Rafał Plutecki:The Catalyst of Startup Success (S2 Ep8)

RICHARD LUCAS:
Good afternoon welcome Project Kazimierz listeners from Cracow and also we’re in two locations today.

SAM COOK:
And today we have a very special guest, Richard as tradition; I’m going to let you introduce Rafał. It’s actually someone you’re just saying before the show, you haven’t actually met but you both been in Poland for a long time in different cities doing a lot of great things, so we’re here with the head of Google Campus Warsaw. So Richard go ahead and introduce him.

RICHARD:
As you said I’m always a networker, so I’m happy to introduce people I don’t know. Basically Rafał has a key role in the pro entrepreneurship start-up ecosystem here
in Central Europe leading Campus Warsaw but if you look at his previous career, he is one of these people who isn’t like a professional ecosystem support person, he may be now but in the past he was a highly successful entrepreneur in Internet Service Providers and insurance company and an investment fund as well as a job sport or so. But I think itis perhaps better for Rafał to introduce himself, rather than me and get it right rather me get it the wrong. Rafał could you just tell the listeners a little bit about yourself that I haven’t covered just now?

RAFAŁ PLUTECKI:
Hello everyone, Rafał Plutecki, head of Campus Warsaw. I am very happy to be with you all. In a general term yes I have been a serial entrepreneur, for most of my professional life and… technology and the Internet was at the heart of what I have been doing and actually my first project was still back in nineteen nineties. It was nineteen ninety-three when the Internet, still without the graphical browser, started to appear. I set up one of the first Internet companies in Poland – Internet Technologies. We were providing internet access that was dial-up access to corporate customers mainly but also consumers all over Poland. That was my start when Google was still not there and many other companies were not there and actually Netscape just launched their graphical browser which gave the Internet the completely new look.

RICHARD:
I first came to Poland in ’89 and went into business here in ’91. I stopped working for other people then. What about your earlier career? Your CV shows that you studied in France, in Delaware and Harvard Business School so you’re obviously pretty educated in the West but what was your experience of education in Poland? Did you have a classic Polish education in the nineteen eighties? How did that work?

RAFAŁ:
Yeah I lived in Poland until I was 18 and that was the last year of the communism and I decided that I am too ambitious for the communist times and I decided to go somewhere else. I was living in West Berlin, this is the place that doesn’t exist anymore, it was really fun place and then Paris and then the United States Delaware. I have studied business administration, international finance but also computer science in my early days and when I was at the University of Delaware, one day the professor of the business administration said “students tomorrow I’m going to send you by email for the first time your homework” that was 1991. It was very surprising for me to learn that I’m going to get homework via an email and obviously my first experience was just outstanding. I spent, I think, around 48 hours non-stop browsing the… still the text version of the Internet – various CompuServe, America Online and the University resources of the Internet at that time. I realized that this is my future, so after this inspiration, Poland open up to the democracy and the liberal economy started there was a huge start of the entrepreneurship in Poland’s and I went back to Poland. I had a very short three-month job at the Polish development bank but the Internet was something that I was looking for. This is what happened I met people, that were IT juniors and we decided that it’s time to build Internet access provider in Poland. This is exactly how it started, we have a lot funny anecdotes and also very interesting stories about that, but this is actually where I started. I started to connect companies across Poland to the Internet.

RICHARD:
When you came to be doing business in Poland around the same time, although obviously you had the Polish childhood, I used to think my dissertation at the Cambridge University was about black markets and communist economies and why they were so pervasive and I felt that a lot of Westerns got Poland wrong because there was a lot of entrepreneurship. The communist system turned people into entrepreneurs, it didn’t stop people from being entrepreneurs and I’m interested to know your perspective on this, because you were too ambitious, so you left. But did you feel when you were 18 and leaving Poland that, like a lot of Polish people, were frustrated business people who wanted to be business people or do you think that the other view, that the communist system destroyed entrepreneurship. Because I hear lots of different opinions and I wonder what you think.

