Following Curiosity: Google’s Ryan Trinidade on Career Pivots, Architechies, and Paying it Forward

By Julia Gamolina

Whether it is building with bricks or code, Ryan Trinidade is a product leader focused on making great user experiences, in the built and digital worlds. Ryan is a Project Executive and Product Lead at Google where he manages the YouTube real estate portfolio and the development of generative design software to build Google spaces.

Ryan earned graduate degrees at Cornell University and Harvard University, designed museums at Canadian firm Moriyama and Teshima, and got started in real estate development at Related Companies in New York. From architecture to development to technology, Ryan’s career path has been circuitous. However the commonality has been using design to solve complex problems in building, finance, and leading people. In his conversation with Julia Gamolina, Ryan talks about his career explorations and experiments, advising those just starting their careers to be honest with themselves about that which they truly want to do.

JG: How did you grow up and how did that plant the seeds for what you’re doing now?

RT: I accidentally fell into both architecture and real estate. The running theme has just been following my curiosity. In high school, I was debating between business school, aerospace engineering, and architecture. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew what I didn’t want to do, or what I wasn’t good at - like writing, for example [laughs]. I have incredible respect for people that write well - it takes me forever and I have to do it in chunks. I knew what I enjoyed doing which was making stuff and untangling visual problems. I don’t think I was able to articulate those interests in high school, but I did know to follow my curiosity, and I have really supportive parents.

Jensen, 1100 Gundy, photography by Mariko Reed.

Walk me through how you got to Google, from studying architecture and then studying real estate.

The theme has been these transitions - architect to developer, and then developer to technologist. I’ll explain what the technologist aspect means in a bit [laughs], but it really was this meandering path. I started out in Toronto and went to Ryerson for my undergraduate degree in architecture. It’s a technical program there and actually lives in the engineering school. Coming out of school, I worked for Moriyama & Teshima Architects, which is a well-known and historic practice in Canada, and my plan was that after two years working for them, working on universities and museums, I would go back to graduate school. I wanted to be a licensed architect.

What I didn’t know is that Cornell, where I went for my graduate degree, would plant the seeds for two huge life changes for me, meeting my now wife there, and a big career pivot into real estate. My time at Cornell led me to rethink which sphere of influence I wanted to be a part of. I enjoyed the design and making process, but the kind of problems that I wanted to work on had more to do with things that a developer would consider, like where we should build, what we should build, why and who its for. You talk about all this in architecture school, but in practice, those considerations are in the development sphere. So I took a bunch of classes, interned at some development firms in the summers, and then after Cornell, intentionally worked at a development firm to solidify and make sure that this is the direction I wanted to go.

Where did you work?

A firm in Toronto called Reigo & Bauer. In reflecting, the founders were really influential in my life, which I didn’t quite understand at the time. Working with them really solidified this, and so I went to Harvard for my real estate masters.

Coming into the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I had already had six years of design training under my belt, so I wanted to leave my comfort zone. I took every economics, real estate finance, and law class that I could. Coming out of school, I wanted to flex those new muscles - I must’ve applied to nearly every real estate and private equity shop that I could. At this point, I was then keeping my then girlfriend, now wife, Tansy, on the East Coast longer than she wanted to be [laughs], and so together we ended up going to San Francisco, and that’s how I narrowed my focus and ended up at Google. I still don’t know sometimes how I got this position, it was maybe pure luck. Google was the only owner developer shop that I applied to. I didn’t even know for a while that they had a real estate arm! I was at a ULI event and saw someone’s name tag that said Google. I remember thinking, “Google?!” I looked on LinkedIn and found a list of people who had Google and real estate in their job description, and then I just totally cold emailed everybody, after doing some sleuthing and figuring out the nomenclature for the emails.

“I’ve been constantly learning — through experiment — what I enjoy doing, and what I’m good at.”

— Ryan Trinidade

Wow. Good for you. Sometimes, that is how it can work!

One person did email me back, and it was the Vice President of Real Estate at Google. He invited me to a coffee chat for ten minutes, and the coffee chat turned into an hour long conversation. After that, he passed me on to a few other Directors, and then after a month of those informal chats, they invited me to interview formally. By the way, this is the typical rigorous Google method of like, seven interviews [laughs].

Now it’s been seven years at Google, and my job as a Project Executive is to be accountable for making office space, from idea to execution. In that, I first go get the funding, and then once I get the funding, to go and make it happen! And that means to hire the consultant team, craft the vision, and then execute that vision.

Tell me more about developing the business case for office space. What does that require?

