Andrej Kiska is a StartupYard mentor, and a partner with StartupYard backer and prominent central european venture capital firm Credo Ventures, joining in October 2011, originally on a part-time basis. Andrej is also a private equity analyst at Benson Oak, where he focuses on early stage investments.

Andrej graduated from University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce with concentrations in finance and management. Andrej is the son of the prominent entrepreneur, philanthropist, and current President of Slovakia, Andrej Kiska Sr. 

Over the next few weeks, the StartupYard blog will feature a series of articles penned by Kiska on investments and investment strategy for startups, from a VC and angel investor perspective. If you don’t want to wait for them to be republished here, you can read Kiska’s fantastic blog on Medium.

Hi Andrej, why don’t you tell us a bit about your background, and how you came to be a partner at Credo Ventures?

After spending five years in the United States and graduating from college there, I wanted to come closer to home and ended up joining a Prague-based growth fund Benson Oak Capital. I had a pretty incredible time with Benson Oak, since we managed to execute the only IPO of a Czech company at the New York Stock Exchange in the history of our country, AVG Technologies. We were the first investors back in 2004 when AVG had about 3 million dollars in revenue, and it went public in 2012 with more than 350 million dollars in revenue. Thanks to AVG I witnessed the fact that companies from Central Europe can indeed become global, billion dollar behemoths. Benson Oak invested in Credo Ventures in 2011 and I joined the team in 2012 to help more companies achieve similar successes as AVG did.

About how many investments have you looked at in your 4 years with Credo Ventures. Of the companies you’ve invested in, what are a few things that make them stand out?

We see about 600 business plans a year, so it is in the thousands. Yet, we invest in less than 1% of what we see. This is because there aren’t too many companies like AVG, with a product that is in some way unique on a global scale with a team that has the capability to deliver the product to a global audience.

How has the landscape changed for early-stage investments in the Czech Republic since you started with Credo?

A: Back in 2010-2011 we would receive only about 300 business plans a year. But it is not just the startups. There were no accelerators, or coworking spaces, and very few angel investors. Heck, even Startupyard didn’t exist back then 🙂 The community has grown radically since then.

Where do you hope to see Credo Ventures in the next 5 years?

I hope we can create another AVG. The sale of our Cognitive Security to Cisco has shown that our startups can attract the attention (and a lot of cash:)) of the largest technology players in the world. I am confident that the stars of our portfolio can become the next Ciscos themselves.

What would you say is the biggest misconception that startup founders tend to have about your job, and about venture capitalists in general?

 I am not sure about general misconceptions, but I really enjoyed the surprised faces of entrepreneurs when they visited my apartment. I guess they expected a big pad or a villa, but the truth is that for the past six years I lived in a living room in an apartment with two roommates. Now that I am starting a family, however, that lifestyle has come to an end.

It is entertaining to see entrepreneurs realizing that many venture capital investors are not extremely wealthy guys who work for an hour or two per day while sipping margaritas at their swimming pool.

You were educated in the US, and you write quite a bit about how Central European startups can compete with US startups. Do you think the local ecosystem is getting better in this regard? How so?

 I think it is getting better only very gradually, and I don’t think this pace is going to change significantly in the next couple of years. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of startup founders we see have no prior exposure to building a product and a team with global potential. These things can in my opinion only be learned on the job, i.e. by doing them.

Therefore, until we will have a generation of founders with prior exposure to global startups as early employees or at least with a few attempts to build a global startup (and ideally succeeded at it), the ability of our startups to compete on a global scale will grow only gradually. We need to build a generation of Jakub Nesetrils, early employees (or founders) of successful Central European startups such as Good Data who decide to start their own startup and know how to do it. These people can then crush it on a global scale like Jakub is doing with Apiary.

Creating such generation will take time, and, of course, money. And I think we are heading in the right direction. Nonetheless, the one thing which is good today and has has not changed over the past five years is the fact that we are continuously able to find heavy R&D teams in Central Europe that are able to invent unique technologies. While turning these technologies into a product and then delivering it to a global audience remains a big challenge for these startups (and one that we at Credo are trying to help to mitigate), companies like Cognitive Security, Comprimato or Codasip serve as great examples that this can indeed be done.

