One of my best friends, David Deng, said that everyone should at least spend a few years in NYC when they’re young. Sinclair said that every city brings something out of you when encouraging me to move to NYC.
I’m grateful to have spent all of 2023 and parts of 2022 and 2024 in this city. It’s a privilege to see and experience the world through intersections. One of my favorite quotes is this from Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs:
Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.
As an undergrad at Brown, I would come into the city from Providence several times, mostly to nurture my curiosity for investment banking (Brown Women in Business career trips) and to visit friends at Columbia. I knew there was a bit of a New Yorker in me — Type A, curious about finance, and a fan of big cities and skyscrapers. New York is the most vibrant, energetic, and alive city I have ever been to. It is full of personality, colors, interesting places and people, and there’s just so much hustle in the air.
In my perspective, New York values include wealth-oriented ambition, aesthetics, lifestyle, deal-making, and “work hard play hard.” It reminds me that the world is very big. That in addition to pure tech, there are a lot of forces, industries, and ways of thinking / building that make up the world we’re in. It taught me to look at startups as assets, beyond engineering. It’s interdisciplinary.
I came for cofounders, to be closer to family that just moved from Brazil to the US, and to experience living somewhere different from SF after five years in that city. New York did bring me closer to where I wanted to go, and it is here that the team and idea behind Spark got conceived.
When I was a college student with an offer to be a trader at JP Morgan, I chose software engineering. But the part of me that enjoyed investment banking superdays and preparing stock pitches as part of Brown Investment Group (woman in finance? 😜) will always exist.
I’ll be back.
I’m deeply grateful to the people who made this city feel more like home: Lari, Tae, Aileen, Justin, Jonathan, Sinclair, Chaitu, Victor, Bogie, Hamna, Austen, Chloe, David, Kristian, Samanee, Zack, Mauricio, mom, Peter, and many others.