Vivian and I met in Sao Paulo back in 2010 when I came back after 4 years working in London. I was relocated by Bank of America as Brazil was then booming (as per The Economist front cover at least) and the bank was launching its commercial platform. The project was huge in nature and local competition was fierce. I was responsible for the legal aspect of the project, while Vivian ran the operations’ side of it.

My return to Brazil was painful. Re-adapting to my home country’s working culture which is significantly different from the UK, was tough. On a personal note, I faced a common issue for ambitious professionals in their mid-30’s – a divorce.

I worked there until 2014 and a few years before that, around 2012 I started flirting with start-ups, VCs and all that jazz. I ended up having a side-gig consulting for a solar energy company in Brazil, to secure its seed investment and series A. That experience convinced me to leave Brazil once more. This time I picked Silicon Valley in California as the destination.

So 2015 came and my goal was simple and very, very easy to achieve: I wanted to move countries, industries, and careers, all at once. Easy, right? I failed in two but ended up staying in California, where I took a job at eBay managing their Legal matters for LATAM. Oh, and I also updated my marital status. I stayed at eBay for almost 6 years, where I made a lot of friends and built a fantastic network.

Working in Silicon Valley allowed me to shift my relationship with work forever. The number of opportunities there is unmeasurable and you really need to focus on devoting your time to what makes sense to you and what you want in your life. Obvious for an American, but hard to realize for someone who always had to build their opportunities from scratch. 

While in California, I joined a lot of meetings and events with other like minded professionals. One of the opportunities I embraced was being an investor. Lawyers are risk averse by training, so I decided to counter that by investing in a cannabis beverage company. That investor angle experience was amazing. The best part was sending pictures to my mom in Brazil with me dressed up on fancy dinners and lots of weed buds in front of me with messages saying that her catholic method of raising a child had failed, but at least the pairing with wine was classy, right? Just to feel that old sense of judgment fading as I got more and more free from that and deeper into the American perspective of doing business.

That “new” American perspective is what Vivian and I also have in common now. Plus having an American passport and not being tied to your visa sponsoring employer makes life much, much easier! We exchange notes on that from time to time and we are both extremely happy with the choice we made to move here.

By Cristiano Alves, who now runs Green, an immigration business focused on assisting Brazilian professionals to obtain their Green Cards without a sponsor.