How Tomide Adesanmi, CEO and Co-Founder of Circuit Mind, Is Enabling Everyone to Be an Inventor
As someone excited by challenging problems, Tomide Adesanmi began his career at BAE Systems, developing display systems for jet fighter pilots. While building solutions to these complex, time and capital-intensive IoT problems, Tomide realized there had to be a more efficient solution, and founded Circuit Mind. At Circuit Mind, Tomide and his co-founder Basilio Gentile have built a novel software that can turn hardware architecture into a circuit board schematic in seconds.
We had the chance to speak with Tomide about his entrepreneurial upbringing, the culture cultivating at Circuit Mind, and his vision for the company’s future. For more information on open roles at Circuit Mind, visit their job board here.
What was it like for you growing up and going to college, and how did your professional journey lead you to start Circuit Mind?
I was raised in an entrepreneurial environment: my parents have always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit and I grew up in the hustling, bustling city of Nigeria. It was in those conditions that I learned how to find opportunities others couldn’t realize. In 2009, I moved to the United Kingdom to study electronics engineering – I had always been fascinated by mass physics and other technical subjects, so it was a natural fit for me.
After I graduated from the University of Leeds, I started working at BAE Systems. I spent five years there as an electronic systems engineer, developing high-integrity, augmented-reality display systems for jet fighter pilots. When I left BAE Systems, I was leading a project focused on a new type of head-worn augmented reality for soldiers. Many projects and people have contributed to my love for complex challenges throughout the phases of my life: BAE Systems, my entrepreneurial family, and the fast-growing country I call home.
Could you speak a little more about the background of your entrepreneurial family and how that inspired you?
Growing up, my parents both had full-time jobs as well as two or three side conquests at any given time. From being a tailor to selling popcorn to even starting a new venture with the state government, my parents were always hustling. We went through a lot as a family; but my upbringing made taking risks and building things from ground zero feel natural – I’ve always been comfortable starting something from scratch.
Vueport was one of my first entrepreneurial exploits, though I was tangentially working on a few other projects. Vueport was a mobile application that allowed users to request and find short videos by searching geographically; it was really the first project where we actually formed a team and spoke to potential angel investors; we had an app and were adding users.
What were your biggest takeaways from your time at Vueport, and the various opportunities you had before going into Circuit Mind?
I can break my takeaways into two categories: the positive and the negative.
In terms of the positive, I learned that when you see an opportunity that you feel passionate about, to go and do it; I learned the importance of finding co-founders and hiring founding members that you respect, admire, and are productive alongside.
And then there are the “negatives” – which, more aptly, were lessons that negatively affected me while at Vueport, but were later positive. At Vueport, I cared a lot about distribution. I was extremely passionate about the specific vision that I wanted to bring to market, and ignored opportunities to gain distribution and virality. Some competitors didn't, and they got acquired or were extremely successful even though we had virtually the same tool – the only difference was that I was too set in my vision.
After getting the experiences and the knowledge, what was the thing that opened your eyes to the opportunity of Circuit Mind?
I've always loved challenging problems – that's my modus operandi. Building at BAE Systems exposed me to the process of developing and designing very complex, high-integrity electronic systems end-to-end; and it wasn’t pretty. It could take up to four years and $20 million to go from concept to a full electronic system. Now, that's the extreme end of it because the products I was designing were safety-critical electronics. Nonetheless, if you're building an IoT system, it will take you at least three to six months to develop.
I saw this problem firsthand; I was steeped in it; I became familiar with it over my professional career in this industry. In this problem, however, I saw an opportunity – I knew that there was a better way and I knew I could combine my electronics industry experience with my software experience to build a solution. So, I left BAE systems in search of general solutions to this problem. It was around this time when I met my co-founder Basilio, who had a deep algorithms experience that I knew would pair well with my electronics experience. Together, we began the journey to create algorithms for electronics and hardware.
What’s the dynamic like between you and your co-founder, and how has it evolved as your business continues to grow?
