The Pursuit of Scrappiness #53 Investing in Baltics, Fintech trends, from entrepreneur to VC and insights into building an investment team with Adam Niewinski 🇵🇱 (OTB Ventures)
Adam Niewinski is the Co-founder and General partner at OTB Ventures - a leading venture capital firm operating in CEE out of Warsaw. Adam is a seasoned executive, entrepreneur and with OTB has invested in several Baltic companies already, including Kevin, Ondato and Fractory.
In this episode we talk about the evolution of the Polish VC/startup ecosystem, investing in the Baltics and sharing lessons for investing from business executive experience. We also talk about global VC trends, OTB strategy and making a good first impression to a VC. Finally we discuss building a strong VC team.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[02:55] - ON POLISH VC/STARTUP ECOSYSTEM
- Historical gaming industry
- Startup ecosystem accelerating last 5 years
- Mid-size country trap
- EU funds impact
- Unicorn inspirational effect
[07:20] - ON INVESTING IN THE BALTICS
- Substantial part of the portfolio in Baltics and huge potential
- Cooperation with local funds
[09:40] - ON LESSONS FOR INVESTING FROM OWN BUSINESS EXPERIENCE
- Confident vs. arrogant founders
- Have strong opinions, but be ready to change them fast
- The strength of the right people
- Investor can’t run the company for the founder
- Investing as art+science
- F2F vs. zoom investing
[18:50] - ON GLOBAL VC TRENDS
- Correction on the stock markets healthy
- Irrelevance of current market situation for long term investments
- Historical context for venture investments
- Innovation transfer from corporations to startups
[24:50] - ON FINTECH TRENDS
- Bringing own financial sector experience to the table
- Hands-on track record
- CEE countries strengths for building fintech companies
- Global fintech trends
[32:50] - ON BUILDING A VC TEAM
- Founding story of OTB Ventures
- Complementing skills of partners
- Diversity with a common goal
- Hiring drivers not passengers
- Managing reputation
To reach out to Adam use: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-niewinski-07b7931/
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
Support for this episode comes from Venetor > https://www.venetor.co/
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