A Bay Area native, I grew up surrounded by beautiful nature, nice weather, and copious amounts of VCs in Teslas. However, in high school, I jumped ship to England where I spent several years picking up skills like addressing my teachers as sir/ma’am, ancient Greek, and just how spicy Nando’s can be. After that, I hopped back to the Bay for university where I studied Symbolic Systems, a fun mix of psychology, philosphy, linguistics, and computer science (basically a reflection of my inability to decide which major so why not do them all).
I’ve always been interested in computer programming since high school and thanks to my godfather, I was able to start building my own websites/programs pretty early on. I always liked understanding everything from server work to design and for several years I was interning at various companies as a frontend developer. However, after several internships, coding became a little monotonous and I needed a little more diversity in my role so I took my first tepid step into product management at Google as an APM intern on the Sheets team. Once I was there, I didn’t look back - it was an amazing experience juggling 15 projects at once and being challenged with new decisions each day. Thus, I ended up at my first real job as a Google PM on Photos, then Chrome.
Through this role, I learned much about what it meant to be a product manager and how to juggle competing priorities across different stakeholders. As a PM for Chrome for Android, it was both thrilling and a little daunting to tackle the problems of a billion+ users, but I loved the challenge and ended up staying for several years. But there came a point when I realized my life goals have always been to live abroad and work on personal projects so I left in 2018 to do exactly that.
Before Google, I had travelled around the world for 3.5 months in a whirlwind 19-country tour. Amazing times and got an excellent sense of solo travel and the backpacker life (hostel living for life). However, fast travel was always a teaser for something more, never really an immersive experience. Therefore, living abroad became a big step in truly understanding a culture for me and so I spent 2018/9 traveling to Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Colombia for one to two months each. I had a great time in each of the cities (and coincidentally my Spanish improved quite a bit) and eventually landed on Barcelona as my #1 city.
Barcelona has a lot to offer with mountains, beaches, and beautiful architecture within walking distance of the center (albeit with copious amounts of tourists in the way :) ). As climbing and biking are my main two hobbies, it’s hard to find a better place where I can both practice my Spanish and still get to bike/climb outside so much. Sort of like San Francisco without crazy rents. Therefore, my current very rough, very in the air plan is to hang out in Barcelona and work on coding projects, climbing and biking my way around Catalunya.
Hasta entonces!