Valery Lebedz about past, present and future of Salesforce at WaveOC
WaveOC. How did you come up with such an idea? Why Salesforce?
This is actually a very funny story. It all started when I was 19. I was a choreographer in one of top dance schools in Minsk. Every day I spent around 10 to 12 hrs dancing without any weekends and I loved that. In parallel I was studying programming in the tech college called Minsk Higher State Radio Tech College.
To be honest I barely attended the college since most of my time I spent dancing. And I thought I will be doing this forever. But eventually it didn’t work out(thank God!). This school had some financial problems and at some point I decided to do something different and new to me. I had a lot of ambitions but not that much knowledge so I applied for multiple jobs, sending applications to be a junior developer. I didn’t really care much what I was to do on a daily basis and what language to use as long as I could get some real-life experience.
That time I received so many rejections that I got heavily demotivated and was thinking that I will have to continue my study and try again in a year or so. But in a couple days surprisingly I received an email! The email was saying that my application to the position of a Junior Developer was accepted. It was a small local company that did Salesforce implementations for customers across the globe. I can’t even express how happy I was about that!
It’s been almost 9 years since then. I am still doing Salesforce but now I got my own company and team. Same passion that motivated me 9 years ago remains in my veins. I just can’t imagine a better place to be and better thing to do.
What are your highlights of 2017?
This was a fantastic year for us. Even though we had our ups and downs as many other companies. It helped us to improve our mindsets, overcome many issues and grow a healthy corporate culture that became a basement of our success.
We started an internal business incubator for the developers within our team and the incubator has already successfully released an app that has a potential of growing to millions of users in audience. We signed a huge deal with $20B enterprise company from the automotive industry.
We decided to change our mission and our vision and where we would like to be in 10 years from now. And as a result of our global rethink and reinvention, we are going to start actively contributing to open source community, building free applications that will help users across all over the world and help non-profits across the globe to succeed with their hard work.
What is your 2018 main theme? A word, or a phrase which would indicate the entire year direction for you and WaveOC ?
A. contribution to the humanity
B. happiness
What do you love about WaveOC?
Corporate culture, team and customers. We all are like a real big family. We don’t have any barriers thanks to respect and huge trust we have in one another.
Healthy relationship with others is something that makes you happy when you wake up or when you go to your office or join a meeting with someone. Transparency and trust are the core things that we value the most at WaveOC and that I love about all of us.
Your advice (business, life — anything you feel you can share with others)
This may sound strange, but make sure you really love what you are doing and it makes you happy. Don’t try to copy someone else’s behavior, we all are so unique for a reason and as long as you have passion to what you are doing, you will always succeed, you will do the right thing, you will never give up and the World will be on your side with every decision you make.
Never be afraid to start or do something because when the time passes we only regret about the things we haven’t done and not the things we did. Good luck and may the Force be with you!
Join us on the way to new results! Visit our website www.waveoc.com and our linkedin page
