@thegostev

Made in Poland - 6 CEOs, founders behind OpenAI, Snowflake, ICEYE

Alex Gostev -

A research into top leaders born and educated in Poland with focus on tech and Forbes 500 enterprises. It's all about Polish influence in tech and global leadership.

Jacek Olczak

CEO, Philip Morris Int.
🇵🇱 Citizen
Born
🇵🇱 Łódź
✈️
Base
🇨🇭 Lausanne
🎓 🇵🇱 University of Łódź

"The first Pole to lead a global Fortune 500 giant; started in the finance dept in Poland."

Jacek Olczak is a Polish economist and business executive who became CEO of Philip Morris International (PMI) in 2021, becoming the first Pole to lead the world’s largest publicly traded tobacco company. He was born in Łódź, Poland, studied economics at the University of Łódź, and began his career at PMI in 1993 in finance and general management roles before progressing through CFO and COO positions; he now lives near Lausanne, Switzerland.

"In just 10 years, we could be saying to people: ‘Remember when people smoked?’"

Olczak is not merely managing a tobacco giant; he is attempting to cannibalize its core product. He is the architect of the "Unsmoke" campaign, explicitly stating that cigarettes belong in a museum.
Under his leadership, PMI’s "smoke-free" products (like IQOS) accounted for ~42% of total net revenues by Q3 2025.
He set a target for smoke-free products to generate more than 50% of total net revenue (originally by 2025, now aiming for 2030 due to external factors like the war in Ukraine).
He started in the finance department of PMI Poland in 1993. His climb to the global CEO role in Lausanne is the first time a Pole has led a company of this scale ($250B+ market cap).

Wojciech Zaremba

Co-Founder, OpenAI
🇵🇱 Citizen
Born
🇵🇱 Kluczbork
✈️
Base
🇺🇸 San Fran
🎓 🇵🇱 Univ. of Warsaw, 🇫🇷 École Poly

"Key brain behind ChatGPT; a math prodigy from Poland who co-founded the world's top AI lab."

Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist and co‑founder of OpenAI, known for leading work on GPT‑class models and earlier robotics projects such as a Rubik’s‑cube‑solving robotic arm. Born in Kluczbork, Poland, he studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Warsaw and École Polytechnique before completing a PhD at New York University; he now resides in the United States and has been a core figure behind systems like Codex and GitHub Copilot.

I thought that... if you have a sufficiently complicated mathematical system, it is possible to point the mathematical system back on itself. (Discussing consciousness and Gödel's theorem)

Before the GPT era, Zaremba led OpenAI's Robotics team. His defining early achievement was training a robotic hand to solve a Rubik’s Cube one-handed using reinforcement learning—a task requiring unprecedented dexterity and "domain randomization" in simulation.
He later pivoted to lead the Codex team (the engine behind GitHub Copilot). He observed that code generation models could "self-evaluate"—if a model generates 100 solutions, it can run them to see which one works, a property unique to code versus natural language.
While Sam Altman is the face of the business, Zaremba is a key technical architect. His specific work on Codex is what turned GPT-3 from a text generator into a coding assistant used by millions of developers.

Marcin Żukowski

Co-Founder, Snowflake
🇵🇱 Citizen
Born
🇵🇱 ?
✈️
Base
🇳🇱 Amsterdam
🎓 🇵🇱 Univ. of Warsaw, 🇳🇱 Univ. of Amsterdam

"His PhD research revolutionized data storage, leading to the creation of the Snowflake cloud giant."

Marcin Żukowski is a Polish computer scientist and entrepreneur who co‑founded Snowflake and was a long‑time leader in its engineering organization, building on his earlier work on high‑performance analytical databases. He completed undergraduate studies in computer science at the University of Warsaw, then an MSc at the University of Warsaw and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, followed by a PhD at the University of Amsterdam, with his research on column‑oriented processing and systems like Vectorwise laying groundwork that later influenced Snowflake’s architecture.

His success is directly traced to his PhD thesis at the University of Amsterdam (CWI). He invented "Vectorized Execution," a method where databases process data in batches (vectors) rather than one row at a time, keeping data in the CPU cache for extreme speed.
Before Snowflake, he co-founded Vectorwise, which was the fastest single-node analytical database of its time. Snowflake’s architecture is effectively the marriage of his vectorized processing speed with the elasticity of the cloud.
He is credited with the fundamental efficiency of Snowflake. Without his vectorized engine, Snowflake might have been just another cloud storage warehouse rather than a high-performance analytics giant.

