Tell me a bit about your early years and where you come from.

I grew up in this really janky town called Fontana, which they nicknamed Fontucky, which pretty much sums it up. It was a really rough and tumble part of the inland empire, and I spent most of my young years there and remember it pretty fondly, although there was definitely a lot of racial tension out there.

I grew up in this really janky town called Fontana, which they nicknamed Fontucky, which pretty much sums it up.

In elementary school, we moved to this place called Chino. If you’ve ever watched the OC, Chino is “the other side of the tracks.” There were a lot of Hispanic, African American, and Asian gangs out there. I grew up really into skateboarding and punk rock, and that was my way of being outside of all that stuff. I still had a lot of friends that were involved gang different gangs and I remember seeing the older high school people get into a lot of trouble, which had a big impact on the younger generation. But also still having this thing that was my own, which was skateboarding, music, and my friends. We still got into our share of trouble, but were luckily on the edge of a lot of the really bad stuff that was happening around us.

I grew up in a musical family. My mom is a singer; she sang in church. My grandmother was a pretty amazing multi-instrumentalist back in the Philippines. She sang, played violin, and piano and all of that. My brother played music growing up; he was a pianist and violinist. My dad was a guitarist. He’d do rock and roll guitar, and was super into Santana and the Beatles. He used to play in rock bands in the Philippines and they’d ditch school just to play music and stuff which is where I got it from, the DNA. I was definitely the nerdy band kid playing saxophone in marching band, but that influenced my musical taste because I started getting more into jazz music through the saxophone.

I started playing a lot of jazz because it was stimulating for me mentally, and my curiosity was piqued the more that I got into the technical aspects of music. But then there is this raw emotional side of music that, listening to punk-rock and stuff also satisfied for me. There are two separate things that attracted me to these kind of polar opposite types of music, and I think resonated with me as this person who lived in two worlds.

Many of my friends were really into gangs and drugs, getting into a lot of trouble. I was never into that, but I definitely tagged along and got into loose mischievous things. Some of them went to jail, and it just didn’t end up well for them.

By the time I got to high school, Chino had now split into two parts, and this new city had formed called Chino Hills. It was this old part of town that used to be cow pastures and stuff, but it became this weird middle-class and yuppy part of town. But we still lived in this part that was on the outskirts, I guess, but still a part of Chino Hills. The new high school was this weird mix of suburban yuppie kids, but also other kids from Hispanic neighborhoods. Everyone from the surrounding area went there since it was the only school around. That was a funny, interesting time, because all of these other little subculture started to emerge. It’s a lot different than it is now because you had to meet people with similar interests. That’s how you discovered music and cults and all that. There wasn’t the internet or Facebook groups. I definitely gravitated toward those more outcast, black sheep type of people. I played in ska and reggae bands, and played some rockabilly music too, but still in the jazz band in high school. It was a big part of my life.

It seems like a really positive childhood experience, considering how rough it was where you grew up. Like you were super curious and hobby-focused.

Yeah, definitely—when something piques my interest I get obsessive about it, and that drives me—I get tunnel vision and that really is the thing that just encompasses all of my time. And I’d say that’s the stuff that kept me out of the really dark parts of where I grew up. Like, my parents and I were not on the same page, if you know what I mean. They’re super religious, Filipino Catholics. My brother and I weren’t super close. We’re like two totally different people. I think we were close when we were really young, but I think the older he got, like Jr high school, we didn’t really hang out at the time, because he’s 4 years older than me. By the time I got to high school, he’d graduated and he went to the military.

Many of my friends were really into gangs and drugs, getting into a lot of trouble. I was never into that, but I definitely tagged along and got into loose mischievous things. Some of them went to jail, and it just didn’t end up well for them.

Take me on the journey from that to getting into tech.

I was still really obsessed with music. I studied Jazz composition as well as recording engineering right after high school. I thought that’s what I was going to do, so I got a degree in recording engineering. After that, I started working in a small studio on Melrose. That was interesting because I was still relatively young,maybe 19, 20 when I was doing that. I was working for other artists. I was tracking their sessions and it was really weird because I think one of my main clients was this group of Pasadena Blood gangster rappers. They would pack the studio and just get insanely stoned and argue over stupid stuff. I was just not into that music. It was just a weird mix and I was like, why am I in here recording their sessions. It was still a good experience, and really good exposure to something different.

