The Ultimate CEE Founder FAQ
I’ve published 700+ posts over the last five years. Scattered through them is the same advice I keep repeating in DMs and 1:1s with founders.
So I went back, pulled the 50 highest-engagement posts that contain actionable guidance focused specifically on Eastern European founders, and stitched them into a single FAQ for founders, condensed, with the original posts linked underneath each answer if you want the full context.
Bookmark it. Send it to your co-founder. The next time you email me asking “should I sign this CLA?” — assume my reply is “did you read the FAQ?”
If your question isn’t here, my email is borys@smok.vc.
— Borys Musielak, SMOK Ventures
Should I raise venture capital at all?
Do I need VC money?
Yes — if your goal is to dominate a market. Capital is oxygen for speed. If you don’t care about speed of growth, skip the funding and bootstrap. But then you’re building a lifestyle business, not a tech startup. Both are legitimate. Just be honest about which one you’re running.
Should I bootstrap or take VC?
Building a brand for a local market — bootstrap. Building deep tech with no near-term revenue, or competing globally where every rival is VC-funded — take VC. Default to bootstrap when you can. You can always switch from bootstrap to VC later. You can’t go the other way.
Isn’t VC funding the biggest cause of startup failure?
Often, yes. The whole VC model is designed for the founder to either fail or be incredibly successful — nothing in between. There’s no way back once you’ve taken the check. Think multiple times before you sign. If you do sign, you’re agreeing to floor it for 8–10 years chasing a fund-returner. Going in with that clarity is the only honest way to start.
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What’s the actual VC math I’m signing up for?
VCs don’t fund things that should work. They fund things that probably won’t — but might change everything if they do. Ron Conway invested in 30 startups in one early fund; the first 29 failed. The 30th was Google. That math is the whole job. If your business plan looks safe and predictable, you’re pitching the wrong type of investor.
Why should I prefer a VC dragon-hunter over a “safe” PE-style fund?
Every company in a real VC’s portfolio should have the potential to return the entire fund. If your VC is optimizing for safe 2–3x outcomes, they’ll start coaching you toward safety too — “maybe don’t go so big with the vision,” “maybe take that acqui-hire,” “maybe raise a bridge instead of swinging.” That mindset is contagious and kills founder ambition. Pick investors who push you to swing, not to bunt.
Building the right founding team
What does an ideal founding team look like?
Three people: a connector (sales, PR, recruiting, opens doors — often ADHD-driven), an operator (the discipline engine: “OK, here’s the plan for the next 90 days”), and a CTO who can actually ship. Magic happens when all three are present and balanced. Two visionaries with no operator get stuck at MVP. Two engineers with no seller hide in the basement and launch too late. A solo founder trying to do all three burns fuel like crazy. Start with your weaknesses and recruit the gaps.
What kind of young founder will you actually invest in?
A young founder without much track record needs three things to be investable: incredible determination to ship the idea, the gift of persuasion (so experienced people work with you for free for half a year), and the ability to listen, draw conclusions, and pivot when needed. With those three, raw experience matters less than you think.
What signals a high-velocity founder?
Replies to messages within hours, even at odd times. Reaches out proactively instead of waiting for the next scheduled call. Communicates with deadlines: “I’ll have this Wednesday” not “I’ll get back to you.” Specific, measurable milestones. Works on multiple milestones in parallel. Ruthlessly protective of their time. Schedules important meetings within hours, not weeks. Travels on extreme short notice when needed. Absorbs new info and acts on it fast.
How do you feel about founders bragging “I have 8 engineers building this” at pre-seed?
That actually makes me sad — your burn must be horrible. What you should be proud of at pre-seed is how little you’ve hired. Show me what you’ve achieved without spending money on headcount. That’s the lean signal I want.
What does it mean to “go all in”?
