There's never a perfect time...

Why 2 Apple engineers walked away from their 6-figure jobs and moved to Paris

Welcome to That Dude Denis, a newsletter about a dude who left the Bay Area and moved to Paris. The idea is twofold: 1) to share my experiences in the most open and transparent way possible as I try to become an entrepreneur for the first time, and 2) to tell you about some important steps in my life that have led me to embarking on this journey. My objective is simply to share my perspectives and experiences with you in the hopes that something may help you in some way, that’s all.

If you’re in Big Tech, startup-land, or just interested in entrepreneurship, this stuff’s for you.

If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, help motivate me by subscribing here (or not, I guess I’ll never know 🤔 ) :

First up : the reasoning behind our move from Cupertino to Paris, almost 2 years ago. Although it doesn’t seem to relate to me becoming an entrepreneur, it is in fact a critical piece of the puzzle. I’ll be filling in more puzzle pieces in the next issues to come!

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You’re probably thinking to yourself, why the hell is he starting the story here?!

So let me explain quickly so that we can move on to the good stuff.

Some of my Bay Area friends have been asking me recently for my thoughts on leaving Big Tech and trying new things, like moving abroad or switching career paths. I’m definitely no expert, but I guess quitting Apple and moving to Paris counts for something. 🤷‍♂️

Call it a quarter-life crisis or blame Covid for giving people the chance to re-evaluate their life priorities…whatever the reason, my friends are in the midst of trying to figure out what they really want to do, and they’re not the only ones. Enter me, naïvely thinking that sharing my escape-the-tech-bubble story might help somebody somewhere. 😅

So here goes nothing: a small glimpse into why my wife and I sold all our stuff and left our stable, highly-respected, well-earning engineering jobs in Silicon Valley to move to Paris with our cat.

Full disclosure, I’m biased. Why? Well, because I’m literally writing this from my apartment in Paris. I already chose my path, and it’s just human nature to try to rationalize our decisions after the fact. So yeah, just keep a grain of salt nearby or something, just in case. I promise I’ll try to be as honest as I can.

Also, I don’t actually talk about Paris much here or why we chose Paris out of all places…maybe a story for a different time, but if you’re looking for a “oh j’adore Paris!” type of story…time for some ⌘-W action.

The Well-Defined Path

Stanford undergrad degree. Stanford master’s degree. Apple engineer. That was me circa 2016. My wife, KT, too.

And oh guess what? All of our friends were some variation of this formula too: all you have to do is swap out Stanford and Apple with some other top tier university and some other big tech company, and out pops John, Mary, and Thomas.

Don’t get me wrong - we love our Bay Area friends and each one of them is unique in their own way, but let’s be honest, we were all pretty much cut from the same cloth, with similar pasts, presents, and most importantly, similar futures. We all came from a socioeconomic background that presented us with opportunities not available to less fortunate kids. We all studied hard to get into the best universities. We all worked hard in college to get the best jobs. We all got jobs at the top companies in the valley. It was the ladder to financial stability, to a comfortable life, to “success,” whatever that means. And so we all climbed it. Rung after rung after rung.

So back to me and KT: Stanford + Stanford + Apple. At Apple, I was basically a mechanical engineer working on iPhones. KT was like a black-ops special agent in an ultra-secret group doing who knows what, then switched groups to work on watch bands.

iPhone was, and almost certainly still is, a very heads-down, heads-buried-in-work, type of environment. It was tough at times, but I knew what I was getting myself into because I had done a year long internship already (a half-rung?). But was I really passionate about building iPhones and designing tiny little parts like screws or buttons? No, but I was learning a ton, getting paid good money, and my resumé benefited from it. Oh yeah, and it made my family damn proud to say that I worked at Apple. 🏆

The problem was that pretty soon, I started lifting my head up and looking around at what the people farther up the ladder from me were up to, the people 2, 3, 5 years from where I was. They didn’t seem that much better off to be honest. Hmm, not a great sign. In the bigger scheme of things, they were pretty much doing what I was doing, but with higher pay, more responsibility, more stress, and more recognition. It was the obvious next step, but all I had to do was take a look around at my more experienced colleagues and managers, and I could sense the cynicism creeping in, the tiny voice in my head telling me that maybe this ladder wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be after all.

That next rung was looming, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to grab it. It was early 2016.

2 years of…procrastination 😅

And so, we moved to France. No, no. Not so fast. Definitely not right away, not by any stretch of the imagination. Despite having sowed the seeds of the France project in early 2016 at a Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, we didn’t actually set foot in Paris until almost 3 years later. Why? Because we are humans, and humans suffer from procrastination and an aversion to risk.

Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that describes why a person tends to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. The pain from losing $20 is actually more powerful than the pleasure of finding $20. Weird, huh? A product of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, of The Undoing Project and Thinking Fast and Slow fame.

