Interview with Krzysztof Drzyzga from Verestro - part 2

I have a list of things I would like to do in life and I successfully tick off the next items. Read the Bible, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, visit Venice or Spitzbergen, see the Statue of Liberty, run a marathon, it's all done. Building a good company is also on the list. I crossed out this goal two years ago.

 What does a typical day of Krzysztof Drzyzga look like?

Over the years, I have developed some effective habits. My alarm clock rings at 6:50 am. Breakfast, walking the dog and... 15 minutes of Spanish language lessons. I have been learning languages for 15 years. Every day. A moment later, I get on my bike and go to work. And then the cauldron starts <laughter>. There are periods when I have a heavier load. They tend to be looser, but most often I have 200 things to do on a given day. I finish around 5:30 p.m. – 6 p.m., go home and vegetate <laughs>. Alternatively, I practice or learn math with my daughter Karolina. Extended mathematics from high school helps me a lot to get my brain cells moving.

And where is the sport? I remember you playing basketball.

I exercise almost every day for several minutes, although recently with less intensity due to the knee surgery I underwent a few months ago. It stopped my basketball career a bit <laughs>. Before that, I did various things – I ran marathons, played a lot of basketball, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I hope that soon I will be able to return to running.

And if you had to choose one passion, one for your whole life, what would it be?

I'm interested in various things, but if I had to choose one best sport, it would be skiing in winter and sailing in summer. I really like basketball, I spent a lot of time playing chess. I read for half an hour every day. The time between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. is my window for reading. It is also a habit that I have been cultivating for several years.

How do you do it that you cover these 200 plus topics a day, run a company employing over 150 people, selling services in 28 markets on 5 continents, develop new start-ups and still have time for your own passions?

Once a year, I do time management training in the office.

When will it be the next? Can we join?

We'll get along. <laughs> One of the practices that I consider to be key is the Inbox Zero methodology. With each e-mail, you have to do something immediately – reply, delegate, archive, turn into a task. If you don't respond the first time, you will have to go back to that email and you will lose another 10 seconds. If you lose 100 times like that, you lose up to several hours a week.

It is also important to respond quickly to emails. Hellishly fast typing on the keyboard is essential. Currently, probably half of my working time is e-mail. The head works much faster than the hand, so when I write twice as fast, I work twice as fast.

Anyway, this is also the simplest and all in all free competitive advantage. Let me tell you an anecdote. Recently, I was able to answer a client (a person from Mastercard) in 30 seconds to a rather complicated question about a new project. This not only made her work easier, but also made a great impression on her. There is no cheaper and easier way to make the WOW effect than to quickly respond to questions asked by email and customer problems. Anyway, it also works inside the company.  I actively try to end ineffective discussions in the company. Of course, I analyze more difficult topics quickly, but I strongly believe in the power of intuition.

What tools do you use in your daily work?

I have completely standard tools, but I actively use them in a disciplined way. An example is Reminders on your Mac. If I send an email to someone and I don't want to forget about it, I put it in to-do, set a reminder for the next week. For 2-3 years when I have been using it, I have not forgotten anything. In the band, I can remind you of something I said three months ago and everyone thinks it's magic. <laughs> There are plenty of tools, but more important are such habits and habits of using these tools.

You can be wise in mentoring, but the most important thing is discipline. It's like learning a language. You can't master a language in a few days, it's also easy to lose motivation when you don't see immediate results, but if you get into the habit of daily discipline, you can do anything. Well, because 15 minutes a day means that I have 90 hours of language learning a year.

What do you look for in cooperation with investors?

I do not yet know what is the right way to cooperate with investors, because I think there is no single path. On the one hand, it is good to start and develop on your own, but in complex businesses it is practically impossible. This is a very difficult question, and I don't know the right answers. It is important that we have similar goals, that we know what we are doing. The least important thing is the money, because it disappears after a few months.

I think that among the most important things is the help that you are giving. Apart from Mastercard, which certainly helps us in business, this is the first time I have dealt with such active help.

In the context of investors, there is something that I am happy to share with others. Apart from the fact that you need to have investors, you need to have people who are willing to get involved. By donating their PLN 20,000, they want to work on it from the beginning as its co-owners. This is a very important direction for me. My goal is that it should not be a narrow group of a few people, but rather 30-50 people who have the same goal and believe in business and the increase in the value of this business.

A question from the category what would happen if... If you were to establish Verestro again, would you go the same way?

At every moment of the company's existence, we made conscious decisions that were the best at a given moment. Of course, not one of them turned out to be wrong and more than one discussion or project also turned out to be wrong. To be completely honest, I wouldn't change anything, because it seems to me that these were good decisions in their time.

However, I would do a different thing. I would build a group of international friends faster. If I had the chance to go back to university today, I would spend more time having friends in 30 countries, not just in Poland. I would develop international partnerships faster. In our fintech business, we build a global business from the very first moment. The fact that we have a nice friend in Poland is cool, but it doesn't mean anything. Unfortunately, Poland is a small and poor country from the point of view of B2B business. That's why a group of 20 colleagues in 20 countries is super important. Thanks to this, I can relatively quickly enter several markets and start developing a global business...

How could you help other start-ups from Poland and abroad, as a founder with your business experience and social capital?

If time is available, I can share my experience. Certainly access to a network of partners and customers built over the years. I think these are the two most important things.

How do you define leadership?

The world is changing, and management methods that were adequate 30 years ago are often not applicable today. The approach to a developer who is 18-20 years old and sits locked at home at his computer is different than the approach to a thirty-five-year-old. You have to skillfully adapt your behavior to different people and to the changing world, which is not easy.