For a good three or four months, I was interviewing relentlessly. It was before web design was super prominent, so I had a physical portfolio full of books and printed pieces and I just talked to anyone that would check out my work or even give me some advice. I’d say I had maybe thirty or forty interviews in this short time span.

George Clinton was the main cash cow for the studio. Whenever he would come in, he would kick out whoever was in their at the time so they could record, but I got to spend some time in some of their sessions. Basically, they’d just get blitzed and then turn on the microphones, and then just creating this weird mix of sound that was part babble and part music. Long story short, I was about to have a kid and the music biz wasn’t cutting it. My girlfriend was 19 at the time, freshly out of high school. I was 20 or 21—and I decided that I needed to step it up. Being young and naive, I thought, “Hey, I’ll go to art school,” thinking that would be better. I went to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and took fine arts, printmaking, as well as environmental design. My passion in terms of design, was the built space. So once I graduated there, I was pretty adamant about not going into tech. In early 2000, web design was really hadn’t caught up to traditional forms of graphic design, and you didn’t have a lot of control. Being very classically trained as a designer, you just—in those early days—were like, “Oh, God. I don’t even want to touch the web. It’s pretty atrocious.”

I started working in the Getty Museum as an exhibition designer. I did interior architecture, environmental graphic design, and furniture. It was lots of fun working in an academic space, with very low consequences in the sense that I’m designing educational exhibits about historic art, or famous people, or just bodies of work. It was the best place for me to learn my craft and I was able to explore all different mediums. But the pay was shitty, and having a newborn child and working in a museum…I knew it would be a fun opportunity, but I couldn’t do it forever. It’s crazy for me to see people there for 10-20 years. Just thinking how they lived off that salary, because I wasn’t getting paid anything and and could’ve made more working in retail or doing something like that.

San Francisco was always a special place for me. It’s like my second home away from Los Angeles. And I’d gotten so burnt out from sitting in traffic and just grinding it out in LA, that I thought that I would try to move up to the Bay area. And once I made that decision, then I just came up here and pounded the pavement.

For a good three or four months, I was interviewing relentlessly. It was before web design was super prominent, so I had a physical portfolio full of books and printed pieces and I just talked to anyone that would check out my work or even give me some advice. I’d say I had maybe thirty or forty interviews in this short time span. Then, one of my friends that I went to school with that was a little bit older than me got a job at Google. He was the first brand guy there. So I met with him, and then I met with someone at Facebook. I think that was actually kind of serendipitous because my portfolio had nothing to do with tech, it was all environmental design. But I think some of them had gone to the Getty and seen an exhibit, and I told them that I designed it, and it was like, “Oh my God, that was a great exhibit.” I think that’s how I caught their eye, because I just applied through a random ad on some kind of job listing site. I didn’t have any ambitions of going into tech, per se, but I thought Facebook would be an interesting gig, and all the people that I met were these really idealistic young entrepreneurial types, and they really sold me on the opportunity at Facebook. All my friends were like, “Facebook sounds like a horrible job, why would you work there?” Especially going from the Getty, which is this Mecca if you’re into high design or whatever. But again, I just couldn’t live like that. It was just really bad. Facebook didn’t have a brand per say, it was much smaller than Myspace. I think Friendster was still around at that time. Honestly it just seemed a lot easier for me to get my family up here through Facebook. Also there was this opportunity to build a brand at a consumer internet company that I don’t think had really been done super successfully before then. That’s kind of what got me up to the Bay area—happenstance. Not even looking for tech, jobs but just looking for a job in a city that I was really interested in living in.

All my friends were like, “Facebook sounds like a horrible job, why would you work there?” Especially going from the Getty, which is this Mecca if you’re into high design or whatever. But again, I just couldn’t live like that. It was just really bad. Facebook didn’t have a brand per say, it was much smaller than Myspace. I think Friendster was still around at that time.

That’s cool. How big was Facebook at the time?

We had just opened our fifth office which was in New York. It was New York, Chicago, and a couple of random cities in the United States. Five offices, most of those people were sales people. So I would say it was maybe 400-500 people. In terms of design, the design team was still really small—definitely less than 10, maybe 7 or 8 people. Engineering was rather large but product design was a tiny little team.

Was your role defined as soon as you got there? Or was it just up to you?

