TED Community » Carmen Elena Oprea

About Me

I am a Romanian born in a beautiful mountain city in the west part of Romania in 1986. At 19, I transferred to university in Bucharest. Studied Business Administration and on the way got very passionate about entrepreneurship and psychology.

At 20, I started volunteering with AIESEC, the world's largest student-run organization for youth leadership development and I got hooked on youth development and the issues facing my generation. In my three years with AIESEC (some of my best years ever) I started and run a number of successful national and international projects supporting young people. And that is how my curiosity for understanding the world and making a positive impact started.

After that, I co-founded my first company and NGO. We were passionate, hard working and creative, interested in innovative projects, events and media initiatives. We were among the first global licensee for TEDx events and that is how the TEDxBucharest adventure started. Two years later, we had organized 10 events and managed to outgrow our most ambitious dreams when in 2010 we had 800 people attend our TEDx event. We were humbled to be named the best event of the year and have the team featured in national media as positive models for generation Y (we were the youngest of TEDx organizers in Europe at that time).

My next step took me to United Arab Emirates where I joined Humantelligence, a pioneering and innovative company that builds social technologies to enable people to work more effectively together, combining over 25 years of proven behavioral science with web-based software. With the team, my learning and capability in the field of psychology, technology, people at work and scaling a small business grew exponentially.

As a small business professional, my heart has always been for small business. This is why, I have also put my passion and energy organizing the first TEDxAbuDhabi event and now in preparing to launch a new project, Al Makan.ae, a travel website for the Middle East Region. Having lived in the UAE and Chile in the last two years, also helped me develop a greater cultural understanding and passion for travel. Each experience has helped me explore the many worlds of joy, and I cannot wait to see what's next.