My first fifteen days in New York have been far less overwhelming than I expected. Everything looks huge and fast, yet surprisingly monotonous. However, beneath that surface, I’m beginning to discover corners of the city with a different, more authentic energy, closer to what I hoped to find when I decided to join the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneur program.
I work as a Creative Technologist in an environment related to integrated systems and home automation. I’ve always imagined my role as a bridge between technology, creativity, and experimentation, a space where ideas can take shape before they become final products. I want to focus on concept creation and prototyping. That’s exactly why I chose to leave. The suggestion came from my girlfriend, who encouraged me to apply to the EYE program as an opportunity to grow professionally. I have many ideas and I want to understand how to turn them into a business, so I hoped to learn from a more experienced entrepreneur and exchange skills: I would deepen my understanding of business processes, and in return I could offer my technological expertise to help a company become more up to date, by introducing them AI tools, among other things.
In practice, balancing a real exchange of skills between two entrepreneurs, each with daily tasks, commitments, and different priorities, naturally becomes a challenging path. You adjust the pace day after day.
New York, in particular, works well as an “incubator of stimuli” because simply walking around introduces you to people and places that motivate you to aim higher. After all, that’s also the purpose of this exchange: letting yourself be inspired, even by chance, without planning everything. Hack Manhattan, for example, is a small makerspace where anyone can solder, experiment, and build without feeling judged. The same goes for Off-Off Broadway spaces: tiny, improvised environments where expertise matters far less than enthusiasm. There, I found the kind of energy that truly interests me, driven by personal initiative.