RAFAŁ
For me an entrepreneur is a person that wants to change his life. He’s really for better, because he’s not satisfied with his status quo and in the early nineties opportunities opened up and many people just decided that to try. There are no big competitors, there are no niches that are taken by big companies and let’s try to build something. I think a lot of people went into the business, not just because it was an opportunity but also because there was no other way to make a living or it was let’s say the alternatives were very poor.

RICHARD:
Yes, but I’m thinking more about the impact of the pre-’89 system on the business culture, because I felt that in a way people had to be quite enterprising to survive under communism, when the system doesn’t work teaches creativity and I wonder whether you agree with that or, looking back not like in the 90’s with hindsight the opportunities were there, although I can tell you a lot of my friends from the UK felt that I was completely crazy to move to Poland as a lot of Polish people thought I was completely crazy to move.

SAM:
They still think that Richard.

RICHARD:
We won’t spend a lot of time on this, but what impact do you think the communist period had on the business mentality, maybe of the whole region, because I see it as mixed by and I don’t see it is entirely negative.

RAFAŁ:
They argue that in the socialist economy you lack all triggers or motivation to build your own business, because everybody’s equal, and I rather get a salary but if you look at the place like Sweden, which is the second largest unicorn factory in start-ups after Silicon Valley this is a very safe and very comfortable place to live. So I think it’s sobering the socialist approach to life it is more the entrepreneurial culture and how it is calculated and again in Sweden, you have the guys that build Volvo, the guys that built Skanska and many other companies, which are global and I think that if you simply cherish this kind of approach that you can build the company the entrepreneurial culture is there. In terms of Poland entrepreneurial culture was not there in the definition that we had amazing role models but actually we had dreams and we had no other alternative to build a company, so I think that created this the first wave pf entrepreneurs but obviously we are generalizing. Most of people in terms of statistical approach to how we view the population, most of the people will not or should not become entrepreneurs. This is not for everyone. But obviously, we should be definitely cherish and promote entrepreneurship as such.

RICHARD:
I’m glad to hear you say that, because i was involved in the Światowy Tydzień Przedsiębiorczości – bringing Global Entrepreneurship Week to Poland and back in the 90’s with Shell the life of our program to promote entrepreneurship and I felt that back in the nineteen nineties it was really… now it’s kind of normal and fashionable to promote entrepreneurship, it wasn’t like that back then and do you think that in a way things have gone to fat, the people who shouldn’t be entrepreneurs are being encouraged to go into business or do you think the situation is about right to the moment.

RAFAŁ:
I think the, especially for technology entrepreneurs, the situation changes positively from year to year. What is happening is that we have two big forces – first of all is we have a huge EU funds available to first time entrepreneurs, we have billions of euros that will be granted to start-ups, so the capital barrier is much, much smaller than before and secondly we have the supporting ecosystems which are bringing out in so many cities across Central and Eastern Europe and all over the world that they really teach the entrepreneurship, that they teach the boot-strapping, the ways to quickly and effectively build your business once you have determination and great idea or great problem you want to solve, so I think that there should be more entrepreneurs and the opportunities right now are bigger than 10 or 20 years ago.

RICHARD:
Google Campus Warsaw has only recently launched and it’s not the first one in the world. I’ve done some events in your sister organization in London so might be an example. Is there anything different about what you’re trying to achieve here compared to London or Tel Aviv all the other ones?

