Immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn is sharing this advice with her high-tech clientele: Get back to the US before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The new year brings Trump's return to Washington, and with it, immigration lawyers like Alcorn say they're fielding nonstop calls from tech worker clients to discuss policy changes that may take place under the second Trump administration. Alcorn said she's helping clients file petitions and extensions under current policies and is telling those with valid visas to consider returning to the country from temporary travel overseas before Trump takes office out of an abundance of caution.

Trump swept to victory on promises to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally, but he's offered few hints into how he will shape a legal immigration system that pipes highly educated foreign workers into tech jobs.

During his first term, Trump signed a series of executive orders that limited access to many work visa types, impacting an important source of technical talent, according to conversations with four immigration attorneys.

They expect Trump to run some of those plays again. "A storm is coming," said Jason Finkelman of Finkelman Law, "and this time, we know exactly what it's going to bring."

A travel ban 2.0 could limit access for the tech talent pool

In the first week of his first term, Trump signed an executive order restricting travel from seven countries with large Muslim populations, virtually blocking immigration from those nations. It also prevented professionals from traveling out of the country for work or personal reasons because they feared they would be unable to return.

In a September speech prior to the election, Trump said he would reinstate his "famous travel ban" and expand it to prevent refugees from Gaza from entering the country.

The last travel ban sparked outcries from tech firms that rely on foreigners with special expertise to fill their ranks and help shape their technologies. Hundreds of executives and employees such as Sam Altman and Sergey Brin converged on San Francisco International Airport in protest, while Box CEO Aaron Levie and the founders of Lyft pledged their support to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the order.

The travel ban faced a series of challenges in the lower courts and didn't take full effect until the Supreme Court upheld the order more than a year after Trump signed it.

"I think its possible that Trump may attempt to impose travel bans from certain countries just as he did when he initially tried to implement travel restrictions," said Jason Finkelman, who's based in Austin. "While I think travel bans will likely face challenges in the courts it may lead to issues of US employers being restricted from hiring and retaining the foreign talent they need for their operations."

Elizabeth Goss, who runs her own law practice in Boston, and Justin Parsons, a partner at Erickson Immigration Group's office in Arlington, Virginia, said they believed a travel ban 2.0 would affect different countries this time around, based on this administration's priorities.

"The wildcard for me," said Parsons, "is what happens to China." The president-elect has vowed to enact higher tariffs on Chinese goods, in an effort to hobble the world's second-largest economy. Parsons has asked himself if Trump would ban travel from China to further these efforts.

Trump could decrease access to a commonly used visa type by tech companies

The tech sector is the biggest beneficiary of the H-1B visa, which allows employers to fill specialty roles with highly educated foreign workers. Last year, more than half of these visas went to workers in computer-related roles, according to data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

During Trump's first term, government data shows that denial rates for new employees and requests for further evidence of eligibility surged. In 2020, the Trump administration temporarily paused the issuance of new green cards and many work visa types, arguing that this would protect American jobs during a pandemic decline in employment.

The Biden administration has moved to reverse some of these policies and facilitate the processing of work-related visas. In December, the White House published new regulations that allow the immigration agency to process applications more quickly for most individuals who had previously been approved for an H-1B visa.

Jason Finkelman said the new rules "give predictability to employers and foreign nationals on the extensions of their visa petitions when there has been no change in the job duties or the employer." He added that it's plausible Trump can withdraw the regulations once he takes office, however.

Elizabeth Goss offered a more optimistic outlook. She suggested that if Elon Musk has Trump's ear, he might be able to persuade the president to leave the program untouched or even expand the number of visas issued, though such a move hasn't been made since President Bill Clinton raised the limit at the top of the dot-com bubble.

Canadians could be turned away

Historically, Canadians have had access to temporary work visa types, the L-1 and the TN, which allowed them to move across the border with less friction. However, according to Justin Parsons, they could face new headwinds under Trump.

Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have relied heavily on the L-1 visa to transfer an executive or manager from one of their foreign offices to one of their domestic offices. Canadians have been able to apply for this visa at an international airport or border station without having to file a petition with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a far more cumbersome process.

In 2017, under the Trump administration, some border agents began refusing to process or renew work visas for Canadians already working in the country, Parsons said. The border agents would challenge their eligibility over what Parsons described as arbitrary reasons, or direct them to the immigration agency. This delayed workers who were traveling home from returning.

At the time, Parsons also observed Canadian clients on the TN visa — a temporary work visa for Canadians and Mexicans created under the North American Free Trade Agreement — come under increased scrutiny at the border.

Parsons expressed concern for Canadians that the probing measures might be reintroduced and potentially intensified under Trump's second term.

• Dual citizen Michael Stiege was raised in Canada but spent many years working in the US.
• The darkness and cold climate of Canada pushed him to sunny California.
• For Americans thinking they can simply move up north, it's not that easy, he said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Michael Stiege, 75, a dual citizen of the US and Canada. Stiege was raised in Canada and spent roughly 30 years working in California before moving back to Canada 15 years ago. He soon plans to split his time between the US and Canada. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Because I'm a dual citizen of America and Canada, traveling between the two countries is virtually a non-issue.

If you're an American coming to Canada, you can travel visa-free. Still, if you're planning to move here and be able to work here, that's another story.

You can visit for six months as long as you leave before the end of the six-month period. You can do that back and forth all the time — but you won't get access to the social system and healthcare.

My friends, who used to live in Chicago, moved to California and said, "We're going to move up to Canada when we retire," but they couldn't get a visa.

This fellow's a Ph.D. and a really smart technical guy — and his wife is pretty bright, too. They couldn't get a visa because they were simply too old. Once you're — let's say 50 — the immigration system disadvantages you. They have a merit-based point system and start worrying about things like age. That's the thinking. Once you reach a certain age, or if you don't have certain other legs up, the criteria by which you can get a working visa is stacked against you.

[In Canada's Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) — which rates potential immigrants based on age, language fluency, education, professional expertise, and if you have a Canadian partner — applicants 45 years old or older receive 0 points.]

Whereas if you're a young guy just out of college, you have some reasonable skills, and you even know a few words of French, you probably wouldn't have a problem.

There are ways around it, but if the expectation is, "I'm just going to go up there and apply for a visa and get a visa," it may not happen like that.

I needed a change from the cold and long nights in Canada

I was born in Stuttgart, Germany. When my parents and I moved to Canada, I was about 3 and written into my parents' passports.

They got their visas and eventually became naturalized Canadians, which was bestowed on me. So, for all practical purposes, I'm a Canadian.

I grew up in Toronto, went to school in Toronto, and it wasn't until the early side of my career that I moved out into western Canada to Calgary and British Columbia.

I have an engineering degree and an MBA — which, at that time, was a pretty good combination to earn a job and make a living. I looked at the available jobs in the market and thought, "Go to Silicon Valley, where your skills will be valued the most."

I applied to a couple of things and got a call one day. It said, "Are you interested in coming down?" I said yeah, and there I was.

I needed warmer weather, and I was able to get rid of Canada's long winter nights. The summers in Canada were great — you could golf at 11 p.m. — but the winters were awful.

Seasonal affective disorder really got to me. It's not so much the cold as the long winter nights. It's dark. My wife says I had started hibernating, so I wanted to leave that behind.

I rented in the US and bought a home in Canada

When I moved to the US, I found that if I pushed myself, I could've bought a house, but I kept holding off. I found it easy to rent — it was affordable. I could get by without any problem. What I didn't put into a mortgage, I put into stocks and stuff like that.

I lived there for almost 30 years in two or three residences. I paid about $3,200 monthly in Los Altos Hills, California, right by Stanford University.

I came close to buying a couple of times, but the property tax burden in California is significantly higher than what you would find in Canada.

If you buy a house in California for $3 million, you're looking at $40,000 yearly in property taxes. [Zillow estimates a $3 million home in Santa Clara County would cost $36,300 annually in property taxes.] I could go on a trip for six months on that.

If I did the same thing in Toronto, I might spend between $6,000 and $8,000 — and that's a big difference. [According to the city of Toronto, a $3 million home costs $21,459 in city, education, and building fund taxes.]

I moved back to Canada about 15 years ago. My father was 96 then, and I said, "Let's go back." My wife is Canadian, and we have family up here. We settled in and bought our house.

We have a summer home up north in the lake country. It's not bad, but it gets cold in the winter.

If I ever move back to the US, my preference is California.

• Dhruv Suyamprakasam launched a telemedicine startup and initially moved to Bengaluru.
• Bengaluru's fast-paced culture clashed with the healthcare industry's needs and the team moved back.
• He says that Bengaluru has its own merits and should not be compared to the Silicon Valley.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Dhruv Suyamprakasam, a founder who launched his startup in Bengaluru but later moved out. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My father was a first-generation entrepreneur and ran a thriving business in the early 1990s in Coimbatore, a small city in Southern India. I would follow him on business trips, and growing up, I spent a lot of time in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, two of India's biggest business hubs in the south.

I studied mechanical engineering. During college, I became fascinated with entrepreneurship and building something of my own.

I first considered entering manufacturing, but I'd have to focus on making one product at a time. I decided building software was the answer, but I still didn't have an idea of exactly what I wanted to use software for.

