7 years ago, I left the sunny, warm and breezy California, for the cold and grey Warsaw Poland.

It wasn’t a blind leap of faith, but rather, it was a process that I thought through for many years. From 2010 to 2018, I closely monitored data points that would validate my hypothesis. Who would have known that those initial observations would prove correct…and that I was about to stumble upon one of the greatest economic success stories of our time.

Our history as Poles is something that has always fascinated me. Poland is a nation caught in the crossfire of extreme ideologies and the shadows of bygone empires. Our homeland, has been perpetually ensnared by its geography, flanked by historical giants whose influence has seeped through our annals for ages. This shared history of resilience and turmoil is a double-edged sword for us Poles — it forges a strong sense of unity among us, yet it also underscores the divisions that challenge our cohesion. It’s a paradox that unites us as much as it divides us, serving both as the bond that binds us together and the force that wrenches us apart.

This is our unfortunate history.

It is a history that has shaped our collective personalities, motivations and culture. It’s so deeply engrained into our psyche, that the overwhelming majority of us are not even consciously aware of it.

Our history is deeply embedded within our collective identity, shaping our character, ambitions, and societal fabric. Unbeknownst to many, the intricacies of our history influences us at a subconscious level, dictating our strengths and, more critically, exposing our vulnerabilities.

These vulnerabilities, I argue, are what tether us from reaching the peak of our collective capability — a capability that is vast and untapped.

The journey to unlocking this potential necessitates confronting and healing from the intergenerational scars that distort our collective psyche and negatively impact our decision-making.

This introspection may prove uncomfortable, yet it is essential. My hope is that through this exploration, you embark on a path of personal growth and foster a dialogue within your communities. Together, embracing this challenge, we can step forward to actualize the immense potential that lies dormant within us, charting a course towards a future defined not by our past traumas but by our shared aspirations and achievements.

Our journey toward realizing our full potential is both a personal and collective endeavor. It requires not just an understanding of our shared history but also a deep, introspective look at how this history shapes us today.

When I moved to Poland in 2018, I, too, was initially unaware of how deeply these historical imprints had woven themselves into my own DNA, until I immersed myself within a population who was virtually genetically identical to me (add a mental note here as I will return to this later in the article).

A Short History of Me, A Polish-American

As a Polish-American and an immigrant, I grew up with my parents instilling in me a strong sense of identity and a reverence for our past. This experience is not unique to me; it resonates with many Polish-Americans. Even those among us whose ancestors embarked on a journey to a new world three generations ago still cling tightly to the traditions and customs of our ancestors. I personally know folks of Polish descent, who still send their kids to Polish school, smoke kielbasa, make Żurek for Easter and marry other Polish Americans. It’s fascinating to see how proud these people are of where they come from, regardless of how long ago they left Poland.

This remarkable attachment to our heritage, a defining trait of the ‘Polonia’ or Polish Diaspora, is rare among diasporas worldwide. It underscores not just a connection to our heritage, but a living testament to our resilience and unity. It is this profound bond to our roots, combined with the willingness to confront and heal from our historical traumas, that will propel us towards realizing the vast potential within us. By embracing our past, engaging in self-reflection, and fostering community dialogue, we can break free from the chains of intergenerational trauma and step into a future where our collective strengths are fully realized.

My family and I emigrated from the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in ’89, fleeing the horrors of a complete economic implosion known as the fall of communism. Inflation in Poland had been picking up steam, as a monolithic centrally planned economy tried to make a U-turn towards Free Market Capitalism. Things were so bad in Poland, my family and I escaped in order to seek asylum in the United States, and start the long arduous process of legal immigration.

My father had a lot of cousins in the US as most of my grandmother’s siblings emigrated in the 60s and 70s. Most of them couldn’t even speak Polish. And then there was us…not a single word of English, but all the enthusiasm in world to start something new. Our family helped us get on our feet in the early days, which allowed us to quickly realize the American Dream.

Upon our arrival we immediately became a part of the local Polish Catholic Community, centered around the Polish-American Nexus in the Northeast: The National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. Saturdays was Polish School and Sundays was Church, always in Polish and always amongst other Polish-Americans. We lived in a sort of small version of Poland, a tiny landlocked island, with only a few thousand inhabitants.

Little do most Poles know, but the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa is a historical landmark in the United States. St. John Paul II visited it before he became the Pope, as well as US Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson & Ronald Reagan. The Shrine attracts pilgrims and tourists annually and is regarded as an epicenter for Polish American culture and community.

