Poland has worked diligently over the past decade to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Once home to businesses focused primarily on app design and..
Poland has worked diligently over the past decade to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Once home to businesses focused primarily on app design and outsourcing, social, societal, and economic pressures forced the country’s brightest to start building for themselves. And they did.
I’ ve covered Polish startups for almost a decade, first on TechCrunch and then on a new blog I helped create, ImpactCEE. It was my mission – as it was Poland’s – to show the world that this central European country was a liberal, open, and capable society able to produce some of the best software in the world. I’ ve seen the ecosystem grow from a small, suspicious group of former cubicle warriors into a vibrant and exciting scene with multiple accelerators and funds vying for startups. Even the problem of capital seemed to be solved with the creation of a €630 million fund aimed directly at growth and innovation inside the country.
Now that growth is in danger of being destroyed.
I saw the first inklings of a trouble when, at an event dinner in Krakow, a government official stood up and said, in translation, that he invited foreign startup experts to the country but warned, ominously, that he wanted to take their best ideas and innovate past them. This nationalist gumbo, while popular with the country’s aging post-Communicst population, does nothing for the young entrepreneur who has to decide whether to stay in Warsaw, Wroclaw, or Krakow or simply leave to work for a tech giant in a more stable country.
Now the Polish government is working diligently to secure power for the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party, an increasingly nationalist and religiously-minded political group that appeals to the Poles born during Communism and who remember the “good old days” of food shortages, rationing, and martial law. This party is anathema to the entrepreneurial class. Now the party essentially wants to reform the judicial branch in favor of PiS in order to ensure complete control of the federal government.
“The Polish government has continued to pursue legislation that appears to undermine judicial independence and weaken the rule of law in Poland, ” wrote a US State Department representative. “We urge all sides to ensure that any judicial reform does not violate Poland’s constitution or international legal obligations and respects the principles of judicial independence and separation of powers.”
Poland was a beacon that arose from the ashes of World War II and into the chill of the Cold War. It survived pogroms, strikes, third-world status, and, finally, bolted out, panting, into the 21st century. It survived and thrived. All that could change overnight.
If PiS does not stop its efforts to pull Poland backwards it will become a visible example of another failed state torn down by fear, anger, and nationalism.
I reprint below a letter from a number of major figures in the Polish entrepreneurial scene who are, without a doubt, the future of this country. These are her best and brightest and if they see that their homeland is falling backwards they will give up, erasing a decade of amazing growth. There is no hope without forward motion and there is no change without freedom. Without the support of the innovative class, Poland will fall back into ruin and rubble.
