April: Someone forgot to tell them no
If you're open to being inspired by others, you can lower your own threshold for taking action.
We made our way back to America. After last month’s experience, we didn’t take that as a sign to stay away. If anything, it made us more ambitious.
Cris and Anda spent three weeks making new connections, immersing themselves in the culture, and chasing new opportunities.
They traveled to San Francisco, Las Vegas, and New York, each destination carrying its own lesson and building on this belief that exposing yourself to other people and places opens new ways of thinking.
They met fascinating people. Romanians living abroad. Young founders building mission-driven startups, all reaching for the moon. You could feel the hunger to do more, the audacity to aim higher, and that burning belief that more is always possible. In San Francisco, it gets under your skin.
Failure has crossed the threshold of just being accepted. It’s expected. Expected to try crazy things and poke the box, as Seth Godin would say. Fall down, get up. That’s the norm. And it’s kind of insane.
Because back home, in Eastern Europe especially, we start businesses already thinking about what could go wrong. “If this doesn’t work out, what’s my backup?” The mind goes downward before it ever looks up. We’re wired to play it safe and to avoid the fall at all costs.
But there, the fall is part of it. The mess is part of it. Falling upwards, that’s the whole philosophy.
What are they doing differently?
And we started to wonder, where does that audacity actually come from? What builds that kind of belief in a human being?
Cris kicked off his trip by attending the New Narratives retreat in California, organized by Renee Lynn Frojo, a gathering for entrepreneurs building intentional and human-centered businesses. It was intimate by design. A small group of people moving in the same direction, having conversations full of depth.
He came away with a lot of inspiration. But more than anything, he left with other people’s stories living rent free in his head. Because that’s what stories do. They stick, and are one of the most powerful ways we learn. Always have been.
When you see a principle lived out, applied by a human being, in a real situation with real stakes, it just gets more texture. Nuance. Color. You understand it differently, even more fully.
They talked about marketing, business strategy, team dynamics, productivity, solopreneurship, and what not. But it all came up through the lens of lived moments.
All of that richness came from the openness and the willingness to be vulnerable. From people who wanted to see each other succeed. When someone shared something, others would genuinely engage. Reflect it back. “Have you ever considered doing it that way?” or “Are we missing something here?” Questions that in our culture can easily land as criticism, but there, it carried no weight at all.
That culture of trust and co-creation is what feeds the audacity. When you’re surrounded by people who believe in possibility, who challenge you with kindness and build with you instead of competing against you, you start to believe more is possible, too.
Renee captured it so beautifully in her newsletter after the retreat: “If we want to create the change we want to see in the world, we have to stop thinking we can do it alone.“
Cris also noticed a pattern. Most of the people there had walked away from corporate life to build one-person businesses. Done with the hierarchies and processes that slowed everything down, ready to bet everything on their own dream instead. More of us are one decision away from the same leap.
The gamble is believing first
Next stop, Las Vegas. Strip away the casinos and the gambling, that’s a city that rose from nothing. Literally from desert. Built by people with a vision, a strategy, and the nerve to follow it all the way.
Walking through it, you can feel that mindset everywhere. The city is clean, structured, and organized. Love it or hate it on a moral level, it’s hard not to be humbled by what people can build when they’re truly committed to it, and not to respect the scale of that ambition.
That same energy followed Cris on the padel court. He plays regularly back home, and while he was there, he joined games with strangers and instantly connected with people. Through those matches, he met people building things with the same belief that ideas only matter if you execute them boldly.
He met some startup founders who were building a New York–based startup that supports sports through AI-powered cameras that record matches, analyze performance, and elevate the entire player experience effortlessly. They were to be in Vegas, setting up for the biggest padel tournament in the USA.
The city left a door open
Two weeks later, back in New York, the same ambition continued to compound. They reconnected with people we first met back in November. People who share our story and our book. Friends who gave us their trust, and who believe in us with the same conviction they bring to their own dreams.
Cris also connected with other people who had no reason to care about what we’re building, yet they pulled their chairs closer and offered to support our vision. Like they decided somewhere along the way that scarcity was a lie, and that helping someone else go further costs you nothing and might just change everything.
It made the whole journey feel less like pushing against the world and more like moving through it, with the right people appearing at the right time, almost as if ambition itself was organizing the encounters ahead.
Ambition lives a few streets away
Last month, we met some young people in Cluj who carry that same audacity to start before being ready, knowing the odds and going anyway.
It started with Vic. 19 years old. Already built two startups. Already sold one of them. He got his first taste of it at 13, just following a love for computers, and by 16 he'd opened his own company under his father's name, building his first product with a few friends. That's the one he ended up selling.
After that, he created Listener, a startup that helps podcasters track their efforts. Now the company is based in San Francisco, and he’s the head of engineering there.
He’s also part of Cluj House, a co-living and co-working space built for people like him. We met Bantu, who came up with the idea of hanging out with his friends while each of them worked on their projects. Along the way, more young people joined, and now there are around 12 of them.
Last month, we visited them. It was refreshing to spend time with young people who believe so deeply in what they’re capable of.
And while we were there, we discovered another product they’d been building, Anara, an AI workspace designed for scientists, students, and research teams.
This month, we had them over to our home.
The more people like them we find, the more we believe that a different culture is being built. By all of us together.
A few takeaways from this experience:
We’re so busy avoiding the fall that we forget to look at how far we could go.
The culture you’re in shapes the ceiling you believe exists.
When people move in the same direction and commit to the path, even empty ground can become a city.
Every connection you make is a door that hasn’t revealed itself yet. Go further and meet more people.
A commitment for this month:
I’ll leave you with a thought Anda shared with me. When you travel to places that feel more evolved and surround yourself with driven people, the environment changes you. You come back more awake and ambitious. Your creativity, your hunger for life, and your sense of what’s possible start to expand.
So this month, seek out at least one place, one community, or one environment that makes you feel that way. Let yourself be inspired by others. Take action. And once you’ve started, ask others to join in.
 | A guest post by
|