In March 2015, I got on a plane in Buenos Aires with two suitcases and a job offer from Meta's New York office. I wasn't just relocating — I was the first employee from Meta Argentina's Client Operations team to ever make that move to NY. No playbook. No "here's how the last person did it" conversation. Just me, seven interview rounds behind me, and a lot of unknowns ahead. Eleven years, three companies, and one COO title later, I still think that move is the single decision that reshaped my career the most. Not because moving abroad is inherently magical — it isn't — but because of what it forced me to learn, fast, without a safety net. I coach people through exactly this kind of transition now — international career moves, operations leadership, the jump from "good at my job" to "trusted with the P&L." This is the story of how I got there, including the parts that weren't glamorous.
The Setup: Two Years Before Anyone Said Yes
I'd been working in Client Operations at Meta Argentina for over two years before NY ever became a real possibility. I wasn't looking to leave Buenos Aires out of dissatisfaction — I was looking because I'd started to sense a ceiling. The interesting, high-leverage work was happening somewhere else, and "somewhere else" was usually a US office. Getting the NY role wasn't one clean path. It was three things happening at once: - I applied directly, because the opportunity existed and I wasn't going to wait for someone to hand it to me. - I had a referral from friends who'd already made the jump to NY — people who could vouch for how I worked, not just what my resume said. - I went through seven interview rounds. Seven. Not because I was underqualified, but because moving someone internationally is a bigger bet for a company than a domestic hire, and they wanted to be sure. Looking back, three things made me a credible candidate for that bet: **Internal knowledge.** I already understood how Meta worked — the systems, the language, the way decisions got made. That's not something you can fake in an interview, and it removes a huge amount of ramp-up risk for whoever's hiring you. **Analytical chops.** My background gave me a comfort with numbers and math that showed up naturally in how I answered questions. In operations, especially at Meta's scale, that's not optional — it's the baseline. **English fluency, at a genuinely professional level.** Not "conversational." Fluent enough to hold my own with directors and VPs from day one, in fast-moving meetings where nobody was going to slow down for me. If you're eyeing a similar jump: none of these three things happen overnight. If you're missing one, that's your work plan for the next 12-18 months, not a reason to write off the idea.
The Move: L1 Visa, Three Months, and a Week of Stomach Sickness
The logistics moved through an L1 visa, and the whole process — offer to landing in NY — took about three months. Meta made it about as smooth as an international relocation can be. Genuinely great support on that front, and I don't take that for granted; a lot of people doing this without a company like that behind them face a much harder road. But "smooth logistics" and "easy" are not the same thing. The hardest part had nothing to do with visas or paperwork. It was saying goodbye to my family. I'd never done that before — never lived somewhere where "coming home for the weekend" wasn't physically possible. I had actual stomach sickness for a week leading up to the move. Not nerves in the abstract sense — real, physical, can't-eat-properly sickness. And it wasn't happening in a vacuum: my dad was dealing with some health issues at the time, which made getting on that plane feel less like an adventure and more like a decision I had to keep choosing, every single day that week. I want to be honest about that part because most relocation stories skip it. They jump straight to "and then I moved and it was amazing." The truth is the week before was one of the hardest of my life, and I got on the plane anyway. That's not a footnote — that's the actual cost of the decision, and if you're considering something similar, it's worth sitting with that cost honestly before you commit, not after.
The First 90 Days: No Salary Yet, and a Lot of Hoops
Nobody warns you about this part: the first stretch in a new country is bureaucratic before it's anything else. I didn't have a salary hitting my account yet, and I had to jump through hoop after hoop just to exist administratively — getting a Social Security number, opening a bank account, finding someone to guarantee an apartment lease when you have zero US credit history and zero US rental history. Every single one of those things depends on the other. You need a bank account to get an apartment, but sometimes you need proof of address to get a bank account. It's a maze, and you're solving it while jet-lagged and homesick. Work-wise, those same 90 days looked different — genuinely exciting, but disorienting in its own way. I was meeting the North America team for the first time and starting to actually learn what "business operations" meant at Meta's scale, versus what it had meant on the Argentina team. The scope was bigger. The stakeholders were more senior. The pace was faster. I wasn't behind, exactly, but I was very aware I had a lot to absorb quickly. If there's one piece of advice from this window: don't underestimate the admin chaos. Budget mental energy for it. It's not a distraction from "the real work" — for the first month or two, it basically is the work, and it's exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with your job performance.
