So let’s start there.

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The day is March 3, 2025. I boarded a flight from Seattle to Berlin. On paper, it was a questionable decision at first. My university schedule at first seemingly had barely any give. I had never been to Berlin. I was flying across the world for a startup bootcamp I’d heard about through a LinkedIn connection just a couple months prior. Someone I’d never met in person, in a city I’d never visited, for a program I only half-understood.

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I went anyway. Because I’ve learned, slowly and stubbornly, that the moments which look like bad ideas on paper are often the ones that matter most.

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The program was Brightdale: a global immersion experience that drops you inside some of the world’s most dynamic tech and startup ecosystems through intensive, boot-camp-style expeditions. Berlin was the first ever stop. I showed up with a carry-on, zero expectations, and a vague sense that something important was about to happen.

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I was right.

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How a LinkedIn message sent me to Germany​

A few months back, I connected with Cesca Centini, Brightdale’s Founder’s Associate, from Italy. It was one of those routine LinkedIn interactions you almost scroll past, but turned into something great after she joined my organization, Youth STEM Initiative, and we started to work on a neuroscience projects + a ton of other stuff (a whole other story). She told me about the Berlin expedition, and something in the way she described it made me stop. Not the usual startup pitch energy. Something more genuine. A real invitation to something real.

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Long story short…I told her my schedule was a nightmare and the program date coincides with my final exams that quarter. She encouraged me regardless, connected me with an amazing person called Lucabrando Sanfilippo (Brightdale’s Co-Founder) and left it to me. After much contemplation, a talk with Brando, filling up the application, doing some research, and negotiating with my profs to reschedule exams, here I was on the flight to Germany’s capital on a random Monday in March.

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There’s a concept I keep returning to: surface area of luck. The idea is that luck isn’t random. It’s a function of how many interesting situations you put yourself in. Every new experience, every room you walk into, every stranger you say yes to: that’s you expanding that surface area. You can’t control what luck lands on you. You can control how much space you give it to land. That was a life-changing takeaway from this experience.

Brightdale Berlin was me expanding the surface area. And as it turned out, Berlin had A LOT to land.

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What actually happened in those five days

I want to be very careful not to over-glamorize this, because the honest truth is that the most memorable parts weren’t the famous logos or the impressive venues that we visited across the city—even though there were plenty of those.

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We were guests at Google. We visited a lab in a Berlin suburb doing cutting-edge research on nano enzymes, explained in real time by the scientists actually doing the work. There was a life coaching workshop that hit harder than I expected, the kind of session that quietly rewires how you think about the choices you’ve been putting off. Then at the end of an intense, saturated week, a meditation session that I (and I’m sure everyone else in the cohort) genuinely needed. The week kept giving us things to metabolize, and then gave us the space to metabolize them. That balance wasn’t accidental. It was designed beautifully by Brando, Cesca, and Andrea Parodi, also Brightdale’s Co-Founder.

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But the real texture of the week was the founders we met from all the startups and companies we explored in Europe’s San Francisco.

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Let me break it down for you in numbers:

19 hrs

with founders across biotech, fintech, VC, healthtech, and edtech

10 hrs

of dinners with real conversations about life, careers, and meaning

2 days

of workshops at Brightdale House in the heart of Berlin

15

incredible friends made from across Europe

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Nineteen hours with founders is not a networking event. It’s something closer to being handed a window into how people actually think when they’re building things that don’t exist yet or that they’re ambitiously striving towards making a reality. The mental models. All the failures they talk about so openly. The specific way that someone who has launched three companies and wound down two of them speaks about risk-taking differently from anyone in a classroom ever could.

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You start to notice patterns. The best founders weren’t the most confident or cocky people in the room. They were the most curious. They asked more questions than they answered. They were comfortable saying “I don’t know” in a way that felt like a strength rather than a gap. That observation alone has been quietly rearranging the way I carry myself since I came back home.

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The dinners

If the daytime sessions were where I learned about the startup world, the dinners were where I learned about everything else.

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group selfie (Jack Gallazzi, the photographer) at a Vietnamese restaurant

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Something happens when you take a group of driven, curious people from across Europe (and America ig), put them around a table with good food and no agenda, and let the conversation go wherever it wants. It goes to the real stuff fast. We talked about what it actually feels like to be in your twenties and unsure of your direction. About how you know when you’re chasing the right thing versus just the impressive-sounding thing. About what happiness looks like when you stop performing it for other people and start actually asking yourself what you truly want in life.

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Those weren’t conversations I expected to have at a startup bootcamp. But they were definitely the ones I’ll carry the longest.

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The fifteen people I met that week are already the kind of friends where the chats can be active at midnight and the plans to visit each other are already half-formed. Joseph Perrotta, Luca covini, Eszter, Isaac Tolley, Marco Lomele, Giacomo Gallazzi, Kaan Durmaz, Manuel Martín Morante, Gabriele Santoro, Tiberiu-Aurelian Toca, Fotis Tsiroukis, Karol Wapniarski—all people from different countries, different fields, different ways of seeing the world, all striving for great things.

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That kind of diversity in a room isn’t decorative. It genuinely changes the quality of thought.

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The thing Barbara said

“Your unique point of view is your biggest strength.”
— Barbara Orsingher, Aware

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Barbara said this during one of our sessions and I wrote it down immediately. It sounds simple. It isn’t.

We spend so much of our time trying to acquire the “right” knowledge, the “right” skills, the “right” credentials, as if the goal is to make ourselves interchangeable with a better version of everyone else. Sand down the rough edges. Optimize toward some imagined ideal candidate. Get good at the things you’re “supposed to be good at.”

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But the things that make you specifically you—your particular combination of experiences, the strange angle you see problems from, the things you find funny, the things that make you unreasonably angry—that’s not noise to be filtered out. That’s the signal. That’s the whole thing. I’ve struggled for a long time to understand this in its full essence and to take it to heart the way I wanted to. But hearing it said out loud in a room full of people who clearly believed it landed differently.

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I keep coming back to it.

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What I learned

What I’ve written here aren’t polished takeaways. They’re things I wrote in my notes at the end of each day, when the conversations were still fresh in my mind.

• 1: Take the opportunity without hesitation. The version of you who waits for the perfect moment is protecting something that doesn’t need any protection.

• 2: The most valuable knowledge doesn’t live in books or on the internet. It lives in people who are in the middle of doing things. Go find them and ask real questions. It can change your life.

• 3: Building connections is everything. Not in a transactional way, but in the sense that the people you know shape the problems you get to work on and the person you become while working on them.

• 4: You don’t need to know everything before you start something. You need to find the right people to figure it out with. That’s a completely different problem and a much more solvable one.

• 5: Consistency will outlast talent, perfectionism, and short-term intensity every. single. time. This in particular is worth repeating to yourself more than once.

• 6: The people you surround yourself with are the single most important variable. More than your habits, your routine, or your tools. The people.

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What Brightdale actually is

There’s a word I keep reaching for and that has inspired me since scrolling through the Brightdale website the first time: agora. The ancient Greek meeting place where ideas collided, where people argued and learned and changed their minds in public, where being part of the conversation was itself the education. Brando, Andrea, and Cesca built something like that. A modern agora, stripped of gatekeeping, designed so that students who wouldn’t get access to these rooms for another decade can walk into them now, early in their exciting careers.

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Most of what I’ve gotten from university is theoretical. Knowledge delivered at arm’s length, filtered through (often boring) syllabi and assessment criteria. Brightdale was the opposite of that. It was messy and real and human in a way that lecture halls rarely ever are. I was learning from people who had skin in the game, who had built things and broken things and were in the middle of building again. That context changes everything about how the knowledge lands, what it’s used for.

I’m aware that experiences like this aren’t available to most students globally. The fact that Cesca, Brando, and Andrea have worked together to change that is something I’m genuinely grateful for. Not in the way you say it at the end of a thank you note, but in the way that makes you want to send others in the same direction.

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Would I do this again? Don’t even ask.

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Berlin · 03.04.25 – 03.09.25

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p.s. remember when I said these are the kind of friends where the plans to visit each other are already half-formed? That did indeed come to fruition as I visited Cesca, Jack, Luca, Marco, and Andrea in Milan as well as Kaan and Fotis in Munich the following summer, reflecting on this beautiful experience we had a few months prior and catching up on what life has presented us with ever since.