With a lazy gaze I look at my phone. I have two new matches on Tinder, the UberEats driver is already on his way to me, ten people like me, five love me and a hundred simply respect me. Since Friday I haven't left the house, and yet all of this is really happening. A glance at the monitor and I am reassured by the ever-growing green of the reach bars and the purple of well-delivered KPIs. And yet over the past few years things weren't quite so rosy.
Interesting times, in which the immensity of possibilities surpasses the vastness of dreams and plans. Today everyone is a serial entrepreneur, everyone fixes the world from the comfortable seclusion of offices shared with like-minded visionaries. On the wall it is written in paint that an idea is only 10 percent of success, that a good business is one that can be pitched in thirty seconds, so with no shortage of verbiage they would put Eminem to shame and, just in case, they keep ten such ideas. The manna of financing trickles in, whether from magical sources controlled by generous mustachioed officials, or from mythical angels hunting for unicorns. An idyll! No one says they have a company - because a company, by definition, serves to create money. A startup - not necessarily.
At hundreds of meetings conducted in agile scrum rituals, a cult grows around the product, the service, the technology, the platform or the solution, which one day will descend upon the faithful bringing fame and prosperity. So long awaited and longed for! After all, everything was done the way the hired mentors and coaches said. A beautiful office, the first funding, wide-scale recruitment, full commitment, scrum masters, millers, an Instagram account, the second funding, an accelerator, employees on the other side of the globe. After all, that's exactly how it works in Silicon Valley! And on the Vistula? When I think of our dusty backyard, an image from the late 19th century comes to mind. Has the Silicon Valley cult, like the cargo cult once did on the islands of the Pacific, bewitched the minds of local entrepreneurs?
The cargo cult was noticed by anthropologists at the moment when the indigenous population began building landing strips and runways for airplanes, quays for ships, warehouses, etc. It turned out that the local population, seeing that the whites were building runways and landing strips, the result of which was airplanes arriving with food and other goods, began to imitate them - describes the phenomenon, eagerly quoted by the authorities of domestic public life, Wikipedia.
Young startup founders, like the indigenous population of old, do everything to recreate the success story of Western companies. They conjure reality by spending successive installments on fashionable office furnishings, overpaying for absolutely everything, because that's what they saw on television. Elon Musk's cosmic tweets, the possessive visions spun by Mark Zuckerberg or the Steve Jobs biographies devoured with bated breath set the imagination ablaze, fueling the hunger for million-dollar deals.
The new cult, as befits a religion, has its devoted priests, spiritual guides through the sages of progressive philosophy, who, like Buddha or Confucius, with unction teach how to live and run a business. The televangelists of success won't let you catch your breath, rest and think. What counts is efficiency and the zeros in your bank account, so you have to push, push and push again. At least as much as the corporate people climbing the glass ladders of success. For the preachers of inverted morality, to have means to be, and success is a golden calf worthy of the highest reverence. The experts ordained by coaching schools charge dearly for their miraculous teachings, but where else can you look for motivation? After all, without doping and personal development training the world would come to a standstill, and all the eminent businessmen destined to change it would grow mustaches and drive taxis.
O masters of sales, whatever the customer wishes for, they shall get it! O experts, marketing ninja warriors, self-proclaimed growth hackers and evangelists. How many of you went your own way? How many managed without an office with a hammock, foosball, without a photo with your first foreign client on Instagram and without spinning global plans on popular portals? The sky is not the limit. You are. And the more imitated habits you manage to reproduce, the harder it will be to survive the long and winding road to your goal.
Łukasz Kapuśniak, Chief Technology Officer at Cloud Technologies
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Cloud Technologies is a Warsaw-based company from the new technologies segment, founded in 2011 by Piotr Prajsnar. It deals with Big Data marketing and data monetization. It is the largest data warehouse and Big Data platform (DMP) in Europe and the fastest-growing company on NewConnect. The company has developed innovative analytical tools (OnAudience, Data Management Platform), whose reach covers practically every internet user in Europe. The data collected and processed by Cloud Technologies allows marketers to personalize advertising campaigns online and to expand BI-class solutions in companies (data enrichment). The company has also developed its proprietary UnBlock technology, which makes it possible to serve online ads despite installed AdBlock-type software. UnBlock by Cloud Technologies has already received preliminary patent protection from the Polish Patent Office.