There wasn’t a bunch of projects waiting for me there. I think I asked my manager at the time what I should be working on, and he just pointed to some people across the room and was like—“go talk to them and see what they’re doing.” He encouraged me to put myself out there and start seeing where I could dive in and have the most impact. Which was something super foreign to me because working in an exhibition design studio—especially the Getty Museum—they have their exhibits planned out probably a decade in advance to be honest with you. They’re like, we know what we’re doing 5 years from now in August. So it’s kind of like a machine there.

At Facebook I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that I would be focusing on communication design and more of the brand aspects of it, but I don’t even think we knew what that was at Facebook. It was still early in my career so I didn’t have any formulated opinions on it. It was this perfect storm of “just go with your gut and see what happens.”

Walk me through some of your projects over the course of your tech career, they vary quite a bit.

Early on, I was kind of feeling my way out through the place and understanding the identity system, which wasn’t really apparent. It was a logotype, color, and basic stuff. But it didn’t have any voice in terms of the visual identity. In fact, we intentionally didn’t have a brand voice in the early days. I worked with some of the sales and marketing teams to create some of their collateral, like brochures, little handouts for sales events. And that’s how I started—a lot of those relatively small design tasks. Working with HR to do the employee benefit packets, stuff like that. After a while I think we started to just go for it and take the reins.

The more the company grew, the more initiatives we started to realize were happening that were pretty large, at least for the company at that scale. Having some experience in environmental design, I took on some work doing their conferences. We did their first F8, which is their developer’s conference. At the time, I think they had done one already, but it was relatively small in scale, and it was almost this popup thing. We had some insight on budget, and we had some direction on the content, but for the most part we had very little oversight in terms of how it was going to manifest physically.

At Facebook I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that I would be focusing on communication design and more of the brand aspects of it, but I don’t even think we knew what that was at Facebook. It was still early in my career so I didn’t have any formulated opinions on it. It was this perfect storm of “just go with your gut and see what happens.”

So the other partner that I had at the time was this guy, Ben Barry. He and I were both similar, young and wide-eyed, hungry designers, and I think we just started making and designing and building things for this physical event. It was just the two of us alone in a warehouse with screen printing tables, assembling them ourselves, and people were just like “why are you doing that, why don’t you rent them.” And for us, no one was going to give us money to do this stuff, so we were just going to make them on the cheap, and we wanted this aesthetic to feel very DIY and handcrafted. Mainly just out of necessity, because if we had a bigger budget we would have spent more money to make it a little bit more elaborate. Most of it was just working with our hands and trying to bring this—it’s like this idea of what a hacker-based visual identity might look like. We were just trying things and making stuff. It was super fun.

For me, the biggest opportunity at Facebook was that we were building this product, but the story of the company was very focused on data, and privacy, and this young renegade CEO. Everyone forgot about what the product was enabling. Which was just communication with people and families—communities sharing information and really changing the way they they interacted.

So early on, using film was one of our easiest ways to capture a lot of those stories, document them, and get them out there. We started doing small brand video projects. Then we started doing bigger product launches and creating narrative pieces around specific products. But then we also got into documenting human stories that were on Facebook, which for me was the most fun part of being there, getting to travel and hear about these communities and different people that were doing interesting things with Facebook, in some remote part of the world. A small crew of people shooting, editing, and creating this channel to deliver stories on behalf of the brand, was a really powerful thing for me. It was this big arc for me, thinking I was going to design web pages and ultimately doing these really big brand initiatives over the course of about five years.

I think the Analog Research Lab is one of the coolest things I saw when I first visited Facebook’s campus, and you created it. How did that come about?

I mentioned the F8 conferences that we did early on — I would say that was the impetus for us to build a space to make stuff. We had this huge warehouse that was basically used for storage, and no one knew that we were in there. We just started making stuff in the corner. I think somehow we just weaseled access into the garage, and then they looked the other way and let us do whatever we wanted in there.

For me, the biggest opportunity at Facebook was that we were building this product, but the story of the company was very focused on data, and privacy, and this young renegade CEO. Everyone forgot about what the product was enabling. Which was just communication with people and families—communities sharing information and really changing the way they they interacted.

We started bringing in our own supplies. I think the Analog Research Lab started with some homemade silkscreens and some power tools that we had that was our own personal equipment. We just started making and building in the space, and accumulating equipment over time. Officially made it a thing after these F8 conferences, once people saw some of the output, then we started working out of there more and more, Ben Barry and I.

