Does Poland have enough to become the next big tech ecosystem

how’s everybody doing

it’s a supreme pleasure to be with you

all today

today i’m going to be talking about

building tech ecosystems

but before i begin i just wanted to

ask the audience just out of curiosity

how many of you have ever visited the

san francisco bay area or silicon valley

as

one may call okay so we’ve got a couple

of people in the audience

it’s a pretty amazing place isn’t it

some of you may recognize this picture

this is

university of downtown palo alto

but it’s also kind of startling to think

that this is what palo alto looked like

less than 100 years ago

and so the question is

why

why is it that all of the big tech

companies

decided to set up shop in this obscure

place in central california

what were the key elements

that made the santa clara valley

the silicon valley

well

let’s talk about a little bit of history

first

this is stanford university leland

stanford founded stanford university in

he was a railroad baron

then in 1909 david starr jordan

he was the president at stanford at the

time

invested in the audient tube

he invested 500

into this piece of technology 16 000 u.s

in today’s money

and this was considered one of the very

first high-tech investments arguably one

of the first venture capital investments

ever made

and this spawned a culture of

entrepreneurship

several decades later william shockley

invented the silicon transistor he won

the nobel prize for this

and in 1956 he left bell labs in new

jersey

and went to mountain view california

where he started shockley semiconductor

laboratories

he brought his entire team with him but

unfortunately

his paranoid and neurotic management

style drove his team out in 1957.

these eight gentlemen

became known as the traitorous eight

they started fairchild semiconductor in

1957

and about a month after opening their

doors

the ussr launched sputnik and the space

race was on

in 1961

john f kennedy announced that the us was

going to put a man on the moon

and in order to do so they had to figure

out how to take an astronomical amount

of computing power

and squeeze it into this tiny little box

aboard the lunar module

luckily for nasa robert noyce

just a couple years earlier inventor

invented the planar integrated circuit

made from silicon

and this is quite literally what blasted

the entire silicon valley to the moon

at a fairchild semiconductor many

employees and founders left to found

companies such as intel sandisk and amd

and the venture capital fund sequoia and

kleiner perkins also came out of

fairchild semiconductor

all of a sudden we have ourselves a

budding ecosystem

in addition to that the total population

of those who live in silicon valley is

just under 40 so almost half

whereas the national average for the

united states is less than 15

so

returning back to my previous question

what are those elements that you need to

start an ecosystem well you need this

culture of entrepreneurship

you need a high density of highly

skilled workers

you need a lot of public capital to

catalyze the reaction

you need a lot of investments into

high-tech areas and finally

immigration

now to really drive my point home here

i want to talk about israel

so here’s a country that’s basically an

island except being surrounded by water

you’re surrounded by a bunch of

countries that are trying to wipe you

off the face of the earth

so the israelis had to get creative with

how they were going to defend themselves

they also had to think fast and act like

a startup

so when the israelis organized their

military they organized it such that it

had a horizontal structure and not a

vertical structure

like almost every other military in the

entire world

what this did was this fostered a

culture of entrepreneurship

so much so that today for every

1844 citizens in israel there’s one

startup

so we have our culture of

entrepreneurship

next up for every 10 000 employees there

are in israel there’s roughly 140

scientists and 135 engineers the most

out of any developed society in the

entire world so we have our high density

of highly skilled workers

next up in 1993

israel launched something called the

asma group yazma which stands for

initiative

yazma was responsible for funding its

first generation of venture capitalists

in the country they provided 40 percent

of the total capitalization of a fund

and this was in the form of a refundable

grant so the investors realized a lot of

leverage

now this chart i want you to just take a

mental note of this chart we’re going to

use it later

but beginning in 1993 yazma started

deploying funds to its vc ecosystem and

as you can see

it went up and to the right

and it sustained itself even after the

dot-com bust so we have our public

capital to catalyze a reaction

next up in 1974 intel was looking to

create its second headquarters and it

decided to pick israel it was

instrumental in developing its

generation of mobility chips these

mobility chips to this day make up half

of intel’s revenue

intel has since invested 10 billion

dollars in the country actually more

than 10 billion dollars since 1974.

