Coming to Silicon Valley. Shaping Chaos Issue 4
For each of us, the immigrants to Silicon Valley, there was that first morning in California.
An unfamiliar room, jetlag, some confusion about the time, how you’re going to get breakfast, how the day is going to go, what to wear. Questions. Underlying everything is a strong sense of floating, of being untethered, feeling a little lost but at the same time that this is exactly where you're supposed to be. The crazy, daunting, exhilarating knowledge that finally, finally, you’re here.
It’s taken a lot.
People probably started noticing you were smart early on, age six or seven or so. You took to math easily, were always top of the class or near it, didn’t have to work particularly hard at school. You got your hands on a computer (an uncle? friend of your parents?) and just fell into it like it had been waiting for you all along. Maybe you started some programming jobs for friends, family, or a local company. You enjoyed it. You could sit down for a day, be completely absorbed and when you raised your head to look around, you'd made something. And that something worked.
Gradually you started to understand that you could connect with people from all over the world who were doing what you were doing. They were irritating, smart, funny, helpful, sarcastic. They knew things. You learned. You read the stories about Silicon Valley — crazy people building astonishing things, places where there were thousands of people like you. And somewhere along the way, the wisp of an idea showed up. Maybe a comment in a chat room (“we’re hiring!”) or an online compliment from somebody who worked at one of the FAANGs.
The thread of the idea was: you could leave. You could keep on the known trajectory of your family, your home country. Or, and the idea gradually becomes stronger, more insistent… You could leave. Silicon Valley hired people like you. It could be real.
School, college, some serious exams — you found ways to succeed. And as you did, you looked around for a break, some kind of thread you could pull on. Maybe a family friend. Maybe a temporary job in Canada — not California, but a whole lot nearer that you were. Rejections. Mistakes. And finally, almost at random, an invite, a college semester away from home, a speculative recruiting email — somebody noticed you.
Years of work, study, struggle, determination, anxiety, luck (luck, always luck!) leading to this morning. And now, right now, that part of your life is over. You’re here.
"I arrived with one dollar in my pocket. For four years, I worked nineteen hours a day either at McDonalds, or at school. I was rejected in twelve interviews, including six at Google. Now I’m here” — VP, SF-based Unicorn
Outside, the morning air is ridiculously clear and clean. On the freeway, a cop car passes, and it looks exactly, and I mean, exactly like the movies. At breakfast, the waitress keeps filling your coffee cup without you asking and she seems (to you) almost insanely happy. Is everybody here like this ? The French toast is almost comically huge.
As you leave the diner, you’re acutely aware of a lightness, as if you’d shrugged off an old wet overcoat, leaving the weight of your old life, your home, in a pile on the ground behind you.
The blue, blue sky is dazzling.
“I placed very highly in our national college entrance exam at the end of the year”, says my client. She’s not boasting — I just want to know a bit about her history. “How highly?” I ask.“I was number one in the region,” she says.“How many students took the exam?” She pauses. “Fifty thousand.”
Gradually, you settle in. You’re here to do a job, and you do it. You work with people who are smart and driven, which is exactly what you wanted. It’s scary and exhilarating. There’s a familiarity to the work, and you're good at it, which makes a comforting backdrop to the strangeness of it all.
For a while (it can be months, or years), you have an ongoing astonishment that you’re doing it here, at Facebook, or Twitter, or Google or a real, honest-to-God Silicon Valley startup. You get tripped up by suddenly noticing that you're driving by the Apple campus — there it is, right there! You take a picture of yourself at the Yoda statue outside Lucasfilm. At a meetup, you find yourself chatting to somebody who seems to have been around the Valley for quite a while. It turns out she was on the original Macintosh team. She designed the icons.
You gradually understand that outside of work you can do anything, be anybody. A meditation retreat? Ultimate Frisbee weekend? Improv? Surfing? Skiing? Juggling? Real estate investing? Who knows? Maybe it all seems ridiculously indulgent (it is!) and all you want to do is build a career and put some money together. You can do that, too.
Your old life, you realize one day, is gone. You’re not going back — to the weather in Dublin, the weight of a traditional family, or the narrowness of a future in a small, centuries-old town. There is just too much here.
That feeling from the first morning, that anything is possible, never quite goes away.
“I get anxious,” says my client. “About failure.” We dig into it. Finally: “I don’t want to end up back in my Mom’s house in Ireland,” he says. I ask him what that feels like. “Cold. Wet. Stone,” he says.
There are difficulties. You are told you are “too direct.” Where you grew up, people just said what was on their mind. Here, apparently, that can be “taken the wrong way.” Or, the reverse, you sit in meetings and say nothing, because you are not asked, and that’s how you have always been expected to act, and the founders are from Stanford and very confident. And then your year end review says “we need you to have a stronger point of view.” Perhaps you have an accent. It’s pretty strong. Nobody seems to notice it. But you do.
You wonder if you really belong. You learn about “Impostor Syndrome.”
“You think you’re scared of US immigration? Try coming through the border on a Canadian passport from Syria” — Client responding to my offhand comment that I, a white English guy, used to find US immigration intimidating when I was on an H1.
Underlying everything is the visa, and the visa is attached to the company. Without the visa, you have sixty days to find another job or you’re done — your immigration lawyer blandly tells you that you can “go back home and wait.” But home is Palo Alto, or San Francisco, or Oakland. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the US, how much property you own, the fact that your kids are in school here. It’s all provisional. Sixty days. You can’t lose your job. You can’t.
You start the Green Card process. It takes years, during which you know that your entire life could collapse because of anything — economic downturn, a bad boss, a random investor decision to “slim down costs.” At times this uncertainty becomes unbearable.
But you make it happen (stubbornness again, hard work again, sheer blind luck, again). You build a career. Doing your taxes one day, you realize that last year you made several multiples of what your parents made in their entire lives. You have a kid, an American kid, who decides that he loves baseball, so you figure out how it works. You find yourself telling him: pitch that kid inside! You learn to ski. The Green Card comes through.
Is it home? Almost. Your original home is in the past now. For you, it’s gone. Your family still lives there and you visit. The smells, the air, the smallness of the houses briefly awakens a half-forgotten, younger self. Yes, part of you is still there, but the larger part, the growing part, is here.
Of course you slowly learn more about this place you’ve adopted. The tech world goes through bouts of hubris, insane optimism, open dishonesty, crazy creativity. You learn that California, and the United States, is wracked with ridiculous contradictions: incredible financial freedom and terrible financial cruelty. Openness and racism, a sweeping idealism and an ignorant disregard of history. It feels ugly, vicious, unredeemable at times.There are firestorms in the wine country. San Francisco, a city you once felt so close to, looks, in places, like a dystopian sci-fi film — self-driving cars gliding serenely past desperate tent cities.
But oh, the moment that morning when you shrugged off the heavy, damp overcoat of the old world and felt a new lightness, a sense of beginning!
For that morning, and for all the moments that have happened since, (an offer from an energy startup! Finding your co-founder! ChatGPT!), even now after decades — for those moments of possibility, you will forgive this place a lot. You love it for that. And you will, as millions have done before you, add your own piece to building its frantic, chaotic, extraordinary future.
Links: Meetings Suck Edition
(I don't think meetings suck fundamentally, although there are certainly very many ways to make them suck)
The Seven Circles of Meeting Hell
Rands (VPE Slack), typically on point.
Which Meetings Should You Kill?
Camille Fournier breaks it down.
So Shopfy cancelled them.
Incredibly Simple Meeting Rules
Does it have to be so hard? (No. It doesn't).