Crossing the USA by Bike to Meet the Greatest Startups!
startupcycling.co
9 months ago, I started a journey by bicycle to meet startups around the world. From Bordeaux (France) to Budapest (Hungary), I already cycled more than 8,000km through 15 different countries in Europe. You can see my exact path here.
2015 — Crossing Europe by bike + Learnings
It’s the really first time that I traveled alone for such a long period. And this journey already taught me really important lessons so far.
Most of them are actually simple and obvious. And I realized that there is a huge gap between the moment when you know about a life lesson and the moment when you actually understand and applicate it.
The first one is about accepting. Accepting your flaws. Accepting to let it go. Accepting to. Accepting to change your mind.
The second one is about finding out what you really love, and spending most of your time doing it. Before anything else. Do things that count!
My initial plan was to go all around the world in 1 year (through Europe, Asia and up to San Francisco). I had no idea about how it was to travel by bike. Which is actually a really good point. I learnt on the road. For my own good.
I changed my itinerary maybe 100 times since the beginning, and I’m glad that I stayed in Europe, taking my time, meeting really awesome and unique people, and visiting more countries than expected in this continent (15).
During this first part of the journey, I met more than 70 more startup CEO’s and slept in more than 200 different places, most of the time in my tent, sometimes at some people’s house, sometimes in totally random places.
I learnt a lot about entrepreneurship. I heard a lot of awesome inspiring stories and I wish I had been better with sharing these stories (this my main focus for the US part of the journey).
And I also practices what I learnt.
As I left home with 400€ on my bank account, I had to find ways to make some more money on the road. One of them had been to work for cool startups remotely. I made some money with creating websites, doing consulting, business development and community management.
One of my greatest experience was the Startup House Budapest project, that I co-organized with my friend Théau Ravier.
Take a huge apartment, put 15 like-minded people from the whole Europe who don’t know each other inside and make some magic happen with them during 4 weeks. It was really intense, rich and full of new learnings!
2016 — Crossing the USA by bike
As I’m living the last days in Europe, I’m getting ready to go to the USA. My flight is already booked. I’ll arrive in Miami on February 2.
This is what my planned itinerary looks like at the moment. 9,000km cycling across the continent. And it will probably change into 10,000km as I already know I’ll change my mind about some steps on the road :)
With everything I learnt during the first 9 months of this trip, I really want this part of the journey to be the most awesome thing I lived in my entire life.
I realized that when you dare to dream + when you kick your own ass off to make this dreams happen => things actually happen.
There’s no secret. No magic.
Meeting the greatest CEOs
These are the personalities I really want to meet and learn from the most in the USA. They’re actually inspiring me and millions of other people.
I’ll share the video of the meeting next to their name below:
- Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb
- Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors
- Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
- Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks
- Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin
- Reed Hasting, CEO of Netflix
- Paul Graham, Co-founder of Y Combinator
- Casey Neistat, CEO of Beme
Most of you guys who are reading this article probably heard about 80% of the people in this list.
But the startup scene is not made only by these famous CEOs.
That’s why my goal is also to meet the really new great startups that no one knows yet in Europe to share their story and what they do.
Achieving new goals
It’s amazing how things can change really fast when you set goals and dive into them. The biggest barrier is always in your mind.
You don’t need to be outstanding to achieve outstanding things.
You just have to decide to do outstanding things, and go fucking do it.
And then, you may become outstanding. Or not. Who cares.
So this is what I want to achieve when I’ll be in USA:
- Cycle 10,000km and cross the continent from east to west
- Meet all the inspiring personalities & more on the list above
- Learn awesome video skills and manage a vlog during the trip
- Attend to a TED Talks as a speaker
- Keep writing and sharing content to give back and inspire people
These are the main rules I followed in Europe and will continue to follow there:
- Don’t spend money in hosting. This is the best way so far to meet local people and learn from them or to live on your own in the nature and face yourself to learn more about you.
- Don’t ask for anything but water or the permission to pitch your tent somewhere.
- Give something back. Every time you have the opportunity to do it. Whether it’s by sharing a story, your knowledge or a meal.
If you like my story and want to help me to achieve any of these goals, feel free to get in touch with me.
You can also just click on the ❤ below to recommend this article!
USA, here I am! First step, February 2: Miami
This article is the first in a serie of seven articles I’m writing during the Hell Week. A week in which I wake up at 6am, write one article and publish one video per day. Learn more about this challenge here!