In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with 617 men and burned his own ships. No retreat, no plan B. Founders need to do the same: sell your shares in the software house you founded ten years ago, drop the corporate advisory gigs, kill the side hustles and “just in case” projects. Half-commitment produces half-results. I want to invest in conquistadors, not in people running five experiments to see what sticks.
So one project at a time, right?
Right. “A few” projects is too many. If you want VC funding, focus 100% on one. Multiple “cool projects” in your pitch tells me none of them is your life’s mission.
What does a strong pre-seed founder bring to the first meeting?
Two things: real experience in the industry they’re trying to disrupt, and a non-obvious insight about a painful problem tech can solve. Bonus: a dozen prospective customers who already said they’ll pay before the product even exists. With that, I’m listening before you’ve finished slide one.
How do I deal with rejection?
Get used to it. Most people you talk to won’t believe in you. Investors will say the market is too small or that they don’t get your vision. Customers will take months to close or back out at the last minute. It’s not personal — every founder goes through this. The best founders learn from each rejection: better at communicating, better at listening, better at closing. Sometimes a change of scenery (e.g. a flight to California) is what does it.
How to pitch — decks and meetings
What’s actually on a good pre-seed deck?
Eight slides. That’s it. Most decks I see are 20+ pages of stuffing — that signals lack of focus and pure laziness. The longer the deck, the weaker you look. Cut everything that isn’t: company + one-line pitch, team, problem, solution, why now, traction, market, ask.
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If I had to fit it in three points?
(1) Who you are and what you’ve already done — not just in this startup, as founders in general. (2) What you do, in plain words, and what’s unique about it (your competitive edge). (3) How much money you need and why specifically from me. That’s the whole pitch. Nail those three and the meeting will happen.
What should the competition slide look like?
Not “us all green ✅, competitors all red ❌.” Startups don’t win on having more features — they win because they do one thing 10x better than everyone else. Make that one thing painfully obvious. The first time I see a deck where the startup has one green check and competitors have green all over, I’m wiring before the meeting ends. I want to invest in a Rolex, not a Frog watch.
Does storytelling actually matter, or is it just noise?
It matters more than the idea. Founders who can’t tell a story will struggle to fundraise no matter how good the product is. I’m a much bigger fan of investing in great storytellers with “stupid” ideas — Airbnb, Reddit, Bolt — than in technically brilliant founders who can’t sell. If you can pitch a weird idea well at pre-seed, you’ll figure out traction and the next round will fund it. The reverse rarely works.
What are the most common mistakes on a VC call?
A short list of things that make me lose interest fast. “Let me introduce my fundraising advisor” — if you need someone else to sell your company, that’s a red flag. “I brought one of my angels” who then does all the talking — I’m investing in you, not your spokesperson. “We’re spinning this out of a software agency” — services DNA, divided focus. “Once we raise, I’ll go full-time” — no, go full-time first. “We’ve been building this for years and now need to raise to hire sales” — if there was no traction in years, the problem isn’t sales. “Here’s another cool project I’m working on” — none of them is your life’s mission then. “We’ll start in Poland and just translate the website later” — global expansion is not a localization exercise. “My CTO works at a software house, so he knows what he’s doing” — part-time CTOs rarely build venture-scale companies.
Should I just walk up to investors at events and pitch?
Please don’t ambush. After my last student panel I was surrounded by people pitching ideas — none excited me, not because the ideas were bad, but because I rarely get excited about ideas alone. I get excited by people. By stories. By urgency and obsession. Talk to me like a human being. No one enjoys being ambushed with a pitch, and that’s not how you “score” investors.
Cold email or warm intro?
If you have a third person we both know and trust well — ideally a portfolio founder, a topic expert, or an angel already investing in you — get the intro. Otherwise, cold email is the way. Most cold emails fail because founders use shortcuts: CRMs, generative AI, mass-mail systems. They go straight to spam. A real, personalized email — one that shows you understood what I care about and why you’re writing to me specifically — beats a weak intro from someone I barely know.
