About Suzanne Rice

A dose of luck and a liking for a challenge have helped Suzanne Rice to embrace the Silicon Valley life

Suzanne Rice acknowledges she has been lucky at times and her varied career in the United States, including Silicon Valley, has presented her with some great opportunities as a result. One ‘sliding doors’ moment for the Cork woman was her decision to apply for a US green card visa in a lottery held in the early 1990s. She was successful, giving her the opportunity to forge her future in the US and ultimately in the vibrant tech world of Silicon Valley.

Hard work and an liking for a challenge has allowed her take advantage of such moments and she’s forged a remarkable career on the US West Coast, often finding herself in the centre of complex projects and transformations at prominent companies like Cisco, Apple and Meta.

Life post-UCD MBS programme

After school and occasional casual jobs in pubs (which she says taught her a lot of life lessons), Rice did European Studies at UCC and for a time thought about pursuing a PhD in Italian politics no less, but her supervisor took a sabbatical, which was a reason to prompt a re-think. She decided to do a Diploma in Business Studies (DBS) at UCD and followed that with a Masters in Business Studies (MBS) at UCD, sponsored by Digital Equipment Corp. She enjoyed her time at UCD and believes she was very lucky to be able to go from a diploma to a masters all in one relatively seamless jump. “The MBS gave me a good basis in business acumen which has been an accelerator throughout my career,” she says.

After this she further topped up her qualifications and employability with a post-grad in Computer Science at UCC and then it was time, with her Green Card in her back pocket, to cross the Atlantic in 1993. “I said I am going to see what America is all about,” is how the recalls that time. Her first touch down city was Austin, Texas, a place she has fond memories of and where she secured her first job with the local municipality in Travis County. But while the US was to her liking, an even bigger leap awaited, moving to Sillcon Valley a few years later.

Going to the Valley for a new life

Rice, who spent her earlier life in Montenotte, Cork, started her string of jobs in the Valley with Cisco. Cisco’s culture was one that clicked with Rice from the start. “The culture at Cisco was, if you wanted to do something different, you had the opportunity to do it. So every two years I did something completely different to before,’’ she recalls.

The more intimate world of Austin, Texas, was very different to the Valley, she observes. “The move from Cork to Texas was easier than the move from Texas to California,’’she laughs now looking back. But the vibrant atmosphere at Cisco helped her adjust to the Valley, she explains "I would say so. It's very collaborative company. The cross functional collaboration is extremely important to them. And it also is a company that is willing to take chances, there is a rational experimentation that happens both in the product development and also that filters through the culture, so that employees benefit from that as well,” she says.

Rice then had a stint with McAfee (who were the subject of a takeover offer by Intel in her initial weeks at the firm), and eventually made her way back to Cisco, where she headed up a major transformation project, helping Cisco to transition away from traditional hardware to a software, solutions company.

Flinging herself into projects that others might shy away from seems to come relatively easy to Rice, and means she has never become boxed in as one type of subject matter expert or pigeon holed in any way. Asked for a neat self description she replies, “Oh, I'd say chief bottle washer!’

“I'm very much a people person. I am also very focused on one thing and I say this to my kids all the time- give me the one reason we can do something. Don't tell me the 10 reasons we can't, give me the one reason we can, and that then lends itself to sort of bringing people with you,” she says.

Taking a bite of the Apple..

After Cisco, came a job with the biggest brand of them all- Apple in 2015, when she took up a sales operations role, with the famous maker of the iPhone. While the culture was different to Cisco, she revelled in the role at Apple. “So I love Apple products and always have. And I've been a user of Apple products right from the early days,” she points out.

Working at such a consumer-facing company was different for Rice, but she enjoyed the change and loved working with non-traditional channels that were retailing Apple products.

But she wasn’t done with the big brand companies just yet, a phone call came in from Meta immediately following her departure from Apple.  She had planned on taking six months off and it speaks to Meta's great culture that they were open to this, and Rice was once again getting involved in projects others might find daunting.

Meta and Privacy Role

Again she was up for a challenge, this time getting involved in the sometimes charged area of privacy, dealing with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for example, a heavyweight US regulator.

“Facebook is under a 20 year consent order from the US Federal Trade Commission. So part of that is that a report is issued every two years about what Meta is doing on the platform for privacy, which is a phenomenal amount of work. So my job was to interface with what was called the assessor, who are the representatives of the Federal Trade Commission, and just make sure that everything was moving along in the way that it should be,” she explains.

As for advise for others, Rice takes a relaxed view. “I'm not the person to talk to about career paths, because I'm all over the place,” she laughs.

Asked why she has taken on some many tough corporate challenges, she has one possible answer.  “I certainly don't shy away from challenges. And I've been incredibly lucky in the roles that I've been able to get, and the companies that I've been in. But I'm also willing to go out there and take a chance. I mean, if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It's not the end of the world, you know,” is her neat summary. She says her one pet hate is not trying or as she says ”people who commit to do something and flake”.

Future plans- giving back

Asked might she still get around to that Italian PhD, she is not entirely dismissive of the idea.

“Well, funny you should mention that. So I left Meta in summer of last year, to go into more advisory/consultancy type of roles. And according to my kids, I need to go back and finish my PhD, so never say never,” she states.

Rice says she takes her Irish heritage and background very seriously and both her children are studying at Irish universities. Trips home to Cork and Ireland generally are a regular feature and she is a big supporter of several UCD initiatives, including student mentoring programme and the Ad Astra scheme, which she hopes will be extended even further in future years, as she believes it allows students to combine all sorts of different interests and passions with their academic work.

But for now, San Jose is home. “I absolutely love it. It's a great scene and we have great, great friends, and we live in a neighbourhood which is all of houses, that were built in 1920s, which is very unusual in America, and it is a historic neighbourhood, and I'm very involved in the community. Both from early childhood education perspective and in an organization called Glam, which is the Girls Leadership Academy Meetup. This is 8 to 12 year olds that have their own startups. It's really good fun. And then, I'm also involved in an all girls high school here, which is again, pretty unique. So, I’m involved with those girls, helping them to make great decisions going into college,” she says. She is also involved in urban development in the San Francisco area.

The future is something she is embracing. “As I say, I have loved working at the large companies. It's been phenomenal, and, as I say, I've been very lucky along the way,” she says.

Having had that luck, combined with a sense of adventure, Rice says she is hoping to give back, potentially in the start-up space, but mainly seeing that others get the opportunity she got, all those years after she left Ireland’s shores.

March 2024