For each Google Product Area, we monitor how they are growing as a company, and align that with our real estate portfolio that we have for them. So if a PA is going to be growing at a certain rate for the next couple of years, we typically know how quickly they’ll run out of space and will need more, so that becomes the business justification for needing to buy land and develop space for the next three years.

It’s an awesome job, I really love it. It certainly keeps me on my toes, and combines all of those things that I was interested in that started percolating in architecture school.

So where does the technologist aspect that you mentioned earlier come in.

Right, so for the past two years, I’ve been working with a couple of others at Google to lead something called Project Clay, which is a suite of apps to centralize our knowledge for designing buildings and to design with data. We work at a tech company, so this was a natural transition. Working with so many millions of square feet, we really needed to rethink how we design. I’ve been a product lead for the last couple of years in developing our own in-house generative design software. That’s another really interesting career pivot.

Have you heard of Jean Brownhill? She did this exact same thing for Coach, and building out that internal technology led her to eventually starting Sweeten. She’s amazing.

Yea, the technology building aspect is a lot of the same muscles that designers are trained to use, just a different medium and different scale of impact. We’re also working with Stanford; a lot of people helping us build this tech product are at Stanford grads and I’m actually an advisor for their Artificial Intelligence in AEC class at Stanford.

This will be amazing for our readers to read about, because I know a lot are wondering and asking how else they can apply their training.

There are a lot of people who went from architecture to technology in this way. We call them architechies [laughs]. There’s a big Slack group of architechies.

Jensen, YouTube, photography by Mariko Reed.

VDTA Architects + Office of Things, YouTube, photography by Mariko Reed.

That’s amazing. So throughout all of this, who has mentored you?

I was noodling on this question for a while. I don’t know if I’ve had formal or long-term mentors, but I’ve certainly had an evolving network of people that have informally provided really critical guidance at really important points in my career. Two come to mind – Merike Reigo from Reigo & Bauer in Toronto, and Anthony Fioravanti, a former VP at Related, where I had interned. He had the same path – architecture and real estate, so with both, I have a lot of parallels.

How do you then mentor, and how do you choose who you mentor?

As a result of me not having formalized mentors, I’m hyper sensitive to cold calls when people reach out to me for advice. We do have a formal program at Google, so I have mentees through that, and in my work with Stanford as well with students that I help out. It’s a lot of coffee chats, but honestly, I’m pretty open to anyone who cold emails me. I totally respect the hustle because I was like that, and because I’ve been given opportunities through that way. Definitely trying to pay it forward.

Other than your professional identity, what other identities do you feel like you hold, and what does the integration of all of them into your life look like?

Like a ton of professionals, I derive a ton of my identity from what I do. The architect-developer-technologist has been a huge part of my life. But the common link continues to be design, making, and visual problem-solving. The other identity that I take a lot of pride in being a dual citizen – I just became an American citizen last year, and literally the day before the election, I was able to vote. I never appreciated how much I would care about that, and I still take a lot of pride in being Canadian and saying I’m from Canada, but learning about the civic process here was great.

The last thing, and the biggest change in identity for me was being in California for the last seven years and I finally understand what being a Californian is. I finally embraced being that cliché outdoorsy person [laughs], and I’ve been biking and hiking a lot. For my COVID hobby, I started skateboarding, as a thirty-something-year-old man. You would not believe the community that’s in skateboarding! Literally every time I’m on, I’ll get a comment from a random person like, “Just lift your leg up a little bit and you can do an ollie!” I’ll be doing a trick, and someone will stop at a stoplight and try and help me. That’s amazing, and has been a newly forming identity.

“...how do you influence people to come along with you and believe in you when they have much more experience than you and are perhaps an expert in the field?”

— Ryan Trinidade

In terms of integrating everything into my life, this has definitely evolved with each career stage. School was really about purely work and not much else, but now recently, I think I’ve been constantly learning — through experiment — what I enjoy doing, and what I’m good at. Google actually has a twenty percent program where they encourage you to try something new for twenty percent of your time there. That’s how I evolved into a product lead, it was purely from that experiment.

The last thing I’ll say on the integration front is that a lot of people on my team have families, and COVID has really exposed how they integrate family with work. I’ve seen them take time mid-day to go for walks, or to care for loved ones, and shifting when they work – not how much they work – and people have been more autonomous and flexible with when work happens, and when family-life happens.

Your life partner Tansy is also in the industry and I’m guessing that her professional identity is really important to her. How do you then advance your own career and aspirations, while making sure to support the advancement of hers?