Picking investors and structuring the deal
Should I just take the first money on offer?
No. Search for the best possible investor from day one — ideally someone with an international angle. Don’t settle for a mediocre investor; it will bite you later. Cap tables are forever. Choosing an investor is more like getting married than buying a service.
What due diligence should I do on the investor?
Talk to founders who took money from them before. If something is off, those founders will tell you. Look for repeated patterns in how they handle term sheets, conversion terms, and personal guarantees. Once a Polish founder showed me how the same “investor” template worked: enthusiastic first meeting, long negotiation tied to public grants, last-minute change to the contract adding personal-asset collateral, then progressive loans that drag the company into a debt spiral until the founder hands over equity. Two iron rules came out of that experience: never sign a convertible loan without precise, written conversion terms, and never ever secure a loan with your personal assets.
What about the LPs behind the fund? Does that matter?
A lot. Capital carries legal, reputational, and geopolitical baggage. Before the wire hits, ask: Who are the LPs and beneficial owners? Is there current or potential sanctions exposure? Is there undisclosed state-linked capital? What contractual protections exist if an investor becomes sanctioned? If a fund refuses basic transparency on material LPs or source of funds, treat it the same way you’d treat a customer who refuses to fill out a security questionnaire — that’s a risk signal.
Are venture builders a good first home for my idea?
Most of them in CEE are not your friends — especially if you want to build a global leader. Common pattern: lure you in by pretending to invest, drag the process while building the same thing in the background, then offer you 10% of “your own” company on a vesting schedule. If you accept out of desperation, expect to be terminated one day before the cliff. Always do thorough DD on a venture builder, talk to multiple founders who went through it, and get an outside opinion before joining.
What contract should I sign with my first investor?
If you can: a YC SAFE under Delaware law. If you can’t: sell equity. That’s it. I don’t recommend CLAs (convertible loan agreements) under Polish law because they’re treated as debt. The instrument doesn’t determine whether your investor is honest — but fraudsters disproportionately push for debt because it gives them the most leverage to crush a founder psychologically.
Why do you push SAFE so hard?
If you can raise on a YC SAFE, raise on a YC SAFE. Cheaper, simpler, faster than convertibles or equity. The minor downsides for VCs (no rights outside pro-rata, edge cases if there’s no equity round) don’t matter for the best startups, which raise their priced round fast anyway. SAFEs are the most efficient pre-seed instrument that puts founders first.
Is a YC-style $3–5M SAFE at $25–40M cap actually a good idea?
For the top 1% of any YC batch, yes — it lets them avoid dilution before raising the next round at a higher mark. For the other 99%, it’s a trap. You’ll have impossible expectations: PMF on Series-A timeline before you have a Series-A product. If you don’t deliver, your next round happens at a lower valuation — painful dilution at best, “uninvestable” at worst. What feels like de-risking your startup today kills it tomorrow, 99 times out of 100.
How much equity is too much for the first round?
Anything over 20% is too much. 10% is a golden standard. There’s still a Polish fund out there that habitually takes 49% in pre-seed. Dinosaurs. Don’t sign that. Cap tables this bad don’t get fixed; they get walked away from.
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What does a big-name fund actually give me at pre-seed?
Mostly branding, and that’s it. A Tier-1 logo helps you raise the next round — it signals credibility to people who don’t know you yet. It will not help you build the product, find your first customers, figure out pricing, or close your first enterprise deal. For that you need partners who pick up the phone and have built something themselves. Make a top-5 list of investors you actually want — not “most famous,” but “will treat your startup like it matters.”
How are pre-seed valuations actually set?
The team is everything at the earliest stage. Superstar teams (former successful entrepreneurs who built and sold a high-growth startup) can raise on great terms even at idea stage — though they often prefer to self-fund early and not give away equity. First-time founders without a track record raise at much lower valuations unless they can prove the model and show real early traction. Each case is different, but the rough rule is: the further you are from a known winning pattern, the more progress you need to show before you get a strong term sheet.