Before Ben Barry came to Facebook, he worked at a screen-printing studio in Austin called The Decoder Ring. I used to teach letterpress at Art Center before moving up here, in Pasadena. So we had this strong connection to the tactile and the physically made design stuff. And being in a world of engineers, and product, and web designers, it was a hyperdigital space. We just wanted to keep our hands dirty and still keep those skills sharp.

It was a way for us to break out of that very technological world. Then we bought some legit screen printing equipment. I found an old letterpress that I restored, and it’s still there today. We just started producing tons of hand-crafted stuff. Not just to make pretty things, but a lot of it was centered around the messages themselves. We were trying to bring the company’s values to life, but also use the lab as this provocateur inside the company. We would print posters, slogans of things that were in the air—sayings, or mantras—and we would commit them to paper.

The fact that we were using these seemingly antiquated pieces of communication technology was very subtle; but it was conceptual for us in the sense that Facebook was building this communication platform which was a paradigm shift from all the different means of communications that existed. People didn’t see it in this trajectory of human communication; from cave paintings to scribes to the Gutenberg bible. All of these things increasingly ramped up the amount of information that people were producing and consuming. Facebook is no different.

My father used to work for Pacific Bell, the telephone company. There were payphones on every street. Now that I’m an adult, you can’t even find a payphone out here. That’s how fast these communication platforms are changing. We just wanted to use the letters as a way to tie these things together. It wasn’t a project that was delivered to us or that was cued up for us. It was a passion and a very personal thing for us. That was how it took off. Once we moved to the current campus, we put it front and center. It became a landmark inside of the campus. It has a full staff now. There’s a shop manager and designers that work full time in there, but for us it was definitely a “nights and weekends” type of personally driven thing.

I love that it was a side project and it wasn’t necessarily in the realm of specialty that you were hired to work. You were pioneers for work culture that way. You guys started the posters-in-the-tech-office movement, I don’t know what else to call it. Who would have thought that something that didn’t feel necessary to a digital company or a digital product actually made ripples across all of tech?

Yeah. It’s pretty wild that now it’s all par-for-the-course, I guess. When I moved over to Pinterest, early on someone asked me, “Hey, can you make posters of some of our values?” I’m like, “No. I’m not going to do that. Not because I don’t want to do it but because I don’t think it’s what we need.” We delivered an idea because that’s what Facebook needed at the time to catalyze the culture around these things. But Pinterest was different.

I want to go into Pinterest as well, but I’m curious about something. Just hearing you talk about your work—it’s so interesting that you worked in tech at a time when specialization was important. Yet you seem to have broken those rules all over the place. It’s so interesting to me that you were so successful at that and made so many impactful projects. Did people notice that you were all over the place, and were they okay with it? I’m just so curious as to how you were able to create that path of your own when it wasn’t normal.

I don’t think at the time that people quite understood it, I don’t even think we understood it. We were just doing whatever we thought was important or whatever floated our boat at the time, I guess. I would say, in hindsight, it definitely has become a model. There were always marketing designers inside of companies, tech companies or not, but brand-focused designers were never really given the autonomy in tech companies the way that engineers and product designers were. There is still, like you mentioned, specialization. I think there are still a fair amount of generalists that they hired early on at Facebook. It could be because it was what the early team valued, and they knew that people who can do lots of different things are going to be able to move the needle more in that very malleable time. I’d say now it’s very specialized. You need to be a certain type of designer or engineer on a specific platform.

My father used to work for Pacific Bell, the telephone company. There were payphones on every street. Now that I’m an adult, you can’t even find a payphone out here. That’s how fast these communication platforms are changing.

I would say even though my work is seemingly diverse, when you look at an exhibition, or video, or whatever, a digital piece, there’s still a central trend which is around narrative and storytelling. I think that comes through in a lot of work, and being thoughtful about the strategy—if I were to describe the specialty that I bring, it’s probably more on the strategic side of brand. Most people only see the output, and they see my portfolio and they’re like, “Wow, you do all kinds of different stuff.” It’s because I don’t start with an output. I’m not a video person, I’m not an environmental designer. Those are appropriate mediums for whatever objective I’m trying to accomplish. Having that approach gave me the flexibility, but also still tied all that stuff together. Now I think there is a model for that inside of a tech company. Although I still think it’s hard for companies to kind of wrangle them in. A lot of it is about the culture and the leadership, and how willing they are to give you autonomy, which is rare for a lot of companies.

