The offer that I received on April 20, 2012 left me with some tough decisions to make. Good compensation, the opportunity to get involved at the ground floor with a Y-Combinator startup, and the idea of moving right into the thick of things as it relates to the tech sector. But, at my current position at BCLC, I’ve really taken a true leadership role of late with lots of opportunities to continue down that path. It seems like all of my hard work over the past five years is about to pay off. It truly was a great situation to be in. I had two great choices, without the ability to make a bad one. All that said, this would be, arguably, the hardest decision that I have had to make.
Of course, the best timing for a trip to Las Vegas is when you have a life altering decision on the table. As a result, the following morning, I joined some good friends for a 3 night bachelor party in the sin city. Of course, the details of that trip are to not for blogging but I can say that we had a great time. I can also say that my travel mates (Mike Kuromi, Corey Kuromi, and Todd Drake) provided me with a great sounding board. Next to the Excalibur pool, we spent many hours and about one million beers, chatting about what moving to the Bay Area could look like and what the pros and cons could be.
Ultimately what this trip did was reduce the real amount of time that Andrina and I had to work through this decision together. When the dust settled from my trip to Vegas and a last minute work trip to Vancouver, I was left with just 48 hours to make a decision and more questions than answers.
One of the key challenges that we identified is Andrina’s ability to find work in the US. Clearly, as a Chartered Accountant working at the executive level for many years, she is infinitely employable but the states are pretty different when it comes to common law marriage and Andrina and I have absolutely no rights as a couple in the great state of California. So, the way it seems to have shaken out is that Andrina will need to find a position in the Bay Area on her own while living up here in Canada. Well, either that or we could married. Seriously. We had some difficult getting a handle on Andrina’s ability to come down with me so we felt we needed a couple extra days to figure out how we could manage her inability to work in the states. And oh, yea, I forgot to mention the issue around Andrina’s soon to be sixteen year old daughter. Yea, there was a couple big deals here that we needed to get a handle on before any yeses or nos could be given.
As only a computer geek and a chartered accountant can, we spent the entire weekend developing attributes of moving or staying, assigning importance factors, and scoring those attributes. It was all an attempt to attempt to quantitatively determine what the right thing to do is. But unfortunately we came to the decision that this was not a situation that could be assessed completely based on logic alone and emotion plays a huge factor that isn’t easily captured in an Excel spreadsheet. Go figure.
Kelsey, Andrina’s daughter couldn’t have made the decision much easier. As a sixteen year old, our relationship has been not without its difficult times. Those times have been plentiful lately. But this young lady has blown me away with her enthusiasm for this idea. In fact, as it turns out, Kelsey’s enthusiasm and maturity about the situation may have been the swing vote.
With Kels’ definitive desire to make this happen, we reevaluated our RFP style matrix and the decision was made for us. A last minute trip to my Dad’s house for confirmation that we aren’t crazy and I was on Skype with one of the founders of my employer saying that I would see him in a few weeks. The decision has been made. Now I just need to tell everyone that we are moving 1800km to another country. After the week that we had just had, this will be easy.
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