From Suceava to Harvard — and back.

I'm from Suceava. If you're not Romanian: north, near the Ukrainian border, cold, good monasteries. My childhood was the pool in the morning and math problems in the evening, and not much in between. I swam competitively and did olympiads, and I think both taught me the same thing before I had words for it. You don't get to argue with a stopwatch.

For high school I moved to Bucharest. Two boys a year above me got into Harvard, and that did something to my sense of what was allowed. I remember the exact thought: dacă ei pot, pot și eu. Not confidence, exactly. More like: it's a process, and processes can be copied. So I copied it. I ended up with full scholarships to Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, Durham, Harvard, UPenn, Rice, Vanderbilt, Richmond, Colgate. Writing that list still feels slightly ridiculous. I picked Harvard, and math.

I got there in the fall of 2010 expecting people in suits talking about Kant in libraries. What I got was people in flip-flops arguing about jazz and Iran and startups at two in the morning, and changing their minds in front of you, which I had never seen a Romanian adult do. I spent three years as a teaching fellow for math and engineering courses. I swam on the club team, not fast, mostly for the company. Then I graduated and went into finance like everyone else.

The job paid well. That's the whole nice thing I have to say about it. One afternoon I was in a meeting with my boss, he was explaining what I'd need to push through in the coming months, and I noticed, very calmly, that nothing in me wanted to. Not tired. Just nothing pulling. I went home and told my roommate I was going back to Romania to do something in education. He asked what. I didn't know. I had the sentence and that was it.

First night back in Bucharest, in an apartment on Speranței, I stayed up with an old friend until it got light. The next day I started. Five thousand euros, no office, no name for the thing yet. I walked into classrooms at Tudor Vianu and told sixteen-year-olds there was another way to learn. Twenty-six signed up. The investors I talked to said no, and the phrase I heard most was "how can you leave America for Romania?" Fair question. I still don't have a tidy answer to it.

That became Upgrade. Nine years, more than 1,500 students, a network of 150-odd mentors — Romanians already at the universities our students are trying to get into. Kids at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, ETH, Bocconi, Berkeley. In 2020 eight of us wrote Study Abroad. In 2021 we raised a seed round, SeedBlink plus some angels, including the people who co-founded WHOOP, which still surprises me a little when I say it.

What I care about has drifted. Less the destination, more the person. The thing I keep seeing in Romanian teenagers is not a lack of talent, it's a lack of permission. To try, to be wrong out loud, to think before someone hands them the answer. So what I'm building now is about character more than admissions. Admissions tend to come along anyway. Usually.

Outside of that: I run, long and slow, and I'm nearly always training for something I haven't trained enough for. I play drums, which is the only hour of the week in which I do not think about work at all. And I go back to Suceava and Vatra Dornei more than I used to. There's something up there I'm still working out.

Here you'll find a vlog every day, in Romanian, and essays in English when I need the room. If you think I'm wrong about something, write to me. I'd rather be argued with than agreed with.