then in 1998 cisco decided to build its

second headquarters in israel

it was responsible for the development

of the crs-1 web router this is a very

high piece of technology that lives in

many data centers

and cisco has since invested 2 billion

since 1998 and so we have our large

investments into high-tech areas

finally in 1990

after the fall of the soviet union

roughly 800 000 jews emigrated from the

soviet union or the former soviet union

back to israel

one in three of these individuals had

some sort of formal technical training

they’re either a scientist or an

engineer so we have our

immigration story

but on the other hand we have a place

like dubai

so dubai arguably has a phenomenal

culture of entrepreneurship it has one

of the highest immigration rates out of

any developed country in the entire

world

and there’s lots of public capital

flowing into its ecosystem

but it’s missing two very important

things

it’s missing a high density of highly

skilled workers

and because of that

companies aren’t creating centers of

innovation in dubai

sure large tech companies have presences

in dubai but these are service centers

these aren’t centers of innovation so if

you don’t have all five of these

elements that doesn’t necessarily mean

that you’re going to have a tech

ecosystem so this is very important

so the question is is what about poland

what’s the story here

well

ironically poland’s culture of

entrepreneurship stems from the many

decades behind the iron curtain

because of a centrally planned economy

and state enterprises this created

economies of shortages in the country

long lines like this were not uncommon

in those days and i’m sure many of you

sitting in this audience

have stories from parents or

grandparents or other family members

about these days

here’s an article from the new york

times

1975

black markets bloom in eastern europe

behind facade of straight-laced marxism

if you had an old pair of blue jeans and

if you’re in warsaw you can get up to 70

for that old pair of blue jeans that

just gives you an idea of this black

market

and then this man jessica hanovsky wrote

a book about all of these anecdotes

because there were just so many

it’s estimated that anywhere between 20

to 30 billion dollars annually was the

size of the polish black market during

that time so we have our culture of

entrepreneurship

next up we’re going to talk about the

highly skilled workers here in the

country and what better place to start

than looking at stem graduates

so this is a period between 2013 and

2019 so a seven year period poland

produced

761 000 stem graduates in that period so

number four in europe

even though it’s number six

in terms of population

so this high number isn’t simply a

function of the population of the

country but rather it’s a function of

the stem graduates per capita

now poland is number nine overall in

that seven year period in terms of stem

graduates per capita

if we zoom in here onto this chart

we see the top ten

but if we want to go beyond the united

kingdom

we only need to increase this figure by

roughly 12 percent

or 14 000 students per year so

very very tight race here at the top

now the next couple of charts that i

want to show you are one of poland’s

superpowers and that’s its women

poland is also number four in terms of

total stem graduates total female stem

graduates at 324 000 but look at this

it’s number one on a per capita basis

and what’s even more striking is if we

look at the female to male ratio

for stem graduates

poland’s at 43 percent

it’s almost half

compare this to norway or finland which

are 28 and 27

so we have not only our high density of

highly skilled workers but we get

brownie points for great gender

diversity

next up we’re going to talk a little bit

about the public funding situation in

poland

so there’s two vehicles that provide

funding to both startups and vcs we have

the national center for research and

development and pfr specifically pfr

ventures pfr is the yazma of poland

ncbr since 2016 will have deployed four

and a half billion dollars to its fast

track and bridge alpha program and pfr

will have deployed

750 million dollars

if we’re going to compare this with

yazma that deployed 250 million dollars

back in the early 90s pfr alone will

have deployed three times as much

capital but if we combine this with ncbr

it will have been 20 times more capital

remember this chart

let’s zoom in on vc backed startups 1993

was the inflection point

here’s poland

there’s our inflection point

so poland today is where israel was in

so we have our public capital to

catalyze a reaction

i’m sure all of you may have heard

google just recently announced a massive

cloud development center here in the

center of warsaw at least 14 floors and

is deploying roughly two billion dollars

into this project

and they’re probably doing this because

microsoft just a year earlier announced

that it was investing a billion dollars

also into its azure cloud platform here

in poland

and finally intel yet again

is f and poland is fighting for an 80

billion dollar prize from intel and this

is also in addition to the 3 300

employees

that are in gdisk in the north of the

country

so we have our large investments into

high-tech areas

finally

back in 2014 2015 with the political

situation in

ukraine roughly two to three million

ukrainians emigrated to poland in a

five-year span

this is one of the largest migrations in

the history of europe

and also since 2000 as the economic

situation is continuing to improve in

poland more and more people want to move

to poland for economic opportunity

so we have our

immigration picture

but now there’s

one last thing that i want to bring up

that i haven’t mentioned at all

wasn’t part of the five vectors and it’s

poland’s other secret superpower

that it has that no other country has

in the entire world

and that’s its diaspora

in the 20th century

many poles

left poland because of the war and

because of communism

because of that

poland has one of if not the largest and

most dispersed diaspora in the entire

world

to put it into context there’s roughly

10 million people of direct polish

descent living in the united states and

6 million living in europe

that’s 42 percent

of today’s population

imagine if we were to repatriate

1.6 million of these individuals back to

poland

that’s four percent of the population

these people would bring back

soft skills

that would complement a highly skilled

workforce here in poland

so

i go back to my original question

does poland have enough of these

vectors to sustain and to build

a big tech ecosystem

i think it does

but not only that

i also think poland has an opportunity

to not just become any old tech

ecosystem but one of the largest tech

ecosystems

in the world

and that’s given the fact

that we have the largest diaspora

in the entire world

when the 800 000 jews left the left the

soviet union

back in the early 90s and came to israel

that was the spark that initiated the

israeli tech ecosystem

imagine if the same happened for poland

so if you’re out there right now and

you’re listening

and either you

your parents

or your grandparents left poland many

years ago

i want you to consider this as an

invitation

an invitation to come back

an invitation

to utilize your skills and apply them to

a highly skilled workforce here in

poland

an invitation

to come back

and build the largest tech ecosystem

the world has ever seen

thank you very much

[Applause]