We often hear that Czech and European investors in general are “too conservative.” Do you think this is accurate?

I think one could actually argue the opposite. In my opinion, most of the startups that Czech investors invest in would not receive an investment in the United States at a stage when Czech investors are willing to invest. From this perspective I could make the claim that Czech investors are actually more liberal than their Western European or U.S. counterparts.

 That’s an interesting point. But we hear this all the time- it’s almost a cliche now that Czech investors are overly conservative. So why do you suppose that this criticism is so often leveled at Czech investors?

I think it is a result of very effective marketing of U.S. startup success stories. The buzz around companies like Snapchat, Whatsapp or Tinder makes it look like as if startups in the U.S. effortlessly raise money with no traction and nice powerpoint presentation, while back at home conservative Czech investors require user base, revenue and financial projections.

But let’s take a deeper look for example at Snapchat. It received its seed funding of USD 500k in mid 2012, same year it achieved 50 million snap views per day. If there is an app in Central Europe with no funding that boasts 50 million interactions per day, I would be very happy to give it 500k as well. As a matter of fact, I would give it much more than that. At Benson Oak we invested in an Israeli startup with 40 million users 7 million dollars.

The criticism leveled at Czech investors comes especially from startups, which are misled by awesome self-promotion capabilities of the U.S. startup ecosystem. And this should be a lesson learned for our ecosystem: we are terrible at self-promotion. Look at AVG. On the day it went public, the prime focus of the Czech media was on the fact that shares went down on first day of trading, mostly ignoring the fact that there was no other company in the Czech Republic that even managed to IPO at the New York Stock Exchange. What do the Czech media say now, when AVG is trading 75% above its IPO price? Nothing. And that’s a big shame.

The Czech Republic has taken some steps, such as lowering the costs of incorporation, to be more competitive with Western European and American startups. Has the government here done enough to lower barriers to entry for startups and investors like Credo?

Current “direct” steps such as lower costs of incorporation are marginal improvements that don’t make or break a startup. We learned how to handle all of bureaucratic nuances of the Central European region by now anyways and can navigate these waters for any startup in our portfolio. I think the government will do enough if it simply doesn’t interfere with the ecosystem that is able to take care of itself.

If the government wants to help, the form of such help should be more indirect and long term: encouraging entrepreneurial spirit in young people and eliminating the negative connotation (and economic impact) of failing, motivating more people to invest in startups, providing better education that will help entrepreneurs compete globally and so on.

What are some specific governmental policies that you would like to see improved in the Czech Republic to allow the local startup ecosystem to compete on the world stage?

 I don’t think any governmental policy will dramatically improve the quality of the startup ecosystem, at least not in the short term. The quality of the ecosystem will increase gradually as the ecosystem will gain more experience with competing on the global markets, there are no shortcuts around that.

When it comes to long term initiatives, which I mentioned above, they require more of a mindset than specific policies. Let’s take encouraging entrepreneurial spirit. I heard some people in Slovakia say that Slovak Aeromobil has been the biggest boost to Slovak national pride since we won the Hockey Championship in 2002. I loudly applaud the fact that Aeromobil received government support: it will be tough to turn it into a sustainable business, but has done a tremendous amount of promotion of entrepreneurship in Slovakia. Or look at my father (the president of Slovakia) taking promising Slovak startups to Silicon Valley. I am very much looking forward to the day when Mr. Zeman [President of the Czech Republic] is going to pick promising Czech startups and take them to the Valley.

It is not easy for a government to think outside of the box, but that’s exactly what it needs to do if it wants to be helpful. How come Sweden has allowed autonomous cars on some of their streets? How much talent and innovation could we attract if we build an autonomous car zone/ecosystem in Mlada Boleslav?

 We recently interviewed Ondrej Krajicek on this blog, and he pinpointed education policy and immigration as key areas of public policy that demand attention in order to foster innovation in the Czech Republic. Does the Czech education system put Czech entrepreneurs and investors at a disadvantage today? What about immigration policy?

A: Surely a lot can be done in both areas. With that being said, we invested in multiple university spin-offs already, one of them was already sold to Cisco and others are doing very well, so I guess at least something in education at the university level must be going right. 