Building the product (especially in the AI era)
Customers, investors, grants — in what order?
Customers first. Investors second. Grants last. Never the other way around. The reason 99% of grant-based projects fall into the “valley of death” isn’t a lack of capital in Poland or CEE — it’s that grant founders don’t talk to the market, don’t validate with customers, and don’t build relationships with investors. When the grant ends, they fall off a cliff. Validate with the real market first; use grants only after the technology or idea has been market-tested.
What’s changed in pre-seed investing in the last 6 months?
Five things, all driven by AI. (1) I don’t invest in pure ideas anymore — anyone can build and test a product in weeks, so raise only with assumptions validated on real users. (2) No moat, no investment. If what you’re building can become a Claude feature next month, it’s not investable. (3) I’m more open to deep tech and hardware, because everything else just got easier to copy. (4) I’m open to solo and non-technical founders, because execution speed is no longer gated by coding skill. (5) “Human productivity” tools got less interesting; tech that replaces humans is more interesting than tech that assists them.
Should I raise money “to build an MVP”?
No. If I can vibe-code a useful app in a few hours, there’s zero excuse for a founder raising VC money “to build an MVP.” Build it first — then raise to scale what’s working.
Everyone’s building an AI hiring marketplace. Should I?
Probably not. Hyper-competitive winner-takes-all market, hundreds of teams chasing the same idea with little differentiation, hundreds of millions of dollars needed to dominate. Build for an industry you actually know well instead — that’s where your unfair advantage lives.
Should I be building a “dual-use” startup?
No. Startups don’t start as dual-use; they start by solving one painful problem for one specific customer. Defense or civilian — pick one. The dual-use label is mostly a political construct because European institutions are uncomfortable openly funding defense. If you want to build a great defense startup, focus 100% on the defense problem. Defense is the mission, not a side application.
Should I fail fast or push through?
Fail fast. A startup collapsing in a week is better than collapsing in a year. Especially after taking VC money — VCs don’t want you stubbornly pushing an idea that can only become a lifestyle business; they want you to find something that scales. Instagram started as Burbn (a cluttered check-in app). Reddit began as MyMobileMenu. Fast failure enabled both. What disappoints investors isn’t pivoting — it’s wasting time pretending something works when it clearly doesn’t.
Going global from CEE (and why “global” matters)
“We’ll start in Poland, then go global.” Good plan?
Bad plan. If your first market is Poland, your ambitions aren’t global. Global founders start with global markets and design for scale from day one. Translation isn’t internationalization. You can be a successful local business this way — you’ll just never be a venture-scale one.
Local winner or 10% chance at global dominance — which do you back?
Always the global swing. I’d rather invest in a startup with 10% odds of dominating the world than 100% odds of being a great local business. That’s how VC math works: local winners don’t return funds, dragons do. If your ambition isn’t global, VC isn’t the right capital for you.
What’s the right setup for a CEE-rooted global startup?
The structural advantage we keep seeing: sell and fundraise in the US, build in CEE. Founders in San Francisco, New York, London, or Miami get direct access to the largest customer market in the world, top-tier angels and funds, and faster feedback loops. Their product, engineering, and customer-success teams stay in Warsaw, Kraków, Kyiv, Split, or Bucharest — deep technical talent at speed and cost that’s hard to match. That’s why most of our portfolio is C-Corps in Delaware with engineering in CEE.
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Should I incorporate in Delaware or wait for EU-Inc?
Delaware, today. VCs need standardization — predictable governance, standard legal frameworks, well-understood investor rights, clear exit mechanics. Delaware C-Corp won that competition; Europe hasn’t. EU-Inc could fix this in time, but until it actually delivers a true 28th regime (one law, one judicial system), the best founders will keep registering in Delaware. The moment Europe ships something investors are happy to wire into, I’ll switch — and tell our portfolio to switch too.
