What brought us back to San Francisco?
After over a year of building a software product between Spain and Russia, we recently moved back to San Francisco.
Our startup Wavyn, a fast-growing collision avoidance mobile app with thousands of drivers all over the world, can operate from anywhere. However, we were dazzled again by Silicon Valley’s unique entrepreneurship lifestyle.
These are the four reasons why we chose San Francisco to grow our startup rather than any other city in the U.S. or Europe:
To dream big is forced
Since I arrived in 2011, most of the people I have met in Silicon Valley are not afraid to think big. They can inspire and challenge each other continuously. If you can’t quickly come up with a few ideas about how to make your product grow 10, 100 or 1000 times you probably are thinking too small. If you are an overachiever, you will love the stimulus and play this game.
“Coopetition” is the secret sauce
Successful entrepreneurs, investors and even competitors in the area generously offer up their time to advise budding startups. If our real competitor is the status quo, why not help each other make things better. After all, we are very passionate about our work and spend precious time solving the same world challenges.
Risk-taking and resilience is admired
In the Bay Area, there is such a level of commitment to success, that it is hard to fail. Either you succeed or you learn how to succeed. That’s why most entrepreneurs invest — positive return is always guaranteed. It’s pretty much like investing in college education: in the long run, the experience will provide a strong network and enrich your life and career, no matter what.
We left our heart in San Francisco
During our time in Europe, I learned that every city or country has its personality and promotes different types of lifestyles depending on its historical big bets, priorities or just inertia. In our case, the decision was clear: entrepreneurship is our lifestyle and the largest concentration of tech startups in the world is in Silicon Valley. Sometimes we don’t know if we live our lives as a startup, or we build our startup as our lives.
W e are passionate about dreaming big and working together to build technology that makes other peoples’ lives safer, easier and more fun. We are not afraid to start over again because we enjoy the process. We love to be pushed and this is a place to learn and grow as we are life-learners. It was great to disconnect for a while because we gained a tremendous and valuable life experience by living out of our comfort zone. We brought back with us new perspectives that we are now sharing with friends and colleagues and fully charged our batteries for the next big thing. We are back!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