In terms of immigration policy: this is obviously a big topic in Europe today, but has been in the U.S. for decades. It is fairly easy to answer from the point of view of startups: yes, we want as much as free movement as possible, so we can attract the best talent to the Czech Republic or move to the U.S. when our business demands it. Yet, looking at it from a holistic point of view, the solution becomes a lot more complicated e.g. if you have 200,000 immigrants (of whom many are unskilled or in unproductive age) heading to European Union annually.

You often write about company culture and organization as a key aspect of competitiveness for Czech and Central European startups. Does the Czech Republic have unique deficiencies in terms of company culture and employment habits or traditions? How should these be improved?

Well, Central Europeans are simply Central Europeans. We are affected by decades of collective ownership, distrust in entrepreneurs of the 90s and a host of other peculiarities. These obviously impact how we go about building businesses. We are proud when we rip off the state by optimizing taxes and frown upon people whose startup idea didn’t work. Many of us are hesitant to share the stake in our business with our employees. Or prefer owning a big stake in a smaller business as opposed to a smaller stake in a potentially bigger business. We want to be either CEOs or corporate employees, not early startup employees. We think we are going to win the World Hockey Championship every year, even though we are ranked number 8 in the world. But I guess that’s just Slovakia.

I think these traits make us who we are, there is nothing to feel ashamed about. As we try to compete in the global marketplace, we have to learn how to leverage our culture and skillset to turn it into a strength, not necessarily how to change it or improve it. Slovak startups for instance might want to consider buying a big TV for the hockey champs to boost team bonding (and don’t have to worry about loss in productivity since this tournament doesn’t last long for our team). But this is for every startup founder to figure out on his own.

You can Tweet Andrej @Kiskandrej

Founded in 2014, CzechCrunch has been the Czech Republic’s answer to a raft of English language tech magazines that focus on startups around the world, but have long ignored the Czech Republic and central Europe generally, focusing on London, San Francisco, New York, and other larger cities.

With original daily reporting from a small cast of local writers and editors, the magazine’s content has at times verged on the tabloid-style of ValleyWag, and at others echoed the work of Wired, TechCrunch, and the incumbent Czech tech publication Lupa.cz. Its slick styling and focus on startups sets it apart from other Czech publications.

Michal Ptacek, an experienced net entrepreneur who owns multiple online publications and other businesses, and is now CzechCrunch’s sole proprietor, wants to bring the attention of average readers to the Czech technology sector, inspiring a new generation of would-be entrepreneurs in the Czech Republic.

I sat down with him recently to quiz him about where CzechCrunch started, where it is now, and where it might be headed.

Here is the exclusive interview: 

Michal, tell us a bit about yourself first. What’s your background?

Founder and CEO of CzechCrunch: Michal Ptacek

Well I remember when I was a kid I started playing with my uncle’s computer, it was a Commodore 64 running on Basic. Such a cool machine. We were mostly playing games but then one day my uncle bought me a book about programming, and I started to teach myself to program in Basic.

I remember my first program was just generating random numbers from 1 to 10 and then you had to guess which one it was. Then a few years later when I receive my first real computer from my parents, I started to learn Pascal and Delphi and to program actual freeware games with my friend. We were featured in some magazines, and stuff like that, but it was mostly a hobby.

Later I started some blogs and websites. For example when I was about 18 I launched a website called Starmagazin which quickly became one of the most popular entertainment blogs/magazines getting about 15 000 users daily. I basically took a very successful concept from a few U.S websites and applied it to the Czech market, and it somehow by a huge miracle worked, even though I didn’t know anything about marketing, SEO etc at all back then.

I think it was just huge luck and the fact that there weren’t lots of competitors back then. But what I loved about it was that I was just sitting in front of my computer in my room and was generating more money than my parents while still attending a high school. A year later I sold it to a digital agency and realised making websites is something I wanted to do in the future.  

