#leaveusa

Yesterday my dear sister left this world. After suffering in secret for several months there wasn’t much we could do. It’s not a good idea to get sick in Silicon Valley today, once the digital jewel of our old center of the world. Gone are the times when the glowing stars of the internet filled the valley’s coffee houses with hipsters hacking some new ideas. If you were lucky to work in one of the rising stars you had everything including health insurance. Today most people are happy if they can pay the ticket for the bus.

In 2017 the so called “exodus of the smart” started as Drumpf took office and nobody could continue to pretend that the old west is a good place for innovation. It just didn’t add up anymore. The backward laws, the crazy fears, the lack of basic services and freedoms every other developed country provided. Drumpf was merely the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

But she couldn’t leave. My older sister was always a little nostalgic and much more into horseback riding than me. We both grew up on a farm close to Mountain View and somehow both ended up writing code changing today's world. I still get the question how a farm girl ended up writing software, but stepping into this big white room and filling it with our own crazy ideas always made sense to me.

We were already looking for places in Canada some months before the election. She was very angry about me thinking about leaving. I told her she’s so smart she will easily find a new amazing job in a nice startup and that we can move her horses there. Her team was working on a break through neuronal network engine and she just managed to get her therapeutic horseback riding side business to run. So it wasn’t her time to leave.

I clearly remember the morning after Drumpf was announced. There was a frustrating whisper and several of our intellectual stars filed for relocation to Europe or even quit their jobs in the valley.

At 11:00 we all got a message to get into a global company hangout. Larry and Sundar where on the screen smiling and welcoming everyone as we were used to. They gave a breathtaking speech about how our mission is important, more important than any political development and much bigger than any country borders. Then they told us that they insist on keeping everyone and will offer amazing relocation plans for all the bright minds that want to leave the states. Somehow they managed to get several locations with a strategy to extend them for all employees. And then the line of the century hit: “By now the official headquarter and country of A-Z is moved outside the US…”. It went around the globe like a wildfire. The company that created the most amazing search engine, a revolution in mobile operating systems and ground breaking technology in every important field was not a Silicon Valley company anymore.

This step was like a shock wave to the tech world and the impossible happened. Most smart minds and with them nearly every important technology company left to resettle all around the world. Silicon Valley became the Detroit of Drumpf and was the starting point of a gray wave spreading all over the country. It wasn’t a apocalypse, it was a slow decay that spread further. A decay that a lot of regions where already used to before.

I’m very sad that this decay also hit my sister and that somehow I didn’t see it coming. After they closed the borders and nobody could leave anymore it was very hard to get any support to her. I begged her several times to join us but she just didn’t want to leave the farm. But at last she could stay at the place she loved most...