How was designing the new Facebook building with Frank Gehry?

I don’t think I’ll ever top that in my career, ever. That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I got to spend a lot of time with him. He’s in his 80s and he’s still the hardest working guy in the studio. He’s not doing all the grunt work, but he’s still a pretty active individual. Just being able to see the way that he works, which for me was pretty interesting, I say like most people that you think about, when they’re at a certain level like he is like, “Oh, this guy might be crazy cerebral or just really out there and different.” But he’s just the epitome of California cool, super laid back, but also still has this punk rock ethos, you know? The more people that I work with and seeing them operating at the highest level of their field—that gives me hope for our industry. Because there are definitely people that are super smart and crazy talented, but I think they make a thing out of being crazy smart and talented. Some like Frank Gehry do really cool shit, and if it fails, he’s still pushing himself to do better and more interesting and more unique stuff. That was the best part of my career.

Then you went to Pinterest.

It was just fun to get back into a smaller stage of a company, around something that was more personally relevant. A lot of the stuff I did at Facebook, from a superficial and aesthetic standpoint, probably would’ve worked better at Pinterest because it is this creative platform and there’s a lot of very specific things that we’re doing in the Analog Research Lab that actually worked well content-wise on Pinterest, like the DIY stuff. Not that I didn’t like the mission at Facebook. I think it’s pretty amazing, but being a creative individual, and going to art school, and always being connected to that, I think Pinterest brought me closer to my roots. I was around a bunch of people that were more like me.

The more people that I work with and seeing them operating at the highest level of their field—that gives me hope for our industry.

Pinterest has a much stronger personal relevance to me. I think that’s why the work that I was doing—even though it wasn’t necessarily at the scale of Facebook—there was always this this intimacy about it. It felt a little better to me because I would use this product pretty religiously.

Across your time in tech, what have been your biggest hardships and the biggest obstacles for you?

On the one hand I love the autonomy and being able to try stuff and come to the table with ideas, but I still operate in a very structured way and if I don’t have a framework, then it’s really hard for me to move forward. I think that’s what a more traditional design setting gave me. We have this exhibit going out this day, and this is the process, and it enabled me to be hyper-creative in a very streamlined way. So the lack of that has been the biggest challenge. Theoretically, I should be the one imposing that stuff, but it’s not as straightforward as that. It’s a pretty fluid, yet tumultuous environment to begin with, and each company is trying to do something different, including building the company that they want. When you bring existing processes to the table, I think it takes a lot of energy to implement those things, because everyone’s pretty reluctant to in the beginning.

When I first started at Facebook, I would find myself around people that were Ivy league or maybe had a lot of money. Part of me growing up in inland empire and the east side of Southern California just thinking, “How did I end up here?” It’s kind of crazy. It’s this conflict of money, class and upbringing that has been a weird struggle for me.

I think culturally, it’s also been a challenge. The culture of Bay Area Silicon Valley tech. I didn’t grow up like that, so I think it’s really weird for me, to be honest. Even now, having lived in the Bay Area for a good 10 years, there’s a side of me that sees all the money, and the crazy entitlement that goes around, and it really bums me out. It makes me not super excited about it anymore. It got progressively more over time, but even when I first started at Facebook, I would find myself around people that were Ivy league or maybe had a lot of money. Part of me growing up in inland empire and the east side of Southern California just thinking, “How did I end up here?” It’s kind of crazy. It’s this conflict of money, class and upbringing that has been a weird struggle for me.

You describe yourself as a broke, punk rocker from L.A. How did you fit in, or feel like you fit in, in your early days in tech and even now?

It was hard and I would say what resonated with me was the entrepreneurial spirit of early Facebook. And I think if it wasn’t Facebook, I don’t think it would have worked so well for me. Mainly because they let me explore myself creatively. Not intentionally, they just were too busy doing their own thing, and I was still producing a fair amount of work that was having some impact. I was also able to do that in a space where I didn’t have a ton of oversight, which is super rare. A lot of the great designers that I look up to, seem to have a combination either a good patron, or a studio, or a client that allows them to take those risks, and I had that at Facebook. I always use that as a benchmark which for me is not the right way to do it because all the jobs after that, I’m like “oh man at Facebook it was so different.” But I realize that it was a time in my career that I’ll probably never be able to replicate. I mean, I shouldn’t try to, I should just let these other things be themselves, you know?

