Silicon Valley has for years been a dreamland for science and tech enthusiasts—a utopian land of invention and innovation where new small building blocks and micro breakthroughs add up to a fundamental shift in the way we explore and experience the world.
The technical interactions taking place in this rich and vibrant environment feed the engine of research and development, propelling advancements that fuel our unrelenting pursuit of a more fulfilling life at an amazing pace.
The disruptors born or raised in Silicon Valley have charted new paths to enrich our collective technological riches, while elevating the reputation of the largest and most enduring locus of entrepreneurship as the most attractive entry point for startups from around the world.
Even the recent exodus of a string of high-profile tech investors and executives from the Bay Area and its dark side is unlikely to alter the image we have of this powerhouse of idea creation.
But in the midst of the heated competition to land in Silicon Valley, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this tech magnet is more than a place.
“Silicon Valley is not a location. It is a mindset.”
Alex Circei, CEO of Waydev
“Silicon Valley is not a location. It is a mindset,” Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder at San Francisco-based Waydev, a Git analytics platform for engineering productivity, told StartupBeat in an interview.
Having moved from Europe to Silicon Valley in 2013, Circei has experienced first hand that the highly coveted tech hub is the embodiment of an idea.
The Romanian entrepreneur started working on an e-commerce platform in 2007, and it took him three years to develop and launch an award-winning product in his home country under the name Live2c.
This early success ignited his passion for further product development pursuits and planted the seeds of desire to go global and solve more critical problems in his heart and mind.
In 2011, he was accepted into UK-based Oxygen Accelerator, one of the first tech business accelerators in Europe, where he co-founded an e-commerce marketplace called StoreBeez.
Circei, who has an academic background in economics, marketing, organizational leadership, and entrepreneurship, decided to move to Silicon Valley in 2013 as “the startup environment was not much evolved in Europe at the time”.
After arriving in the Bay Area, he gave life to two new projects: Lupsale, an email marketing platform, and Billme, an invoicing app for freelancers.
His latest initiative founded in 2017 is Waydev, which offers a new agile data-driven method of tracking engineers’ output without their manual input.
The platform, which has been trusted by over 300 companies across the globe, analyzes the client’s codebase from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket to help them make objective decisions that contribute to faster delivery of reliable software while driving up engineering productivity.
Circei was among the founders who realized early on that the best takeaway from the Silicon Valley experience would be the learning part.
“I wanted to live and breathe the mindset that exists in Silicon Valley and learn from the best,” he noted, adding that one feels capable of building the next Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Facebook with that mindset.
Elaborating on the characteristics of this mental make-up, he said, “You have to understand and have a passion for what you do. If you don’t love each day of work, it will be very hard to continue.”
“You can be anywhere in the world and have the Silicon Valley mindset.”
Alex Circei, CEO of Waydev
According to the CEO of Waydev, another tenet of this mentality is best evident in the motto of Y Combinator—an early stage startup accelerator that has supported the launch of companies like airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox—which reads: Make something people want.
Having the right attitude can help you achieve your vision, Circei said, adding, “You can be anywhere in the world and have the Silicon Valley mindset.”
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