Around this time, I met my now-co-founder, a medical doctor, who was also my relative, at a wedding. We kept in touch and came up with the idea of our startup — a telemedicine company that would allow people to access doctors virtually and across local and international borders.

I was a recent graduate with a good job offer. My cofounder was worried about how our family would react to me quitting to venture out on my own. But I absconded the job offer and began working on our idea full time.

Moving to Bengaluru

We brought on another cofounder who lived in Bengaluru at the time. I had read about the city being the center of the mainstream startup ecosystem. In 2010, moving to Bengaluru felt like the best decision for me as a founder.

But it wasn't the best place for us. It's a place that expects companies to grow fast and fail fast. I didn't think it was the right pressure to put on a healthcare startup, which has no margin for errors and requires a lot of trust from people. We met investors who had expectations like getting 100 paid consultations in a day.

Around 12 years back, I also felt like there was a lot of bias from investors. I felt excluded because I didn't speak Hindi, which is the most spoken language in India, and I did not go to college at the Indian Institute of Technology, the most coveted engineering school in the country. I also got some judgment for being from a small town many people had not heard of.

A combination of those factors helped us decide to move back to my hometown after around 16 months in Bengaluru.

There were challenges back home, too. We faced issues with our internet connection, which we never had in Bengaluru, and there was no established startup community. But it gave us the space to grow at our own pace.

Since then, we have onboarded about 4,500 doctors to the platform and have patients from all over the world. The company has grown to around 200 employees, and we have expanded to include health content on the platform, too.

Heart of India's startup scene

We even moved back to Bengaluru for a second time in 2016 because we had grown a lot more as a company and thought things might be different this time around.

We thought that maybe the first time around, we hadn't understood how Bengaluru worked and how things were done. We were ready to give it a second chance.

The inclusivity had improved because of the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion, but not much had changed for the healthcare industry like the speed at which we were expected to show results. We ended up coming back to my hometown after a year and a half.

The city has tons of advantages, like proximity to venture capital, a massive pool of tech talent, and more opportunities for networking, which can be helpful in the early days.

But building a business outside the tech hub is also a good option, especially because of lower costs. While employee salaries are usually on par, founders can save a lot on office space and home rent if they build from smaller cities and travel to Bengaluru as needed. I also think we need more tech hubs in India outside Bengaluru.

It's no Silicon Valley

I don't think Bengaluru should be compared to Silicon Valley at all. Since 2018, I have also spent time in the Bay Area growing our business. Now, our company is headquartered in the US, and I spend four to five months of the year in the US.

Bengaluru has an amazing tech crowd, but Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley for a reason — people are far more open-minded and inclusive about giving opportunities to those from different backgrounds, which has allowed it to become a sponge. The city just sucks up anyone with talent from across the globe.

It would have made me incredibly happy if the first large language model came from India, but it didn't. It came from OpenAI and Silicon Valley, where Sam Altman's team was allowed to burn cash for years before ChatGPT came to fruition.

It would be easier for anyone trying to build a software company that aims to have global customers move to the Bay Area for better access to funding and talent.

We call Bengaluru the Silicon Valley of India, but that is just another way Indians are comparing themselves to the West.

I think the way to go is to be great on our own account. One step in that direction is to be more inclusive and start seeing people for their talents rather than their educational or cultural backgrounds.

• Big Tech companies and CEOs are already lining up six-figure donations to Donald Trump's inauguration.
• Amazon, Sam Altman, and Meta are each prepared to donate $1 million.
• There are virtually no limits on inaugural donations, meaning Big Tech companies can cut massive checks.

Big Tech companies and the moguls behind them are preparing to make six-figure donations to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural committee.

Jeff Bezos' Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta have all been reported to have made or will make $1 million to the outfit tasked with planning and organizing Trump's triumphant return to power.

"The financing of inaugurations is really a cesspool when it comes to campaign financing," Craig Holman, a lobbyist for government watchdog Public Citizen, told Business Insider.

Holman said there are few, if any, limits to inaugural donations, and what makes them particularly appealing is that megadonors and CEOs don't have to worry about picking the loser.

"Unlike financing a campaign, when you don't know for sure who is going to win, here in the inauguration, you've got the winner," he said. "So corporations and other special interests just throw money at them at the feet of the president with the hope of currying favor."

Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest group, said donations to the inaugural committee are less likely to irk the opposition.

"They are frequently a mechanism for entities that sit out elections to get good with the incoming administration," he said.

Trump's 2017 inaugural set a record, raking in roughly $107 million. Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson donated $5 million, the largest single donation. AT&T gave just over $2 million. For many in Washington, it was a time to make nice with an incoming president that few thought would win the 2016 race.

This time, Trump's inaugural offers one final major opportunity for CEOs to curry influence with the president-elect at his peak.

Since he'll be term-limited, the next major fundraising opportunity likely won't come until Trump begins preparations for a presidential library (should that even occur). At that point, companies will have missed their window to make a final impression before mergers and acquisitions.

2017 Trump inaugural donors benefited greatly

Playing ball can have major benefits. OpenSecrets found in 2018 that "of the 63 federal contractors that donated to the inauguration, more than half won multimillion-dollar bids" from the federal government later on.

Foreign donors can't contribute to a president-elect's inaugural committee, and the committee must publicly disclose details about donations over $200 within 90 days of Inauguration Day. Otherwise, there are few limits on what individuals or corporations can give, and inaugural committees are not required to explain how they spend the money.

Some presidents, especially Obama in 2009, have imposed voluntary restrictions on donations. Obama refused to accept corporate donations or individual contributions over $50,000 for his historic first inauguration, though he later lifted those limits for his reelection celebration.

Hauser said donations will allow corporations to prepare for an especially transactional period.

"I think that corporations with an agenda in Trump's Washington, be it offense, like getting new contracts, or defense, like avoiding negative federal scrutiny, are going to spend millions of dollars in Washington to either make or protect billions in the real economy," Hauser said.

Tech companies are under the microscope.

Amazon, Google, and Meta have all faced antitrust concerns. Republican lawmakers have frequently grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's decision to limit sharing the New York Post's initial report on Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to help election officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, enraging some on the right, while Trump repeatedly lit into Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for The Washington Post's coverage of his first administration. Amazon sued the Trump administration after Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract over them, alleging that Trump's animus for Bezos sunk their chances.

Bezos and Zuckerberg have since taken steps to repair their relationships with the Trump world. Zuckerberg has expressed regret over Facebook's decision to censor some posts about COVID-19. He also pledged not to donate to help election officials. Bezos intervened when The Post's editorial board was ready to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos also recently said Trump seemed "calmer than he was the first time and more settled."

"You've probably grown in the last eight years," Bezos said at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December. "He has, too."

Altman has been entangled in a legal battle with his OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, who is set to be an influential figure in the Trump administration.

In a statement about his donation, Altman said, "President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead."

Representatives for Amazon, Meta, and Trump's inaugural did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

To get a taste of what may be in store, one only needs to look at what happened at President Joe Biden's inauguration.

A leaked fundraising memo showed that large donations netted individuals and organizations various perks, including opportunities to meet Biden, receive private briefings from top campaign officials, and "preferred viewing" for the virtual inauguration.

All of those benefits came amid pandemic precautions. Trump's party will have no such limits.

• Regina Grogan is a tech exec who says high stress once impacted her mental health and relationships.
• Grogan has developed nine daily habits that help her reduce stress and increase productivity.
• Grogan's methods include cold plunges, meditation, and gratitude lists for better mood.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Regina Grogan, a Zillennial technology executive, AI founder, and former Google consultant based in Salt Lake City. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in high-stress Silicon Valley for over 10 years, including as a Google consultant, before transitioning to being an associate security engineer at one of the largest banks.

Working in the tech industry is stressful — it has extreme volatility, which has led me to feel anxious and depressed in the past. I've seen tech startups shut down very suddenly with zero discussion. I've also worked in big companies undergoing layoffs and wondered, "Am I next?"

High stress also impacted my relationships. My work took up a lot of my personal time, so I wasn't able to build as many relationships as I wish I had.

Over the years, I've discovered hacks to mitigate stress, boost my mood, and increase productivity. These are my favorites.

1. Cold plunge

I take a 15 to 20-minute ice bath or cold shower every morning. The first five minutes are awful and shocking. Then I acclimate to it, and it actually feels really good.

During the plunge, I feel extremely alert, the world looks brighter, and when I emerge, everything feels like a new beginning.

2. Meditation

I was very addicted to my digital devices until I noticed it was severely affecting my mental clarity and focus. Now I try to stay off my phone as much as possible in the morning, and instead, meditate for 25 minutes.

Ever since I made the switch, my mind has become quieter and I feel reset from the attention obsession that my digital devices create.

3. Increase my bodily awareness

I've realized I have to create balance in life by tuning into my body and intuition for guidance. I now listen more to my instincts.

One time, I was working on a partnership and felt physically uneasy while reviewing the terms. Looking back, I realize I was sensing a subconscious resistance in my body about this partnership, which ended up going south.

4. Take a walk without my phone

I often use my phone as an anxiety and comfort tool. The only way I've had luck mitigating this anxiety is by leaving my phone at home, coming back, and seeing that nothing horrible has happened.

