Hi everyone, and welcome back to SCALE UP – Global Talent Strategies Deep Dive. This is Season 2!
If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that the pilot episode went live last week across all platforms. Its title says it all:
Before we move into the upcoming releases, I wanted to take today to share the making of this pilot episode — why we chose to start with Silicon Valley, how we built the story, and what it tells us about the flow of future episodes.
Season One was more essay-like — eight episodes across Asia-Pacific, full of data points, salary benchmarks, and historical and cultural context. It was structured and evidence-driven. But for Season Two, we wanted to try something different. This time, it’s more narrative, almost documentary. The backbone is still data and research, but the heart is human stories — anonymized but very real — that bring the numbers to life.
That’s why we opened with Sarah Chen. On paper, Sarah is living the dream: a Stanford computer science graduate, $180,000 salary at a leading AI company, equity in one of the world’s hottest sectors. But in reality? She’s sleeping in her Tesla in a Whole Foods parking lot, because rent in Palo Alto swallows 70% of her income. At 3 a.m., she wakes up in the backseat, exhausted, before heading to build machine-learning models that might transform entire industries — while her own life feels unsustainable.
Sarah’s story was the perfect way to illustrate Silicon Valley’s paradox. It remains the magnet for global talent — the place people still dream about. Yet at the same time, it’s driving people out: over 230,000 in just a few years, despite sky-high salaries. The median home price is $3.2 million. Burnout is rampant. Immigration bottlenecks are intensifying. The Valley is both opportunity and inhumanity rolled into one.
What struck me most while shaping the episode is how much this mirrors a broader historical cycle. We traced the arc from the Traitorous Eight in the 1950s, through the venture capital model that promised freedom and upside, to today’s reality: wealth creation for some, but scarcity of land, housing, and even human energy for many. That context matters, because it shows us that Silicon Valley’s current crisis isn’t an accident — it is the result of decades of choices and structures.
And in the end, the story circles back to Sarah. Because her decision — to stay and gamble on the dream, or to leave for somewhere less glamorous but more humane — is the decision facing millions today. That’s what makes her story powerful: it’s not just a tech worker’s dilemma, it’s a mirror of the future of work itself.
Season Two will keep building in this way. We’ll move beyond Silicon Valley into the rest of the U.S., then Canada, then Mexico — still country by country, still grounded in data and history, but always centered on the people who embody these shifts.
So welcome to Season Two. Same mission: decode global talent markets. But this time, with more humanity, more storytelling, and, I hope, insights that stick with you long after the episode ends.
