We take matters into our own hands

We stick to investing in fintechs, green energy and technology companies, but our strategy is evolving towards creating business holding structures. Investing in technology companies at an early stage is very lottery and not very efficient - declares Wojciech Pysiewicz, co-founder of the WP2 Investments fund, in a frank conversation.

You have been co-running a venture capital fund for several years now. What path did you take from the world of traditional banking to the environment of investment funds, technology and fintechs?

I think that in general I went through a rather unusual path, because after graduating from high school, I decided to study journalism at the University of Warsaw.  My youthful dream, which is still unfulfilled today, was to become a sports journalist. But - as it happens in life - my professional life went in a completely different direction.

So what went wrong?; -)

During my studies, I worked for a while at Radio RMF, I did radio specialization in Polish Radio, television specialization in TVP, and in the third year I found myself in the then emerging Puls Biznesu, where I wrote mainly about the media market, sponsorship and advertising. And so I started to be interested in business, finance, banking, etc. From Puls Biznesu, I found myself in the world of finance, where for 20 years I went through the path from PR, through marketing and financial products, which I dealt with at Noble Bank and Santander Consumer Bank, to sales, products and responsibility for the entire Santander business in the Benelux, where I had the pleasure of being a member of the management board responsible for the Santander Group's business in Belgium and the Netherlands.

How did it happen that you exchanged a comfortable life in the corporate world for a less predictable market of startups and funds?

At Santander in the Benelux, I was responsible, among other things, for the digitization of banking products and processes. And so, year after year, I observed that there is much more going on in the world of startups and technology than in the increasingly regulated and predictable banking world. I also knew that I needed further development and new challenges. Life circumstances were also conducive to change - the pandemic, the resulting new style of work in banking, but also mental changes in me. To put it simply, this situation probably only accelerated what I had planned anyway and it had to happen at some point. After a few months of the pandemic, my family and I decided to return to Poland and the decision to set up a fund was quite a natural step at that time. Together with the other Wojtek Pysiewicz, my cousin and friend, we officially launched in the spring of 2021. Initially, we operated independently, and in the second half of the year we started to build a team.

You often emphasize that you are a slightly different fund than other players on the VC market. What do you mean?

As so far we have only invested our own funds, we have not had other LPs or used public funds, I think that we are more suitable for the term that we are an internally managed family office with elements of venture building and venture capital. It is worth adding that we currently operate in a team of a dozen or so managers, most of whom I knew from the banking world and whom I invited to board the fund.

How did you start investing?

We very quickly diagnosed three mega investment trends, around which we built three thematic portfolios of companies that we are still developing. Naturally fintechs were the first direction for us - we built a portfolio of ten companies focused mainly on payments. This is a portfolio that is constantly our pillar - because the fintech companies in which we invested generated over PLN 200 million in revenue, EBITDA of 40 million and net profit of PLN 32 million last year. The second area is technology companies with a focus on impact investing and artificial intelligence.

The third pillar of our activity is the energy transition, where in the area of green energy we operate mainly in biomethane and solar projects.

So how do you invest?  How has your strategy changed over these few years of operation?

At the beginning, it was traditional investing similar to VC funds - we usually took up about 20 percent of shares in companies forming three thematic portfolios. During the first two years, we built a portfolio of 35 companies in three segments and we hoped that thanks to our strategic support and the so-called smart money, our portfolio companies would grow, and we would happily exit for fat millions;-)

To sum up - in the first two years we probably built the largest portfolio of fintech companies among Polish funds. We have also started green energy operations around solar and biomethane investments and managed to build an interesting portfolio around Impact Investing with companies representing industries such as medtech, biotech and edutech. However, we came to the conclusion that without a significant impact on the companies' operations, we are exposed to a lack of agency and increased lotteries.

I understand that such a strategy, which other players on the VC market are trying to implement, is ineffective in your opinion?

I don't want to put a stick in the anthill, but it's no coincidence that virtually no domestic VC fund boasts about its results widely. Funds declare that they want to make a 3-5 times return on capital for their investors, in an 8-10 year period. But the reality shows that only a few manage to earn such rates of return. In our case, we quickly realized that investing in technology companies at an early stage is very lottery and not very efficient. I think we were very lucky anyway - because so far only two out of about 40 projects in which we have invested, have been closed. Therefore, on the one hand, we very quickly began to allocate capital thematically, counting on synergies between the companies, and over time we went in the direction of building business and holding structures.

What do you mean by business and holding structures?

Recently, we have been changing our approach to running a fund quite intensively, while observing what is happening on the fund-startup market. That is why about a year ago we decided to create business structures around thematic portfolios consisting of our companies. I will give you three projects that we are working on - for example, around fintechs, together with two other shareholders, we have started to create a fintech holding focused on the payments industry. We will have almost 70 percent of shares in this holding on a tripartite basis, so we will actively have control over the strategy and synergies between the companies.

The second area is the Da Vinci VC ASI fund, established in November 2024 and managed by us, in which we want to design and build 20 biomethane installations. In this fund, as WP2 Investments, we are the General Partner and additionally we take up 20% of shares in it.

The third example is the area of artificial intelligence, where we are working with our industry partner to create a group of companies that build and deliver products that automate processes and repetitive activities in the financial sector and corporations in general.

How does cooperation with portfolio companies affect your approach?

We are certainly richer for the experience of regular, daily cooperation with companies from our portfolio - such "shoulder to shoulder", without telling fairy tales about smart money, as part of our ScaleUp support program. Further megatrends have appeared on the market, such as the development of advanced technologies with particular emphasis on AI and even more intensive development of the payments market, in which Polish companies play a significant role.

Certainly, we are constantly looking for our own path of development, different from the traditional paths of VC funds. Our strategy for the coming years is evolving towards a transition to the "holding" model and is aimed at maximizing the potential of the investment portfolio built so far, on the one hand, and greater agency in the established structures, on the other. Investing in the VC model will continue to be of interest to us, but it has become one of several elements that will form the core of our business from this year, as part of which new structures have been created.

On what values do you build the fund, what kind of manager are you?

The great strength of our company is the team of people we surround ourselves with. I mean both the fund team of a dozen or so managers at WP2 Investments, most of whom I had the opportunity and pleasure to work with for many years in my previous professional realities, but also the founders of companies from our portfolio. In total, it is a group of about 100 people with whom we have the pleasure to work in various forms. We try to invite people on board who are effective, open and act at the right pace, adapting to business circumstances, but we also attach great importance to surrounding ourselves with managers who show activity and the right amount of "life fantasy". I am also constantly learning it myself, on the one hand I try to make our strategic vision and the goals we set for ourselves consistent, but I also try to learn from the managers I have around me. Most people declare that they like challenges - but I really like them and I have to admit that for several years I have "had such big wings" that thanks to the projects we build and the people from our "blue family" I start each new day with impatience and curiosity.

February 2025