5. Think about what I can and can't control

Let's say a vendor messes up a project, or the intern accidentally gets spam-attacked and is freaked out. Instead of panicking, I use the psychological strategy of the "circle of control," asking myself, "What can I control in this stressful situation?"

If the answer is nothing, I have to let it go.

6. Ask myself, "How can I help others today?"

Doing small acts of kindness helps me take the focus off of myself and redirect my energy toward helping others. This can be helping someone at work, volunteering, or simply letting someone in front of me in traffic.

At the end of the day, I can say, "Today didn't go super well, but I did something in my control to improve things."

7. Make a list of what I'm grateful for

I live a privileged life, and it's easy to forget how hard life is for many other people. In my case, I used to have depression. I've seen bad days, but it's easier to forget when I make a gratitude list.

When I zoom out, I can see how lucky I am and that I have a lot to be thankful for.

8. Epsom salt bath

Every evening, around 9 p.m., I take a hot Epsom salt bath. Epsom salt regulates the nervous system and also staves off loneliness — or so they found in some studies.

I do this as a "day ender" to help me officially close out the day. Otherwise, I'll keep working into the night.

9. Write down my worries and wait to review them

Before I go to sleep at 10 p.m., I write down everything I'm worrying about as a "brain dump." I put it in a box and revisit it a week later to see how many of them came to pass.

Almost none of them do. Over time, I've gained more confidence and calmness.

Ever since I started using these hacks, I've been in a great mood and more productive than ever

My colleagues always talk about my energy and good mood. These hacks allow me to be creative and productive at work, even in a stressful environment.

If you work in Big Tech and have productivity hacks you'd like to share, please email Tess Martinelli at [email protected].

• Batool Fatima moved to Bengaluru, "India's Silicon Valley," nearly 25 years ago.
• She said the city felt like a dream when she arrived but now it's struggling with urbanization.
• After a water crisis this year, some people are leaving Bengaluru but Fatima plans to stay.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Batool Fatima, 50, about environmental issues facing Bengaluru, the city known as "India's Silicon Valley." The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born and raised in Hyderabad. Like Bengaluru, it's one of India's tech hubs.

I moved to Bengaluru in 2000 after I got married because my husband lives there. I also visited frequently as a child because my father used to work there.

It was like a dream city for us then. It was more advanced than Hyderabad, with wider roads and a lot of greenery and lakes.

Over the years, the rapid expansion of certain industries in Bengaluru, such as IT and ITES, fueled significant construction and population growth. The landscape changed in front of our eyes. Development has had a positive impact, creating opportunities for both locals and migrants.

But Bengaluru is dealing with water scarcity issues and some people seem to be leaving the city because of problems with infrastructure. Rather than leaving, I want to work on solutions. The community must come together to prioritize sustainability and the city's natural resources to preserve its future.

People who've moved to Bengaluru help to sustain the city

I've been working in the nonprofit sector since 2011. In June 2024, I started my own nonprofit, Sheya Foundation. We're invested in equitable access to healthcare and education, and I'm also very interested in climate issues.

Bengaluru is seen as an IT city. It's an aspirational city to live in because it's known for its pleasant climate and career opportunities.

With the development of the city's tech sector, a lot of intellectuals have moved in, many who care about the city and climate. However, there have also been environmental and economic strains.

There's an economic strain on people who don't work in IT and don't make high salaries. With wealthier tech workers in the city, the cost of living has risen dramatically, and houses have become more unaffordable. I'm seeing young people dropping out of school to start work because of the impact of higher costs on families.

Other people who aren't IT employees have moved to the city to work in industries serving the tech community, such as hospitality and schools. These people are helping to sustain the city.

There have been some tensions between local people and those who've come from elsewhere because of cultural differences. Recent reports suggest a rise in confrontations between locals and people who don't speak the language.

I'm not from Bengaluru and haven't encountered any negativity myself. But I speak Telegu, which many local people also understand, so I feel at home here.

I'm concerned about water scarcity in the city, but there are solutions

Water scarcity has become a particularly visible issue in Bengaluru.

The number of lakes in the city has decreased significantly in recent decades due to urbanization. Too many high rises are coming up too fast, and I don't think there's enough planning going into water facilities to sustain residents.

Bengaluru dealt with a huge water crisis earlier this year. It particularly affected people in high-rise buildings because the buildings are over-reliant on borewells that dried up during the crisis.

The water crisis didn't affect me too badly. Where I live, there's only one borewell for our group of villas, so we agreed to ration it and only use the water for half an hour per house each day. Since June, we've had good rain, so we no longer need to restrict ourselves.

The water issues seem to have calmed down across the city. But we'll have to see if there'll be a year-on-year impact during the summer months.

We need to be ruthless about not encroaching on our lakes. If we're going to be lax on this aspect, people are going to leave. I've read on the news that some people left during the summer because of a lack of water.

I'd like to see companies investing in solutions for Bengaluru. For example, they should work with the government to develop vegetation wetlands.

Residents also need to assess what we are doing to treat water as a precious commodity instead of complaining about what the government isn't doing. The community has to collaborate with the government by doing things like looking into stormwater drainage for their houses.

We need to work on solutions for the city rather than try to create a new Bengaluru elsewhere

Public infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with Bengaluru's growing population. I feel the city is bursting at the seams and may not be able to support further population growth.

But that doesn't mean I want it to stop developing as a tech hub. Bengaluru contributes significantly to India's GDP and helps generate high-paying jobs. Maintaining it as a tech hub allows players in the tech ecosystem — multinational companies, startups, research institutions, and a skilled workforce — to continue collaborating, driving innovation and job creation.

The state government has been developing nearby suburban regions like Yeshwanthpur and Bidadi, which can reduce congestion in the city's core while enabling Bengaluru to continue excelling in tech. In my opinion, that's a more viable solution than relocating the IT sector to other regions in India.

It's not going to be easy to move a tech hub from Bengaluru to another city. When I visit, Hyderabad, my hometown, which is also known for IT, there are similar issues there in terms of traffic, water, and property prices.

I want to keep using my foundation to build community awareness. I love Bengaluru, and I'd rather stay here and work on solutions than leave.

Want to share your story? Email [email protected]

• Spencer Schneier moved from the US to Bengaluru, India, to launch a tech startup in 2022.
• He was inspired by challenges faced by local founders in navigating overseas expansions.
• He finds Bengaluru similar to Silicon Valley and its collaborative ecosystem.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Spencer Schneier, who moved from the US to Bengaluru, India, to launch a tech startup in 2022. It has been edited for length and clarity.

The first time I thought about leaving the US was in mid-2020. I was frustrated with how the pandemic was handled and was looking for a reason to leave the country.

I was born in New York and grew up around the East Coast. I attended college in North Carolina, where I studied math and economics, but dropped out in my third year in 2017.

Around the time, I became interested in Silicon Valley — it felt like a meritocratic place where people could take their own path. After leaving college, I worked as a baseball analyst and traveled between Seattle and San Francisco.

When the pandemic hit, I dropped plans to move to San Francisco. I thought the city was declining, and I preferred my lifestyle in Seattle. I was working for a startup with two Indian cofounders. When they decided to pursue the business full time, they faced visa challenges and had to move back to India. So, in 2021, I tagged along to visit India for the first time, traveling to Mumbai and Bengaluru.

On that trip, I met my wife, an American teacher in India. I also stumbled upon the idea for what would eventually become Commenda — the company I cofounded.

I came up with the idea for my company in India

I was talking to local founders in Mumbai who faced challenges registering or expanding their businesses in other countries. There are hundreds of multilateral trade agreements between countries and thousands of bilateral trade agreements, and no tool for businesses to navigate them.

I returned to the US about a month later and pitched a friend and investor at an early-stage venture-capital firm my idea: a platform that would become a one-stop compliance solution for companies looking to expand overseas.

I didn't have a concrete product, but they liked the idea and wanted to invest $100,000. The investors asked me to go back to India and figure things out. It seemed like a great opportunity. I convinced my cofounder to leave his job at Google, and we both went to Bengaluru without an explicit plan.

Being my own boss was tough in some ways, but I liked being able to do things on my own without the pressure of having a manager. I've been fired from jobs twice, and starting my own company was almost relieving.

In early 2022, we began building our company in India and wanted to provide solutions to both Indian and overseas businesses. We picked Bengaluru because it's where a lot of startups and multinalitional companies are that could use our service.

We developed enterprise software so that users could answer questions they had about local tax laws and ensure they incorporated and stayed compliant in any country they wanted to expand to.

Bengaluru is similar to Silicon Valley in some ways

Bengaluru felt like Silicon Valley in many ways. It's listed as a sister city of Silicon Valley at a train station in San Francisco.

During my first visit, driving through south Bengaluru reminded me of Palo Alto, and talking to people confirmed it. The city is a tech and business hub with many small businesses and startups, so it gave us access to customers.

The city has an amazing pool of talent and is home to really open and collaborative founders. There are some great startup advisors and angel investors driving the ecosystem forward here.

Being in Bengaluru means we learn from local startups. There are cultural differences between the startup markets in the US and India. I've had to learn things about India and unlearn aspects of how business is done in the US.

One difference was that India is a less trusting ecosystem — we have had investors ask questions after agreeing to invest and completing diligence processes, even for a small check size.

