Wiktor Schmidt is co-founder and executive chairman of Netguru, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Poznań, Poland, that he started in 2008 straight out of college and ran as chief executive until 2019. He is also the founding board chair of Endeavor Poland and a co-founder of the private equity fund Supercharge Capital.
Founding Netguru in 2008
He started the company with Kuba Filipowski and Adam Zygadlewicz. In its early years the three built their own products and ran events alongside their client work, until the 2013 sale of their recruitment app HumanWay to Grupa Pracuj led them to focus on software services (Forbes Polska).
Eleven Years as Chief Executive
As chief executive he pushed Netguru to sell outside Poland from early on, at a time when many Polish software houses worked only for companies in their own cities. Speaking to Forbes Polska in 2022, he said building anything on a global scale is 10 to 50 percent harder but can pay off 10 or 50 times more, and that an international business is more interesting for the founders and the team. On The Enthusiast podcast in 2023 he argued that companies from small home markets should think globally from the start, for example by using English for internal and external communication.
Executive Chairman and Investor
In 2019 he and Filipowski handed day-to-day management to Marek Talarczyk, and Schmidt became executive chairman, focused on the Netguru brand, industry events and new business relationships (Netguru). Forbes Polska noted that a founder handing over the chief executive role in so young a company was rare in Poland. In 2020 Netguru became one of the first Polish companies certified as a B Corp.
He now spends much of his time on investing and on Poland’s startup community. He co-founded Supercharge Capital in 2021, a fund that invests in European software companies, and he is the founding board chair of Endeavor Poland, the local branch of the global entrepreneur network.