The Polish Builder's DNA

A different kind of celebration

Poland Tech Week is the week Polish tech celebrates itself. Founders, investors, startup employees and students meet to mark what has been built here, including companies such as ElevenLabs, ICEYE, Booksy and Codility that started with Polish founders and now sell around the world.

We wanted to add a different kind of celebration. Headlines count companies and rounds. Behind each of those companies is a small group of people who decided to found it and a first team who decided to join. This report is about them: who they are, where they learned their trade, and who they built with.

Most of what is said about those people rests on a handful of stories, such as the dorm-room founder, the olympiad genius or the engineer who came home from London. We looked deeper, person by person: the careers of 34,314 people at 452 Polish startups, set against 170,371 professionals in Poland with the same kind of job, experience and city who never worked at a startup.

Question 01

Is there something that sets the people who build startups apart from those who choose a different career path?

Question 02

Who do Polish startups hire, and what backgrounds do these people come from?

Question 03

Do career paths show us what we can do to strengthen the startup ecosystem?

Here are the findings that matter

Founders start again. 35% of founders had founded a company before, against 1.5% of similar professionals. At 24 times as common, no other trait comes close.
Founders lead early and study deep. 40% had managed people before founding (5.7 times as common) and 11% hold a doctorate (7.2 times).
Teams bring range and practice. Employees worked across more industries (1.8 times as common), managed people earlier (2.7 times) and did more internships (1.5 times).
Startups grow out of trusted circles. 52% of founding teams include former colleagues, against 1.2% expected by chance. One in seven of the first ten hires worked with a founder before.
Founders more often studied partly abroad. Studying in both Poland and abroad is 2.6 times as common among founders as among similar professionals. Longer study abroad is less common.
At top startups, founders differ more than teams do. Counting founders wherever they live, 51% of top-startup founders had worked abroad, against 28% at other startups. Their employees differ by less than four points on every trait.

Here's what the data shows, and what it means if you are founding, hiring, investing or studying.

Hiring pro tip

Simon Kubicki

Founding Partner @TechTree

A recruiter's view from placing people. The data in this report does not measure promotions, scope, speed or work samples.

Most companies screen for a famous university or a big-tech logo because both are easy to check. A university shows what someone could do at nineteen, and a logo shows that a company once said yes. Neither tells you what that person will build next month.

So what should you look for?

Promotions and ownership. A manager watched this person work for years and still decided to give them more responsibility. Taking or receiving more ownership is connected with trust, capabilities, growth & proactivity.
Starting over. Someone who moved abroad or spent a semester at a foreign university had to rebuild everything from zero. A startup asks for the same thing every month, and people who have done it once know they can do it again.
Speed. Imagine two people with the same title, one who got there in eight years and one in three. Hire the second. Where someone started is mostly luck, and how fast they are climbing is mostly them.
Scope. At a 30-person startup, one person can own the whole backend with no one to catch their mistakes, so they learn to see the full product. At a large tech company, a very smart engineer can spend years on one feature and never see it.
The work itself. Ask for what they shipped and the numbers it moved. A case study on a real problem, done during the process, tells you more than a round of interviews.
Their questions. Candidates who researched the company and used what they found will prepare the same way for their work.

The best people are often at companies nobody has heard of, or on careers that don't follow a straight line. Ask them "why" three times about one thing they built. People who did the work get more specific with each answer, and people who only watched get vaguer.

The talent is here, and most companies haven't learned to see it yet.

What it means

Four readers, four ways to use the findings

For founders

Hire for what people have done, and check how wide your circle is

Ask what candidates have done, not where they studied. Top-ranked universities are as common among employees of other startups as among those of top startups (13% vs 14%). Startup employees were 2.7 times as likely as similar professionals to have managed people and 1.8 times as likely to have worked in three or more industries.
Expect former founders in your pool. 8 in 100 of the first ten hires had founded a company before, against about 1 in 100 similar professionals.
Use your network, then measure it. One in seven of the first ten worked with a founder before. Check what share of your hires comes from your own circle, and keep at least one hiring channel outside it.

For investors

Read the founder profile, not only the CV headline

Do not treat a repeat founder as a signal on its own. A third of founders had founded before, at top and other startups alike (34% vs 36%).
Note top-university and consulting backgrounds, but weigh small numbers. Founders of top startups more often studied at top-ranked universities (29% vs 19%) and worked at McKinsey, BCG or Bain (5.1% vs 1.6%), but these groups are small.
Do not screen out older founders. Startups whose founders averaged an estimated 35 or older reached the top in 20% of cases, against 10% (110 and 258 startups).

For talent and students

Collect range and responsibility

Work in more than one industry. 38% of later startup hires had worked in three or more industries before joining, against 21% of similar professionals.
Take on responsibility for people when you can. Startup employees were 2.7 times as likely as similar professionals to have been managers by year ten of their careers.
Use internships as a way in. 18% of later startup hires did an internship before joining, against 12% of similar professionals.
If you study abroad, keep a foot in Poland. Combining study in Poland and abroad is 2.6 times as common among founders as among similar professionals. Longer study abroad is less common.

For universities and the ecosystem

Open the circles founders grow in

Mix students across programmes. 56% of founding teams share a university, against 38% expected by chance. Courses, projects and clubs that bring programmes together widen the circle co-founders come from.
Support exchange semesters and joint programmes abroad. Combining study in Poland and abroad is 2.6 times as common among founders as among similar professionals.
Keep doctoral routes into startups open. 11% of founders hold a doctorate, against 1.6% of similar professionals.

Methodology note

How we built the comparison

This report uses TechTree's knowledge graph of public professional profiles and company records, snapshot October 2026. Here is how we built the comparison:

Polish startups. 452 companies on a hand-curated list of Polish startups. A small set of platform companies that list contractors as staff is excluded from most analyses. Eight are headquartered abroad.
Top startups. Startups at Series B or later, with USD 15M or more raised, or with 150 or more people: 61 of the 452.
People. 34,314 people living in Poland who worked at one of the startups: 769 founders, 3,326 first-ten hires (the first ten non-founder hires at each startup) and 30,219 later hires.
Similar professionals. A 5% sample of Polish residents who never worked at a startup-like company (170,371 people), matched to each startup group on role family, experience band and city. Multiples compare the share with a trait in the startup group with the share among their matched similar professionals.
Traits. Measured from career and education history before a person joined the startup, or before a founder founded it.
Study abroad. The total time in education entries outside Poland. “Up to 2.5 years” therefore includes exchange semesters and one- or two-year master's degrees.
Founder age. Our data has no birth dates. We estimate age at founding from the start of a founder's first degree (taken as age 19) or, without one, their first job (age 22), and average it across the founding team.
Chance levels for teams. The share of founding teams with a tie expected if the same founders were reshuffled across startups founded in the same year and city.
What this does not show. These are associations, not causes. They describe who already works at startups, not who would succeed there. Profiles are self-reported and incomplete, so shares are lower bounds. The comparison is not matched on age, and closed startups are under-recorded.