Since arriving in Poland in 2014, I’ve witnessed a surge in entrepreneurial energy fueled by the country’s economic growth, but observed a common challenge among startups: a lack of presentation and communication skills, stemming from gaps in education and culture, emphasizing the need to strike a balance between technical prowess and effective marketing strategies in the Polish business scene.
When I first moved to Poland, it didn’t take me long to feel there was a sense of excitement in the air. The rapid fire changes the country had been experiencing finally seemed to be translating into positive economic momentum. The level of education and technical expertise among Poles was already making it a top outsourcing or nearshoring destination, and the locals were starting to lift their heads up, take a look around, and think about starting competitive businesses themselves. I was a university student at that time working on my master’s thesis, and I picked up this development as my main topic.
Diving deeper into this dynamic business market, I conducted interviews with small startup founders as well as employees of the many large international companies building offices in Poland. I picked apart what was driving the success (for more information, check out my chapter in Poland in Transatlantic Relations after 1989: Miracle Fair), but I also looked into what was holding many of these new companies back from achieving greater success.
I started to notice a pattern in my interviews. Nearly every story went something like this: “I’m the owner and founder of an IT startup developing innovative new solutions in a high demand industry. I attended a technical university in Poland and that’s where I met my business partners, who were equally as talented in hard skills as I considered myself to be. Now we have this solution that works perfectly – but we are having trouble selling it. None of us have experience in giving pitches or developing content to explain to a layperson how our solution works and what benefits it could bring our customers. We also aren’t very comfortable communicating in English, which makes it more difficult to find investors. In the end, we hired two people in Florida to run that side of the business and we use our American address for extra international legitimacy.”
This difficulty in being able to sell their story turned out to be the achilles heel of almost everyone I spoke with. It seems that even in the business schools in Poland, marketing and communications is not always something that is highlighted in the curriculum, and presentation skills in particular was a skill gap commonly identified.
Nearly ten years later, I do see that there has been a movement to change that and to address these gaps, but it requires an educational and cultural shift that will likely take a while to come to full fruition. The success of Poland-grown startups in the meantime have brought more attention to the local market, with companies across various industries such as CD Projekt Red, InPost, and Booksy starting to become household names internationally. Poland still seems to be filled to the brim with fresh ideas; getting the balance between the technical skills and the marketing strategies will continue to make all the difference.
Cover photo by Maksym Harbar on Unsplash