Born in Boston

A snapshot from Harvard Business School’s campus from deep in my camera roll.

I grew up in Michigan, but I was born in Boston. Every place I’ve lived has shaped me, but Boston and Cambridge are a part of me.

I joined my family one spring when my dad was just months away from finishing up his Ph.D. in economics. I was born at Brigham & Women’s in Boston. That summer, we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where my dad started his academic career as a professor of economics at the University of Michigan.

While my first stint in Cambridge was much too early and brief for me to have any memories of it, I remember feeling connected to it throughout my childhood. My parents would read me Make Way for Ducklings—set in Boston—and remind me that I was born there.

Much later, I dreamed of moving back to Boston for college. For I think the first time since birth, I visited Boston again as a teenager thinking about schools. I remember riding the T on that trip, looking at the skyline speeding past through the smudged window while listening to Modest Mouse on big headphones. Interestingly, Harvard was not the conscious dream; Boston University was the focal point of my fantasies. Harvard was one I applied to with the Common Application while in denial that I was applying in the first place—maybe because the stakes felt too high. Going back over my college application files recently, I found pros-and-cons lists for a few of the nine schools I applied to. The Boston University “pros” list had a lot about Boston itself, starting with the first thing on the list: “I am in love with BOSTON: amazing music scene; great, quirky wardrobe; always more to explore; saturated with history; bookstores everywhere; access whole east coast; old, beautiful town.” Other pros included “Boston = intellectual community extreme,” “tons of coffeeshops,” and “setting would motivate,” and “sense of possibility.” For me, Boston was it—the place where history and culture came together.

The next time I found myself in Cambridge, I was there for good. Well, for the next four years, anyway: I’d surprised myself by getting into Harvard. I know it was a surprise because I was an obsessive researcher at the time (still am), yet had spent almost no time on Harvard’s website during the application process. Once I got my admissions letter, I remember falling down the rabbit hole of all the subpages on the site: dining services! I can see what MEALS are going to be served! Academic department websites! What classes will I take? My daydreaming ratcheted up a notch. The dreams weren’t probabilistic anymore; they were practically plans.

Up until I moved into the dorms in Harvard Yard, some part of me really thought I would spend all my time in Cambridge at indie rock shows and thrift stores. I’d been fantasizing about independent, DIY city life for so long that it felt like fate. I’d made some early friends in the incoming class by clicking through shared Likes on Facebook—bands we both admired, mostly—and messaging them. On campus at last, I thudded back to reality: there wasn’t time to do everything at once, and I did care about my classes; they would take up most of my time. In the end, I think I went to fewer than five shows total across four years of college! But I tried to make the most of immersing myself in coursework and campus life. I decided to study history in part to spend as much time as possible in the libraries at Harvard; did you know there are over seventy? Cambridge taught me to find the romance in everyday life.

Something I’ve always appreciated about my time at Harvard is that I could arrive at a new theory of what I wanted in life and be testing it at the highest levels just weeks later. I arrived on campus thinking I would study neuroscience; after meeting with a top professor in the field and realizing I wasn’t excited about lab work, I quickly changed course. Later, I realized that maybe a Ph.D. in history was not the path for me, and I might need a Plan B. Soon after, I had an on-campus job as a computer user assistant and was embedded at The Berkman Center (now The Berkman Klein Center) for Internet & Society on the Harvard Law School campus. Cambridge helped me dream bigger and see plot twists as opportunities.

After college, I moved to San Francisco to start my career in tech. But the whole time I was there, I had Boston on my mind: I was on early admission to Harvard Business School as part of the first cohort of 2+2, and knew I’d have the chance to move back two years later. There was plenty I loved about San Francisco—many of the same factors that brought me back after my time in Germany and keep me there now. But part of what I loved was the buoyant atmosphere, the chance to take brief breaks from being hard on myself. At heart, though, being hard on myself is my home base. It’s a home base I challenge and see the risks and downsides of, but it’s still deeply me. In Cambridge, it felt normal to hold myself to high standards—just as when I spent time in New York later, I got a break from judging myself for worrying all the time. (In New York, it feels like everyone worries all the time.) Effort was normal and respected on campus, but crucially: not the effort of success at any cost, but the effort to reach insight. Cambridge helped me treasure the search for truth.

My two years at Harvard Business School felt like a homecoming. Although the HBS campus is across the Charles River from Harvard Yard—officially in Allston, a neighborhood of Boston—just being close to my birthplace and college self helped to keep me grounded. There were plenty of challenges to my time at HBS. I was in a long-distance relationship (now my marriage) and the ninety-person courses in the first year stressed and grew my empathy; it’s hard to take in ninety hearts & minds at once in real time, and I often came away from classes exhausted from trying. But it was stress I’d chosen, and that helped me grow. Boston helped me choose growth on a base of belonging.

It’s been a long time since I visited Boston. I miss it. It’s on my mind this week because I had a quick trip planned to visit my East Coast partners at Matrix that I had to cancel last-minute. My long interview process with Matrix unfolded entirely in the first year of the pandemic; my first many conversations with the team were all over Zoom, and I’d been on the job for over six months before ever meeting Antonio and Stan in person. The Boston connection helped them find me in the first place; they came across my profile while scouring LinkedIn for product people with ties to Boston and then reached out. Indirectly, my time in Boston brought me to a partnership I love being a part of.

When I talk to startup founders every day in my role as an early-stage investor at Matrix, I say that two things are true about me: I like to learn, and I like to help. My parents are both lifelong learners, and my dad is an academic. I always loved school and I was sad when it was over, especially because for much of my life I’d imagined that I would transition straight into being a professor and therefore get to stay at school forever. But the lessons I learned in Boston and Cambridge have helped me to get creative about building my career in venture in a way that’s consistent with my values: finding the romance in everyday life, seeing plot twists (including the plot twist that brought me to Matrix!) as opportunities, making the most of wherever I am, choosing growth on a base of belonging, treasuring the search for truth. I may not live in Boston these days, but I live every day according to what I learned there. I can’t wait to go back.