Adapted from Chapter 4 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns. It is 2011, and my online funeral business is finally taking shape.
Just as everything was coming together, and I once more began to believe in success, I felt the old “I’ll show you” kick in. I know today that this trait is both my greatest asset and my curse.
We had moved our headquarters to Warsaw: closer to the investors, closer to the money (the version for investors), closer to the best nightclubs (the version for our friends) and closer to home (hi, mum!). I was sitting on the Old Town Square drinking coffee. Not some shitty soya latte, but normal, strong coffee for real men. I had grown up.
Suddenly I heard: “What’s up, Marek!”
I knew that voice from high school. A shiver went up my spine. It was Karol, the guy who had won over my Marysia. The body has an extraordinary capacity to recall emotions, smells and sounds. Just as the ringtone of my ex-boss’s phone had burrowed into my consciousness forever, so that within a millisecond the mature, self-confident businessman became the neurotic Marek craving acceptance, so did this voice. I didn’t even deserve such strong coffee.
“Karol! It’s been a long time! Sit down and tell me everything,” I said, pretending to be excited as best I could.
We each gave the potted version of what had happened since we last shared a flat, each slipping in our biggest successes while pretending to be modest, and each working out whose life had turned out better. It was one of the strangest conversations of my life, and one of those that influenced my fate.
McKinsey, and the Samwers
Karol was working for McKinsey, a breeding ground not only for business talent but for business sharks who calculate formulae in Excel quicker than Excel. In my first year at university I had applied for an internship there and failed the math tests. Karol had won over “my” Marysia and now he worked at “my” McKinsey.
Then he started talking about Rocket Internet, a kind of McKinsey for internet companies, founded in 2007 by the three Samwer brothers. It built companies from scratch, in tens of businesses on five continents, with over 30,000 people. The Samwers sold their first internet service for $35m a hundred days after it went live. As every driver wants to race for Ferrari, every internet manager wanted Rocket on the CV. And for high positions it took mostly former McKinsey people and investment bankers. Karol was trying to get a job there.
Third time lucky. Karol, old buddy: challenge accepted.
We agreed how wonderful it had been to see each other and that we must keep in touch. We haven’t seen each other since. It was difficult to find a table with room for both of us, and our egos.
Poland becomes my Koszalin
The conversation woke a strong need in me to see the world. After high school I had “escaped” from Koszalin to do and gain more. Within a few years Poland had become my Koszalin.
My problem was that, surprise, I didn’t know anyone at Rocket. All I had was their website and its “Careers” tab, which I had regarded all my life as a wailing wall for life’s victims. I parked my ego at the door and clicked. Among the corporate categories I found what I was looking for: co-founders, not for Rocket itself, but for the companies it had established.
The Samwers knew which businesses they wanted to build (usually a tested model from the States, in a less developed market) and had the money ready. What they lacked were partners who would fall in love with an idea and, like a parent, adopt it. What Rocket didn’t know was that it needed Marek Zmysłowski, bored with Poland and online undertaking.
The only location under “co-founders” was Egypt. “The Pyramids and kitesurfing is fine for me,” I thought. The requirements were clear: an MBA from a reputable university and a minimum of two years in a top consulting firm, investment bank, venture capital fund, private equity fund or a start-up. That “or a start-up” was my only hope.
I dug out the CV from when I was looking for work as a barman, emphasized some things, exaggerated or lied a bit about others (especially my English), and made a PDF. The covering letter said: “Although I know that I do not fulfill 90% of the requirements, I know that I am way better than those straight-A terminators from McKinsey, therefore I am begging you to call me! In exchange, I will get you a discount on a funeral. Offer valid while stocks last.”
I clicked send and went to bed. When a journalist later asked how I got in, I said I had been recruited by a headhunting agency. Fame doesn’t make itself, you know.
The interview that went wrong
Two or three weeks later an email arrived: “Dear Mr. Zmysłowski, thank you for your interest in Rocket Internet. Would it suit you if a preliminary interview took place tomorrow…” I didn’t read any further, as it’s hard to read and perform a victory dance at the same time.
The interview was on Skype, with a Frenchman responsible for Rocket’s operations in Africa.
The Frenchman explained that they were looking for a founder to start a business in Lagos. “That Lagos in… Portugal?” I asked hopefully. “Lagos. In Nigeria.” He paused for me to take this in. He was clearly used to such reactions.
“I only know two things about Nigeria,” I said, “Boko Haram and the scam with the Nigerian ‘prince’.” He asked if I associated Nigeria mainly with terrorism and fraud. “You’re able to read my mind,” I said.
“There is no lack of problems,” he replied. “But the economy is growing at an extraordinary pace, to a large degree due to new technology. In the next 20 years, Nigeria will undergo the transformation Poland has experienced in the last two decades, except that it is four times bigger. It is the most difficult country in Africa in which to build a business. But if you pull it off, expansion into the remaining 53 countries, with a population of 1 billion, is just a question of time.”
“You’ve convinced me.” The Frenchman had found my motivational button. If even a little of what he said was true, I had found the size, scale and international aspect that I missed in Poland.
Then the grilling began. “Could you summarize the last five years of your life in one minute?” And then: “Tell me more about building the online funeral business. But please focus on the problems. Go ahead and complain.” The son-of-a-gun surprised me. On the other hand, there’s no better nation at complaining than the Poles. I complained. I said the people in that industry had no understanding of the internet, that corruption was not called corruption but a “marketing channel”, and that to persuade enough companies to join I had visited the forty largest cities in Poland and held over 10,000 sales meetings.
