“How’d you end up in San Francisco?”

“I was a nurse in New York, I dropped out, taught myself how to code and became a software engineer.”

“That seems pretty hard, what was that like? Did you take online classes or something?”

“No, no online classes. I just bought what I wanted to build and I would just google instructions to teach me how to do whatever. It all came from being very interested in those things. Around the time I was in college, there were all these stories of young people dropping out and learning how to code and building something. It’s one of the few industries where you can just think of something and build it. Just do whatever you want. It’s a tangible skill that results in something tangible. I just coded away, hundreds of hours. I did whatever I could to stay up. I used to weight 200 lbs more. You know Tim Horton’s?”

“Nope.”

“It’s like Dunkin Donuts. When you order you say "Double Double” which means 2 sugars and 2 creams. I was ordering triple triples.“

"Whoa.”

“Yeah, super unhealthy.”

“How long have you lived out here?”

“I just had my 3 year anniversary.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I’m shocked I made it. When I came out here I didn’t know anybody, I had $200 in my bank account and I was risking everything to try and become an engineer. Luckily AirBnb was around and this woman let me stay at her place for really cheap and the $200 carried me to my next paycheck. I locked down a job as a software engineer, but I was in shit tons of debt because I was paying rent on 2 places, one here and one for my place in New York because I couldn’t cancel the lease. It was really shitty, I didn’t even have money for food so I would just starve.”

“So how’d you get an engineering job with no experience?”

“Oh sorry, while I was teaching myself how to code in my third year of college, I took my student loans, student loans were really easy to get back then, and I saw this company Apple, and I thought, ‘They look like they’re going to do really well’, and I took all my student loans and bought Apple stock when it was really low. Now I have no money right? Then I realize I have to get a job…and this is when I was young and stupid and think these ideas are brilliant, so I have to get a job and I found this company in Buffalo, NY and they were willing to pay me to code. They weren’t paying me very much, but it was Buffalo, so it was more than I would ever need. During that year Apple’s stock skyrocketed. That year of training in Buffalo I got enough confidence to start really consider moving to San Francisco. I mean, this is Silicon Valley, this is where all the stories come from. So with that experience I was able to get a job offer from a company in San Francisco.”

“So do you still have the stock?”

“I sold it…two years ago. I sold it at about 10 times what I paid for it.”

“How much did you make?”

“I did well. It was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Why? Because the stock’s still going up?”

“No, it’s down now from when I sold it. It was dumb because it was so risky. At the end of it I only came out with about 60% of my investment because of taxes and paying back the student loan. And then I used a lot of it to help my family.”

“So you sold it 2 years ago?”

“Yeah, right after Steve Jobs died. I knew it wasn’t going to end well with Apple because he was so important. He always said ‘No.’”

“No in what sense?”

“If people wanted Apple to expand in certain directions, he would just say no, and make sure that they were very good at specific things.”

“So you moved to San Francisco with a dream and $200, a year later you were sitting pretty.”

“Yeah, it was crazy, my girlfriend was against me, she told me I was never gonna make it out here. My parents were against me. They didn’t believe I was in San Francisco, they thought I had a drug problem and was homeless somewhere in New York and didn’t want to admit it. A year later, a video comes out about me working at AirBnb. Oh, I didn’t tell you, I got an interview with AirBnb and they loved my story so they hired me. So I was in this video, my parents see it, and they finally believe I don’t have a drug habit. I think it’s a thing with Asian parents, if you don’t have a degree in something, they don’t understand how you could get a job doing something.”

“Wow, great story man. Thank you.”