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When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Elon Musk
Our Draper University Experience
We had the opportunity to be one of the two startups selected from Romania to attend the Draper University Hero Training program in Silicon Valley in Fall 2023. At the time, we didn’t fully grasp what this meant, but once we arrived, it became clear that this experience would reshape how we see entrepreneurship.
What is Hero Training?
Hero Training is not a normal accelerator. For five packed weeks you live in downtown San Mateo, share dorms with sixty-plus founders from every corner of the world, and move through a schedule that mixes classic startup sessions with things nobody would ever expect in a business school: survival exercises, hackathons that run past two in the morning, and fireside chats with people who have actually built unicorns.
Tim Draper and his crew designed the program around one idea: founders need to train like heroes because building a company is a quest, not a class. Alumni statistics are crazy. The program has produced thousands of graduates, helped them raise billions in funding, and on average each founder has created about five jobs after leaving the Castle.
Landing in California and joining the Catalysts
I arrived in November 2023, jet-lagged and wide-eyed, and was sorted into the Catalysts team, a group of seven people who look nothing alike on paper yet somehow clicked from day one. The very first morning we had to jump, fully clothed, into the freezing courtyard pool and hunt for the coloured balls that matched our team’s name. That shock of cold water was a perfect icebreaker, literally and figuratively.
We spent mornings in workshops on category design and afternoons iterating on our product. Evenings were reserved for mentor talks or quick runs to San Francisco when we could still stand upright. Somewhere in between we squeezed a three-day Survival Week in the Sierra foothills where phones were banned, sleep was optional, and teamwork was the only way to earn dinner. No spoilers, but imagine cold rivers, improvised rope bridges, and the realisation that a co-founder who can start a fire in the rain is worth their weight in seed funding.
Demo Day and a surprise top-six finish
Demo Day arrived faster than expected. One hundred startups pitched, six were singled out by the Draper team for follow-up, and we were inside that six. Hearing Tim Draper say “I want to keep talking” is the kind of sentence you replay in your head on the flight home because it proves that the idea you were nurturing in cafés and airports can stand on one of the toughest stages in the Valley.
Since then we have kept the conversation alive and, even better, we have been invited back for the July 2025 cohort to push the company toward investment readiness. The emails are already flying.
The power of the Draper network
The power of the Draper network
Right now my focus is on implementing the feedback we received in California and preparing for the July run.
It is still surreal to think that winning a startup competition in Bucharest propelled us to a spot in a mansion nicknamed the Castle, surrounded by founders who treat impossible like a hobby. But that is exactly what Draper University does. It compresses possibility into five weeks and dares you to keep that tempo afterward.
Stay tuned, because the story is only halfway told.