The basic rules are simple - you need to be open, transparent, communicate clearly and quickly. In addition to these basic principles, we must work every day to develop the company culture. You probably haven't had a chance to see it, but at Verestro we have a collection of slides with rules. I think about 70 collected mainly by me and later developed by managers and employees. I regularly wrote down such golden thoughts, and later we collected them and shared them with everyone. In a book about Netflix, I read that for them culture is not 4 values, but 200-300 pages of such thoughts. It is all alive, fluid, changing and evolving affects the leadership style.

Would you like to share your failure that turned into a good lesson?

There are a lot of failures that I usually forget about quickly. The experience of the company's bankruptcy is very interesting. My first company collapsed after one of its shareholders siphoned off several hundred thousand zlotys from its accounts thanks to an independent proxy entered in the investment agreement. The case ended up in the prosecutor's office. A lot of stress at that moment, but in retrospect, an experience thanks to which I got to know, a. o., some of my current co-investors. Dramatic situations related to bankruptcies sometimes lead to very nice results.

And your greatest success?

Private or business? The private one is the family. There is no discussion here. On the other hand, business is to create a group of 40-50 people with whom you can work and have fun, we like each other, we have been working together for 7-8 years, this is more important than the value of the company. And every year this group grows by another dozen or so people. And I mean it. Everything that has happened in Verestro and other companies is a derivative of the work of people who work well together, like each other and have a common goal. Interestingly, I will add that it is possible to combine family with business and this is also a great success. My wife Kasia has always been the head of HR in our companies, in fact, she was even the sales and security department before. My sister manages UX. Both are successful in their roles.

What does competition mean to you?

I don't race with anyone in business. I kill such thoughts in myself. Maybe in the days of corporate racing I used to think about it, but now I don't have such thoughts at all.

No, don't you have the impression that competition is sometimes to prove not only to yourself, but to show others?

At different stages of life, you meet different needs. They are the ones who force or motivate you to do something. Sometimes I laugh that I can act for the world, because I have satisfied all my basic needs. I have a list of things I would like to do in life and I effectively tick off the next items. Read the Bible, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, visit Venice or Spitzbergen, see the Statue of Liberty, run a marathon, it's all done. Building a good company is also on the list. I crossed out this goal two years ago.

So tell me how do you define a good company?

I thought about it for a long time when I wrote this goal several years ago. A good company must, of course, grow. It has any number of employees, because it doesn't really matter. What is important is its profitability and a properly diversified customer base. Once, when I was still working at Mastercard, I wondered if there was a group of people who did not have a boss over them, and if so, who the members of this group were. I came to the conclusion that this group are owners of good businesses. I really wanted to join this group.

So what motivates you?

It is certainly not money, nor material things or racing with others for achievements. I have something inside that keeps me awake. Ideas written on pieces of paper tire me a lot, until I implement them. <laughs> The day before yesterday I wrote down an idea generated by Michał Maciąg (our CTO) for a tool for managing payments between employees, using communicators on which they spend a lot of time. I wrote down the idea and we will definitely implement it. (ed.: a month after the interview, you can already test it in Verestro thanks to Michał)

Doing cool things, with cool people, it motivates and drives me. I am happy to see young people who join Verestro and grow within our company. It's satisfying to see how much work they've done, how much they've grown.

I'm in my forties. I went through a midlife crisis, but I didn't buy a motorcycle. <laughs>. I like traveling, one day I want to go on a trip around the world, but I don't think I'll ever stop working. Creating new things gives me too much satisfaction.

You are a serial entrepreneur. What is more important in your opinion - profitability or the scale of the business?

The answer is simple. It always was. Maybe it's more obvious now than it was 2 or 5 years ago. Scale without profitability is asking for problems and stress in life. Loss of liquidity means a lack of salaries for people, and this is the biggest problem I can imagine. I went through such an episode. When we started working at UPaid (ed.: previous name Verestro), we had money for two months from the activity. A delay in one payment by a large customer may have caused payouts to be halted. Such moments must not be allowed.

The business must achieve profitability in the foreseeable future. Positive cash flow in the company is needed. If I saw that the company's coffers were missing tens to hundreds of thousands of zlotys per month, I would immediately start reducing costs.

An easy question at the end. From the perspective of a company operating in nearly 30 markets, what strategy would you recommend to other companies scaling internationally?

Easy question. <laughs> First of all, it depends on the business. There is no single solution. Coal is sold differently, services such as Amazon Web Services are sold differently, and fintechs or loans are sold differently.

You definitely have to be focused and disciplined. Think about every little particle of this Lego, these 200 parts that make up the whole, because the smallest of them can destroy the whole business.

Is the fact of being from Poland a blocker or is it neutral in your opinion?

It doesn't matter. Well, maybe with the exception of the war, which is a bit too close to the Polish border. My family and I consciously made the decision to stay in Poland for business. I believe that Poland is a good market from which you can effectively scale your business on an international scale. We are part of the European Union, which is one of the largest and most important markets. We have virtually unlimited opportunities for development in the European Union. We still have relatively low labor costs.

From the perspective of a company operating on the fintech market, we are a very attractive market, with specialists, projects, and one of the best experience in the world. The downside is Polish banks, which are too good. I'm saying this completely seriously, they have good teams and they do the same internally, and this limits the flow of money from the Polish banking sector to fintechs operating on a local scale. This is one more argument for the need to scale globally.

And with this conclusion we propose to end the conversation. Thanks for your time and sharing your experience and knowledge.

THE FIRST PART OF THE INTERVIEW >>