RAFAŁ:
Each Campus around the world has the same mission – to support the local start-up ecosystem, to support the local start-up communities and to enable the next generation of entrepreneurs to learn, to connect and to build companies that hopefully will change the world. So the mission is the same in every Campus. In terms of our approach and the way we work the functions of Campus is also the same – we have the cafe area, that this is where the networking starts with the fast Internet access, we have a even space area where anybody can attend events all of them are for start-ups and all of them are… huge majority of them are for free; we have acceleration programs that companies are fine-tuning their minimal viable products or fine-tuning their go to market strategies; we have co-working space and obviously all the community events which are very important so anybody interested in the start-ups can set up a community event. So this functions are the same all over, the mission is the same and also we have a global programs that also are the same and available so we had a gaming and acceleration program in November, in December we have a Campus exchange program in Warsaw where we have invited start-ups from across Central and Eastern Europe to join our program to learn how to globalize their ideas and then we are running around 5-6 global programs each month for start-ups, for all the Campus members across the globe. So the main idea, the main mission, and the main way that we work is the same. However each of the Campuses are actually solving its own problems which is particularly the existing market so London has a different situation, because this is much bigger and much more mature market, they are putting more diversity, on the female entrepreneurship and so they have diagnosed biggest problem is there are start-ups, Korean start-ups know how to globalize their products and their solutions. In Poland our mission that we have in mind is to create a new brand for the region, for Central Eastern Europe as a start-up brand. We would like to tell the world and create the visibility internationally that, first of all the region has the population is almost 200 million in 20 countries, where over half of them 105 million live in the Schengen EU-NATO area, that’s for free; secondly we have, as the region, we have more technical engineering graduates each year than the United States, we have lower cost of living in all of those areas which makes having an engineer much easier task, we are various computer science or engineering competition world-wide, usually in top five countries which mean Poland or Ukraine or somewhere from the region is usually taking two or three spots out of the five, so we have engineering talent, we have excellent competencies, we are the quantity and quality of those engineers are great. But the entrepreneurial system is not really ready to turn those engineers into global entrepreneurs and that’s our mission we want to bring this start-up knowledge and we want to popularize that knowledge by supporting the ecosystem all across Central and Eastern Europe and if we do that, if we use those strong points from the region… plus we had this huge billions of dollars, billions of euros that are coming from EU funds. This seems to be a task which is achievable; it’s very ambitious but is achievable so that’s our regional mission for Campus Warsaw.

RICHARD:
That’s fantastic and for anyone listening to this who’s not from either Warsaw or Cracow and we have listeners all over the world, I did three events in Google Campus London but I live here in Poland and it was really straight forward to… obviously you need our credible event but we were setting up an alumni event for the school I went to, something for the Oxford and Cambridge alumni society so anyone anywhere in the world who wants to do something in this region potentially, provided what you do make sense and is pro start-up community you can potentially book space and the point about the Google brand is it gets people to come who otherwise might not that is it i used to say in Cracow Google for entrepreneurs logo did more than the president Miasto Kraków because people like to be close to global brand and obviously Google isn’t the only global brand but it’s a kind of door opener to get people to come, that’s one coming. The other is in terms of what’s missing, yesterday I was hosting the Open Coffee Cracow meeting, which happens every second Thursday and we had a lawyer show up and every now and again we get a lawyer and one of the big things that’s missing is what I call the support groups, the accountants, the lawyers, the bankers who in other countries might regularly show up to these events and it is absolutely remarkable that in two and a half years of Open Coffee Cracow we’ve had one banker show up once. People from the investment front in Innovation Nest and certainly some others do show up but it’s absolutely extraordinary. I think it would be… I told the city of Cracow they should make a survey of all the bankers in Cracow just asking them who’s the person for start-ups to talk to because most banks in Cracow don’t have anyone who’s dedicated for start-ups there are people to service the EU programs but that’s slightly different than the start-up community and do you see a role for Google there and like actually kind of embarrassing people like the law firms, the accountants and the bankers into realizing that if someone from PKO is invited to visit Google to explain who is responsible for start-ups will notice they have nobody in that they might change their organizational structure?

RAFAŁ:
It’s very interesting that you say so, because our experience is completely the opposite – in the first week we had so many bankers, accountants, consulting teams, strategy firms, all of them are supporting Campus Warsaw and we’ve run so many even with them that we don’t have this problem.