A new chapter
The past year has been an adventure! After my trip home to Michigan during the summer of 2016, I knew I wanted to make plans to relocate back there. I took several fun trips after that (see more in Weekend Getaways), and then my startup was acquired by Oracle in January.
After 4.5 years of autonomy on small, lean teams, I was suddenly part of a 140,000-person, 40-year-old global company. I had job stability at a large corporation for the first time since I graduated from college, which I did during peak recession times with an art degree from a state university in the Midwest, but my work and life experience has taught me that I’m happier at smaller companies where I feel like I can learn, grow, and make an impact.
Grand Rapids
I just moved to a new city for the first time in five years. The past half decade in California has been incredible, and I think the five year mark is where it really starts to feel like home, a place where you can see yourself putting down roots. I loved my life there — Palo Alto is a pretty idyllic place to live — but I decided that being near my family was more important.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer and she told me via FaceTime on Mother’s Day this year. That diagnosis and the way she had to tell me about it put things into perspective.
I bought a one-way ticket to Michigan in June and decided to spend the summer taking her to treatments in Lansing and being with her at our cottage in Leland while she recovered from an intense regimen of chemo, shots, and blood tests. While I was working remotely, helping my tiny startup merge into the massive corporation that acquired us, I realized that I ultimately wanted to be part of a company in Michigan and do meaningful work in the community here.
When husband was offered a job on the digital shopping team at Meijer, we quit our Bay Area jobs (he worked at Apple for 3.5 years), and Meijer moved us home. We just signed a lease on a place downtown, and although half of the complex is still under construction, it’s so nice to be in a brand new apartment with amenities and without roommates (although the people we lived with in Palo Alto were fantastic) for the first time in our adult lives.
I’m consulting for another Palo Alto startup during this transition time, and I’m super excited about that partnership moving forward. I’m happily reunited with my former teammate from a previous startup.
