I went looking for a photograph of the first time I landed in California, and found out I couldn't get into the account that had it.
I joined Flickr in 2007. You logged in with a username then. At some point they moved to a new system, and I had already drifted off the platform by the time that happened, so the credentials I remember don't correspond to anything the login form recognizes. The photos are presumably still there. I'm just not, anymore.
There's something instructive in that, and it isn't nostalgia. For a certain generation, Flickr did the job that Facebook photos did for everyone else: it was where your evidence lived. We handed our proof of existence to a company, and the company kept operating, and we still lost it, not through malice but through a login migration.
Waves
I grew up in the rural Netherlands, which is a fine place to be from and a difficult place to be seventeen. My father took my brother and me to the VHS rental shop every week and we'd come home with a stack of films to get through by Sunday. That was the education. I was raised on American pop culture in a town where nothing much happened, and I built an entire California out of it: the beaches, the suburbs, the light.
Before that there was the machine. My father brought home a Commodore 286, and DOS, and a box of floppies. Prince of Persia. Lemmings. I want to be careful not to make this sound like a founding myth, because at the time it was just a beige box in a room in a small town. But I learned that a machine would do what you told it if you were precise enough, and that turned out to be a useful thing to learn.
So when I finally got on a plane in 2007, I was not flying somewhere new. I was flying somewhere I had already constructed and was about to have corrected.
I remember the flight properly. No usable wifi (you couldn't even fetch mail reliably), so it was hours of enforced disconnection, which is now the part that sounds most exotic. My playlist was Sigur Ros, Kanye, Phoenix, Joan as Police Woman, Deftones. The Deftones detail matters to me because they're from Sacramento, a hundred miles from the city I'd eventually live in, and at the time that felt like a coincidence and later felt like a coordinate.
The Sierras go from white to that dry yellow as you come down over the East Bay.
Silicon Valley has always moved in waves. Waves of politics, waves of technology, waves of people arriving and leaving. I understood eventually that I was one of them. I just intended to stay a while.
What the wave does to you
Here is what I did not understand at the time, and what I'd tell you if you're currently mid-wave.
The environment is extraordinarily good at convincing you that its pace is the natural one. Everything is urgent, everything is a launch, and all of it compounds. You measure a year in quarters and a quarter in releases. And because that rhythm really is productive, it takes a long time to notice that you've adopted a clock that isn't yours and can't be sustained indefinitely.
I built things I'm proud of inside that clock. A marketplace for home care where the design problem was a workforce using smartphones for everything except their profession. A rideshare company reinventing itself around bikes and scooters and transit. A writing assistant moving from an extension to a native app while roughly seventy new people arrived in under two years.
Every one of those was a real problem and I'd take them all again. But if you'd asked me during any of them what I was building toward, I'd have given you a roadmap, not an answer.
What the clock costs
The cost is smaller and stranger than burnout, I think, which has a clear story and a set of responses people know how to offer: a slow contraction of what you let yourself find interesting.
Everything outside the roadmap gets optimized away, because the roadmap is what's being measured and the optimization is working. Reading that doesn't feed a decision, a side project with no thesis, the kind of undirected wandering that produced most of what I'm any good at in the first place. None of it survives contact with a quarterly cadence, and none of its absence shows up in a metric.
You notice years later, usually because someone asks a question that isn't about work and you find you don't have much of an answer.
Coming back
So: back in the Netherlands, running a studio and a small fund, writing software again with my own hands after years of mostly writing org charts.
The temptation is to frame that as a return. I don't think it is. The kid in the rural Netherlands who wanted California got California, and it was largely what he'd hoped, and then it stopped being the thing. Neither the leaving nor the coming back was a correction of the other.
What I take from the Flickr account is smaller and more useful than a lesson about impermanence. It's that the record of a life is not the life, and if you build entirely inside systems other people operate, you should expect the record to go. I have since lost twenty years of another archive to exactly this, deleted deliberately, which I don't regret, and which is why some of what I'd write from it now has to be written from memory instead.
Memory is a worse archive. It's also the only one where I control the login.
What the story leaves out
Reading this back, I notice how much the telling flatters the teller. A boy builds a California out of rented videotapes and then goes and gets it, which is a satisfying shape and mostly a trick of editing.
What the shape omits is that I arrived with an EU passport, an offer, a salary in dollars and an employer handling the paperwork. Almost everyone I met in those years who came from somewhere else was doing a harder version: a visa tied to one company, a lawyer's timeline, a decision about whether to leave a job that had become intolerable because leaving meant leaving the country. I watched people take worse roles and stay in them for reasons that had nothing to do with the work, and at the time I filed it as bad luck rather than as the system doing what it does.
The wave metaphor has the same problem. It suggests everybody in the water is subject to the same physics. In practice the wave sorted people, and the sorting was legible if you looked. I was not sorted, which is why it took me so long to notice the sorting.
So take the arc with that discount applied. I do think the thing about adopted clocks is true, and I think it is true for most people who spend a decade somewhere like that. But the version where you get to leave when the clock stops suiting you, and the leaving is a choice rather than a deportation, is a narrower story than the one it sounds like.
First in a series. I've been an operator since 2005 or so: three companies of my own, four as an executive, on both sides of the Atlantic. The rest of these will be less about arriving and more about the work: the 1:1, the performance review, managing through events nobody trained you for, and what happens to a craft function when the company stops growing.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos