I grew up seeing my parents work long nights as entrepreneurs in post-communist Poland to provide for the family. Observing the lowest lows and highest highs of entrepreneurship and having the ethos of hard work ingrained in my DNA, I was destined to eventually start a company myself. Little did I know that this would never happen...

I traded my first public stock when I was 16 and serendipitously discovered that maybe I'm not the smartest, but I'm certainly a lucky investor. This stock turned out to be the Polish game development studio CD Projekt Red, caught in the midst of a generational bull run. The thrill of taking the risk, investing my own pocket money in a company, closely following the news, playing the product (lucky me — The Witcher is awesome), cheering from the sidelines®, and ultimately making a good return rewired my brain for good. I knew I wanted to become an investor.

Sometime in 2017 (I was a broke 21-year-old student) I figured that a venture capital firm is probably the best place to get paid for growing my investing muscle while satisfying the entrepreneurial itch I'd never scratched. So I hustled my way into landing an analyst role at a leading VC firm in Poland at the time. In the early days I would work with the most problematic portfolio companies and spend hundreds of hours scraping startups from newsletters and event pages. This shaped my view on venture. This industry would like you to believe it's elite and prestigious, but in fact you spend most of your time dealing with failure, entrenched with your partners and portfolio founders.

Despite not being a technical investor, I like working with technical founders. I have found a way to abstract research and engineering complexity from products and translate it into value proposition language. Getting to a positive answer to the question "if this works, I will buy it" is my north star. I invest in people and help them do their life's work, even if this means plowing through challenges, waiting out the market, or pivoting to something completely different. As long as the founders care, I do too.

As a generalist investor, I've been fortunate to partner with founders of research labs that won their category, enterprise AI with 24-month sales cycles, viral consumer AI, hardware in space, and applied research in crypto. Hats off to Mati and Piotr @ElevenLabs, Haroon @Sense Street, Eugenia @Wabi, Adam @Fiat Republic, Hubert and Marek @vlayer, and many more founders behind unannounced companies.

In my free time I play tennis, lift weights, ski, hike, play video games and poker, watch football (Liverpool FC) and get on my wife's nerves.