Is it easier to raise in Silicon Valley or in CEE?
Depends on how good you are. If you’re truly exceptional and can play the SV pitch game, the Bay Area is paradise — the whole ecosystem is built to find and fund outliers fast. But if you’re not in the “mafia,” don’t have the American pitch style, and refuse to overpromise (something CEE founders are taught to do), SV will eat you alive. Most CEE founders should raise locally — competition for capital is lower. But if you’re building a category winner, get on the plane and leave the cautiousness behind.
I’m a diaspora founder. Anything specific I should know?
Yes — your story matters more than your product. We see this most clearly with Belarusian founders in Poland, but it generalizes to any diaspora. Patterns to fix: jumping straight into the product without telling us who you are, being hard to find (limited LinkedIn, communication only on Telegram in Russian, staying in the diaspora bubble), and weak generic outreach. Best path: introduce yourself first, share the immigrant journey and the unique insight that brought you here, and use intros from people we already trust — local founders, experts, angels who’ve vouched for you.
I’m a Belarusian, Russian-speaking, or non-integrated diaspora founder pitching Western VCs. What now?
Four things. (1) Network with locals before you need to raise. Bring value to the local startup community before asking for it. (2) Drop the Cyrillic everywhere — LinkedIn, social, decks, even Telegram. It instantly frames you as non-integrated and only interested in CIS markets. (3) Use English, including at your own conferences. Russian builds a wall around you. (4) Be proud of where you’re from. Don’t change your name, don’t hide your identity — just write it in the Roman alphabet. Hiding looks worse than being open.
Y Combinator and accelerators
Should I apply to YC as a CEE founder?
Yes — it’s one of the highest-ROI moves you can make. YC-trained CEE founders consistently think globally by default, move faster, pivot earlier, fundraise more effectively, and attract top-tier investors sooner. We used to worry about entry valuations of YC alums; now we worry more about missing great founders. Our YC companies are some of our strongest performers across both funds.
How do I write a YC application that actually gets read?
Six things to fix in most CEE applications. (1) Storytelling — reviewers read thousands of these; an engaging story keeps them awake. (2) Focus on the founders, not just the product — YC is people’s business. (3) Be concise. The application is too long; if you can say something in one sentence, do it. (4) Stop using ChatGPT. Be authentic, be geeky, use your own words. GPT-generic writing is obvious and forgettable. (5) Write like an Amazonian: “seven customers” not “several,” “76%” not “significantly.” Numbers build trust. (6) Find the most exciting thing about your startup and make it impossible to miss — a unique resume, niche experience, original research, an unusual hobby. “Just good” applications don’t get in.
After the round: communicating with investors
How often should I update investors?
Monthly minimum. Weekly is better at pre-seed. The truth: if your startup succeeds, no one cares whether you sent updates or not. If it fails, it matters a lot. Imagine running out of runway after $500k — that’s fine, failure happens. But if I got monthly updates, I see your persistence and grit, and I’ll back you again. If I didn’t hear from you for months and the only message is “we need a bridge,” I assume you slacked off. Reputation in startup land is tiny and unforgiving.
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What should weekly updates actually say?
Not essays. Three or four lines: what you learned from a customer this week, what your CTO hacked over the weekend, what insight changed your roadmap, who’s the best new hire you’re chasing. Small notes like these tell me everything about how you work, and they build trust before the next conversation. The weekly cadence beats deck polish at pre-seed — every time.
Can I just round my revenue numbers up a bit?
No, you can’t. You don’t have $6M ARR if you charged a customer $500k for a PoC in January. Nearly everyone in tech is lying about their revenue, which is so bad that YC had to publish guidance on what “revenue” actually means. Use Garry Tan’s framework when communicating traction to VCs. Honest numbers won’t lose you the round. Inflated ones will land you on a quiet blacklist of dishonest founders that investors share with each other.
If your question isn’t here, my email is borys@smok.vc.
