Immigrating North: Melissa Nightingale
Co-Founder & Partner, Raw Signal Group · Canadian from Maryland, U.S.
Karel: I was first inspired to reach out to Melissa for this interview with Immigrating North after seeing her story ‘Immigration, Hives, and Life Under NAFTA’ in The Co-Pour, a publication run by Melissa Nightingale and her husband, Johnathan Nightingale.
Karel: Tell me about your early years and where you come from.
Melissa: I grew up in the states. I was born and raised just outside of Baltimore, MD. My family is fifth generation American. My great-great- (great-?) grandparents came over from Europe and passed through Ellis Island in New York. The running joke in our family is that they got off the boat and just stayed there. My whole family is from New York. My parents moved south for jobs and after a brief stint in DC, they moved to Baltimore and have been there ever since.
My childhood was a bunch of going back and forth up and down I-95 to visit our NY family. Because we didn’t have relatives in town, my parents’ friends were my unofficial aunts and uncles. Their kids were my unofficial cousins. We’re still close.
K: Why did you or your family decide to move to Canada?
M: In 2007, I took a job working for Mozilla, based out of their California office. I’d traveled a bunch but I’d never been to Canada. We had a small Toronto office and a number of the folks who were making Firefox were based there. I was running Global PR at the time and came up here to meet with them. I loved the city right away. I remember walking through Queen West and I think now about how much that neighbourhood has changed in the past decade.
In late 2012, I knew I would have to move to Toronto. My boyfriend (now husband) was living in Toronto and we had been going back and forth on planes every few weeks. He’d be in California every 4 weeks and I’d fly up to Canada and stay for a chunk of time. The Air Canada fees were insane. And it was very challenging to live the life we wanted while in different countries and on different coasts.
In March 2013, Matt Golden offered me an opportunity to work with Golden Venture Partners. I joke that Matt is part fairy godmother and part guardian angel. He really is what ultimately brought me and my husband together. Even though we’d been dating for awhile, it wasn’t until I had a work permit that allowed me to move to Canada that I was able to pick up my life and move.
K: Do you still have family at home? If so, how do you and your family feel about the separation?
M: My entire family is still in the US. In some ways, I’m much closer to them because we are in the same time zone. But I’m very aware that there’s a border between us. The US and Canada are in the process of redefining how their borders work — both with each other and with other countries in the world. We watch the news on this very closely. In some ways my immigration is very boring. But prior to getting my permanent residency, I was on an obscure NAFTA carve-out for management consultants. It meant I spent a lot of time in secondary. I think anytime you’re an immigrant and your paperwork is even a little bit interesting at the border, you worry.
“I love the US. It’s where I’m from and it’s where my family is. But Canada is my home.”
K: How do you define your Canadian identity?
M: It’s interesting. I love living in Canada. It is my home and my husband and my children are Canadian. But I don’t identify as Canadian. And in part because Canadians make a point of reminding me how American I am all the time. But I think it’s also because I lived in a transitional status for so long — settler but not resident — that some part of my brain hasn’t accepted that it’s real and permanent.
I cried when I got my PR card. And I immediately asked them about the clock for citizenship.
I love the US. It’s where I’m from and it’s where my family is. But Canada is my home.
K: How would you define Canada in one word?
M: Cold (ha!). I’m kidding (sort of).
K: When and how did you get into technology?
M: I started working in tech in 1998. I was always interested in computers and I fell in love with the world wide web. I loved the idea that people around the world had a way to all connect. I remember trying out one of the very first VoIP clients and in those days, it wasn’t like today where you call your friends or family on Skype or Google Hangout. In the early days, there were only a handful of people connected so you just randomly dialled. I remember calling someone in Africa and just being amazed that someone else picked up. And of course, this sound ridiculous now — like a precursor to chat roulette — but in those days it was astounding the idea that you could talk to someone you didn’t know, half a world away.
The internet has always been magic for me. I think that’s still true, even after nearly 20 years in tech.
K: How does being an immigrant affect who you are now and what you do?
M: I try not to take anything for granted. My life is only possible because of immigration. My kids, my husband, my life only works because Canada decided to let me stay. There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not struck by the magnitude of that. We are immeasurably lucky.
“My life is only possible because of immigration. My kids, my husband, my life only works because Canada decided to let me stay.”
K: What steps do you think Canada can take to become more inclusive to new and old immigrants?
M: I found the transition from the US really challenging. I know people always say the culture shock between the US and Canada is very light because they share so much in common. But when I got here, I was very disoriented and *very* homesick. It took a while for me to find my footing.
Friends in the US were actually the most helpful. They connected me to the Canadian-American tech diaspora in Toronto. I met a bunch of people who were Americans married to Canadians. And little by little, I started to make friends locally. I found most of the Canadians I knew already had established friend groups. They already knew people from university or even before. They weren’t in a big rush to make new friends. Finding other expats was wonderful because they immediately empathized.
Now I try to pay it forward. When people move here or move back here, I make time for coffee. I host welcome dinners. I remember how much that mattered when I first landed. It’s something people who picked up and moved their entire life understand in ways that people who stay in the place where they grew up never will. And I think if more people understood that deep sense of loneliness, they would want to provide better support.
“And I think if more people understood that deep sense of loneliness, they would want to provide better support.”
K: Time for a curve ball. Is there somewhere in Canada you really want to visit? Why?
M: I’d really like to go to Nunavut. I sat next to Tanya Tagaq on a flight where my littlest kid screamed basically the whole flight. She talked about how the amazing thing for women who have baby girls is that you get to make two generations. You make your daughter but you also make the eggs that will make her children. This floored me. I had never thought about it that way before.
I really want to see the Northern Lights. That’s on my bucket list.
And I am trying to make it to every province and territory. I’ve done 7 so far.
K: Finally, what does the future hold for you?
M: Once I was in Toronto and committed to making my permanent life here, I started to take a longer view on things. If the local tech industry was young, how could I help bring my expertise and experience to bear in a meaningful way? How could I help scale up local leaders and start to undo some of the damage the Valley brain drain had done to the local ecosystem? How could I be a welcoming presence for new and returning Canadians? How could I help people get settled? How could I train up the next set of startup and scale up leaders?
I started thinking about all of these areas where I could have profound and positive impact. And I started thinking about how to do it at scale.
About 6 months ago, my husband and I started a blog to share more of what we learned in tech the hard way, in hopes that it would be helpful for folks. The Co-Pour is now one of top 10 Medium publications on Leadership. Our posts are regularly syndicated via BetaKit and are posted across Canadian startup and tech groups. It’s been really cool to see it grow from an effort to write down what we know into something much bigger.
Immigrating North is a publication dedicated to showcasing the untold stories of immigrants and their families that moved to Canada to build a better future with technology.
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