# The gap year (2023)

> After graduating from the master's in spring 2023, Massimo took a gap year to work full-time on Omnia with Luca — setting a 31 December 2023 deadline to decide whether to turn it into a company, and spending the year building infrastructure for Neom's cognitive city and for the Internet Computer.

- Canonical URL: [https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2023_gap-year](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2023_gap-year)
- Site index: [https://massimo.context-use.com/llms.txt](https://massimo.context-use.com/llms.txt)
- Last edited: 2026-07-26T11:07:00.196Z

I graduated from [my master's](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2020-2024_zurich/2022-2023_master-thesis-at-disco) around March/April 2023. Contrary to my bachelor's [three years of darkness](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/chapters/2017-2020_politecnico/story#away-from-practice), during my master's I managed to work on countless projects with my friend Luca *[link to come]* under the umbrella term ["Omnia"](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/intro). Still, the time I could dedicate to them was constrained by the many lectures, exams, internship, and thesis. Once I graduated, I finally decided to take a gap year to work full time on Omnia with Luca.

### The deadline

We set ourselves an artificial deadline of 31 December 2023 to ensure some accountability over what we were doing. We had no expectation of turning Omnia into a startup — we were thinking a lot more about building "cool stuff" than a "great business" — but we set a meeting for the last day of 2023 to decide whether we would turn Omnia into a proper company or stop working on our projects and start looking for the next thing.

During most of 2023 we built (or tried to build) the infrastructure for [Neom's cognitive city](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2023_neom-cognitive-city/story), and [a bunch of infrastructure for the Internet Computer](https://massimo.context-use.com/p/about/projects/2020-2024_omnia/2023_internet-computer-infrastructure/story) that the developer community had been requesting.