The TLDR of loss aversion: people really hate losing stuff. And guess what? We had a lot to lose - we already had the jobs, the good pay, the comfortable life, a great group of friends, and not only that, we knew with a high degree of certainty what awaited us the next day, the next week, the next year, if we just stayed and didn’t change anything. The inertia was real. We were faced not only with the loss of what we had, but with the loss of what we would likely have in the future.

And not only that. The other side of the deal didn’t really help our case either - it’s not like a winning lottery ticket was waiting for us in Paris. Sure, like us at the time, most of you still see Paris through rose-colored glasses (think croissants, cafés, and scenic strolls along the Seine), but that’s exactly the point - in one hand you have fairly certain and objectively good things (security, money, comfort), and in the other you have this mysterious bundle of “life experiences”. Could be a box of chocolates, but could also be a box of shit. Most likely a mix of the two.

And then there’s that procrastination thing, the thing that you’re probably doing right this second, as you read this dude’s newsletter instead of doing that actually important thing that needs to get done ASAP. Eh, whatever, you’ll do it later. Plenty of time, right? That’s what we kept telling ourselves too. (Plus, you’re like halfway done here already, might as well read to the end to mentally feel like you accomplished something 😏)

So there you have it: a high-risk trade-off plus a healthy dose of procrastination equals 2 years of talking about moving to France while putting almost no effort into making it happen. But you already know how the story ends up, so what changed? What tipped the scales?

The opportunity cost of doing nothing

I’ll give it a cool name to try to sound smart: “the opportunity cost of doing nothing”. All I’ve told you about so far are the positive aspects of staying in the Bay Area: the financial security, the comfortable life, etc. But that’s not the whole story though, is it? It fails to take into consideration the other sides of the dice, all the other possibilities that are thrown away in order to pursue this specific path.

Opportunity cost definition: “in simple terms, opportunity cost is the loss of the benefit that could have been enjoyed had a given choice not been made.” (thanks Wikipedia, for the weirdly worded, not that simple, definition!)

When I talk about “doing nothing”, I don’t mean actually doing nothing in the way that someone who is way too high does nothing. I mean not doing anything to alter the path that you’re currently on. By doing nothing, you are implicitly deciding that you prefer your current path over all other possible paths.

It sounds obvious, but most of us don’t see it like that. Why? Because we can’t actually point to any clear, defining moments that have kept us on our existing path. It just kind of happens without us really paying attention to it. We live one day to the next, and before we know it, we’re celebrating our 5 year work anniversaries at jobs we said we would never stay longer than 2 years at.

OK yeah, so maybe you had job offers from Apple, Google, and Amazon, or maybe you got accepted to Stanford, Harvard and MIT (you’re too smart for your own good) - those don’t count as clear, defining moments. The way we’re looking at things here, those paths are all the same.

For us, the opportunity cost of doing nothing was a potential life in France. It could have been lots of other stuff, but for us, in that moment, that was our dream. For 2 years, this potential life in France stayed simply a vague concept, an idea lacking form that lurked in the back of our minds. We had planted the seed, but without light or water or attention, how could it have grown into anything more? We knew deep down that we needed to at least give our dream a fighting chance, or risk living with the regret of letting it slip away.

We were 26 at the beginning of 2018. Around us, friends were buying homes, settling down. We had gotten married the previous fall. Colleagues were having babies. We could feel the pressure of societal norms closing in on us. We knew we wanted to have kids eventually, and living abroad was definitely something we wanted to experience as a couple before kids entered the picture. The window to do “crazy stuff” like moving and living in Paris felt like it was closing, and fast. We were still a fairly young couple, but not for long.

We had no idea what a life in Paris would look like or what challenges or surprises awaited us, but we knew that each day we spent working at Infinite Loop was most definitely one day that we were not spending in France. The opportunity cost of doing nothing had become too large to ignore. And so we took action.

[I left out the boring job hunt stuff. You’re welcome.]

Self-induced Peer Pressure

Diving off the deep end is always hard. There is no escaping the fear of the unknown or the uncertainty of what awaits you, no matter how prepared you think you are.

As it turns out, diving off the deep end is a lot easier when someone pushes you, or in our case, when you tell everyone you know that you’ll be diving off the deep end (moving to France) soon. 😅 It becomes the first thing people ever ask you, and it forces you to make progress, if only to save yourself from the pang of guilt you feel every time someone brings it up and you don’t have anything new to update them on.

And so 2018 Denis was literally a chatbot programmed to tell everyone he met (minus managers and loose-lipped colleagues) that he was moving to France next year. Very premature, since we didn’t sign our job contracts until late fall, but hey, look where it got us! It’s a more powerful tool than you think, that peer pressure thing, and it was that extra bit of fuel under our asses that we really needed to take the plunge and dedicate ourselves to making it happen.