Sometimes I wish the ecosystem was moving more quickly away from venture-capital funds operating more like private equity. But the new generation of fund managers is really promising.

Splitting my time between Bengaluru and San Francisco

Since we launched the company in 2022, we have faced some hiccups with immigration, but registering and operating in India has never been much of an issue.

I had an e-business visa to work in India. The visa office struggled to coordinate with India's Ministry of Corporate Affairs to ensure I was cleared to open a business in the country, which dragged the process out by a few months.

I wish the roads were better, and the traffic makes it hard to get around. I have also been rejected from renting an apartment because the landlord didn't like that I was a college dropout. Getting a permanent phone number was challenging, too, but knowing other foreigners had been through some of our problems made it easier.

The year-round moderate weather and air quality are perks. I love how hospitable the people of India are. It's one of the most fun countries I have lived in because there are tons of festivals and parades. My wife and I enjoy traveling, and we can stay in nice hotels because they are more affordable in India. We are also close to Southeast Asia, which would have been very expensive to travel from California.

I have apartments in San Francisco and Bengaluru and spend about half my time in each place. My wife and I bought our San Francisco apartment this summer, but I have not had an official residence in the US since 2021. About one-third of our team is in Silicon Valley, while the rest are in Bengaluru. Since we launched in 2022, we now have 250 customers in around 30 countries.

I know other foreigners who have also moved to India to launch businesses. My sense is that moving to India is going to become more of a trend. I don't know if you're going to see a Little America in Bengaluru anytime soon, but there are just so many appealing things about it, such as the talent density and the generosity of the locals.

As more Americans consider leaving the "college to cubicle" paradigm, moving to a foreign country to work for a business or start a business will become more appealing.

• When Vikram Chandrashekar was growing up in Bengaluru, it was quiet and full of natural beauty.
• Chandrashekar said urbanization is a good thing, but it changed the city too quickly.
• He enjoys living in a tech hub, but said locals are struggling with the pressure on infrastructure.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Vikram Chandrashekar, 50, who was born in Bengaluru, India, about how the city has changed over his lifetime. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Bengaluru has become known as the "Silicon Valley of India," but it was once known as a "Garden City."

I was born in Bengaluru and have lived in J.P. Nagar, a neighborhood in the south of the city since I was seven. Back then, it was a remote area with a lot of trees and gardens.

There was a huge lake with a guava and mango orchard across from it. We used to get off the school bus, grab a mango, wash it in the lake, and eat it.

Now, there are houses where the lake used to be, and the majority of the orchard is gone. As the tech sector developed in Bengaluru over the decades, there was a lot of urbanization. As a result, there's less greenery on the streets and more high-rise buildings.

Urbanization is good, but it transformed Bengaluru too quickly and too soon — the city's been catching up ever since. It's left some people feeling frustrated about things like traffic, housing costs, and this year's water crisis.

I've witnessed Bengaluru's transformation into a tech hub

Bengaluru used to be a place where retirees wanted to live. It was a quiet place with a relatively moderate climate.

There's a long history of science and tech development in Bengaluru. The Indian Institute of Science and Raman Research Institute is here. We also have a decadeslong history of aerospace research and electronics manufacturing.

In the 80s and 90s, IT companies like Infosys, Wipro, and Texas Instruments moved into Bengaluru. In the mid-2000s, the startup ecosystem grew as it became more accessible and normalized to start a business.

IT created a lot of job opportunities, just like it did in Silicon Valley. Today, there's a large startup ecosystem and community of venture capitalists. It's probably the best place to launch a startup in India, which means more people have come to the city, creating a need for more space, public transport, and residences.

It also created a lot of urbanization, which gave people more access to resources. We had a larger airport, restaurants with various cuisines coming into the city, and affordable internet access due to more competition between companies.

Because of the startup ecosystem, we get new services and products faster than other Indian cities. I've benefited positively from urban development in these ways.

There are benefits and drawbacks to Bengaluru's transformation

I'm employed in the IT sector. I've been working at Oracle for the past 27 years, and my current role is solutions architect.

People in Bengaluru have undoubtedly benefited from the job opportunities created by the tech boom, but I think local people are split on the effects of urbanization.

It's common to see negative comments about Bengaluru on social media or people complaining to their friends. I think the three biggest issues they raise are the water crisis, housing prices, and traffic.

Traffic is definitely an issue. Public transport isn't sufficient as it stands. Before the pandemic, I'd take the metro to work four days a week because it made me less angry than driving in traffic.

Residential pricing has increased from what it used to be, but so have housing prices in other cities. I'm living in a house that belonged to my parents, so I don't have to pay rent, and this isn't an issue for me.

Bengaluru has had long-standing issues with water. There are too many people and a limited water supply due to a decreasing number of lakes. Earlier this year, there was a very bad water crisis because it got very hot and there was little rain.

People were consciously trying to conserve water, and the government brought in water tankers for people to get water at a price. I've never struggled with water supply in the past: I have access to a well, rainwater harvesting, and facilities to store water from the public supply. But this year, I noticed the public water supply was running out more frequently, so even I had to buy water a few times. It was a bad feeling which made me see how the city was changing.

Things have definitely improved since the summer, and hopefully, people will be more prepared for next summer.

I support carpooling, using public transport, and rainwater harvesting to address infrastructure issues in Bengaluru. We should also plant trees for the next generation. Tree roots can help absorb rainwater when there's flooding, so it's important to conserve every tree.

Creating other prominent tech hubs like Bengaluru is a good solution, but progress has been slow

Despite the concerns people have, I don't think people are leaving Bengaluru.

Jobs are a big reason why. There are opportunities in tech and other industries serving that community, such as schools, public transport, and cooking.

There are problems, but they're probably not as bad as social media portrays them to be. I'm frustrated by the traffic and water crisis, but I'll probably continue to live in Bengaluru.

For many years, people have talked about creating alternate cities to Bengaluru within the state, or cities like Hyderabad or Mumbai replacing it, but I feel progress on this has been small.

The solution probably lies in creating other cities like Bengaluru that can distribute the load across various places, but even in other countries, this doesn't happen. One or two cities always take most of the burden.

There are cities near Bengaluru, like Mysore and Mangalore, that could be developed and house more tech parks, but people have to be willing to move there. I think companies have to move first so that good infrastructure, like schools and jobs, can develop, incentivizing people to move. Why not create more Bengaluru's across the country?

It's going to take a long while for anything to change, so I still think Bengaluru will continue to be "India's Silicon Valley."

It would be like trying to move the capital city.

A whole ecosystem would need to be shifted, and that's not going to be easy.

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It's been decades since a titan of tech became a pop-culture icon. Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in his black turtleneck in 1998. Elon Musk set his sights on Mars in 2002. Mark Zuckerberg emerged from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

And now, after years of stasis in Silicon Valley, we have Sam Altman.

The cofounder and CEO of the chatbot pioneer OpenAI stands at the center of what's shaping up to be a trillion-dollar restructuring of the global economy. His image — boyishly earnest, chronically monotonic, carelessly coiffed — is a throwback to the low-charisma, high-intelligence nerd kings of Silicon Valley's glory days. And as with his mythic-hero predecessors, people are hanging on his every word. In September, when Altman went on a podcast called "How I Write" and mentioned his love of pens from Uniball and Muji, his genius life hack ignited the internet. "OpenAI's CEO only uses 2 types of pens to take notes," Fortune reported — with a video of the podcast.

It's easy to laugh at our desperation for crumbs of wisdom from Altman's table. But the notability of Altman's notetaking ability is a meaningful signifier. His ideas on productivity and entrepreneurship — not to mention everything from his take on science fiction to his choice of vitamins — have become salient not just to the worlds of tech and business, but to the broader culture. The new mayor-elect of San Francisco, for instance, put Altman on his transition team. And have you noticed that a lot of tech bros are starting to wear sweaters with the sleeves rolled up? A Jobsian singularity could be upon us.

But the attention to Altman's pen preferences raises a larger question: What does his mindset ultimately mean for the rest of us? How will the way he thinks shape the world we live in?

To answer that question, I've spent weeks taking a Talmudic dive into the Gospel According to Sam Altman. I've pored over hundreds of thousands of words he's uttered in blog posts, conference speeches, and classroom appearances. I've dipped into a decade's worth of interviews he's given — maybe 40 hours or so. I won't claim to have taken anything more than a core sample of the vast Altmanomicon. But immersing myself in his public pronouncements has given me a new appreciation for what makes Altman tick. The innovative god-kings of the past were rule-breaking disruptors or destroyers of genres. The new guy, by contrast, represents the apotheosis of what his predecessors wrought. Distill the past three decades of tech culture and business practice into a super-soldier serum, inject it into the nearest scrawny, pale arm, and you get Sam Altman — Captain Silicon Valley, defender of the faith.

Let's start with the vibes. Listening to Altman for hours on end, I came away thinking that he seems like a pretty nice guy. Unlike Jobs, who bestrode the stage at Apple events dropping one-more-things like a modern-day Prometheus, Altman doesn't spew ego everywhere. In interviews, he comes across as confident but laid back. He often starts his sentences with "so," his affect as flat as his native Midwest. He also has a Midwesterner's amiability, somehow seeming to agree with the premise of almost any question, no matter how idiotic. When Joe Rogan asked Altman whether he thinks AI would one day be able, via brain chips, to edit human personalities to be less macho, Altman not only let it ride, he turned the interview around and started asking Rogan questions about himself.

Another contrast with the tech gurus of yore: Altman says he doesn't care much about money. His surprise firing at OpenAI, he says, taught him to value his loving relationships — a "recompilation of values" that was "a blessing in disguise." In the spring, Altman told a Stanford entrepreneur class that his money-, power-, and status-seeking phases were all in the rearview. "At this point," Altman said, "I feel driven by wanting to do something useful and interesting."

Altman is even looking into universal basic income — giving money to everyone, straight out, no strings attached. That's partly because he thinks artificial intelligence will make paying jobs as rare as coelacanths. But it's also a product of unusual self-awareness. Altman, famously, was in the "first class" of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's ur-incubator of tech startups. Now that he's succeeded, he recalls that grant money as a kind of UBI — a gift that he says prevented him from ending up at Goldman Sachs. Rare is the colossus of industry who acknowledges that anyone other than himself tugged on those bootstraps.

Altman's seeming rejection of wealth is a key element of his mythos. On a recent appearance on the "All-In" podcast, the hosts questioned Altman's lack of equity in OpenAI, saying it made him seem less trustworthy — no skin in the game. Altman explained that the company was set up as a nonprofit, so equity wasn't a thing. He really wished he'd gotten some, he added, if only to stop the endless stream of questions about his lack of equity. Charming! (Under Altman's watch, OpenAI is shifting to a for-profit model.)

Altman didn't get where he is because he made a fortune in tech. Y Combinator, where he started out, was the launchpad for monsters like Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and dozens of other companies you've never heard of, because they never got big. Loopt, the company Altman founded at 20 years old, was in the second category. Yet despite that, the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham named him president of the incubator in 2014. It wasn't because of what Altman had achieved — Loopt burned through $30 million before it folded — but because he embodies two key Silicon Valley mindsets. First, he emphasizes the need for founders to express absolute certainty in themselves, no matter what anyone says. And second, he believes that scale and growth can solve every problem. To Altman, those two tenets aren't just the way to launch a successful startup — they're the twin turbines that power all societal progress. More than any of his predecessors, he openly preaches Silicon Valley's almost religious belief in certainty and scale. They are the key to his mindset — and maybe to our AI-enmeshed future.

In 2020, Altman wrote a blog post called "The Strength of Being Misunderstood." It was primarily a paean to the idea of believing you are right about everything. Altman suggested that people spend too much time worrying about what other people think about them, and should instead "trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status." Being misunderstood by most people, he went on, is actually a strength, not a weakness — "as long as you are right."

For Altman, being right is not the same thing as being good. When he talks about who the best founders are and what makes a successful business, he doesn't seem to think it matters what their products actually do or how they affect the world. Back in 2015, Altman told Kara Swisher that Y Combinator didn't really care about the specific pitches it funded — the founders just needed to have "raw intelligence." Their actual ideas? Not so important.

"The ideas are so malleable," Altman said. "Are these founders determined, are they passionate about this, do they seem committed to it, have they really thought about all the issues they're likely to face, are they good communicators?" Altman wasn't betting on their ideas — he was betting on their ability to sell their ideas, even if they were bad. That's one of the reasons, he says, that Y Combinator didn't have a coworking space — so there was no place for people to tell each other that their ideas sucked.

"There are founders who don't take no for an answer and founders who bend the world to their will," Altman told a startups class at Stanford, "and those are the ones who are in the fund." What really matters, he added, is that founders "have the courage of your convictions to keep doing this unpopular thing because you understand the way the world is going in a way that other people don't."

One example Altman cites is Airbnb, whose founders hit on their big idea when they maxed out their credit cards trying to start a different company and wanted to rent out a spare room for extra cash. He also derives his disdain for self-doubt from Elon Musk, who once gave him a tour of SpaceX. "The thing that sticks in memory," Altman wrote in 2019, "was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking 'huh, so that's the benchmark for what conviction looks like.'"

This, Altman says, is why founding a startup is something people should do when they're young — because it requires turning work-life balance into a pile of radioactive slag. "Have almost too much self-belief," he writes. "Almost to the point of delusion."

So if Altman believes that certainty in an idea is more important than the idea itself, how does he measure success? What determines whether a founder turns out to be "right," as he puts it? The answer, for Altman, is scale. You start a company, and that company winds up with lots of users and makes a lot of money. A good idea is one that scales, and scaling is what makes an idea good.

For Altman, this isn't just a business model. It's a philosophy. "You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value," he wrote in a 2019 blog post called "How to Be Successful." It doesn't matter what — real estate, natural resources, equity in a business. And the way to make things increase rapidly in value is "by making things people want at scale." In Altman's view, big growth isn't just a way to keep investors happy. It's the evidence that confirms one's unwavering belief in the idea.

Artificial intelligence itself, of course, is based on scale — on the ever-expanding data that AI feeds on. Altman said at a conference that OpenAI's models would double or triple in size every year, which he took to mean they'll eventually reach full sentience. To him, that just goes to show the potency of scale as a concept — it has the ability to imbue a machine with true intelligence. "It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it," Altman said on "All-In." "I don't believe this literally, but it's like a spiritual point — that intelligence is an emergent property of matter, and that's like a rule of physics or something."

Altman says he doesn't actually know how intelligent, or superintelligent, AI will get — or what it will think when it starts thinking. But he believes that scale will provide the answers. "We will hit limits, but we don't know where those will be," he said on Ezra Klein's podcast. "We'll also discover new things that are really powerful. We don't know what those will be either." You just trust that the exponential growth curves will take you somewhere you want to go.

In all the recordings and writings I've sampled, Altman speaks only rarely about things he likes outside startups and AI. In the canon I find few books, no movies, little visual art, not much food or drink. Asked what his favorite fictional utopias are, Altman mentions "Star Trek" and the Isaac Asimov short story "The Last Question," which is about an artificial intelligence ascending to godhood over eons and creating a new universe. Back in 2015, he said "The Martian," the tale of a marooned astronaut hacking his way back to Earth, was eighth on his stack of bedside books. Altman has also praised the Culture series by Iain Banks, about a far-future galaxy of abundance and space communism, where humans and AIs live together in harmony.

Fiction, to Altman, appears to hold no especially mysterious human element of creativity. He once acknowledged that the latest version of ChatGPT wasn't very good at storytelling, but he thought it was going to get much better. "You show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story and what makes a bad story, which I don't think is magic," he said. "I think we really understand that well now. We just haven't tried to do that."

It's also not clear to me whether Altman listens to music — at least not for pleasure. On the "Life in Seven Songs" podcast, most of the favorite songs Altman cited were from his high school and college days. But his top pick was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. "This became something I started listening to when I worked," he said. "It's a great level of excitement, but it's not distracting. You can listen to it very loudly and very quietly." Music can be great, but it shouldn't get in the way of productivity.

For Altman, even drug use isn't recreational. In 2016, a "New Yorker" profile described Altman as nervous to the point of hypochondria. He would telephone his mother — a physician — to ask whether a headache might be cancer. He once wrote that he "used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it," and he has said he used to be "a very anxious and unhappy person." He relied on caffeine to be productive, and used marijuana to sleep.

Now, though? He's "very calm." He doesn't sweat criticism anymore. If that sounds like the positive outcome of years of therapy, well — sort of. Last summer, Altman told Joe Rogan that an experience with "psychedelic therapy" had been one of the most important turning points in his life. "I struggled with all kinds of anxiety and other negative things," he said, "and to watch all of that go away — I came back a totally different person, and I was like, 'I have been lied to.'"

He went into more detail on the Songs podcast in September. "I think psychedelic experiences can be totally incredible, and the ones that have been totally life-changing for me have been the ones where you go travel to a guide, and it's psychedelic medicine," he said. As for his anxiety, "if you had told me a one-weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to change that, I would have said, 'absolutely not.'" Psychedelics were just another life hack to resolve emotional turmoil. (I reached out to Altman and offered to discuss my observations with him, in the hopes he'd correct any places where he felt I was misreading him. He declined.)

AI started attracting mainstream attention only in the past couple of years, but the field is much older than that — and Altman cofounded OpenAI nearly a decade ago. So he's been asked what "artificial general intelligence" is and when we're going to get it so often, and for so long, that his answers often include a whiff of frustration. These days, he says that AGI is when the machine is as smart as the median human — choose your own value for "smart" and "median" there — and "superintelligence" is when it's smarter than all of us meatbags squished together. But ask him what AI is for, and he's a lot less certain-seeming today than he used to be.

There's the ability to write code, sure. Altman also says AI will someday be a tutor as good as those available to rich people. It'll do consultations on medical issues, maybe help with "productivity" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which a person can learn something, versus having to look it up). And he said scientists had been emailing him to say that the latest versio of ChatGPT has increased the rate at which they can do "great science" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which they can run evaluations of possible new drugs).

