Jobbatical’s first-ever employee moved 6000 miles to join us. Today we have close to a hundred people representing 24 nationalities, working either remotely or in one of our offices. In one of my recent skip-level meetings one of our colleagues said:

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“I am still amazed how a company that is so remote can still make this feeling of being so together. Working for the same purpose. That is amazing.”  

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At this point, it no longer amazes me. I know how we do it. We may come from different backgrounds and time zones, but that’s exactly what enriches us and enables us to come together as one strong team. Because culture add trumps culture fit every day. It’s what makes us grow as humans, and as an organization. 

And that growth is what keeps us moving towards our mission—to make moving to a new country as easy as booking a flight. We do that by digitizing the visa and relocation process, touching thousands of lives along the way. 

Our promise to our clients is: On time, every time, no drama. 

Moving to a new country is already daunting enough. Jobbatical takes the drama out of the move and replaces it with peace of mind. For our clients, this also means less stressed-out human resource teams.

And when this team has finished its job, we’ll be living in a world where every human can unleash their full potential anywhere, anytime, regardless of where they were born. That’s a tall order. But I’ve never seen a challenge this team has shied away from.

Vamos! 

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