The conversation ended, along with my hopes. I had said we were continually verging on bankruptcy. That Poles don’t get my business. I had even screwed up my mention of MotoRaporter. What a disaster. Nothing like a movie scene of despair happened to me, though. Three days later, an email arrived: “Dear Marek, we would like to invite you to our office in Paris for two days for the further stages of the interview.”
Paris, and two doors
I told no one, least of all Marcin, my partner and investor in the funeral and car-inspection businesses. If he was going to kill me, at least let him have a good reason.
It was high time to fix the gaps in my education about Africa. At school I had learned that Europe colonized Africa and something went wrong, then Europe liberated Africa and something went wrong. I knew all the African capitals but could not find them on a map. So I did the research any millennial would: YouTube. I watched documentaries about Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, and discovered that Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, produces more movies than Hollywood. The reality was so far from everyday Poland that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I expected glass and metal at Rocket’s Paris office. Instead it was a small sand-colored tenement with a gigantic open space and at least a hundred kids tapping away at MacBooks. Each, of course, sipping a soya latte.
That day I had four meetings, with marketing, venture development, customer service and financial operations. Each gave me cases to work on that would normally take a day, and came back an hour later to grill me for another hour. By evening I nearly fell asleep on the treadmill at the hotel gym.
The next morning, I asked the two “presidents for Africa” (a project at Rocket usually has two or three managers, who complement each other and compete at the same time) whether so few people were interested in Africa that they had invited me after that dreadful interview.
They laughed. “It’s not what you think. We get tens of applications daily. The problem is that few have the combination of skills, character and experience we demand. We need someone who can build a project in an unfavorable environment, dealing with clients, competition, organized crime and corruption. Someone who understands that building a business online takes place offline. Frankly, your application would have gone in the bin if we hadn’t noticed that you had worked in the undertaking sector. Up to now everyone we had employed had snapped. But looking at what you have achieved, we have no doubt that you’ll manage.”
They gave me two options. The first: Jumia, “the African Amazon.com”, a team of barely a hundred people. I would take over online marketing for all African markets, with a twenty-person team and complete freedom. The second: “We’ll drop you into Africa and you’ll build a project completely from scratch.”
I was leaning towards door no. 1. A ready-made company, clients already there, a perfect addition to my portfolio. Then I heard myself say: “Only No. 2 enters into the game.”
They both smiled, and I knew I had chosen right. They needed a troublemaker who would bulldoze his way onto a bus. The risk of option 1 was also too great: I had called myself a “director of online marketing” on LinkedIn, but what I really knew was the textbook start-up, starting from nothing and building it “with these hands”. Only this time I would have an investor with an unlimited budget behind me. The best of both the corporate and start-up worlds. That’s how it seemed to me then.
They offered me a choice of regions, and I learned that the African start-up market mostly copies proven ideas: I could start an African Uber, an African OLX, Booking.com or Expedia. They sent me to the restaurant downstairs to think. I put €10 on the table and pointed at the first dish I saw, which turned out to be beer. I felt that travel would suit me best. “At least I’ll get lots of free coffee and discounts on flights, not only on funerals,” I thought. I went back upstairs and told them I would create a clone of Expedia.
They were surprised I hadn’t asked about the conditions. I had simply forgotten. The contract offered a budget of $10M for the first two years, 2% of the stock plus another 2% if the firm hit its KPIs, a car, an apartment, a cleaner, and a five-figure monthly salary in dollars. Much later I discovered that by signing it I had become one of the company’s worst-paid employees.
That night I decided to walk around Paris instead of sleeping. Never do this. Three times I had to run away from people who, instead of “How are you?”, shouted “How much have you got?” I was almost happy I’d be working in Nigeria and not in the Parisian urban jungle.
Telling Mom, and telling Marcin
Back in Poland, I told my parents first. For half the way there I tried to design a plan to stop my mother having a heart attack: talk for hours about the money and the challenges, and hope she would not ask where exactly I would be working.
“But where exactly will you be working?” Mom asked after thirty seconds.
“Well… in Nigeria,” I said quietly.
“Ambitious, son, as usual. Several of my students work there now and I’ll put you in contact with them. Just watch out for yourself!”
Talking to my parents was the easy part. Then I went with Marcin for a steak. We talked about this and that until I cut to the chase. “Have you ever heard of Rocket Internet?”
“Sure,” he said, chewing, rare as he usually ordered. “A global giant. They’re cleaning up.”
“What would you say about you buying me out of Mementis and MotoRaporter, finding someone to take my place, sorting things out with the investors, and directing expansion, so that I can go to Nigeria and start a new project for Rocket Internet? Great idea, don’t you think?”
Marcin was about to put a piece of steak into his mouth. He held the fork still in mid-air. Then, very slowly, he laid the meat back on the plate and said, through gritted teeth: “Tell me that once again. But slowly, so that I certainly understand it.”
For the second time I had hung him out to dry. For the second time he was furious. And for the second time he forgave me. He told me he would have done the same, and to get ready for a lot of new experiences. With hindsight, he was 100% right. He was fired up about MotoRaporter, and took on sorting things out with our Polish investor, the Polish Enterprise Foundation. I had two weeks to settle my affairs in Poland. Work became a whirlwind.
What I took from it
- Read the requirements, then read the small print. “Or a start-up” was the only line that mattered, and it let an applicant who admitted he missed most of the requirements through the door.
- Be honest about your problems. I thought my interview was a disaster because I complained about my business. They told me my time in the undertaking sector was the reason I got the invitation.
- Choose the harder door when you know your strength. Building from scratch was what I knew how to do.
- “I’ll show you” got me here. It started with one awkward coffee on the Old Town Square.
This is from Chapter 4, “Ten, nine, ignition sequence, start”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.
Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify
Leave a Reply