And what would you or I do with a superintelligent buddy? "What if everybody in the world had a really competent company of 10,000 employees?" Altman once asked. "What would we be able to create for each other?" He was being rhetorical — but whatever the answer turns out to be, he's sure it will be worth the tremendous cost in energy and resources it will take to achieve it. As OpenAI-type services expand and proliferate, he says, "the marginal cost of intelligence and the marginal cost of energy are going to trend rapidly toward zero." He has recently speculated that intelligence will be more valuable than money, and that instead of universal basic income, we should give people universal basic compute — which is to say, free access to AI. In Altman's estimation, not knowing what AI will do doesn't mean we shouldn't go ahead and restructure all of society to serve its needs.

And besides, AI won't take long to give us the answer. Superintelligence, Altman has promised, is only "thousands of days" away — half a decade, at minimum. But, he says, the intelligent machine that emerges probably won't be an LLM chatbot. It will use an entirely different technical architecture that no one, not even OpenAI, has invented yet.

That, at its core, reflects an unreconstructed, dot-com-boom mindset. Altman doesn't know what the future will bring, but he's in a hurry to get there. No matter what you think about AI — productivity multiplier, economic engine, hallucinating plagiarism machine, Skynet — it's not hard to imagine what could happen, for good and ill, if you combine Altman's absolute certainty with monstrous, unregulated scale. It only took a couple of decades for Silicon Valley to go from bulky computer mainframes to the internet, smartphones, and same-day delivery — along with all the disinformation, political polarization, and generalized anxiety that came with them.

But that's the kind of ballistic arc of progress that Altman is selling. He is, at heart, an evangelist for the Silicon Valley way. He didn't build the tech behind ChatGPT; the most important thing he ever built and scaled is Y Combinator, an old-fashioned business network of human beings. His wealth comes from investments in other people's companies. He's a macher, not a maker.

In a sense, Altman has codified the beliefs and intentions of the tech big shots who preceded him. He's just more transparent about it than they were. Did Steve Jobs project utter certainty? Sure. But he didn't give interviews about the importance of projecting utter certainty; he just introduced killer laptops, blocked rivals from using his operating system, and built the app store. Jeff Bezos didn't found Amazon by telling the public he planned to scale his company to the point that it would pocket 40 cents of every dollar spent online; he just started mailing people books. But Altman is on the record. When he says he's absolutely sure ChatGPT will change the world, we know that he thinks CEOs have to say they're absolutely sure their product will change the world. His predecessors in Silicon Valley wrote the playbook for Big Tech. Altman is just reading it aloud. He's touting a future he hasn't built yet, along with the promise that he can will it into existence — whatever it'll wind up looking like — one podcast appearance at a time.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• Peter Thiel, tech billionaire and conservative kingmaker, has amassed influence all over Washington.
• He's close to powerful elected and un-elected political players, like JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy.
• Palantir, a company Thiel co-founded, counts the US government as its biggest client.

In August 2021, a mystery buyer purchased a 10,000-square-foot home in Washington, DC. They made the $13 million purchase through Salona Village Holdings LLC, shielding their identity.

That mystery buyer was billionaire Peter Thiel, whose sprawling influence in Washington has grown in recent years. Between mentoring Vice President-elect JD Vance since his time at Yale Law School to running companies with millions in government contracts, Thiel has entrenched himself in the DC world in ways both seen and subtle.

Worth $14.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, the 57-year-old PayPal confounder was one of the first Silicon Valley leaders to espouse conservative views.

Here's a guide to his influence in Washington, which stretches far beyond the walls of his mansion.

A representative for Thiel did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

JD Vance

Thiel played a critical role in orchestrating Vance's rise to the top of Republican politics. The two first met in 2011, when Vance attended a talk Thiel gave at Yale Law School. In a magazine article written nearly a decade later, Vance called Thiel "a good friend" and said his speech was "the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School."

After graduating from Yale, Vance became a principal at Thiel's VC firm, Mithril Capital. Their mentor-mentee relationship only grew stronger, with Thiel eventually investing heavily in Vance's own venture fund, Narya Capital, and writing a blurb for "Hillbilly Elegy." When Vance decided to pursue politics, Thiel remained by his side, pouring at least $15 million into his 2022 Senate campaign, according to OpenSecrets.

In 2021, Thiel introduced Trump and Vance at Mar-a-Lago, and remained invested in their relationship through the 2024 election. With repeated calls to President-Elect Donald Trump and persistent lobbying, Thiel played an important role in getting Vance on the ticket.

Elon Musk

Musk and Thiel merged their online banking companies in 2000, forming PayPal. Their relationship soured, though, when Thiel ousted Musk as CEO and eventually took over the role. Come 2008, relations had evidently thawed enough for Thiel to make a $20 million investment in SpaceX, one of Musk's companies. The investment was crucial to helping SpaceX recover from a failed rocket launch that same year.

After Trump won the 2024 election, Thiel credited Musk for making other Silicon Valley leaders feel comfortable supporting the president-elect. Musk is one of Trump's top advisors and soon-to-be co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Donald Trump

In 2016, Thiel donated more than $1 million to Trump's presidential campaign. He had a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention and served as a go-between with Silicon Valley. Thiel said he was disappointed by Trump's first term and didn't donate in 2020 or 2024. Still, he predicted that Trump would win this year.

With Vance anointed as MAGA heir apparent, Thiel and Trump have a chance to rekindle their ties.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg may not be a politician, but his influence in Washington runs deep. Between Facebook's role in free speech culture wars, the Federal Trade Commission's ongoing antitrust case against Meta, and Zuckerberg's rocky relationship with Trump, the tech leader is entrenched in the political conversation.

Thiel has a stake in Zuckerberg's involvement. He counts the Facebook founder among his mentees and was the site's first outside investor. Thiel sat on the board of Facebook and wielded great influence as its longest-serving member, but sparred with some of the company's more liberal employees, per the Washington Post. He ended up stepping down in 2022.

In 2019, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Trump all had dinner at the White House, illustrating the strengthening ties between the tech world and Washington.

Sam Altman

Sam Altman, billionaire co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is another one of Thiel's mentees. Thiel offered advice and support throughout Altman's early career, eventually becoming an early investor in OpenAI.

Like other prominent tech companies, OpenAI is under federal scrutiny. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating if the company's investors were misguided after board members suddenly ousted Altman as CEO in 2023, the Journal reported.

Beyond the investigation, Altman is becoming more involved in Washington. In the summer of 2023, he began a lobbying campaign in Congress about the future of AI regulation. OpenAI has spent money trying to sway Washington and hired staff with political know-how, per CNBC. As AI policy is poised to become an even bigger political question, Altman's influence — and Thiel's, by proxy — may continue to grow.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Biotech billionaire and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is set to co-lead DOGE.

Like Vance, Ramaswamy first met Thiel as a student at Yale Law School — he told PBS that it may have been at the very same speech that so impacted the vice president-elect. At the time, Ramaswamy attended an "intimate lunch seminar" Thiel hosted for a small group of students, per the New Yorker.

Eventually, Thiel threw his wealth behind Ramaswamy. In early 2022, Ramaswamy co-founded Strive Asset Management, an "anti-woke" investment fund, and Thiel was an early investor.

David Sacks

David Sacks, a former PayPal executive and prominent venture capitalist, will serve as the White House's AI and crypto czar during Trump's second term. Thiel and Sacks met at Stanford, where they co-wrote the controversial book, "The Diversity Myth." Both men have apologized for some of the book's content, which downplayed date rape. Sacks also served as editor-in-chief for the Stanford Review, a libertarian newspaper Thiel founded.

In 1999, Sacks joined Thiel's company Confinity, which later became PayPal. He eventually served as PayPal's chief operating officer and continued working closely with Thiel.

As the AI and crypto czar, Sacks will create the country's legal framework for crypto and head a presidential council of advisors on science and technology. The council will, according to the White House's website, be comprised of industry actors, academics, and people from non-profit organizations. Through Sacks, cryptocurrency supporters will likely have a direct line to Trump, Bloomberg reported.

Jim O'Neill

Trump has nominated Jim O'Neill, former CEO of the Thiel Foundation, as the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

A Silicon Valley investor, O'Neill worked at HHS under former President George W. Bush before moving to Thiel's network. During his time as the acting CEO of the Thiel Foundation, O'Neill co-founded the Thiel Fellowship, which gives a $10,000 grant to young people who skip out on or pause college to tackle big projects. In 2012, O'Neill worked with Thiel to launch Mithril Capital Management, the same VC fund where Vance worked. He served as the fund's managing director but left in 2019 — he sued Mithril later that year over claims of unfair business practices and a contract breach.

During Trump's first term, Thiel pushed to have O'Neill fill a prominent health role, per the Post. If confirmed this time around, O'Neill will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump tapped to lead HHS. O'Neill, who has criticized the FDA in the past, would play a big role in HHS' daily operations and policy decisions.

Palantir

Thiel's Washington connections extend to his businesses, especially the data mining company Palantir that he co-founded in 2003. Palantir makes software to manage, analyze, and secure data, and its biggest client is the US federal government.

Federal government contracts helped build Palantir, which started out by partnering with defense and intelligence agencies. The company focuses on counterterrorism efforts and immigration enforcement. Some investors anticipate defense and immigration enforcement will see increased spending under a second Trump administration, meaning Palantir may get a boost.

