Why I moved 1722km to work at Sqreen
“What if we all moved to France?”
My wife raised one eyebrow. It was pretty out of the blue, especially for a family with 2 kids.
“You mean, take a vacation?” She tried the charitable interpretation.
Her response, after I assured her I really did mean to discuss what it would take for us to consider moving to a different country, was a firm “no way.” The rest of the breakfast was very quiet, as I contemplated what I’d done — I had applied for a job at a French company and been invited to the first interview round. At the time I lived in Latvia, had never lived abroad, and did not understand French either.
I remember thinking, “It’s probably not worth raising this topic again. I mean, what are the odds…”
A few months and 1722km later, I am sitting in an empty apartment in Levallois, using an empty travel suitcase as a makeshift desk. Turns out — given the right circumstances — life can change course pretty quickly.
I have been happily working at Sqreen for 2 months now.
How it all began
That first call I wanted to tell my wife about went pretty well. It didn’t start out great, though — we had some technical communications issues — and I remember regretting agreeing to it. “This is just going to be a waste of time for both of us,” I thought. But by the time the call was over, I told my wife, “these guys seem great. It would be a great place to work at, it’s a shame they’re based in France.”
She was supportive, though, once she realized the move was a real possibility. She wanted to know why though — why I had applied to a company abroad in the first place; why Sqreen specifically; why not look for companies locally?
These are good questions, and I will try to outline some of the main points I considered, as I was working on the decision.
The quick and short of it is, moving can be an exciting, valuable experience, Sqreen offers the opportunity to do meaningful work, and grow personally.
The risks of moving abroad for work
Personally, the idea of moving to a different country was super exciting to me; and while not a prerequisite to making a decision, I think it is always better to feel excited than not feel excited about something. Excitement is subjective, of course, but I think — for me — the idea of working in a different country was exciting because it makes the job change less risky.
It is always a bit risky applying to a new company. No matter how many rounds of interviews you do, or how much you like the people you talk to, you never know what working there will *really* be like.
So if it doesn’t work out, the absolute worst case scenario is — you have wasted a few months of your life, and have not learned anything from it.
Now, at a glance, having the worst case scenario play out in another country might seem *even worse*. It now becomes — you have wasted a few months of your life, you have not learned anything, and on top of that you have spent a lot of unnecessary time, effort and money on moving, and are now stranded in a foreign country.
Except — you will have learned something, guaranteed. The experience of moving to another country is valuable in and of itself. If the new job doesn’t work out, the experience will leave you more knowledgeable about other cultures and customs, and about the logistics of such a long-distance move. You can immerse yourself in another culture, start learning a language, visit museums you otherwise might not have found time for, etc.
And if you have kids — this is an invaluable experience for them. The younger they are, the easier it is for them to adapt, and expand their horizons. They will come out smarter, more experienced, and with better foundations upon which to build the rest of their life.
In other words, if you value knowledge more than money, then moving to another country limits the downside. It adds a guaranteed win to the worst case scenario.
Don’t move for just any company
The second reason was specific to Sqreen — it was the right kind of company for me.
Everybody has a type of company they want to work for in mind. For me it’s a promising startup, with a product that I believe in, that is still at an early stage.
This is — I think — for people working in startups, a cliché. However, the tricky part is not to come up with requirements, but to find a company that satisfies them. Let’s deconstruct how Sqreen fits this.
Sqreen has gone through Y Combinator, which to me indicates that the company was promising even before YC, and surely is even more so after having done YC. In other words, the founders had managed to convince some very smart people — to the point of them parting with money, time, and effort — that Sqreen is promising. That is a good proxy, I think.
As for the product, it really caught my attention for two reasons. Throughout my career, I have been working on products that are security-adjacent. Infrastructures for smartcard provisioning, secure document signing with digital signatures, PKI infrastructures with APIs, cryptographic audit logs etc. There is a pattern here. At one point I founded my own company, which helped enterprises add multi-factor authentication to internal systems, including legacy systems not designed for it.
So Sqreen’s philosophy — of democratizing security — made a lot of sense for me. I believe in the mission, have the background to appreciate the mission, and I believe the team can deliver on the promise. This means work on Sqreen will be meaningful for me.
I was especially convinced about the work being meaningful after visiting Sqreen for the first time. I was given a product demo, and as soon as I saw the — then recently launched — Playbooks feature, I could immediately link it to actual, valuable, real-life use cases.
The playbook that they demonstrated was a simple one — if a user fails 5 authentication attempts within 5 minutes, block the problematic IP for a certain amount of time. Simple, right? Why was I so excited about this?
I was excited because I had worked on that exact feature before, in a government project.
A few years ago, I worked at a contractor for the government on a system for digitally signing documents. The system was audited at one point, and the auditors that a very similar improvement should be implemented.
For this particular project, it was not a simple task at all. There was a 6 person kickoff meeting, then 3 persons collaborated on the exact work order requirements for 1 to 2 weeks. Then at least 4 people worked on implementing, testing, documenting, and delivering the feature over 2 to 3 weeks. Then the feature was delivered as a bunch of .zip files — which the client insisted on, because it was a native format to Windows, even though the server ran Gentoo. After the delivery, there were multiple people on the client’s side testing, and deploying, and — if something was unclear — calling for new meetings.
All in all, a feature like this could easily take 2–3 months to get into production.
This is why I loved the Sqreen demo — because I had seen the ugly side of bringing that exact same feature to production. What took 1 Sqreen user 5 minutes, took these two companies multiple man-months in collaboration.
I was immediately convinced of the potential.
Seek out opportunities for personal growth
And finally, Sqreen is a great place to work, if you want to raise the bar personally.
It is all good and fine to learn about the intricacies of moving to France, while enjoying the startup environment, but not every environment is conducive to personal growth.
But at the right kind of place — if you’re lucky — you get to be the dumbest person in the room. If you’re the smartest, you’re in the wrong room for learning.
Sqreen offers the potential for me to become better at so many things. One area I specifically was looking to get better at — engineering at scale. I had never worked at a company before where you had to design and engineer for scale. And what better way to learn, than to have that a product requirement. Not every company can provide this type of opportunity.
Second — having been a founder before — I was very interested to see world-class company-building in action, from the inside. This ties back into my requirement that a startup is still somewhat early-stage, as well as the proxy indicators for quality and potential, such as having been accepted into YC.
So, to summarize, Sqreen convinced me they will be successful at a mission that is meaningful to me, that I will be able to contribute, and learn. They are based in one of the greatest cities in the world, and on top of everything, I get to go on an exciting adventure with the people most important to me — my family.
What’s not to love?
If a move to Paris sounds tempting, let us know!