The culture of Bay Area Silicon Valley tech. I didn’t grow up like that, so I think it’s really weird for me, to be honest. Even now, having lived in the Bay Area for a good 10 years, there’s a side of me that sees all the money, and the crazy entitlement that goes around, and it really bums me out. It makes me not super excited about it anymore.

I still have my family too, so that was the biggest thing because part of my life goals at the time were getting my family on their feet, and I was super determined. I think in many ways I just blocked out a lot of things. I had my eye on the prize for a long time, which was really hard to achieve, like getting out of debt, and owning a home, and the basic needs stuff. That’s really all that I cared about. I think everything else just kind of tuned out for a while.

Were you one of the first parents at Facebook?

Definitely on the design team. It wasn’t until relatively recently that those people I was on the team with at the time started having children. Only a handful of them. I still see them in my Facebook feed and they’re posting newborn photos. My daughter’s a teenager now. She spent a lot of time with me at Facebook in the early days. She would come to work with me and hang out and I would just let her run around the office. She knows Mark and Sheryl. She’s seen all those people. For all she knew at the time, they could have worked for me. I’m like “no, that young guy over there is the boss of all of this stuff.”

I tend to work early. I would take the Caltrain and get there super early in the morning. Sometimes at 6:00, 7:00 in the morning and be the first one there for a good 2 hours. But then people would want to meet at 6:00 at night. I’m like, “I got to go home. I got to eat dinner with the family,” and that was a struggle. But I didn’t feel like it was too much of a compromise. Everyone’s like, “why does he always leave early?” It wasn’t super early, it was just normal time, but they were a young crew of people that worked super-late. Now they know because they’re all having little babies and they’re like, “This is so hard,” and I’m like, “No shit, try doing it when you don’t have the financial means and the support network!”

How do your friends and family from home feel about the work you’ve done and how you turned out?

I think my parents are proud. Just being at Facebook, they assume that I’m a billionaire.

It’s a weird environment. And I think if you don’t live in the Bay Area or work in tech it’s so foreign. Even being inside of it you’re just like, “What is happening?” It’s such a weird thing. Each company is different and there’s all these different groups of people. Someone will write a book about this someday—but at this point in time, you kinda gotta be here to experience it.

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? Do you see yourself still working in tech?

I don’t know if I see myself working in tech. My goal is definitely to have my own design practice. In five years my daughter will be in college, which, for me is crazy because we don’t have another kid and I’ll still be 40 years old. Relatively young in the sense of having a child that’s already out of the nest. That for me is pretty exciting, because we basically did our family life backwards. We had a kid early. We kind of grinded it out at work and got on our feet as a family. I didn’t spend my 20s dicking around going to clubs and stuff. Now I’m able to go out without freaking out about a babysitter. I’m starting to experience the city from a young adult’s eyes versus a parent’s eye, which is a new thing for my wife and I. If I’m able to travel and still have my own clientele and do stuff, that would be pretty amazing. I can’t say I won’t be in tech because I think most people are somehow tangentially connected to tech. Even if you’re freelancing as a designer, you might have a tech client, because that’s the predominant industry paying good money. I do see myself doing more music. That’s been number one on my list, trying to get a group people playing again. Also, doing more makerly things, like furniture design. Or make something physical and tangible versus working on a computer.

What advice would you have for people from similar backgrounds who are hoping to get into tech?

I guess the philosophical side of me is saying: First examine your motives. Sometimes a problem isn’t in the motive, but in the fact that you have a motive at all. And I think for me, just being able to navigate these really weird situations at times, was because I felt like a conscious observer and I was trying to be really objective towards things. But I think, had I come in with a goal being monetary or superficial stuff, then I don’t know if tech would have worked well for me. So that’s probably my first advice, which I don’t even know if that’s advice. But if you’re following tech because that’s where the money is, or that’s seemingly the most fluid and flexible work environment, I’d say all of those things are superficial. Examine what it is that really motivates you and see how tech either gets you closer to that or doesn’t, and make a real decision.

Someone will write a book about this someday—but at this point in time, you kinda gotta be here to experience it.