DISPATCH NO. 3 Temporary Homemaking

I. DECLARED

Nobody tells you that home is something you do, not somewhere you go. I figured this out not in Manila, not in Miami, but in the middle of a week that looked like a schedule, and felt like a search.

I have been asked, more times than I can count, where I’m from. The honest answer? Well, that changes depending on the day, the direction of the flight, what I had for breakfast and who I had it with. This week the answer was: a corner table at CUT, three times over. A microphone in a recording studio on 37th Street. A circle of women founders in Brooklyn who looked at me across fifteen minutes like I might have the words they needed, and I sat there thinking —

I am still looking for those words myself.

Home, I’m starting to think, is not a place you return to. It’s a practice you carry with you, like a boarding pass you keep folding and unfolding to make sure it’s still there.

This issue is about home. Which means it is about distance. Which means it is, finally, about the places we construct out of a restaurant booth, a mentor’s chair, a theater seat, a recording booth, a shop you weren’t supposed to find — all the rooms that are never quite ours and somehow, briefly, completely are.

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II. IN TRANSIT — THE MAUDE LABS ACTIVATION

The thing about bringing your team somewhere is that the city stops being yours alone. The Maude Labs team arrived in New York for a week that was equal parts activation and initiation. We had an event to anchor: Loading Future State. They took care of the event design and logistics (and got quite an impressive number of leads with their free brand audit during the show). I spoke at a panel that discussed money, where I encouraged the audience to “buy the bag and book the trip,”

What you don’t know? Well, there were about a hundred things that hadn’t been formally agreed upon yet. That’s the part nobody photographs.

What they do photograph: the energy in the room when something you built is actually running. When the people who know every draft, every pivot, every three a.m. message finally get to see the thing standing up. You don’t really know your team until you’ve worked an activation across the globe together, when someone has to make a decision in real time with incomplete information and there’s no Slack thread to hide behind. That’s when you find out what you actually have.

We had something good. We have something good. That, too, is a kind of home.

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III. DUTIABLE — THE TORY BURCH FOUNDERS CIRCLE

I had the privilege of taking a peek at the Tory Burch Foundation Founders Circle. Advisor 1:1s in the late afternoon, a welcome party at Westlight, a curated dinner at Leuca overlooking the water. I was there as a mentor — which is, I’ve come to understand, a generous way of saying: someone who has lived and made enough mistakes that they’re now quite useful.

What I didn’t expect, as I always don’t expect: how much I would receive. Fifteen-minute windows with founders who arrived prepared, specific, hungry — not for validation but for friction. They wanted someone to push back. I obliged. And somewhere in that pushing, I found myself examining things I’d long stopped questioning about my own practice. The way I think about risk. The way I talk about capital. The assumptions I’ve built whole frameworks around without ever writing them down.

The mentor’s chair, it turns out, is not elevated. It just has a different angle of view.

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IV. CUSTOMS — WHAT AI IS BUILDING FOR BELONGING

The founders I keep coming back to are the ones building for belonging. Not community as a feature, but, rather, community as the whole point.

At the Tory Burch Foundation Founders Circle, I discovered a few of them.

A laundry service called Juliette that removes one of the most tedious friction points of urban life and somehow makes you feel cared for in the process.

The Authentic Asian, which is doing something important around representation and food and cultural identity.

Silk or Lace, high-end wigs that are really about self-determination — the right to decide who you look like on any given day.

And here’s the thing — we now have a tool that allows non-technical founders to create something tech-enabled and potentially scalable. AI has given us accessibility and speed of build to solve for something emotional. Something that, even just two years ago, would have required either enormous capital or enormous luck to reach the people who needed it most.

There’s a version of this conversation happening in every pitch room right now, and I find it genuinely interesting: AI has made it almost frictionless to build. The barrier between idea and product has collapsed. Which means the question is no longer can you build it — it’s should you, and more importantly, what is it actually for.

The most interesting thing you can build right now isn’t a product. It’s a feeling. And the founders who understand that are the ones I’m watching.

Which leads to the question I keep turning over: what can you build with AI that makes someone feel more at home? Not at home in the decorative sense. At home in the sense of: seen, handled, at ease. Less alone in the logistics of being a person in the world.

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V. DISCOVERY — 69 ATLANTIC & THE ART OF THE DETOUR

Before the chaos of New York Tech Week, My Man and I walked into a curiosity shop in Brooklyn called the Art of Play. It had the particular energy of a place that knows exactly what it is — shelves of strange beautiful things, the kind of shop that rewards slow looking. I was not walking slowly. I was, as I often am in New York, moving between coordinates.

Then someone opened a shelf. And behind that shelf was something I did not expect — something that made me stop, made me smile, made me wonder. It was an intimate venue for magic shows, a regular thing for us to do as a couple, wherever we may go in the world. We were expecting a cute little theater when we booked our tickets. What we got instead was a half hour of play, of solving puzzles, and of finding cool knicknacks we could possibly bring home.

What I will say is that the best discoveries are the ones you stumble into mid-transit, when you weren’t looking for anything in particular. When you were, technically, on your way somewhere else.

That shop became my favorite half hour of the week. Not because of what was inside it. Because of what it reminded me: that a city is not a map. It is a series of thresholds, and most of them are unmarked, and the ones worth crossing are the ones you find by accident.

Discovery is not what you plan for. It’s what interrupts you.

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VI. THE CONTRABAND — WHAT I ACTUALLY PACK

People ask about this more than almost anything else. Not what I invest in, not what I read — what’s in my bag. So here, without ceremony: the things that make a week like this one survivable. The infrastructure of feeling at home when you’re not.

Great skincare. My favorites include Keracell’s Vitamin C Serum, Agustinus Bader’s The Cream, and a bottle of Shiseido Sunblock. But truthfully? Buy the best skincare you can afford; the investment is worth it.

Supplements. I’m not evangelical about them, but I do have a few consistent ones in my arsenal: AG1 for overall energy and gut health; Magnesium Glycinate (currently trying out AGZ) to adjust to timezones better; and

Dual voltage thermal brush. The only hair tool that travels with me everywhere. One tool, any country, no adapter anxiety.

Dual voltage handheld steamer. Because checking a bag for a wrinkled silk blouse is not a personality trait I’m willing to adopt.

The usual stuff. These include a universal adapter, earphones, compression socks, and a shawl.

These are not glamorous. They are functional. But function, when you’re moving through seventeen countries a year, is its own kind of luxury.

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VII. CLEARED — LANDING

Here is what I know about home, at the end of a week like this one: it is not a fixed address. It is a set of conditions you learn to recreate, imperfectly, in whatever room you find yourself in. A team around a table who knows the work. A founder across from you who makes you think harder than you expected. A door at the back of a shop that opens onto something wonderful. A stage full of women refusing their assigned endings.

I came to New York. I landed from Dublin, with my fiancé. I met with my team. I sat with founders. I judged pitches. I recorded podcasts and went to the theater and ate at the same restaurant three times because sometimes a familiar table is the closest thing to an anchor when everything else is moving.

I leave with something I can’t quite name yet. A feeling of having been exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was made to do, in a city that belongs to no one and temporarily to everyone. That is not nothing. In fact, I think that might be everything.

Home is not the place you leave from.

It’s the feeling you’re trying to get back to.

And some weeks, against all logic, you find it in transit.

Nothing to Declare is published when there is something worth saying. If this found you at the right moment, forward it to someone who needed to read it.

— Erika

Manila · Miami · Everywhere in between