On the flip side, I also had lots of failures. The biggest one from a business perspective was definitely a local “copy” of Yelp called Flob.cz. It cost me lots of money from my own pocket and it just never really took off. A year ago I sold it to [Slevomat.cz Founder] Tomas Cupr for some pennies. :laugh:

Today my main business is a big network of mostly U.S based websites which I monetize via Adsense. It is nothing innovative and it is pretty boring most of the time, but on the other hand, I think it allows me to live a very comfortable lifestyle.

Recently I also launched this project called: OfficeLovin, which is a sort of platform featuring the offices of tech companies. It somehow became very popular and currently it is getting thousands of visits per day and still growing. This was when I somehow realised that the more money I spend on projects the bigger failure it is going to be in my case! :laughs: So now my approach is mostly: MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Just for pictures of offices?

Yeah! You know, because offices have sort of become a major perk when it comes to working with certain companies, I wanted to give people a sense of what was out there. What helped me was that the site actually made it into the top 3 of new products on ProductHunt, just behind a new Foursquare, which really helped us get a lot of traffic and recognition.

A good office feels almost like a hiring tool these days, so it’s really easy to find great pictures of all these different workplaces. Nobody wants to work in a garage anymore- they want to work somewhere nice. So the result is that huge companies such as Shopify, Spotify, WeWork, Thumbtack and many others exclusively send us pictures of their offices so we can feature them on Officelovin.

Can you tell us a bit about the history of Czech Crunch? How did it get started?

Czech Crunch started about 14 Months ago. We launched it with my now former partner, Robin Razska, who is a well-known mobile app developer (he sold Summly to Yahoo) and basically we wanted to make a local clone of TechCrunch. We saw that as a huge and cool opportunity.

How has your vision evolved since it started?

So, just for some context, a few weeks ago I bought Robin out, and got a new partner (Vaclav Bedrich in) There were some differences of opinion on where we were going. I think the site was a mix between more gossipy content -something like ValleyWag, which I don’t like- and more serious content like TechCrunch. Let’s say that I’d prefer to come up with a balance that is more like Business Insider and TechCrunch or TheNextWeb.

So you want to balance between general readers and industry insiders?

Yes, basically. I think more Czechs are interested not just in startups, but in the Czech technology industry as a whole, and I think the audience for that could be much bigger than the one we currently have. We obviously still have a lot of readers interested in startups, and we want to keep covering them, but there are a lot of other aspects of the Czech technology sector that are underserved at present.

Who is CzechCrunch current targeted at, and who is reading it?

At this moment, it’s mostly startup guys. :laughs: People interested especially in mobile apps visit CzechCrunch.  We also want to lean more towards the popular crowd. I want my mom to read it- you know? There are not enough purely tech people to support a great tech magazine, but if it is a magazine that also appeals to regular folks who are interested in what’s happening, and how the Czech Republic fits into that, then we might find a broader audience and get a better business model.

Do you feel CzechCrunch has had a positive impact on the Czech technology sector so far? What would you like to do better?

In general yes, we have. But I still see much more potential there. We want to make something much bigger from that.

We also want to lean more positive. That had been an issue of our vision, that sometimes we were somewhat gossipy and also negative.

Goal number one for us right now is to provide more articles per day. We need at least 10-15 articles per day, whereas we currently publish about 5… I’ve been talking to some authors recently, and it looks very optimistic. You will definitely see more interesting  content from us in the near future.

What will that content look like? Features? Interviews? Investigative journalism?

Well not just startups for sure, but tech in general. And yes, features and interviews will play a bigger part because that’s what the readers like. More in-depth reporting is something we want to be able to do more.

In our current model, if we have exclusivity, we can find out about a story maybe 3-5 days before it happens. We can do some research and gather some background. But on the other hand, if we don’t have a story, then we’re looking at having to publish something within 20 minutes of hearing about it, to stay competitive with sites like Lupa. That’s not easy, obviously, and having more authors will help us to get ahead of the stories more.

We definitely also want to have more subjective writing, including editorials and features. Right now, it’s mostly “Company A raises X Crowns,” that sort of thing. More insider stories and opinions will help distinguish us from others, and give us more of a voice.

Are you considering branching out into English language content as well?

A lot of people are asking me about this, and I can see some sense in it, but to be honest I feel that there aren’t enough people yet to support it- it would be a hobby, not a business. And I want to have a business.

Maybe one of the ideas we have for the future would be to focus on Central Europe, not just Czech Republic. There are not really any great magazines covering tech in the region as a whole but it’s really in the future. There isn’t a lot of evidence to show that the region could yet support that kind of thing. We’ll see.

Speaking of the region, how do you feel about the current state of the Czech tech sector? What remains to be improved?

It’s getting better. If you look back a few years, there was a lot of bullshit, frankly. Everybody was doing mobile apps for the iphone- Facebook for cats, etc- the problem was that there were no business models-, just “me-too” products with no potential.

It was more like a lifestyle for many people – but today I think they realize it’s mainly a business, and you have to come up with something serious.

Startups a few years ago became way too cool- everybody wanted to do it, but it brought a lot of people into tech who had no experience with tech whatsoever. But these days I think that’s less of a problem. Tech grew up a bit in Czech Republic.

Investors of course are much more careful than the ones in US, as we all know. I feel it’s still way too passive here and it should be more aggressive. They should be investing more, and faster. On the other hand, I realise there are still not enough interesting projects to invest in.

Do You see more interesting projects than you used to?

Yes, we definitely do.

There’s SocialBakers of course, but they’ve been around for a long time now, in startup terms. They just hosted Engage 2015. It was absolutely amazing.

Apiary I am a huge fan of as well.

Rohlik.cz- it has everything, and I’m a big fan. I feel like everything Tomas Cupr touches just turns into gold. I am a huge fan of his businesses, and everything his team does it top notch. He brings a lot of focus and a high level in terms of delivery and execution, which is great to see and get inspired by. It lifts the game of all his competition in the region as well.

Speaking of interesting projects, why weren’t you (CzechCrunch) at StartupYard Demo Day 2015?

Well :laugh: It’s not every day you  see John Sculley in Prague, it was something I wanted to see for a long time, and he was at Engage, which was on the same day as StartupYard’s demo day. That’s a shame, and it’s something I think should change when we have more authors, and can have a bit of a wider reach. It’s just bad luck too- you can’t predict what will be scheduled at the same time, and your demo day ended up on the same day as several other really big events. That’s tough.

What have been some of your most popular articles so far?

Articles about Czech companies are definitely the most popular.

Out of our top articles, number one was definitely our piece by Petr Ocasek- he wrote a very interesting piece about getting into 500 startups accelerator- it was so popular that it nearly brought down our servers :laugh:.

Pavel Kacerle: He’s a czech guy who moved to the U.S to pursue his dreams in the movie industry, and today he works for companies like Marvel, Disney, Lucas, and creates digital effects for movies such as Captain America, Avengers etc. He wrote 6 pieces for CzechCrunch where he described his journey, and that was very popular as well.

And of course investments in the Czech market. When Tomas Cupr sold [StartupYard alum] DameJidlo, the delivery service, that was really huge as well.

Czech articles are in general much more popular than pieces on foreign companies. You can read that stuff in TechCrunch or TheNextWeb, and I think many of our readers do, so we don’t want to necessarily cover the exact same territory.

How does CzechCrunch make money? Is it self-sustaining?

It is self-sustaining already, sure. It’s not as good as I would wish, but it’s mainly in advertising, including banners and sponsorships.

Sponsorships are like “PR articles,” but they’re real articles about the startup or company, and they also get a banner and mentions on Facebook and Twitter. We also interview them, so it’s really a complete package. It’s clearly labeled as sponsored content, but the thing is, if you look at it, it feels quite natural. We don’t want to do pure PR stuff, stuff that screams OMG this is PR.

Abhishek Balaria is CEO and Founder of the enterprise mobile solutions company Zentity, a leading developer of mobile gateways for telecoms and banks in Europe. He is also a mentor at StartupYard, and a regular at many of StartupYard’s events.

Abhishek has been working in technology for nearly 20 years, with an interest in banking, telecommunications, and mobile. He founded Zentity in 2008 to produce mobile games, and has since expanded to provide mobile gateways for some of the Czech Republic’s and Europe’s largest banks and telecom providers, along with other services like major e-retailer Alza.cz, and Novinky.cz, the Czech Republic’s most popular news portal.

Hi Abhishek, why don’t you start by telling us a little about yourself and your background.

I like to think of myself as a technologist who happens to understand a bit of business or specifically software related businesses. I was extremely lucky to have started my professional career at a startup in the early days of the Internet boom and had a dream to someday have a startup of my own.

Before starting my own business I had worked on three continents (North America, Europe and Asia), in startups and the world’s largest corporations, across various industries and with people from all over the world. I feel this background gave me a solid footing for creating my own business. I have been building mobile applications since 2000, when I first built a game for Palm Pilot.

I am married with two children and try to live a simple life.

My current focus is on mobility and cloud related technologies.

You are Founder and CEO of Zentity, which is responsible for a multitude of apps millions of people use on a daily basis. Can you tell us how Zentity started?

I have been interested in mobility since cell-phones became popular in the late 90s. I still remember when GPRS and WAP were first announced. I was also lucky to have worked at an early mobile based product startup called 12snap in Prague where I programmed some WAP based systems.

Later I went on to work for Oskar/Vodafone on SMS content based systems and Česká spořitelna where I worked with online systems. Since the beginning of the millennium we heard every year that it will be the year of mobile.

It started to seem like a real possibility in 2008-9 timeframe after Apple’s App Store was opened to 3rd party developers. So, over the years, I always had startups and mobility in my mind and when I held the first iPhone in my hand, it was crystal clear to me that this was the time for action.

So, I started playing with mobile apps for new smartphones and hired a few people to program mobile games. At that time there was no market for Enterprise mobile solutions, but the mobile games allowed us to learn the technology and were successful in their own right. In summer of 2010 it became clear to me that banking will eventually be performed on mobile devices, we called it a “bank in your pocket”.

My years of experience in banking and telecommunications allowed me to design, market and successfully rollout mobile banking products when the market finally came about. By 2011 we were on our way to become an important player in Enterprise Mobility.

Today we are a leader in mobile banking and related solutions in the CEE region, and probably in wider Europe. 

You’ve designed mobile gateways for huge enterprises, like Vodafone, CSOB, ING, and Alza. Why do these big companies come to Zentity to build their mobile solutions?

It’s got to be a combination of our product maturity, security focus, technical expertise, agility, scale and references.

The enterprise market is very difficult to get into. In the early days, we won because we were ahead of the game. Nobody was thinking in terms of mobile gateways back in 2010-11. Also, we were very clear about our focus and committed to things that mattered to our customers: security, time-to-market and user experience. We have stayed true to that vision through the years.

After successfully rolling out first projects we started winning on the strength of our references. Over time we have reached a scale which is hard to replicate for others in our space. I would love to say that this was the game plan, but we didn’t know how far we can push it.

So, I suppose the formula here is, first you win by correctly timing your product market fit, then you win by scaling through reference selling and then you win because of the scale (as it becomes harder for your competitors to be faster, better and cheaper than you). All the while you have to run a tight and efficient operation.

What are some of the unique challenges in working with such large corporations, with such complex needs?

I have had a long career on Enterprise IT side of things, so to me it came naturally. You have to be aware of long sales cycles. It took us 2-3-4 years to close some accounts, so you have to be patient.

You have to work with a big sales pipeline. On the delivery side, the projects have to be managed very tightly with constant evaluation of the risks. Communication is very important. As in everything I do, I believe that it all starts with putting together the right team for the project. Half of your job is done if you have put together the right team.

Working with large corporations is not much different than working with startups in that you are always delivering a piece of software to a group of people who need it to run their business.

What have been some of your “favorite” or most important failures in the process of building Zentity into what it is today?

We probably have made every mistake in the book as we were getting started 🙂 I always tell my team that the most important projects (tenders or RFPs) for us are the ones that we lose. Every loss makes us regroup, work harder and smarter.

Also, the projects we didn’t win often come back to us because competitors don’t do a satisfactory job or for some other reason. We work hard everyday to make sure that from an operational point of view we are absolutely world-class.

As a mentor at StartupYard, what is are some of the key mistakes that you see startups making most often? What piece of advice to you find yourself giving all the time?  

Timing and product market fit. Also, doing it for the right reasons. I generally lose interest when someone speaks of getting acquired or just raising a funding round. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who think raising money is the main objective.

I never discuss the idea itself, I only want the team to explain the product market fit to me. I want the team to have a deep understanding of their market, technical talent is not enough. I understand that pivots are an important part of a startup’s life and no plan survives contact with the enemy, or as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.” But you have to let the team figure this out and not push them to your world view.

In the early days of Zentity, I was advised to open source our product, because we will never sell it. I was advised to hire a VP of sales or build bikini apps. But all I wanted to do was to build a “bank in your pocket”. It’s very important to stick with the core idea, but it will only work if you have deep expertise in the subject matter. I knew banking, so I knew what I was building.

Not pushing a startup to adopt your world view is incredibly hard. It’s something our team struggles with, and I know our mentors do as well. What would you say is the ideal role of a mentor for seed-stage startups?

Yes, it’s natural to try to comment the idea based on our experiences and beliefs. But it’s counterproductive on many fronts. First, young founders look up to you and will underestimate their own convictions, second, they get defensive about this and then you don’t discuss anything other than the idea.

You want the founders to convince you of the product market fit and that they have a deep understanding of their market. Peter Thiel calls it “the secret that you believe in.” Sean Parker didn’t change a thing in the core Facebook idea, he simply advised Zuck on how to stay in control of his own business (a whole different topic :-)) and scale it.

What has worked for me is to start with the assumption that I would never know the market and its product needs as well as the founders. Then you can start on a clean slate and may even learn a thing or two.

As a non-Czech who has adopted the Czech Republic, what are some of the advantages, and disadvantages, that you see in this market? What attracted you to it in the first place, and what keeps you here?

I will answer the second question first. What attracted and keeps me here is the love of my life, my wife and later our children.

Even though I always kind of knew that I wanted to run my own startup or company I could not have known where it would be. I believe that the fundamentals of business in the long run are the same everywhere. You have to build something or work in an area which others want enough to pay you, do it well, be straightforward in your dealings and keep things simple. I do not like complex business models or deals.

But I can share some observations of the Czech Republic compared to other places like US or India where I have lived or done business. The Czech Republic is a remarkably small market and everybody tends to know everybody, which can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on your reputation

 It’s also a very young market, which means sometimes there are no clear category leaders. An older or more mature company here simply means someone who got started in the early nineties. You can find world-class technology talent. I consider all those things advantages.

On the disadvantages side, I can only think of two things. First, it’s hard to scale and secondly, sometimes it can be hard to build meaningful and mutually beneficial partnerships.

The scaling problem is understandable, given the size of the Czech market, and its incomplete integration into the European market as a whole. But why would you say building partnerships is particularly difficult here?

Regarding partnerships, it probably has to do with the fact that if you are trying to create a software product in an industry vertical you will run out of accounts very soon. E.g. banking only has about 15 real accounts and Telco only 3-4 major accounts. The partners would not have enough incentive to invest in the pre-sales of your products.

Another observation I have had is that people and companies generally don’t get the idea of specialization. They want to do everything for everyone. Again, probably due to small market size or historically this is how it worked here. In US, for example, you normally hire someone to mow the lawn, here people just like to do it themselves.

We try to overcome this by explaining to companies about the whole value chain in a vertical market and that they don’t have to do the whole stack to add value.

We have been successful with partnerships like Microsoft, locally and globally, because of the mature partner ecosystem Microsoft has built. Let’s hope more companies will get this over time.

What do you think Czech corporations and startups should do in the near future to compete on a higher level with larger markets, such as Germany, the UK, and the US?

We have been reasonably successful abroad. To compete globally you have to run a very tight world-class operation. English has to be your corporate language from day one. You have to have diverse and international talent early on.

What has worked for us is to try to scale globally once we build a solid business locally. Every global market is unique and sometimes you may have to tweak your product and communications strategy. It’s also a timing issue, you can’t be too early but you can’t do it too late either.

A lot depends on your funding situation. If you have tens of millions of dollars in funding you can try to build full global operations, but if you are growing organically you are better off finding one deal and then grow around that deal.