20 years of Silicon Valley

I arrived in San Jose 20 years ago.  I was offered a job as temp/contractor customer support rep for TiVo.  I had no guarantee it would work.  I was betting on myself.  The Dot.Com boom was happening.  I could tell from Portland that San Jose might be the right place to be. I packed up my apartment into a U-Haul trailer and took a leap.  

It turned out to be the right choice.  I was able to create a career arch here.  That is something I was unable to do before I got to San Jose.  I know I was lucky to have found my way to TiVo.  It was a great at a great time to get started in Silicon Valley.  I made a lot of great contacts and friends there.  People who have helped me throughout my career.

I survived a couple of layoffs, got laid off, went through a startup implosion, went though an IPO.  I think I've had 14 direct bosses and a bunch more dotted line bosses in that time.  I have a ton of stories from those times. I could write pages and pages about moving to San Jose.  All I can say is I never knew before I got here San Jose would be such a big part of my life.

In our 20s Jeremy Bushnell and I would talk about the conflict of place is both a fake and a real thing.  Even in a world where the whole country has the same restaurants and TV commercials, places still have elements that make them unique.  Moving to a new place, but you are always you.  Moving does not get you away from yourself.

Looking back I feel that San Jose is a place that liked me.  It was a place that I could grow and change in positive ways.  In 2005 my sister asked me when was I going to move back to Philadelphia.  I told her I was not done doing whatever I came to do in San Jose.  Before I was doing growing in San Jose, I ended up putting down roots here.  It turned out San Jose and I fit pretty well together.