A side note: this self-induced peer pressure strategy worked well for the France project, but not so well the time I tried it before, in 2017. That was the time when I told everyone that I was leaving Apple at the end of the year, interviewed for and even signed an offer elsewhere, then…in a weird turn of events, decided to stay at Apple and just join a different group. It really sucked to turn down that offer, and I felt like I disappointed a lot of my friends with my decision.

Making sacrifices

One thing I want to be super transparent about with you is the sacrifices that we had to make in order to move to France (the opportunity cost of going to France, I guess). I already talked about losing stuff in more general terms earlier, but while we’re talking about taking the plunge, I figured it’d be the perfect time to give you a clearer picture about the sacrifices that entailed. Just in case any of you are also considering moving abroad and need a reality check to get your head out of the clouds.

The biggest sacrifices we made :

• 🔻 50% : 2 people’s 6 figure salaries

• 🔻 100% : 2 people’s stock benefits (RSUs, ESPP) + 401K contribution match

• 🔻 100% : Friends and family in close proximity

• 🔻 40% : Apartment size

• 🔻 80% : Our stuff (we sold most of it and had to re-buy stuff here)

• 🔻 95% : Being able to communicate with people (we knew basically zero French)

Yep, some of those can seem pretty damn scary. A lot of people who aren’t as fortunate as us wouldn’t even be able to consider such an opportunity to begin with - I want to take a sec to express how thankful we are that we were in a position financially that allowed us to consider this adventure and be OK with the decision that we ultimately made. We know that a lot of you out there aren’t so fortunate.

As analytical thinkers (remember, we’re engineers), you try your best to compare the ✚’s and ➖’s, to calculate the odds of this or that happening, to keep emotion at arms length…but at the end of the day, you just have too many intangibles on the page to form any sort of logical argument. At the end of the day, you’re left with a bunch of things that you can’t attribute a monetary value to: feelings of hope and a desire to experience a new life, to open new doors, and to create new opportunities. Off the cliff you jump, towards the deep blue water.

There’s never a PERFECT time.

Honestly, the subtitle says it all. We tried to time our transition the best we could, but there’s a limit to what you can do when you plan things months ahead of time. Luckily we had a bit of flexibility with our start dates in France, which allowed us to at least check a few important things off of our list, but the timing definitely wasn’t perfect. Here are a few of the bigger things on the list:

• ✅ We were able to spend a few months enjoying the new Apple campus

• ✅ We vested a batch of stock at the end of January, 2 days before our last day

• ✅ I finished up some projects and prototypes that I was working on

• ❌ Started working on a new startup idea with a friend…had to back out of that

• ❌ KT’s project got delayed by 6 months…so she wasn’t able to see it to the end

That last one was a real bummer. If you’ve ever worked on a product before, you know how rewarding it is to finally bring it into the real world and see people use it and interact with it for the first time. Unfortunately, the timing just didn’t work out for KT this time around. 😢

Little known fact: we actually did consider postponing our move to later that year to try to turn those ❌’s into ✅’s, but after going through this entire process and with Paris finally right within our grasp, we decided it wasn’t worth the risk. In hindsight, it was the right decision - KT’s project got pushed back even further and Possible Future, our future employer, put on a hiring freeze later in the year, but of course, we had no idea at the time.

The perfect time doesn’t exist, especially for couples like us who are making a leap together. You just take your best shot and live with how it all turns out.

We’re almost at our 2 year mark now. Are there things we wish we had done differently? Sure, we’re not robots after all. But we don’t have any regrets, despite all the tough times that we’ve had here in France so far. We’ve opened the doors to a new adventure - yes, one that required a lot of sacrifice, but one that’s already provided us with invaluable life experiences and a fresh outlook on life.

So was it worth it, you ask? Can’t say for certain until I’m old and wise, but I’d say it’s looking pretty OK so far 🤙

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Thanks to Michael, Isabel, and KT for editing, and my cat Taro for sometimes sleeping near me while I wrote this.

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What’s coming up next?

I’ll be back in a couple weeks to connect the dots between our move to Paris and the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. For now, I’m thinking that I’ll touch on a few key things that have influenced me greatly over the past couple of years, and that have pushed me towards entrepreneurship, in a meandering kind of way.

If there’s something you want to learn more about, please leave a comment or write me! I’ll give you a quick response or maybe even dedicate an issue to it if I think it’ll be helpful to other readers.

Amazed that you’re still reading, but I appreciate it greatly! 🙏 If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe below if you haven’t already.

That Dude Denis

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Wow! You’ve just finished the first issue of That Dude Denis, a newsletter about a dude who left the Bay Area and moved to Paris. I’ll be sharing my experiences in the most open and transparent way possible as I try to become an entrepreneur for the first time, and also tell you about some important steps in my life that have led me to embarking on this journey. If you haven’t already, please help motivate me to write interesting stuff by subscribing here: