The Mensch of Eastern European Venture - A session with Borys Musielak, Founding partner of SMOK 🐲 | Replay available now
Let me paint you a picture, my friend. Borys Musielak is more than just a rising top dog on the Eastern European Venture Scene, he's a force to be reckoned with. This guy's got heart, soul, and a whole lot of grit. More than anything, Borys is a true mensch.
Borys is an inspiring figure, the kind of person who leaves you feeling energized and ready to take on the world. His honesty is refreshing, his insights are profound, and his approach to investing is nothing short of inspiring. This is a man who's blazing a trail worth following, and he's doing it with style, grace, and a whole lot of moxie.
See for yourself 👀 and please bear with yours truly😊
EUVC is building a community syndicate to back SMOK Ventures with capital & super powers💸
📝 The executive summary
SMOK is an operator-led US fund investing in top serial founders of the CEE region
SMOK has delivered on its promise of connecting ecosystems with 80% of the money raised by portfolio startups coming other global investors
SMOK has risen to become the first-choice fund among serial entrepreneurs in CEE in less than two years of operation
Named one of the most active CEE seed funds in 2020, and the second most active in Poland (Vestbee reports)
GP team consists of Borys Musielak, Diana Koziarska & Paul Bragiel
💸 The financial argument behind our investment
With Fund I, SMOK demonstrated they can consistently attract the best CEE entrepreneurs and attract global investors to follow on these deals.
SMOK delivers a differentiated value-add of being a “for founders by founders”-fund that is highly connected to both the local startup scene and global venture scene via the Bragiel brothers.
The firm-building strategy will further strengthen SMOK’s dominance as one of the go-to funds in software & GameDev in CEE.
Fund II is an extension of the strategy employed in fund I which is on track to become one of Europe’s highest-performing funds.
♟️ The strategic argument behind our investment
It’s an explicit goal of SMOK to give LPs initial CEE-traction, making it a high priority for the team to work actively with the EUVC syndicate.
Borys is one of the leading voices in Eastern European Tech making him a strong partner and entry point to the ecosystem. If you don’t already follow him on linkedin, we advise you to do so and check out his musings here.
Borys and Diana have demonstrated extremely high levels of collaboration towards us as well as their surrounding ecosystem ensuring us that they’ll be a great partner for knowledge sharing & co-investing.
❤️🔥 The type of investors we’re building for
Tech entrepreneurs & operators from across the CEE
Community leaders and angel investors from CEE
Industry experts from various industries and geographies
Programmers from around the world
While the above are broad categories, they narrow a lot with the core criteria that we’re building the syndicate for investors that want to be engaged and useful. And as Borys put it beautifully in our memo episode with him and Diana:
I don't want boring LPs. I don't want LPs that do it just for the returns. I want LPs that are entrepreneurs, friends, people who are like us, who care about the community in Central Eastern Europe and want to be part of something big. Of the big force that we’re building.