In the beginning of November I made a trip to the city that never sleeps, New York. I decided to share my thoughts about the differences between my country and this big city.
In NY, there is a culture of “image selling”. They always try to negotiate something, for instance, I found an homeless guy who negotiated with me, the amount of money I should give to him, because he helped me with the ticket to the airport.
NY is the capitalism capitol. Every service is private, and the public ones are very expensive. I talked to a girl in Wall Street that payed 40 000 dollares for a college degree! So, who has the money, has the education. The city of NY is very multi-cultural. A sign of it, is that some of the publicity that is shown are in spanish, because of the increasing people coming from South America.
The majority of the people that I have met in NY, are not americans, but immigrants looking for a better life.
The trip showed me that Europe is the zone of the world where the level of education is higher, but from my point of view and seeing my country, Portugal, we are not very entrepreneurs to create our own company. In the USA we see a lot of people that doesn’t have access to a college education, but still create successful companies. There are some private Universities like Stanford and Berkeley that gives for free, online courses, for instance: http://www.venture-class.org.
The difference between the rich and the poor in NY is very high. I watched a lot of homeless people in subway stations asking for food. This is really disturbing because some of them, don’t ask for money, but for food. That happens in Europe too, but not in that much quantity.
Conclusion
NY city is one of the best places to launch a business. One of the reasons is that we can do everything. If you have an interest in something, you will certainly find the group of people in the city that does it. There is a show called How to make it in America that happens in NY and show how entrepreneurship and persistence are very important in today’s market.
We should learn more about the entrepreneurship model of the USA, where they instigate people from the faculties to launch a business. In Portugal, there are a lot of improvements in that area. We have a lot of entrepreneurship events like Startup Weekend, Startup Pirates, SwitchConf, etc.
If I will return to NY? Off course!
