Building a Startup Outside Silicon Valley: What I Learned Founding and Scaling Direlli

Where Direlli started

In 2021 I co-founded Direlli in Yerevan, Armenia. Not a satellite office of something bigger, not a team inside an accelerator — a company, with clients, payroll, and the ordinary pressure of making it work.

I had not planned to be a founder. I had been building software professionally for several years, working on increasingly serious systems, and I had reached the point where I understood the work well enough to know I wanted to own the outcome. That is a different ambition from wanting to work on interesting problems. Ownership means you are responsible when things break, not just credited when they ship.

Armenia is not a typical place to start a tech company. The local market is small. The investor community is thin. The name 'Yerevan' does not carry the shorthand of 'Y Combinator' or 'South Park' in San Francisco. I knew this. I started anyway.

What the Silicon Valley playbook gets wrong for everyone else

The startup advice that dominates the internet was written in and for a specific context: California in the 2010s, when money was cheap, talent was concentrated, and the social infrastructure of tech — warm intros, demo days, angel dinners — was operating at full speed. Most of that advice does not port cleanly to somewhere else.

The most common failure mode I see in founders building outside major hubs is spending energy trying to simulate the Silicon Valley context instead of taking advantage of the actual context they are in. They optimise for a Techcrunch mention when they have no US distribution channel. They raise a round before they have a product worth funding because they read that fundraising is the job. They hire fast because they have been told that speed is everything, and end up with a team that does not share the founding conviction.

The useful insight — which I had to learn by doing rather than reading — is that most of the Silicon Valley advice is about solving Silicon Valley problems. If your problems are different, you need different solutions.

The real advantages of building somewhere else

Lower cost is the obvious one. Running a team in Yerevan is materially cheaper than running the same team in San Francisco. That is not a moral claim — it is arithmetic. Lower burn means a longer runway with less capital, which means more time to find product-market fit before you run out of money. That time advantage is not small.

The less obvious advantage is hiring quality. In a market without many large tech companies, the engineers who want to build something real have fewer distractions. There are fewer recruiters, fewer competing offers, fewer reasons to leave for something shinier next quarter. The engineers who joined Direlli early did so because they believed in what we were building. That belief is harder to manufacture in a city where your competitor is also hiring and offers more liquidity.

The third advantage is discipline. When you cannot rely on a strong local market or easy fundraising, you are forced to build something customers actually want to pay for. That discipline — earning revenue from real customers before you can afford to optimise the pitch deck — produces better companies. The constraint is the training.

What is genuinely harder

I do not want to make this sound simpler than it is. Some things are genuinely harder outside the major hubs, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.

The first is credibility. In a place with thick networks, you borrow trust from the people who introduced you. In a place without those networks, you build trust from scratch, on every call, with every client, with every new hire. That takes longer and requires more proof. The bar for a warm intro in San Francisco is a coffee. The bar for a cold email from Yerevan is a track record.

The second is access to capital. Most institutional early-stage capital still gravitates toward the US, and most US VCs have a strong preference for companies they can drive to. Remote-first investing has improved this, but the default is still biased. You can work around it — angels, revenue, strategic partners — but you have to work around it deliberately, not assume the normal path applies.

The third is isolation. There is no equivalent of walking into a co-working space and running into someone who solved the problem you are stuck on last month. You have to build that network intentionally, online, over years, before you need it. The founders I see struggle most outside major hubs are the ones who are building in genuine isolation and do not realise it until a solvable problem has become a crisis.

What actually matters

Two years in, Direlli had more than 20 engineers, real clients, and a product that worked. I moved to Barcelona in 2023 on an EU Blue Card and continued building from there. The geography changed; the fundamentals did not.

What determined the outcome at Direlli was not the address. It was whether we were solving a real problem for people who would pay for the solution, whether we hired for character and conviction before credentials, and whether we maintained quality standards when it would have been faster to lower them.

Those things are not specific to Silicon Valley. They are not even specific to tech. They are the basics of building something people want, done with enough discipline to still be standing when the market gives you the chance to grow.

My honest advice to any founder building outside a major hub: stop treating the geography as the problem. Treat it as one constraint among several, engineer around it specifically, and spend the rest of your energy on the things that actually determine whether the company works.