That’s a great question. What’s really amazing about having a partner in the same field is that you understand each other – you understand the pain points, the relationships, the nuances. A trapping of that though is thinking that you know better, so what we’ve learned is to not try and solve each other’s problems, but just to be there, and to listen. And, more than anything, to appreciate. Over COVID, I’ve realized what a total rockstar my partner is, even more than I thought, because I was able to hear her take meetings and hear how she was able to navigate and handle super difficult conversations. I’d be thinking, “Damn, she’s impressive.”

What’s been your biggest challenge in your career?

You said this once when we were catching up, so I feel a lot of empathy towards that, but, my age! When I first joined a lot of the companies I worked at, I’d be the youngest person on my team, or in my peer group, and I’ve had to give direction to people and teams that have years or decades of experience on me.

Yep. That’s very real for a lot of people that do these career pivots, like you and I have.

The big challenge was finding my voice and leadership style that was authentic to my context and who I am. Even if you have a role of power, how do you influence people to come along with you and believe in you when they have much more experience than you and are perhaps an expert in the field? That has been challenging over time, but then also, where do you go from here? You can probably appreciate this as well, but as you get into a senior position ahead of when your peers do, where do you go from there and keep up that momentum? It’s exra-hard to justify further advancement when you’re amongst the youngest in your peer group.

Oh I’ve certainly been there.

Right, it’s a tough thing to show impact and merit when you’re overcoming perceptions like, “You’re young, you need to wait your turn, pay your dues first.”

My pet peeve, hearing that. I certainly have as well. On the flip side, what have been some highlights and what are you proud of?

We’re in this very visual field, so I think the nicest moments are seeing things come together. When you see the hundreds of hours of meetings, and all of the brain damage that you went through [laughs], and finally you see the prototypes and things coming together, that’s always great. I’ve never appreciated how much of a lift execution is, so when things become real and tangible, I think that’s always super rewarding.

Coming back to what we talked about in regards to Tansy’s own career advancement, what do you think needs to be done for equity in the industry? What would you encourage all of your male peers to do?

Allyship, senior representation, and actual tangible change. How I try to work that into my every day life, and what I would encourage other people to do for allyship is to give credit to people out loud. It’s really easy to gloss over when someone comes up with a really great idea, so taking a moment to pause and acknowledge that out loud is really important. Giving space for folks to bring up their ideas, like saying, “Hey Julia, what do you think?” or, “Julia is trying to say something,” is important as well. Making sure people have that space.

“...what I would encourage other people to do for allyship is to give credit to people out loud.”

— Ryan Trinidade

I’ve had a number of male colleagues that bulldoze through when someone is trying to say something. There really is a difference, I haven’t noticed as many women doing that.

Yea, it’s real. Allyship in that regard means being observant and attentive and understanding the dynamics of the team, meeting, or context you’re in. And then, Google actually has this really great culture of addressing and removing unconscious bias. That’s something I’ve been super attentive to. Like, when someone says, “It would be great to hire a guy to do this,” you’re saying that you’re assuming that whoever the expert that you need to bring in will be male. Calling that out and correcting that is important. And with that, using non-gendered language is key too. For example, not saying something like, “Alright, see you guys,” but instead, something like, “Bye everybody,” or “How are y’all doing.”

One other thing we should also be doing and questioning is representation in senior leadership. We’re seeing some change happen, especially at the entry and intermediate levels, but we need to make sure that it’s happening at the senior level too, and that there’s a path to that. Also when we’re hiring teams – architects, engineers – making sure that the teams that we send RFPs to, they know that part of our rubric and decision making will be representation on the team, and representation at those senior levels. We are seeing that when we’re explicit about that, people do make the necessary changes and take the necessary steps.

Who are some architects that you admire?

I love this question because if you had asked me in school, I would have totally said Rem Koolhaas or Peter Zumthor. But now, after having seen my career progress, I’m really admiring entrepreneurs and people who bring together design, technology and business to make something tangible. I think about some of my peers and friends, like Lane Rick who is a co-founder of Office of Things, as well as Leslie Bristow Mather, who started her own firm with her partner as well. And of course, I’ve mentioned her before, but Merike Reigo. She was the reason for a lot of my career steps and decisions.

Finally, what’s the best that you’ve gotten and what advice would you give to those just starting their careers?

I forget who said this to me, but the best piece of advice has been to follow your curiosity and pull on that thread. Be super honest with yourself and ask yourself really tough questions – get to know yourself. The translation of that, and the best advice I could give is just to start somewhere. Don’t let analysis prevent you from making a decision – just make a decision that feels good, learn, pivot if you have to, but just start. Your resume doesn’t need to be a perfect list of moves – it could be all about experiments.