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Borys Musielak

Founding Partner at SMOK Ventures

Warsaw, Mazowieckie

Overview

Work Experience

  • Founding Partner

    2019 - Current

    Founded SMOK with the goal to become a leading pre-seed fund in the CEE region. Invested in Alokai (YC W2021), inSTREAMLY, Sunroof, Authologic (YC W2021), Omnipack, 57hours, Finmap, MX Labs, Gotiva, Workee among others. SMOK Ventures is a venture capital fund created by former entrepreneurs with the aim to help early stage startup founders build multi-million-dollar global software enterprises from Central and Eastern Europe. We primarily invest in software and gaming startups in pre-seed and seed stages.

  • Co-Founder

    2016

    In 2016 together with Diana Koziarska we co-founded ReaktorX, a pre-acceleration program for first-time founders. In twelve batches we accelerated 100+ companies which include Vivid Mind, Linghos, Renderro, Hashiona, HiPets, Heroify, Redata, Funlo or Haip. Read more about our startups at https://angel.co/reaktorx

  • Co-Founder, Board Member

    2014

    Together with fellow entrepreneurs I helped found Startup Poland, an umbrella organization that quickly became the community voice of Polish startups to policy-makers, academics and media. The aim is to build better conditions within Poland’s entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem. For any inquiries about Startup Poland, contact our CEO Tomasz Snażyk at tsnazyk@gmail.com

  • Member of The Supervisory Board

    2020 - 2024

    I'm a minority investor and used to be a member of the supervisory board at Dziki 🐗 Warszawa 🏀, a basketball club run as a startup. Only 6 years in operation, we advanced to Ekstraklasa, the top Polish league, in 2023.

  • Co-Founder

    2011 - 2020

    In 2011 together with fellow entrepreneurs Anna Walkowska and Kuba Filipowski I co-founded ReaktorWarsaw.com, a startup community and a co-working space located in a Żoliborz mansion in Warsaw, Poland. We hosted monthly #OpenReaktor events that featured a number of great international speakers (Marvin Liao, Jerry Colonna, Paul Bragiel, Simon Cross...) and gather major figures of the Warsaw startup scene under one roof.

  • Director of Product Management

    2015 - 2019

    I joined Samba TV when the company acquired my startup Filmaster in 2015. During my 4-year venture, I built Samba's Warsaw office from scratch and helped it grow from 4 to 40 people. Simultaneously I was responsible for EU operations and international product bringing Samba's cross-screen media and analytics products to UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.

  • Founder & CEO

    2009 - 2015

    I co-founded Filmaster where we built Netflix-like personalization and analytics solutions for the entertainment industry helping cinema exhibitors and TV operators rapidly capture and analyse user preferences in order to deliver a comprehensive picture of the audience and drive incremental admissions / viewership. We raised ~€500k from international investors. The company sold to Samba TV in June 2015.

  • Founder

    2005 - 2012

    I created from scratch a media group related to GNU/Linux and open source software. Some of the websites like jakilinux.org and OSnews.pl became market leaders in their niche generating millions of page views per month.

  • Consultant

    2007 - 2010

    99 Bishopsgate was my home for a few years where I worked on a number of confidential projects for the investment banking division of Deutsche Bank as part of my work as a Rule Financial consultant.

  • Consultant

    2007 - 2010

    Being a Technical Consultant (tier 1) for various investment banks including Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital I worked both as a software engineer, analyst and connector between different branches of the bank. A lot of projects I took part of were related to processing derivatives like swaps and swaptions in formats like FpML using software like Tibco Business Works.

Relevant Websites