Blake Masters

An ideological ally of Thiel and Vance, Blake Masters lost his bid for a Senate seat in Arizona to Sen. Mark Kelly, but nonetheless benefited from Thiel's money and support. A decade before running for the Senate in 2022, Masters took Thiel's lecture when he was a student at Stanford Law School. Enthralled by Thiel and the course, Masters posted his notes from the influential class on a website.

The two co-authored a book, and Masters served as chief investment officer at Thiel's investment firm and president of the Thiel Foundation. When Masters pivoted to politics, Thiel donated $13.5 million to Masters' 2022 campaign.

Other elected officials

Though Thiel's most notable political contributions have gone to Vance, Masters, and Trump, he's donated to an array of other politicians and Republican causes. Among his beneficiaries are Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, according to OpenSecrets. He's also given to the Republican National Committee and other GOP-aligned groups.

Thiel isn't entirely partisan with his contributions, though. In 2014 and 2015, he gave at least $70,000 to Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California. Between 2011 and 2016, he also donated at least $7,800 to Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents parts of Silicon Valley, per OpenSecrets.

• A Stanford researcher says his algorithm pinpoints employees who are doing the bare minimum.
• Roughly 9.5% of coders are "ghost engineers" according to his research, which has not been peer-reviewed.
• The research underscores tech's newfound mania with rooting out low performers.

Quiet quitting. Lazy-girl jobs. Bare-minimium Mondays.

Over the past two years, employees have expressed repeatedly that they are fed up with being asked to do too much.

Tough luck. The latest catchphrase to describe working less is "ghost engineer" — and it comes not from burnt-out employees but from a Stanford researcher whose team has developed an algorithm to help tech companies identify freeloading coders.

Stanford researcher and former Olympic-level weightlifter Yegor Denisov-Blanch ran the algorithm, which grades the quality and quantity of employees' code repositories on GitHub, on the work of more than 50,000 employees across hundreds of companies.

Roughly 9.5%, he found, "do virtually nothing."

Measuring output is difficult

Denisov-Blanch calls these workers "ghost engineers," defined as software engineers who are only 10% as productive or less than their median colleague.

His research began as an attempt to find a better way to grade the performance of software engineers, he said in an interview with Business Insider.

"Software engineering is a black box," Denisov-Blanch said. "Nobody knows how to measure software engineers' performance. Existing measures are unreliable because they rate equal work differently."

"It's not fair when someone's doing a very complicated change that's only one line of code. And the person doing the very simple change that's 1,000 lines gets rewarded," he continued.

His algorithm attempts to resolve that tension, giving high ratings to engineers who write many lines of code only so long as that code is maintainable, solves complex problems, and is easy to implement.

Denisov-Blanch's research has not been peer-reviewed.

There are other caveats. Industry-wide, the 9.5% figure could be an overstatement because Denisov-Blanch's research team ran the algorithm only on companies that volunteered to participate in the study, introducing selection bias.

Conversely, while Denisov-Blanch's team didn't classify employees whose output is only 11% or 12% of the median engineer's as "ghost engineers," there's a strong argument that those employees aren't contributing much either, which could mean the 9.5% figure is an understatement.

The hunt for underperformers

Rooting out underperformers has lately become something of a mania among some in Silicon Valley.

In September, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham published an essay lauding a management style he called "founder mode," which he distinguished from the conventional wisdom of, in his words, "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs."

"In practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground," Graham wrote.

Heading the charge has been Elon Musk, who has spoken proudly about firing 80% of Twitter's employees after buying the company in 2022. Twitter, now X, didn't appear to experience significant outages or service interruptions following the staff reduction.

"Were there many mistakes along the way? Of course. But all's well that ends well," he told CNN. "This is not a caring-uncaring situation. It's like, if the whole ship sinks, nobody's got a job."

More remote workers were superstar coders

Musk now aims to apply that same ruthless efficiency to the federal government. As co-chair of a new Department of Government Efficiency, he pledged in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to slash federal staffing, including by ending remote work to spur resignations.

"If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home," Musk wrote.

Denisov-Blanche's research showed mixed results for remote work. On one hand, he found that the prevalence of "ghost engineers" among remote workers was more than double that among in-person workers.

But he also found that many more of the most effective engineers — employees whose performance was at least five times better than their median colleague — were working remotely than were in-person.

• A notable portion of Silicon Valley's electorate has steadily shifted toward Donald Trump.
• While the region remains solidly Democrat, the GOP candidate made gains in this election.
• In Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco counties, Trump's vote share increased by several points.

Silicon Valley, long considered a progressive stronghold, has begun to shift toward Donald Trump, according to new voting data analyzed by Business Insider.

Across the three San Francisco Bay Area counties that constitute the epicenter of America's tech industry, there was a marked bump in support for Donald Trump in the latest presidential election, and a corresponding decrease in support for Kamala Harris and the Democrats, provisional voter data shows.

California can take weeks to tally all its ballots, so the final totals won't be known for some time. But with well over 95% of the votes counted in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties as of this week, a trend has emerged.

Among the voting citizens of Santa Clara county, home of Apple, Google, and Nvidia, 28.1% cast their ballot for Donald Trump this year. That's up from four years ago, and notably higher than in 2016.

Meanwhile, 68.1% voted for Harris. That was down from 72.6% who backed Joe Biden four years ago, and 73.1% who voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016, according to data compiled by the California Secretary of State.

In San Mateo county, where Facebook parent company Meta is headquartered, the vote shifted from 77.9%-20.2% Republican-Democrat to 73.5%-23.2% this cycle.

And San Francisco county's vote for Trump went from 9.3% in 2016 to 15.5% this year.

These numbers show that Trump and Republicans are still a long way off from gaining any real majorities in Silicon Valley. However, even this relatively small shift suggests that the region, and the tech industry, is becoming less firmly Democrat — and comes as some tech leaders grow more pragmatic about politics.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously publicly supported Democratic candidates, but didn't this year. Venture capital power players Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz said they were supporting Trump this summer, though Horowitz also provided funding for the Harris campaign.

While Elon Musk is based in Texas these days, many of his companies, including Tesla, are still very active in Silicon Valley. He sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into helping reelect Trump this year, is undoubtedly the president-elect's most high-profile supporter in tech.

Incoming Vice President JD Vance once worked in venture capital and is seen as a protégé of PayPal cofounder and investor Peter Thiel, one of tech's most influential conservative voices.

Some of this comes down to self-interest. Trump, with Musk in support, has promised to cut regulations, which could help Silicon Valley startups grow more quickly.

"The most exciting thing of all will be putting Elon in charge of government efficiency," said Ben Narasin, a VC based in Atherton, in San Mateo county. "He's going to take a chainsaw through calcified butter, and it's going to be awesome to attack the bloat and overreach that we've had in the government."

The trend toward Trump in the Silicon Valley electorate mirrors statewide and national trends. Nationwide, the Democrats fell from 51.3% to 48.3%, while the GOP rose from 46.9% to 49.9%.

In California, Democrat voteshare dropped from 63.5% in 2020 to 58.6%, as of the data available on Tuesday.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on November 12. It was updated on November 26 after more ballots were counted. This new data did not materially change the story's findings.

• Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is leaving the firm at the end of the year.
• Krishnan has discussed joining Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency, reports say.
• Krishnan has supported Musk in the past and worked at various Big Tech companies.

Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is leaving the firm and has had discussions with Elon Musk about joining the Department of Government Efficiency, reports say.

Krishnan joined Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16z, in 2021 and has worked as a crypto investor at the firm. He's also previously held roles within Big Tech companies, including Twitter, Snap, and Meta.

Krishnan confirmed in an X post on Wednesday that he'd be leaving A16z at the end of the year.

"What's next? I'll have more on that in a bit but it's obvious we are living through a unique moment in history," Krishnan wrote. "I'm going to be jumping all into something I've wanted to spend my energy on. More on that in the coming months."

The Information, which first reported Krishnan's departure, said he'd had discussions with Musk about joining DOGE, President-elect Donald Trump's initiative to cut government waste.

Andreessen Horowitz didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside normal working hours.

Krishnan is the latest Silicon Valley leader to be linked with DOGE, which is set to be an advisory group outside the Trump administration and spearheaded by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Several notable tech figures — including the Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the A16z cofounder Marc Andreessen, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick — are involved in planning the department, The Washington Post reported.

Musk loyalists, including Steve Davis, the president of The Boring Company, and Antonio Gracias, a private-equity executive, are also said to be involved in planning out DOGE's early stages.

Krishnan and Musk have a history. The investor temporarily helped Musk in the early days of his Twitter takeover. He's also publicly supported the billionaire in the past, calling him an "inspirational person and an iconic founder."

Cutting 'insanely dumb' government spending

Under current law, Congress must approve most budget changes, limiting DOGE's power.

Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget to make it more efficient. He's floated several plans to cut waste, including creating a leaderboard displaying the "most insanely dumb" examples of government spending in an attempt to promote "maximum transparency" and allow the public to share feedback.

The name DOGE is a nod to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which was based on a Shiba Inu dog meme.

Trump's administration has signaled that it plans to be particularly attentive to emerging technologies. Reports say the transition team is considering appointing a czar for crypto and AI.

• Mike Manalac has worked in the tech hubs of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Chicago since 2016.
• He says each place has its strengths, but Chicago is the best place for raising a family.
• Chicago offers Manalac and his family the perfect balance career, affordability, and family life.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mike Manalac, a 39-year-old accounting manager at Google. It's been edited for length and clarity.

