Introduction

Molly Johnson-Jones was 22 when she found out, on the bus, scrolling Bloomberg News, that her entire division at Nomura had been cut. She was one of the first to know, and one of the last anyone believed. A few years later, in a different job, an occupational health assessment classified her autoimmune disease as a disability. Ten days after that assessment, she was called into a room, handed a settlement, and told to leave immediately.

Most people would call that a career derailed twice in a row. Molly Johnson-Jones built a company out of it. Flexa now has over 2.5 million users searching companies not just for salary, but for the working conditions that actually let people stay well. This is the story of how she got there, and what she has learned about leadership, fundraising, and stress since.

The Oxford Gap Year and the Making of a Relentless Worker

Molly grew up on a dairy farm, wanted to be a large animal vet because she'd decided no women were doing it, and was talent-spotted for Junior Apprentice as a teenager. By 18 she had pivoted from veterinary ambitions to wanting "to go into the city." She applied to Oxford straight from school and didn't get in.

Rather than go elsewhere, she took a gap year, working eight months in Deloitte consulting and six months in financial services to fund a second application, then reapplied and got in. "I just had it in my head that that just wasn't another option," she says. "I wanted to give it another go, to try and get it. I didn't feel like I'd given it everything the first time."

That same refusal to leave something unfinished would show up again and again, in a very different context, a few years later.

A Redundancy Notice Read on the Bus

Molly graduated into an equities research grad scheme at Nomura, a Japanese investment bank, after deferring the offer for six months to train as a chef. Five months into the job, on the bus into work, she opened Bloomberg News and read that Nomura was cutting its equities division. She was the one who broke the news to her own office.

"I walked into the office and was like, guys, I think we've all just lost our jobs, and they were like, Molly, stop being ridiculous." By 8am, staff were being called upstairs in waves of 250 to be told. Around 2,000 people lost their jobs that day. Molly and the other graduates, only five months in with no mortgages or children, were delighted to discover they'd get three months' paid gardening leave. Colleagues with families and years of service were devastated. It was, she says, "the beginning of an interesting and chequered career history."

When the Job That Nearly Broke Her Body Also Fired Her For It

Molly had lived with an undiagnosed autoimmune condition since she was 18, rashes, joint pain, days where she physically couldn't walk. In her next role, working 14-hour days on roughly four hours' sleep a night, the flare-ups intensified to about once a week.

She asked to work from home one day a week. Her employer agreed to send her to an occupational health assessment first. The doctor's verdict went further than she expected: he wanted to classify her condition as a disability because of how severely it was affecting her life. Ten days later, she was called into a room, given a settlement package, and told to leave immediately.

"They would have been able to effectively fire me with absolutely no grounds and not compensate me if that doctor hadn't suggested that my autoimmune disease was severe enough to be classified disabled." She hadn't seen it coming. She thought she was doing well.

From a Pub Conversation to Flexa

The idea for Flexa wasn't originally hers. It came from her now-husband, Moriss, who floated it over drinks: "Surely this is quite a big problem to solve, and we could solve it like this." Molly wasn't immediately convinced. But Moriss had just left a five-year job for what was meant to be a one-month break, came home with a whiteboard, and she couldn't resist joining in.

Neither of them could build a product, so they advertised on AngelList and met, in her words, "a lot of absolutely terrible potential CTOs" before finding Tim, now their co-founder. All three kept their day jobs, testing the idea on the side, until Flexa raised its pre-seed round about six months after launch. "We were always seeking validation from the market, from our users, making sure that we were building the right thing," she says. "There was never this point where we were like, oh, we've just developed the best thing since sliced bread."

Riding the Pandemic Wave and Redefining What Candidates Search For

Flexa launched three weeks before Covid lockdowns began. Terrifying timing to give up a job for, and also, in her words, a way to "capture the zeitgeist" of a market suddenly obsessed with remote work. Growth that might otherwise have taken years happened fast, because companies were already reaching for the language of flexibility.

What people search for on Flexa has since expanded well beyond remote days. Molly and her team watched demand shift toward benefits, culture, values, diversity of leadership, and family friendliness, and rebuilt the platform's filters around it. "The beauty of Flexa, because it's top of funnel, is that the volumes are so high that you can test and learn very fast."

Raising Money as a Woman

Molly's first £250,000, raised from angels and an EIS fund, came without her thinking much about gender at all. The seed round was different. "There were a lot of conversations I had that were obviously very biased against me because I was a woman," she says, recalling being told women run less VC-backable businesses, or asked when they were planning to have children. "It doesn't make it easy to raise money."

Flexa has since raised almost £4 million, most of it led by Molly, despite team conversations about whether a co-founder with less bias against them should pitch instead. "It's horrible to have to think about that." She takes some comfort in the fact that the investors who did back Flexa, several of them women-led funds, share the company's values by default.

Building a High-Performing Team Without Burning People Out

Flexa was built to be everything the founders' old employers weren't: 45 days of holiday, a four-and-a-half day week, remote-first working, one office day a month. For many people, that inspired loyalty and better work. For others, it became an excuse to coast. "Looking at some of the main reasons that people apply to Flexa, it's like, oh, so that I can work less hard," Molly says. "Battling that narrative has been really challenging."

The company has had to re-hire and let people go to protect a high-performing culture without abandoning the flexibility it was built on. "You can give a lot as an employer, but you won't always get the same amount back."

Redefining Stress, Boundaries and Leadership

Molly manages stress by removing rigid structure rather than adding more of it. She's effectively online from 8am to midnight, but fits the gym, cooking, dog walks and errands in whenever suits her energy that day. "That rigidity is actually what made me sicker and sicker," she says of her old corporate schedule. Flare-ups now happen roughly twice a year instead of once a week.

Asked to define leadership, she's candid that she's still working it out: "I don't think I'm there yet. I don't think I've worked out 100% what kind of leader I am." What she's holding onto is a balance between being highly effective and genuinely caring, rather than success at any cost. "Leadership for me is about gaining people's respect without having to ask for it, and providing inspiration that makes people want to remain at the company even when things are difficult."