The Lesson I Didn't Want to Learn: My Boss Read Every Email for Three Months
Here's the one I still think about. For my first two to three months in NY, my new boss read every single email I sent before it went out. Every one. And I'll be honest — at first, I was pissed. I'd been doing this job successfully in Argentina. I knew how to write a client email. Having someone check my work like I was fresh out of school felt like a step backward. Then I actually looked at her edits. Hers were better. Consistently. Sharper framing, better structure, more precise language for a US audience that read situations differently than the stakeholders I was used to in Buenos Aires. Once I got over the ego hit, I realized what was actually happening: we were "getting to know each other" — she was learning how I thought, and I was learning how the NY org communicated, and the email review was just the mechanism for both of those things to happen fast. This is the lesson I give mentees most often when they're navigating a new team, a promotion, or a relocation: **when someone more senior is checking your work closely, your first job isn't to defend your work — it's to figure out what they're actually seeing that you're not.** Ego will tell you it's about trust. Most of the time, it's about calibration. Once I stopped being defensive and started treating those edits as free, high-quality coaching, that three-month stretch became one of the fastest learning periods of my career. But I want to be honest about what that actually cost me, internally. Moving abroad didn't just reshape my career — it reshaped my character, and not always comfortably. Before NY, I carried a certain confidence that, if I'm being fully honest, tipped into believing I was usually the smartest person in the room. That belief doesn't survive contact with a boss who is genuinely, provably better at your own job than you are. It can't. Having her read and rewrite my emails for three months wasn't just a professional recalibration — it was a personal one. I had to sit with the fact that someone else did what I did, better, and that being good at something in one context doesn't automatically make you the best at it in a new one. That's a harder thing to swallow than any visa paperwork or apartment guarantor requirement. It takes a real willingness to be humbled — to let go of an identity you'd built for yourself — and rebuild it on more honest ground. I had to grow up fast, in ways that had nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the job. If I'm honest, that shift in how I saw myself relative to the people around me has mattered just as much to who I am today as anything I learned about quota setting or client operations.
The Win: 93% Forecast Accuracy, Year One
By the end of my first year in NY, I'd taken over the North America Quota Setting process — the first time anyone had done this in quite that configuration on our team. I landed it with over 93% forecast accuracy. I want to be specific about why that number mattered, beyond just "it's a good stat for a resume." Quota setting sits at the intersection of a lot of things people find genuinely hard: reading historical data honestly instead of optimistically, understanding what's actually driving a market versus what's noise, and building something that senior stakeholders across an entire region are going to rely on to run their business. Getting it right at 93% accuracy in year one, with no prior version of this process to inherit or learn from, was the first moment I felt like I'd actually earned my seat at that table — not just survived the move, but proven I belonged there.
The Throughline: From Meta to Rappi to COO at Eureka
People sometimes ask if the Meta chapter is "just" a good origin story or if it actually shaped what came after. It's the latter, directly. Meta NY put me in the big leagues in a way nothing before it had. I was operating with real exposure to a business worth billions in P&L, working with stakeholders at director and VP level as a matter of routine, not as an exception. That environment taught me three things I still lean on every day as COO: **Consultancy instinct.** Learning to walk into a room with a senior stakeholder's problem, not your own agenda, and leave them with a clearer path forward — that's a muscle, and Meta is where I built it. **Product thinking, applied to operations.** Treating operational processes like products — with users, with iteration, with a bar for quality — instead of treating them like static admin work. **Organizational politics, navigated honestly.** Not politics in the cynical sense — politics in the sense of understanding how a huge, complex organization actually makes decisions, and how to get things done inside that reality instead of pretending it doesn't exist. Those three things carried directly into Rappi, where I ran Global Operations and later Global Marketing for a 500+ person org across LATAM. And they're exactly what I use today as COO at Eureka, where a big part of my mandate has been cost reduction and a company-wide reorg — work that lives entirely at the intersection of numbers, people, and politics.
My Honest Advice for 2026
If someone came to me today wanting to make a move like mine — and the market in 2026 is not the market of 2015; visas are tighter, remote work has changed what "relocation" even means, and AI is reshaping what operations and sales roles look like — here's what I'd tell them, honestly: **Try it. But brace yourself.** The opportunity to work at that scale, with that level of exposure, is still worth pursuing. The path to get there has changed — I wouldn't tell someone the mechanics are identical to what I went through — but the core trade is the same one it's always been. You are trading comfort for growth, on a timeline you don't fully control, and you need to be honest with yourself about whether you can absorb that trade emotionally, not just logistically. Be prepared to be humble. I had two-plus years of internal credibility in Argentina, and I still had a boss reading my emails for three months in NY. That's not a sign something went wrong — that's what the beginning of real growth actually looks like. If you're not willing to feel like a beginner again, even after you've already proven yourself once, this kind of move will be much harder than it needs to be. And put in the work. Nobody hands you a 93% forecast accuracy number. Nobody hands you a P&L. You earn the trust one cycle, one project, one honestly-absorbed piece of feedback at a time.
If You're Standing Where I Was in 2015
If you're weighing a move like this — a relocation, a jump to a bigger org, a step into operations leadership you're not 100% sure you're ready for — I'd rather you make that decision with your eyes open than with a highlight reel in your head. The stomach sickness the week before you leave is real. The admin maze in the first 90 days is real. The ego hit of having your work checked by someone more senior is real. And so is the version of you on the other side of all of it. This is exactly the kind of transition I coach people through now — international career moves, the jump into operations leadership, building the credibility to be trusted with real numbers and real stakeholders. If you're navigating something similar and want to talk through your specific situation, let's chat! — I'd rather help you skip some of the harder lessons than watch you learn them the slow way, like I did.
