When we raised a seed round for Filmaster from a German fund HackFwd in Spring of 2011, we were one of the first Polish startups to work with a foreign investor. Traditionally, Web companies in Poland were focused on the local market of 40 million people, which seemed big enough to scale their business.

Big European and US­-based VCs, however, were not impressed. They looked for startups with global ambitions, something the Polish ones lacked. Three years later and Poland has got a number of well-­funded startups disrupting global markets. What the hell happened?