Being Polish American is something that is very unique in and of itself. You’re not quite Polish, yet not quite American either. You’re stuck somewhere in-between. You have this bizarre feeling of connectedness to your history, and yet you resent it at the same time. It’s something that’s just there…you can’t explain why but you know it exists.

If Polish-North America was a country, including Polish Canadians, we’d be a country with over 11 Million strong. That’s more than all of Sweden and the Czech Republic. Polish North America is so large, that US Presidents campaign to get the Polish American vote, as the majority live amongst the swing states. We even have our own cultural phenomena such as Polka music, Dyngus Day and the Pulaski Day Parades.

Now, I know this may sound shocking, but for as long as I could remember, I was always ashamed to be Polish. I didn’t know why, but it was just some instinctive feeling I could never shake. But my parents always stressed the importance of learning the language, keeping the traditions, and always remembering where we came from. The Shrine was always a place where we could feel comfortable doing that and those Polish Americans around me also kept a tight bond with their past.

I went on to finish my degree in Physics from Villanova University, and quickly assumed one of the vocational stereotypes we Polish men undertake: I became a software developer.

I ended up founding my first company Nooch, which brought me from the East Coast to the WestCoast. The San Francisco Bay Area. Home of Tupac, and Steve Jobs. As a software developer, I spent a lot of time on GitHub and StackOverflow. Github is a repository for lots of open-source software and StackOverflow is an internet forum where developers help solve each other's problems.

One of the things that always stuck out to me, was the sheer number of Polish last names on both of these platforms. And this wasnt something that happened every once in a while, it was like 1 out of every 5 usernames I came across. And all of them lived in Poland.

This realization made me think…”if there are so many software engineers in Poland, and such a shortage here in Silicon Valley, then why are there no Polish Tech Unicorns (A Startup with at least a $1B Valuation)?” Estonia already had tons of them. Clearly the prerequisite of a successful startup ecosystem was an abundance of talent, as I learned in my career in Silicon Valley. Therefore it had to be one of the core axioms for a successful startup ecosystem. I began to conduct further due diligence on the Polish Tech Ecosystem, and starting in 2013, I started spending a month or two during the summer meeting the locals in tech. And what I discovered further intrigued me.

Poland’s Massive Untapped Potential

The local ecosystem was clearly still developing, and the majority of software companies there were all consultant shops, better known locally as Software Houses. Software Houses rarely ever raised money from investors, and instead resorted to professional services. This gave them access to capital, in an otherwise capital depleted environment. There were no venture backed companies because there simply was no venture funding. But over the years things slowly got better and in 2017, the Polish Development Fund (PFR), (i.e. the Polish Sovereign Wealth fund) announced that it was taking meetings to invest in its first batch of new venture capital funds. This initiative would effectively seed the first generation of the Polish venture backed companies and start accelerating its own tech ecosystem.

In 2018, a friend of mine alerted me of this program, and shortly thereafter I raised a ~$17MM USD fund, as one of the first deep tech funds in the region. This is what ultimately pushed me over the line to make the move to Poland. By 2020, right before the Covid pandemic, we committed to our first investment in a quantum computing company as Atmos Ventures.

From 2020 to 2022, Atmos Ventures invested in 9 companies, all from deep tech and enterprise software backgrounds. And all the while I wanted to continue my research and be able to validate my hypothesis that Poland had the potential to become a force to be reckoned with in the global tech race. After all, I was investing in the region, so I aught to be 100% sure that my investments were going to return. I published an article with this analysis in the Fall of 2021.

The Israeli Tech Ecosystem and Its Parallels with Poland

In 2020, I visited Israel for the first time, and I was given a book called Startup Nation.

Startup Nation talks about a country Israel, that is basically on an island because the folks living around it want to wipe them off the face of the earth. It’s about the size of New Jersey, yet they have the highest number of Unicorns per capita of any country on the planet, including the United States. It was a place that started with literally nothing but traumas from the horrors of the holocaust….and a small patch of dirt in the middle of the desert. Yet they turned it into an economic miracle, seemingly overnight, and they did this with just a few million people. The population of Israel has the highest number of engineers and scientists per capita in the developed world, and a wave of Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union in the 90s made that number grow even more. By 2014, the country had already minted its first unicorn, Ironforge, and is second only to SV as the most competitive tech ecosystem in the world. They were small, so they had to think big and global from day one, and most of them set their sights on the US market first.