Basilio and I are business partners, but we are also close friends – that's important. There are two key things that are important architecturally when starting a company. First, it’s important that all founding members have the same goals and values. Second, you have to leave your ego at the door. Things like your frameworks for solving problems will fall into place based on those two ideas.
When we started, we both wanted to work on complex problems. For example, Basilio and I would never want to build a company like Slack even though it’s a great tool, but it does not fulfill our desire to work on deeply complex, technical problems – again, both of us wanted to solve complex problems. We were also aligned in terms of our commitment: we were both ready to work for the next decade together. Finally, we both cared more about the impact than the financial returns – even if we still want to build a multibillion-dollar company!
Could you speak to the culture you've been trying to cultivate at Circuit Mind?
If you’re spending 10 hours a day with a group of people, you need to find a balance between being productive and having fun and being productive – we think a lot about friendliness when hiring new team members. Ultimately, we want to form bonds with other members of the Circuit Mind team that extend beyond daily work; I can go have a beer with my coworkers or talk about things that matter to them.
We also prioritize expertise in our team. So far, we have only hired very, very senior people. My former boss Gary Chambers, who spent more than 15 years developing high-integrity displays at BAE Systems, joined us; almost all of our lead software engineers were former heads of development or principals at larger companies; our senior algorithm engineer is a former professor from McGill. Expertise is something we don't compromise on. One thing that everybody can enjoy at Circuit Mind is working with people that can teach them something new. As well, we want our experts to be open to continuous learning – we are still trying to improve, and we want our team members to always be open to change and new ideas.
Finally, we also want people who are committed. We’re laying down the foundations of what we know will be a long-lasting company. Everybody here is trying to build something impactful at an early-stage company, and they want to know that they’re in it with other individuals who care a lot about the progress and success of the company.
What has been your deployment and GTM plan at Circuit Mind?
There's the ideal customer, there's the ideal user, there's the kind of motion, top-down, bottom-up, etc. And then there are other things like the pricing model and so on, and maybe key partners too.
One thing we’ve found is across industries, there's a need for what we’re building. So, the process of discovering our initial ideal customer has been more dependent on finding specific customers in each industry whose core hair-on-fire problems are fulfilled by our product, as it stands today.
In terms of which company types have this “hair-on-fire” problem, we've narrowed it down to companies like product development firms, industrial electronics companies, and consumer electronics companies. The other side of that – aerospace defense or the medical field – is not the right fit for us now.
For example, here is one specific use case: a product development firm has three electronics engineers. The business is cyclical, so sometimes they have zero products they need to develop and sometimes they have ten; their three engineers can work on about five developments at one time. The owner of the product development firm doesn’t want to increase their engineer count because when there are zero designs to develop, the firm’s margins will plummet. So, they have become one of our customers – they use our platform and are able to scale their capacity whenever they want. Customers are able to grow or shrink their capacity using the power of our platform based on their inbound requests. That is Circuit Mind’s ideal customer.
Ideal users are usually early to mid-level electronics engineers or embedded software engineers that use circuit design. These are people that take joy from their jobs, but want and need time to focus on more important tasks in their design process. In terms of signing a company, we believe it’s best to have a multi-level strategy. However, it’s incredibly important to have a champion, who is someone that strongly believes in your value proposition and will advocate for you. While there are many individuals that have to buy into your ideas, it’s more efficient to find a champion, as opposed to selling your product to everyone in the company. Finding the ideal users in your target companies is an important step that cannot be skipped.
What does a perfect future for Circuit Mind look like five years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years from now?
10 years from now, we want the 15-year-old girl in southern Togo to be able to go onto a computer, write in the input specs for a mission computer for a spaceship, click a button, and get it sent back to her the next day. That's the dream. Everybody becomes an inventor. We want Circuit Mind to become a cockpit for creating the inventions of the future; for making progress for mankind. While there are still many things to be built until we get there, that perfect future is not far away.
