The purpose of this post is to provide an update on what’s been going on and share some details of life in Silicon Valley.

I’ve been based in Mountain View now since January 2018 (coming up to over 5 months) and I’ve had exposure to various functions at Pure Storage, the transition has been better than expected and my family seem to have settled well in the region, kids are enjoying school and my wife has met some new friends and is volunteering to better understanding what it’s like teaching in California.

Mountain View Life

I’m about a 20 minute walk from work and the kids school is on the way so I’m able to avoid the challenges of driving to work in Silicon Valley for the most part.  Places are a lot further apart so you do need a car but because I can walk to work I decided to only lease 1 car to reduce costs. Lyft seems to be a great supplement to this if required and it’s much cheaper than Uber so has become my rideshare of choice here.

Being based in Mountain View has it’s benefits, Castro Street is a great hub for Food/Drink and there are lots of community events including street parades, live music etc. The major downside is the cost of rent (you wouldn’t believe it!) and the size of the 3 bedroom matchbox, but the family have adjusted well and there are parklands really close which makeup for this.

VMUG

I wanted to maintain my User Community involvement and so I decided to join the Silicon Valley VMUG @SVvmug as a steering committee member and help the team organise events/content/engagement for VMUG in the region and with the help of @ravi_venk, @porterdeleon and @shyam001 we held our first VMUG last week, of which @PureStorage ended up sponsoring along with @Cohesity.

I got the chance to talk about VVOLs and although the demo gods were not favourable to me due to technical difficulties the session went well, there was a good turnout for a quarterly meeting and there was some great conversations at the end of the event.

TechVillage

I also had the chance to talk more about my transition a few month back on the TechVillage podcast with @porterdeleon, @malhoit & @Mierdin and while I think at that point I’d attained relocation ‘peak of inflated expectation’ on the Gartner hype curve I shared some of my first impressions of coming to America and finding my way in California: –

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/tech-village-podcast/tech-village/e/53533965

Pure Storage

It probably comes as no surprise when I share that the core reason for me coming to the US was around work, the great thing about what Pure Storage have done is bring all these really smart people into one place to develop a storage platform.  My point about this is that the majority of the development team are based out of HQ, which means everyone is accessible and the ability to collaborate closely with engineering on a daily basis is really something quite special.  I have to acknowledge Pure’s founder Coz with this as he’s build a development team that work closely together and has nurtured a family feeling into the DNA of what Pure is about at an engineering level, which in my mind re-enforces the culture of this company.

Product Management

I hope this provides insight into why I decided to relocate to the US, the culmination of this move is to share that I’ve finally joined the Products and Solutions team I originally set out to be a part of right at the beginning of this journey several years back.  I’m now a Senior Product Manager covering (amongst other things) FlashStack our converged solution offering in partnership with Cisco.

A final shoutout/Thanks! to the following people who have been a great source of advice on getting over here @bendiq, @tomfyoung and also @nickmarshall9 for this: dlvr.it/QSLh1T