startup – my passion for startup and my experience in Poland vs USA

I am always crazy about getting things done and this year was soooo great to me:

1. I started to blog

2. I gave 10 speeches at different conferences

3. I had a chance to give speech to students at my university (University of Economics in Poznan)

4. I started Harvard Business School in Poland

5. I started working with Venture Capital on my new project (new experience I always wanted)

6. I drove 75 000 kilometers and visited tones of cities in Poland, also Germany, France, Spain, Luxembourg (always wanted to see Europe through car windows)

7. I flew to USA, Spain, UK, Finland, Thailand this year and it was great experience

8. We started iTraff project and we currently have team of very smart people on the board.

9. Me and my family we are all healthy which is great. Thank you God!

10. I finished totutam.pl project, my first startup. I did my duty there.

11. We prepared charity action for kids. We collected great products and prepared Christmas gifts for children’s home in Poznan, Poland.

12. Being very busy I spent almost a month (including weekends, holidays through whole year) with my family. Each month I am trying to visit my family to be in real world.

13. I read more then 12 000 posts this year (great exercise for my brain)

Thank you people for your support, knowledge sharing and trust.

Thank you my family for love you give me.

Thank you God for keeping eye on me.

HAPPY NEW YEAR to everybody

Arek

I was recently participating in many interesting talks, presentations and speeched. They made me think about failure and win. I had also excellent meeting with Yahoo managers, which are leaders of Yahoo Branch in Spain. What I found interesting is that:

- we still care about failure too much – Europe is failure orientated. We shouldn’t follow this schema “if somebody fails, everybody cares so much, in States, if somebody fails nobody cares”

- we still care about social too much – social support so strong in Spain, France kills entrepreneurship. We, entrepreneurs don’t want it cause it stops heart beat. Europe needs more entrepreneurship

- we still care about particular startup too much – there is this law 1 survive, 9 needs to die ! It is unchangeable. We have to live with it, don’t try to make it softer with UE funds.

My VC company offered me the opportunity to be Harvard School (European Branch) student. It is great experience as it shows the leadership factor. I think true leadership approach can develop in the “dark forest” condition. What I mean “dark forest is” – when you need to go through dark forest but there is no map available. Don’t want to use too big words but dark forest means doing something without clear instructions – compare to start ups. This is how you get skills, but being afraid of failure, being equipped with too much helping hand and thinking you must win, will just make your experience less valuable.