How working abroad changed my Silicon Valley mindset

Hi there, I’m from Cupertino, California.

When I tell someone this, the look on her face is always the same: cautious recognition, cogs behind the forehead furiously working to remember where she’s heard that city name before.

Seeing the obvious confusion, I’ll usually hasten to relieve her of her internal struggle – “It’s where Apple is,” I say. “You’ve probably seen Cupertino in your Weather app, when you first turned on your iPhone.”

Recognition floods her face. Yes, she says with relief. Yes, that’s it.

I’ve gotten this reaction a million times before, when speaking with people everywhere from Italy to Indonesia. Which is surprising, because Cupertino is not a big city, nowhere near large or metropolitan enough to have the kind of recognition that it does. It’s a suburb approximately 11 square miles large and containing a population of roughly 60,000. It has a Panera Bread and a Target. A Whole Foods. The population has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, as has the number of cars on the road and skyrocketing housing prices. When I was growing up, we still had relatively un-congested streets and new buildings were homes with large lawns, not high-rise apartment complexes. It’s based in the heart of a valley that used to be known for grapes and – at one point – gold mines.

Now though, it’s known for gold mines of a different sort.

Now, Cupertino is synonymous with Apple. The main campus was less than a mile from my elementary school, and it was everything to my little city, before it became everything to the rest of the world. Before it was quite literally, the most valuable company in the world. When I was in third grade, Steve Jobs gave my tiny Catholic school 30 of his brand new iMacs, the ones with the blue and purple backs with the translucent playful plexiglass. I can still see them sitting all lined up, waiting to be learned, to be played. I remember thinking, “How did we get so lucky?”

And I felt so, so lucky. To be from where I was from, to be inspired to solve some of the world’s biggest problems through technology, even from the age of seven. My parents worked in tech, all of my friends parents’ worked in tech, and so naturally I assumed that tech companies were the norm. You would too, if you’d literally never known anything else.

Which is why, I guess, I never really thought about any other kind of career. Despite trying creative work in the field and on paper, I wound up in a similar workspace to my fellow Silicon Valley natives: smack dab in front of a stand-up desk working on a shiny new Mac again.

Upon graduating from USC, I’d accepted an offer at Intuit, maker of QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint. Just a few weeks into full-time employment, I immediately loved my job. Like, I really, really loved it. I wouldn’t shut up about it to anyone who would listen, which mostly resulted in my friends – somewhat unhappy with their own entry-level jobs out of college – rolling their eyes, but I was in my own happy bubble. I was working on national and global marketing campaigns that supported small business owners, a customer segment that I absolutely love. I loved my job, I loved my life.

But, fast forward a few years, and I was running into a small problem. That small problem was my big, big dream of living and working abroad – a dream I’d always had but that lately, after 2.5 years of working in Silicon Valley and enduring 4 hours per day of commuting, was calling to me more than ever.

Because of the nature of my role, I have the privilege of working in the UK, Australia and Canada as my team brings experiential marketing for QuickBooks around the globe. I love every minute of it – working with different cultures, getting to know the small business segment in each country, and figuring out how to create content and campaigns that resonate with each unique market. But working globally poses its challenges, especially when preparing for large events, and so my manager and I decided it was critical to our work for me to spend time in market to prepare for our upcoming events.

AKA, my dream was coming true.

I had to pinch myself. Several times. But I wasn't waking up -- this time, the dream was for real. So at the start of February of this year, I moved out of my San Francisco apartment and spent a month in London and another three living in Sydney, Australia before ending my time with two weeks of traveling in Asia. I’d traveled a good amount growing up, but this would be different – this would be my first extended period of time absorbing a foreign business culture.

While four brief months only scratched the surface of self-discovery that’s possible while living abroad, I was stunned at how quickly I gained a refreshed perspective and emerged reenergized as a more globally-focused innovator.

I believe that if you work in tech – if you are one of the very few, very lucky ones who builds the technology that impacts the rest of the population – you need to spend time outside of the bubble to realize the responsibility we have to the rest of the world.

Here are just a few of my own realizations, ones that I hope will inspire you to take on a similar journey:

• You will be humbled by the impact our small bubble has on the entirety of the world. I was shocked, and then very much so humbled, in realizing that the products and software we create find their way into the hands of tiny Indonesian children, of elderly and poverty-stricken Thai people, of pretty much everyone I came across. People who, just like the rest of us, appeared relentlessly glued to their screens. Except there was something more jarring about seeing a Thai shop owner glued to his screen than seeing a San Franciscan looking at his phone. The difference, I think, is that they never had a chance to give input on what technology they wanted placed in their hand. We have that chance.
• We should be taking ideas from around the world and building them into our products. It’s commonly accepted that Silicon Valley suffers from groupthink and cultural uniformity: we create things for people just like us. And yet, we aren’t just creating products for ourselves – we’re creating products that will be used by Italian dressmakers, for ski instructors in the Swiss Alps, taxi drivers in Vietnam and businessmen in Singapore – people whose opinions and needs we can consider more during product development.
• The Silicon Valley is not the center of the tech universe. Alas, we are not even really the center of our very own respective companies. Those of us that work at companies headquartered in Silicon Valley tend to think that the employees in our global offices care a lot about what happens here. The reality is that they have their own office culture, their own strategies they want to implement, and their own unique perspectives that Silicon Valley companies should further integrate to truly become more globally-focused.
• There is so much to learn, even if you stay within your company. This varies between companies, but generally, larger tech companies headquarters in the Bay Area can be massive, multi-building campuses where – largely simply due to the sheer size of the office and workforce – teams can be siloed and independent in nature. In a global office, everyone works much more closely together – both literally and figuratively – giving you more opportunities to proactively volunteer to take on projects outside of your scope.

The QuickBooks team interviewing and learning from Aussie small business Dress for a Night

• It will be hard to come back. I somehow got culture shock coming back to where I’d lived for 24 years. How could that be? Because I got used to my mind opening up. To my previous ideas about the world being challenged. It puts you into a different headspace – a good one – and it will be difficult to readjust to your old, simpler way of thinking. The important thing is to hang on to that new perspective and share it with others.

My Intuit Aussie coworkers-turned-friends and I pose at QuickBooks Connect Sydney 2018

To any of my fellow techies thinking of going overseas, I really can’t recommend it enough. I can’t stress how important it is for our collective mindset, and for us to bring this newfound perspective back to headquarters. As the ones who are building the technology that impacts so many, we owe it to our global teammates and customers to live like them – to build and design great technology with global diversity in mind.