Rafał Modrzewski

CEO & Founder, ICEYE
🇵🇱 Citizen
Born
🇵🇱 ?
✈️
Base
🇫🇮 Helsinki
🎓 🇵🇱 WUT, 🇫🇮 Aalto

"Revolutionizing space tech with radar satellites; started his journey at Warsaw University of Technology."

Rafał Modrzewski is a Polish engineer and entrepreneur, co‑founder and CEO of ICEYE, a Finnish company that built the world’s first successfully miniaturized commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites and now operates a leading SAR constellation. Born in Poland, he studied at the Warsaw University of Technology and later Aalto University in Finland, moved to the Helsinki region, and has led ICEYE’s growth from an early research project to a major provider of radar‑based Earth‑observation data.

The huge advantage of the ICEYE space vehicle is its ability to clearly see a cluster of even carefully camouflaged enemy mechanized units. (Ukrainian Defense Ministry describing ICEYE capability)

Traditional radar satellites (SAR) weighed tons and cost hundreds of millions. Modrzewski’s ICEYE launched the world’s first SAR satellite under 100kg (starting at ~85kg), enabling a massive constellation that can image any spot on Earth every few hours, day or night, through clouds.
In a move known as the "People's Satellite," a crowdfunded ICEYE satellite was leased to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. Ukrainian intelligence (GUR) claims this single satellite helped destroy over 1,500 Russian targets, with Modrzewski’s tech providing visibility when optical satellites were blinded by clouds or smoke.
Revenue: Surpassed $100M in 2023/2024. Funding: Raised a total of ~$438M; recently closed a $93M growth round in April 2024.

Mati Staniszewski

CEO & Founder, ElevenLabs
🇵🇱 Citizen
Born
🇵🇱 Zalesie
✈️
Base
🇬🇧 London
🎓 🇬🇧 Imperial College

"Co-founded the world's leading voice AI unicorn; brings Polish math skills to the London tech scene."

Mati Staniszewski is a Polish‑born mathematician and entrepreneur, co‑founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a fast‑growing audio‑AI company focused on highly realistic text‑to‑speech and voice‑cloning technology. He grew up in a town just outside Warsaw (Zalesie is described as a suburb of the capital), later studied mathematics at Imperial College London, and previously worked in roles at Opera Software, BlackRock, and Palantir before launching ElevenLabs in 2022 and basing himself in the UK

The true solution is digitally watermarking synthetic voices to enable humans to discern real from fake. (On AI safety)

Revenue: Hit $100M ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) by Oct 2024, doubled to $200M just 10 months later (mid-2025), and is tracking toward $300M by end of 2025.
Despite having ~400 employees, Staniszewski claims to still personally interview every single hire to maintain the "micro-team" culture where groups of 5-10 operate like mini-startups.
He worked at Palantir and BlackRock, bringing a "deployment-first" operational rigor that complements his co-founder's research background.

ElevenLabs is one of the fastest-growing software companies in history.

Piotr Dąbkowski

CTO & Founder, ElevenLabs
🇵🇱 Citizen
Born
🇵🇱 Gdańsk
✈️
Base
🇬🇧 London
🎓 🇬🇧 Cambridge, 🇬🇧 Oxford

"Ex-Google engineer and machine learning expert who built the tech behind ElevenLabs' realistic voices."

Piotr Dąbkowski is a Polish computer scientist and machine‑learning engineer, co‑founder and CTO of ElevenLabs, where he leads development of the company’s core voice‑synthesis technology. Originally from Poland and educated in the UK at the University of Cambridge (with later study or research affiliations also mentioned with Oxford in some profiles), he previously worked as a software engineer and ML specialist at Google and other companies before founding ElevenLabs in 2022 and is now based between London and the US tech ecosystem.

Before ElevenLabs, he was a Software Engineer at Google (Zürich/Warsaw) and did his MPhil at Cambridge and BA at Oxford. His academic focus was on "Real-Time Image Saliency," showing an early focus on efficient, real-time model inference.
His breakthrough wasn't just "text-to-speech" (which existed for decades) but "context-aware intonation." The model he architected understands the emotion and context of the text before speaking it, allowing it to laugh, whisper, or shout appropriately—something previous models (like Siri) could not do.
While Mati handles the $300M revenue growth and investors, Piotr is responsible for the proprietary deep learning stack that keeps them ahead of competitors like OpenAI's Voice Engine.

The list is non-exhaustive. Additionally to that I have more ideas on the same topic e.g. companies built in Poland, then expanded, tech leaders educated in Poland, american tech stars with Polish roots. The list can go on - so many interesting discoveries to make and to publish.

Hope you liked this one. Feel free to write me your ideas and suggestions to gostev@pm.me. Thanks for reading.