The significant momentum in Israel’s development was sparked by a government initiative known as the Yozma Group. This program, which operated on a ‘fund of funds’ model, closely resembled the structure of our own Polish Sovereign Wealth Fund, and Atmos LP: PFR. It started in 1993, and was the tinder match Israel needed to get its VC-backed startup ecosystem brewing. After 1993 its clear as day that the combustion was sustainable, and the Israeli ecosystem was off to the races.

Now the big difference between Israelis and Poles has to do primarily with their personalities and character traits. An Israeli friend of mine who lives in Warsaw once told me a funny but fitting adage:

“If you give an Israeli a problem, he will provide you with 12 solutions. If you give a Pole a solution, he will provide you with 12 problems,”

and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the core symptom that points us to the number one problem holding us Poles back from realizing our full potential.

Polish People’s Worst Enemy is Themselves, and this Threatens its Massive Potential.

Now, let’s go back to my sudden realization of my own character flaws after immersing myself in this completely new environment in 2018. This realization wasn’t the final light bulb moment, but rather the beginning of a new journey, where I’d try to find answers to why we all had these bizarre yet similar complexes as Polish People.

In 2021 I read the book, “It Didn’t Start with You,” which presents an innovative method for addressing traumatic legacies that have been transmitted across generations. The author, Mark Wolynn, is a renowned expert in the domain of inherited family trauma.

The book suggests that many psychological and physical issues such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, phobias, and obsessive thoughts may originate not within our direct life experiences or brain chemistry imbalances but from traumas experienced by our ancestors. Groundbreaking scientific studies, affirm the theory that trauma can be inherited, a concept previously intuited by many. The book builds on research by esteemed figures like Rachel Yehuda, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist and author of “The Body Keeps the Score.

Despite the original trauma bearer’s possible death or the loss of the trauma narrative, the emotional impact can persist, subtly woven into gene expression and everyday language, significantly influencing our mental and physical health. For over two decades, Wolynn has applied his therapeutic insights in working with individuals and groups, developing the Core Language Approach. This approach, outlined in the book, includes diagnostic self-assessments to identify the hidden fears and anxieties communicated through common words, behaviors, and physical signs. It also uses genograms to trace family histories and emotional patterns, alongside techniques like visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue, to foster reconnection and healing, offering pathways to overcome enduring challenges that may not respond to traditional therapies or medications.

I personally suffer from clinical depression, and have known it for the majority of my life. It was only until recently that I began to notice how this disease had developed the following complexes that we as Poles all share to some degree.

An Inferiority Complex, masked by a thin veneer of a superiority complex is something that the overwhelming majority of us not only feel, but can also see in daily Polish life. The other is the Scarcity Complex, which not only do us Poles possess, but the majority of the population of Central and Eastern Europe, or the former Warsaw Pact nations.

An Inferiority Complex can be described as: constant feelings of inadequacy or insecurity in your daily life due to a belief that you are physically or mentally inferior to others. Something I’ve noticed about living in Poland is that many Poles irrationally feel that they are inferior to the rest of Europe or the West. Many see Poland as a backwater country, or the back-office of the rest of the world, when in fact, we as Poles have so much to be proud of, both from the present and the past. The thin veneer of a superiority complex I mentioned earlier can be seen in the designer clothes we wear or the Italian sports cars we cannot afford, and the air of entitlement that this subsequently creates. These complexes are subconscious, and manifest themselves as anger, resentment, or our favorite pastime: complaining.

The problem with this inferiority complex is that if we cannot love ourselves, how can we possibly have any sense of respect towards others? The net result is a collection of personal anecdotes of Poles taking advantage of others both here in Poland and in the US. Many years ago when my family and I were still asylum seekers in the US, we were taken advantage of by many Poles who promised to help us fast track our Green Cards, only to fall prey to some scam perpetrated by people who were “trying to help out their community.” Because the majority of us are insecure about our own subconscious shortcomings, we project that unconsciousness towards our peers and our communities.

This Inferiority Complex goes hand in hand with our Scarcity Complex. A scarcity complex refers to a mindset where an individual consistently feels like they don’t have enough, leading to behaviors driven by a sense of scarcity. This complex can relate to various aspects of life, including money, time, relationships, or other resources. People with a scarcity complex often experience persistent anxiety over running out of these resources, which can influence their decision-making and overall mental well-being.