Over the past eight years, I've worked in the tech scenes of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Chicago. The three places couldn't be more different in terms of lifestyle, and they've each appealed to me for different reasons.

Here's how the three places compare:

San Francisco is fun but not for the faint of heart

I moved to San Francisco in 2016 to pursue world-class career opportunities and adventure. I'd spent the past eight years as an audit manager in Baltimore and the cross-country move was a big change for me.

As someone with ambitious career goals, San Francisco was the mecca of opportunity, so I joined PwC to get closer to Bay Area tech jobs. Some of the world's most innovative companies were basically next door, and their corporate headquarters lined the city's blocks like Lego bricks.

I once interviewed at Salesforce's headquarters while on my lunch break since it was only a few blocks away from PwC. When doing phone screens for Uber, Twitter, and Dolby, I knew I'd be able to walk over to their offices for an on-site interview at a moment's notice.

As a young professional with limited life responsibilities, San Francisco turned out to be the perfect place to live fast and loose. The social scene was amazing — a night out for drinks could mean stopping by a speakeasy with no sign, sipping a mai tai on a floating tiki bar, or drinks served from a bathtub at a bar the size of a walk-in closet.

San Francisco also has the best park scene in the country; I've yet to find a better party than a regular Saturday afternoon at Dolores Park.

It's also a walkable city. For the first time in my adult life, I was car-free. The city was full of trendy coffee shops, unique bars and restaurants, and charming neighborhoods to explore.

But living in San Francisco also isn't for the faint of heart. Outside of coworkers, my then-fiancée (and now wife) and I found it incredibly challenging to make friends; everyone seemed to assign others a level of importance based on where they lived and worked. I also would've needed an absurd amount of wealth to purchase a home and raise a family there.

I felt that the city's biggest blemish, though, was the seedy Tenderloin district, which sits smack dab in the middle of downtown. I had to walk through the neighborhood to catch a corporate shuttle bus to work, and I saw my fair share of sketchy characters and shady dealings at the time.

Silicon Valley's career opportunities were unmatched

Later that year, I started working in Silicon Valley after I joined Walmart's eCommerce division in San Bruno. And the following year, I landed a job as an accounting manager at Google's Sunnyvale campus.

Silicon Valley offers the coolest places to work and its career opportunities are unmatched. I was amazed by the sprawling corporate campuses. Walking through Facebook's invite-only campus, which is like a walled garden city, and down its main street, Hacker Way, I was in awe. In nearby Mountain View, I couldn't believe how nearly every building in the city was branded with Google's logo.

I saw corporate buses and colorful bikes whizzing around and young professionals with corporate badges on their hips and branded backpacks on their backs.

While Silicon Valley may be the tech capital of the world, I'd never live there. For one thing, I couldn't afford it; the cookie-cutter neighborhoods of Silicon Valley are reserved for millionaires and the hillside mansions for billionaires. I, on the other hand, commuted from San Francisco via corporate shuttle bus.

But I wouldn't have wanted to live there anyway. The social scene was dead, the city wasn't walkable, and the nightlife was nonexistent. Nobody I knew went to happy hour after work, restaurants closed early, and most people only lived there because of the proximity to work.

Chicago has a down-to-earth social scene and affordable, family-friendly neighborhoods

I moved to Chicago with my wife in 2019, transferring to Google's Chicago office. The cost of living in Chicago was much cheaper, my commute would be shorter, and we'd be closer to her family in Michigan and mine in Maryland.

Chicago doesn't have the buzzy tech scene or beautiful weather of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but it's no slouch when it comes to career opportunities. More Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Chicago than in almost every other city in the US, and the job opportunities are much more diverse than what you'll find in the tech-centric San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

From Google's office in Chicago's West Loop, I can see McDonald's global headquarters down the street and a number of other premier employers dotting the city skyline.

Chicago is a city that likes to party, making San Francisco look sleepy by comparison. Bars don't close until 2 a.m., with some staying open until 4 a.m. Chicago's Lake Michigan beach scene is much livelier than that of San Francisco. But the social scene also has a down-to-earth vibe; people are Midwest nice and seem to live at a more casual pace.

The best part about Chicago is the moderate cost of living. I was able to afford a three-unit home with rental potential in Chicago for $830,000 — a price I'd never find in San Francisco — that's in a walkable neighborhood. It's the perfect blend of family-friendly city life. Our three-year-old son loves taking the train home from daycare and running wild at one of the city's many playgrounds.

I think Chicago is the best of the three places to start a family

After working in these three awesome places, I've realized that even the best cities have their flaws.

San Francisco has the coolest social scene and overall vibe, but it's one of the worst cities for settling down because of its high costs.

Silicon Valley offers the best career opportunities, but its social scene is lacking since everything there is about work, work, work.

Chicago is the best of the three locations to start a family due to its affordability and comfortable pace of life, but it's not quite as cool as San Francisco and can't match the career opportunities offered in Silicon Valley.

Overall, though, it's hard to beat Chicago's mix of career opportunities, vibrant social scene, and opportunities to start a family.

If you've moved around for work and would like to share your experiences of different cities, email Jane Zhang at [email protected].

• Adam Fletcher left San Francisco for Philadelphia in 2022.
• The product engineer was initially nervous about abandoning the tech hub for an East Coast locale.
• But Fletcher found a renewable energy job in the city and loves Philly's culture and cost of living.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Adam Fletcher, a 28-year-old product engineer who moved from San Francisco, California, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in November 2022. According to NerdWallet, the cost of living in Philly is about 40% less than in San Francisco.

The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

I was born and raised in Philadelphia and loved it. But when it came time for college, I was accepted into Stanford.

I've always been really interested in green technology, renewable energy, and solar stuff. I studied material science engineering as an undergrad, and then I stayed for a fifth year and got my master's degree in electrical engineering.

After graduating, I spent almost three years living in the Bay Area, working at Applied Materials, a semiconductor company. I lived in San Francisco, right on the edge of Mission and Portero Hill, and commuted to work in Santa Clara.

Silicon Valley was a hub of innovation

In the 2010s and early 2020s, California was the place to be if you wanted to do tech, engineering, or renewable energy.

At Applied Materials, I was learning how to be an engineer in the real world. But I wasn't working on energy efficiency or renewable energy, which was my dream.

I found that I was clashing with the culture of Silicon Valley. There are a ton of amazing people there, but generally speaking, I felt like people could be "fake nice." I attributed that attitude to the Silicon Valley atmosphere. I don't want to call it cutthroat, but it was tough at times to join a community of really driven people who would sometimes drive themselves over the edge.

I'm more of a "go-at-your-own-pace" kind of person. I don't think 16-hour days are a path to success.

In Silicon Valley, you have a lot of Google people, a lot of Meta people, and, at the time I was there, a lot of Tesla people. And that's the core of who they are. I grew tired of the way people would define themselves by their jobs rather than who they are as a person.

Leaving California was always in the back of my mind

After graduating, I was worried I would have to choose between staying in California and having a career I liked or leaving California and having a career I didn't like. The career opportunities in Silicon Valley seemed more abundant.

But ending up with a career that wasn't what I wanted while I was in California helped push me to take the next step.

In 2022, I started applying to East Coast jobs, specifically looking for roles in renewable energy.

I got an offer from my current workplace, Carbon Reform, in September 2022. They're a Philadelphia-based startup working on sustainability. It was right up my alley.

I moved back and started at the end of November 2022.

I definitely had some nerves before moving. I was questioning whether this was right for my career. The sustainability hub is in Silicon Valley, and moving to the other side of the country felt like I was separating myself from that.

But I was also so excited. It felt surreal that I had found something I wanted to do, and I got the bonus of being on the East Coast.

At Carbon Reform, we're working on devices that connect to HVAC systems in existing office buildings. They remove the carbon dioxide from the workspace air and allow you to recycle the air without having to bring in new air from outside.

I love my work now. I'm feeling a lot more fulfilled.

Philadelphia is much more affordable

It was so expensive to live in California. I had to live with two roommates to afford the cost of living, and that was for a spot on the edge of San Francisco.

Now, I have my own space in Philly. I pay about the same as I was paying in California, where I was splitting with three people.

I moved to a Philly neighborhood called Rittenhouse. It's a combination of older people and a bunch of young professionals and grad students who live there. There's always something to do around here. It's close to a huge park where they have shows and dining. It's a great way to meet new people and not break the bank.

We also have an incredible sports scene here. Between the Eagles and the Phillies, sometimes Philadelphia feels like a big college town.

Philly's tech and business scene is growing.

We have the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University right in the city. There are incredible students coming out of those schools.

I think the city has started taking advantage of all those really intelligent people. It seems like Philadelphia is putting in the work to try to keep them.

That said, Philly still seems like a little secret sometimes. I don't want to tell everybody about it because once the secret is out, people will move here, and costs will go up.

It's in a really unique pocket location-wise. You have the financial capital of New York nearby and the political capital of DC close, too. You get the benefits of both without the negative effects.

I miss parts of California sometimes. I miss my friends and the access to incredible types of food.

But my hope is to stay in Philly for the long term. As long as I have a job and am getting paid what I think I should be making, my goal is to be here.