Increasingly International Krakow and the Silicon Valley Talent Phenomena

[Ramon Tancinco (rtancinc)]

Greetings Krakowians,

 

    I just received an email about yet another start-up event in Krakow and when I perused the organizer list, it brought to me a stunning realization…that much of what I had anticipated several years ago with regards to the evolution of an Cosmopolitan Krakow was already clearly happening. The event was Start-Up Pirates event and when I looked at the folks pulling the event together, in addition to a few Poles (outnumbered by the way) were Australians, Russians, Americans and Ukrainians.

  Then I noticed some of the most active participants of the Krakow Open Coffee initiatives are Ukrainian and Belarussian.  While I have always lauded Google for the international atmosphere in their Krakow Office, now even at Cisco it is easy to hear groups speaking Spanish and Italian, even Arabic at the break areas, breaking the traditional idea that folks just come from the East and that now we are seeing eager imports from Western Europe as well. The trend ties in nicely with the recent Krakow Post article about European Expats.  And just to clarify, these are not folks recruited for call-center language work, in most cases these are Network Engineers.

  The capstone amazement was learning that Deutsche Telekom was opening their second start-up incubator after Berlin in Krakow, called Hub: Raum Krakow. DT is a very large service provider coming from very conservative roots, so in my experience, this was  very large but certainly well thought out bet on their part…and the main reason stated in their announcement was not just to capture Polish talent but rather regional talent. As I have mentioned before, one of the pillars of Silicon Valley in California’s success was its renown for being a global talent hub, attracting the best and brightest from all over the world to make the big ideas happen and Krakow is well on its way to being its own emerging global talent hub. The great thing is that we have now moved from the realm of marketing and anecdote to a situation where the numbers tell the story, whether it is global capital being invested in local entrepreneurs or individual people choosing Krakow to be their home base for the next big thing.

  In addition, I know that we have wave after wave of Krakowian (and when I say Krakowian, I mean any entrepreneur living in Krakow, not just the Polish variety) entrepreneurs spending more and more time commuting back and forth to Silicon Valley, networking, raising funding and most importantly, learning global business culture.  All in all, watching this tremendous evolution of a city from the ground-up is an amazing thing…if you are in the mix, keep up the great work and if you are watching from afar, get involved.

   Cheers

    Ramon