Tech • AI • Robotics • Game
The EU is dysfunctional”: Rafał Brzoska, the Polish billionaire who doesn’t hold back
6/10TL;DR
Rafał Brzoska, founder of InPost, says Poland’s rise from post-communist economy to European logistics and tech contender shows both the value of EU integration and the need for a faster, more selective European Union 2.0 focused on competitiveness.
KEY POINTS
From leaflet delivery to a continental logistics group
Brzoska founded his first business in 1999 while studying economics in Kraków, starting with supermarket leaflet distribution. By graduation, the company was delivering more than 1.5 billion leaflets a year across Poland. He turned down a €12 million offer from a US fund in 2001, choosing expansion over an exit.
Breaking Poland’s postal monopoly
In 2005, the company entered postal services in direct competition with the state-owned Polish Post. Because letters under 50 grams were legally protected by monopoly, InPost added metal plates to envelopes to bring them above the limit. The tactic survived a court challenge and exposed how rigid regulation could be bypassed through product design.
A costly bet on parcel lockers
Seeing digitalization erode the letter business, Brzoska shifted toward parcels in 2010. He concluded that the only way to beat global operators such as DHL, UPS, FedEx, DPD and GLS in Poland was to eliminate costly home delivery through automated lockers. Early adoption was near zero: after roughly €30 million in deployment, revenue was only €500 a month across the first few hundred machines.
Persistence turned lockers into a mass-market habit
Supervisory board pressure to shut the project down was intense, but Brzoska, then still holding control, kept funding it. A few years later, parcel lockers became one of the country’s best-known consumer services. InPost exited postal services in 2017 to focus entirely on parcels, and the locker model has since spread across nine additional markets.
Why InPost rejects the “just logistics” label
Brzoska argues the group should be valued as a technology-led consumer platform, not a conventional carrier. In Poland, he said 17 million people use the InPost mobile app, out of 24.5 million online shoppers, and the company’s Net Promoter Score stands at 74. He said competitors have copied lockers, but not the user adoption, loyalty or profitability.
Mondial Relay and the French expansion
InPost acquired Mondial Relay in France for €650 million and has already invested about €350 million, with another €500 million planned. The move followed an earlier failed attempt: 1,000 lockers deployed in France in 2012 were withdrawn by 2016. The lesson, he said, was that cross-border expansion in infrastructure is slow, capital-intensive and often easier through acquisition than greenfield rollout.
Poland’s EU accession as an economic accelerant
Brzoska said EU membership transformed Poland by opening access to capital, improving roads and telecoms, and accelerating modernization. He contrasted Poland’s near-universal digital banking and broad 5G availability with slower legacy systems in parts of Western Europe. In his view, the bloc’s spending in Central Europe was not charity but a profitable expansion of the single market.
A controversial argument on who benefits from EU funds
He said every €1 invested by the EU in Poland generated roughly €2.5 in returns for older member states through trade, market access and profit repatriation. He cited foreign logistics groups operating in Poland while booking profits and tax elsewhere under legal transfer-pricing rules. His position is that companies should pay at least a minimum share of tax in the countries where profits are generated.
Call for a smaller, faster “EU 2.0”
Brzoska said unanimity and bureaucratic inertia are blocking reform. He advocated a core group of major countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands to move ahead on common priorities such as capital markets, innovation, education, defense and economic regulation. Countries unwilling to integrate on those essentials, he argued, should not be able to block the rest.
A 100-day model for deregulation
To show reform can move quickly, Brzoska pointed to a recent deregulation effort in Poland launched at the request of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. He said 600 experts working pro bono across 34 streams produced 500 simplification proposals in 100 days. About 200 have already been implemented and another 150 are moving through parliament, a model he believes could be replicated at European level.
CONCLUSION
Brzoska’s story combines founder mythology with a broader political message: Poland’s entrepreneurial rise was enabled by Europe, but Europe now needs structural reform to stay competitive. His argument is that the bloc’s future depends less on preserving process than on rewarding speed, capital formation and cross-border execution.
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