Immediately after Bartosz Boniecki, the CEO at CobinAngels, extended an invitation to participate in this event, I thought of the huge responsibility resting on my shoulders. Companies subject to assessment are not at the stage of an idea scribbled down on a sheet of paper, but fully operational organizations whose owners and teams have invested a lot of work and effort to introduce original projects onto the market. The products and services implemented are already being used by the first clients. The most frequent motivation guiding the companies applying to participate in the competition was their development on foreign markets which meant, more or less, that they are doing fine on the Polish market.
I don’t know why, but I was certain that most of the companies would be connected to new technologies, in the narrow sense. In my mind’s eyes I saw ideas correlating with e-commerce, e-marketing, CRM, hosting, etc. Obviously, the group of applicants included such companies as well, yet the diversity was enormous, starting from the energy sector, through to robotics, medical devices, clinical trials, recycling, gastronomy, and finally fairytales for kids.
In selecting the best fifteen companies, I decided to focus on several areas which I resolved to scan thoroughly to give myself a chance at comparing and evaluating the applicants. And so:
Most of the companies passed my scrutiny with flying colors, yet there were some guilty of small sins, such as providing too broad a description of the range of the services offered (at the end of such presentations I found myself wondering if I could answer a simple question, namely: What does this company really do?), the lack of an appropriate presentation of the team which they base their company upon; after all, the professional experience acquired by founders and their team in their previous jobs is extremely valuable in the context of developing one’s own business.
Unfortunately, on more than one occasion have I had a chance to witness the failure of a start-up managed autocratically by the main Founder who is perfectly suited to create new functionalities and solutions, but completely unprepared in terms of human resources management and/or the operational aspect. Such people either choose a team of individuals with personalities weaker than their own or employ managers who rapidly arrive at a conclusion that there is little point tilting the windmills since the Founder knows best. Consequently, the company works over a dozen of scattered functionalities, the Founder lacks either the time or the idea required to produce a solid development strategy, the company is running out of money, and parties willing to finance the next stage of its development are hard to come by.
The companies I had the pleasure of evaluating in the frames of CEE Released seem to contradict the above-mentioned perceptions and this makes me feel extremely optimistic. We have fantastic, inventive, and wise entrepreneurs characterized by industriousness, high determination to take action, the capability of taking risks and to think in business terms. To conclude, I present short descriptions of several companies that made the greatest impression on me and which are already performing more than well on the market. I am keeping my fingers crossed for their further development on global markets.
Breaking news: Photon Entertainment, startup from Poland, won European finals of CEE Released!
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