Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/532968
t m c ยป p u l s e | j u ly 2 0 1 5 26 Q | Tell us about your early days in Spain. A | My early days in Spain started by me accidentally landing at a French school since kindergarten. My mom was working at the school opposite to it and after a while she realized that having her daughter at her same school was not such a great idea since I always wanted to be with her. I therefore became bilingual at a very young age, and that kind of totally shaped my mind to be extremely open to other cultures. Since they didn't have a French high school in Bilbao at that point, I had to go to France to do my high school years before boarding school. Bilbao is about two hours from France, so the whole trip was about two hours to get to the high school every Monday and then go back on Friday. I really wanted to continue my education in the French university, but my parents objected. During my university degree based in Spain, I decided to do my study abroad with the Erasmus Exchange Program at a university in France, in Nantes. During my last year there, I realized that everybody there was applying to jobs outside of France. I always wanted to have an international career, but thought it would likely be Europe, maybe Brussels, where there are a lot of international jobs. But in Nantes, many students were getting jobs in Southeast Asia, because there is a strong connection between France and Southeast Asia and that destination really inspired me. So there was this international trade program from the Spanish government, and basically they would select people to go and work in the Spanish trade commissions all over the world. I got selected, so I started my career in Singapore at the International Trade Commission of Spain. I was there for a year and a half and loved it so much, I was like, 'I want to stay here. There are so many things going on.' So luckily, I met the head of CitiGroup's Asia technology office. It turned out that- all of the technology in CitiGroup was run from that technology office. They were having a system migra- tion for the credit card systems, so they put together a JULIANA GARAIZAR, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF THE HOUSTON ANGEL NETWORK (HAN), SAT DOWN WITH TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF STRATEGY AND OPERATING OFFICER WILLIAM F. McKEON TO LOOK BACK AT THE PATH THAT LED HER TO HOUSTON, AND HOW THE HAN HAS BUILT A SUCCESSFUL MODEL FOR CONNECTING EARLY-STAGE COMPANIES AND ACCREDITED INVESTORS. huge department. It was called the ICC, International Credit Card Center. And they needed a project man- ager for that in America, because nobody there spoke Spanish and was able to understand the business side of things. So I got hired and was doing that for almost four years. I had to travel to Latin America quite a bit, and it was great. And then we started with the migra- tion in Europe. We started with Spain. But then I had to go to Greece a lot, and I ended up doing the migration for Asia, too, and I spent quite some time in Japan. So it was great because I was able to travel a lot and meet a lot of people and different kinds of businesses. But I always had to interact with programmers, so I would go there, check what they required in terms of business requirements, and then I had to go and ask the programmers to shift them. At some point, they said, 'You know, it would be great if you would be the only person there, and actually could also fix the programming yourself.' I didn't want to be a program- mer, so I got to a point where I said, 'I'm ready to do SPOTLIGHT