I believe this is a net result of the engineered poverty we experienced under the boot of communism. Under communism, people had to figure out how to get by and engaged in ‘cwaniactwo’ or ‘hustles’ to ensure their short term well-being. This short-term thinking may have proven to be effective in those days, but in a society where resources are no longer scarce, this mentality is a bug and not a feature.

As an investor in Poland, I have personally seen founders who have many side hustles and find it hard to focus on only one thing. This kind of thinking makes it difficult for the founder to realize success in their primary aspiration, and inadvertently ends up failing in both their side hustles and their primary aspiration. I have also noticed that in Poland and CEE, the culture of “paying it forward,” does not exist whereas it is the modus operandi in US business culture.

These two complexes, when combined create a very toxic, self destructive business environment that thwart our collective potential. I have seen it and have also experienced it first hand. I’ve heard some absolutely outlandish horror stories of people who clearly optimized for the short term and completely disregarded the long term cost. As an American, it’s hard to wrap my head around but if an individual has always been exposed to this kind of environment, it’s nearly impossible for them to see things under a different light. It’s even harder to point out the unconscious to someone whose core beliefs dictate that “this is how things are done,” and “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

How To Fix these Software Bugs in our Society

It’s no secret that we as Poles have been dealt a rough hand for centuries. Beginning with the partitions of Poland, where we were relegated to second class citizens, only to regain our independence 5 generations later. Shortly thereafter, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union carved up Poland and sent it into one of the most terrifying periods in human history. For the Polish and Jewish population living in Poland, the circumstances felt like an apocalypse. From 1939 to 1944, the Nazi Germans exterminated 17% of the Polish population, including 3 million Polish Jews, who were an integral part of our society. The irreparable damage this caused our ancestors still plagues us to this day in the form of mental illness and behavioral complexes.

It’s unrealistic to expect an entire population to recognize and agree on the same character flaws that you perceive. Often, what one individual notices, others may not fully grasp, especially if their environment doesn’t encourage diverse perspectives. Many people grow up surrounded by others with similar thought patterns, which can normalize negative and self-destructive attitudes. These individuals might not see these traits as problematic because they’re viewed as “normal” within their cultural context. However, by identifying and addressing these negative traits within ourselves, we can liberate our minds from a form of mental bondage that we often unknowingly impose on ourselves. This self-awareness can be a powerful step toward personal growth and freedom.

I’m not sure if this is something we can fix within a decade but I am convinced that it is the major roadblock on our way to building a powerful tech ecosystem. The Israelis also have their traumas from the past, but I think that over the millennia, they have figured out how to heal from those traumas and stay united. Our history is obviously much shorter than that of the Jewish people so perhaps we still need some more time to learn how to heal from our unfortunate history.

Your Call To Action

If you’ve gotten this far in the article, I would recommend you grab a copy of It Didn’t Start With You (in Polish: Nie zaczęło się od ciebie. Jak dziedziczona trauma wpływa na to, kim jesteśmy i jak zakończyć ten proces) and start with your own Self Assessment by the author. Mental Health is still something that is unfortunately frowned upon by Polish Society, and the data for that is clear.

“Poland, like other countries in the WHO European Region, has significant challenges when it comes to ensuring access to mental health services. 60% of patients who have reported needing mental health support say they do not seek help due to stigma. There are just 9 psychiatrists per 100 000 population in the country and waiting times are long. 3.7% of the Polish national health budget is spent on mental health care, which is low compared to some other European countries.” — WHO

My hope is that this article begins to raise awareness in our communities and throws cold water on the stigma of taking care of our mental health. What should be stigmatized is the current dismissive attitude towards taking care of one’s own mental health.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” — Leo Tolstoy

John C. Maxwell, an American author and speaker, once said, “Most people want to change the world to improve their lives, but the world they need to change first is the one inside themselves.” Many people criticize the world’s problems, but few work on improving themselves. I have been on my own journey of healing and growth for years, and it’s still an ongoing process. By confronting the uncomfortable truths about ourselves, we can achieve remarkable things. Only by doing this can we unlock our full potential, paving the way for a future shaped by our aspirations and achievements, not our past traumas.

This is the key to our limitless potential.

Dominik Andrzejczuk

Polish American Venture Capitalist