Doru Borșan

After the Revolution, I wanted to reach France, chasing a girl I'd fallen for at a volleyball camp in Olimp. Instead I boarded the wrong train and ended up in Trento, northern Italy, with $380 in my pocket and no plan at all. I slept five nights on a bench in Parco Dante. A Serbian man challenged me to a chess match for that bench, and I won. For nearly two years I had no name. I was just 'il rumeno,' a word that told the world Romanians were nobody. I promised myself that if I ever had the power to change that perception, I would.

I spent five years working in prestigious Italian restaurants, learning everything there was to learn about business and people. When I came back to Romania, I started with coffee imports and grew the business past 20 tons a month before I turned 24. Then I opened Club Jo, the biggest nightclub in Mureș County, with room for 1,500 people and over a million customers over the years. In 2005 I transformed it into a hotel, pivoted into real estate, and never once went back to a bank since.

Today I'm developing 1,500 apartments through a €150M project, Rua Home Invest. Twelve years ago I pioneered 3D city scanning through SmartCity®, Romania's first initiative of its kind, scanning cities across more than 10 countries, from Berlin and Vienna to New York and Miami, building one of the largest 3D databases of European cities. I carried that forward through Smart Cities Technologies SE, based in Munich with €15M in social capital, and through NeoTech, an AI-powered 3D scanning platform I co-founded with Christian Meier.

That work earned me CEO of the Year 2018 at the Smart City Industry Awards and the Best Technology award at the Royal Summit in Dubai, presented by His Excellency Sheikh Abdulaziz Bin Duaji Bin Khalifa Al Khalifa. I was also the only Romanian speaker at NFT Show Europe, Valencia.

Beyond technology, I also own 25 hectares of logistics land at Transilvania Airport, a 130-hectare agricultural farm, the largest gravel pit in Transylvania, and Argila Albastră Raciu, a natural treasure certified for cosmetic and therapeutic use, sold in pharmacies across the country. I founded MS News, the regional news agency, and host the 'Story of Life' podcast, with millions of views and guests like Prince Dimitrie Sturdza and President Emil Constantinescu.

I organized three major business events under the Transylvania Summit name, the last one evolving into a full Web3 summit with high-profile speakers, public figures, and state representatives, alongside an academic partnership with the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. Over 30 years of activity, more than 10 companies founded, all self-funded, no banks, with a clean record very few people at my level could still claim today.

But my real story isn't about business. At 33, an elderly woman from the village took my hand and told me plainly: 'My horse was stolen, let's go buy another one.' I bought the horse, gave it to her, and in that moment I discovered what kindness actually meant. Before that, I had lived like a lone wolf. I've repeated it every day since: 'Sa fi bun este gratis.' I founded the RUA Association ('Românii Uniți Acasă'), a growing network of volunteers working daily for a better Romania. And more important than any number in this text, I am the father of four children I love without limit, they are the real reason I build everything I build. There is only one path: goodness, dignity, unity. This is who I am.