Growing up in London's East End, I was always the kid who got told off in class for being too chatty. Years later on TV, chattiness served me well when interviewing leading figures in entertainment, politics, sports, and beyond. Moments away from seeing Nelson Mandela. Throughout my career as a host, author, speaker, and corporate executive, the one thing I've consistently observed in remarkable people is that purpose is key to long-lasting success. And when it comes to purpose in business, what matters most is culture. In this series, some of the world's most visionary corporate leaders join me at the iconic London Stock Exchange to share their winning formula for building the kind of culture where high performance teams can thrive.
Welcome to Culture Conversations with me, June Sarpong, in association with LSEG. Rafal Brzoska's entrepreneurial journey is truly remarkable. In 2006, he founded InPost in his home country, Poland, where state control of the postal service placed huge restrictions on the private sector.
It's all about, you know, identifying the barriers and then trying to find the right solution.
Rafal managed to circumvent this by innovating a weighted envelope that met the legal restrictions and within a short space of time InPost had captured the majority of the Polish delivery market. Soon international expansion loomed with major acquisitions across Europe.
When I was graduating my university, an American private equity firm came to me. They were already integrating such platforms across Central Europe and they offered like 12 million euro check to buy me out and I thought it's too early to retire. The beauty of entrepreneurship is finding the way. In four years' time horizon we took over one third of the Polish postal market and became the fastest growing private postal organization in the world.
In 2021, InPost IPOed on the Dutch stock exchange, securing one of the biggest European IPOs that year, and today the company operates in over 14 territories with over 40,000 employees globally. In this episode, Rafal explains how he built a company culture to deliver this growth. There are not many CEOs answering people's questions, letters on your LinkedIn profile, Instagram, and you do.
And he shares his passion for philanthropy, which he works on with his Polish TV star wife, Omenaa.
I would love to help Rafals like me, coming from a poor family, from a small village without chances.
Shortly after this interview was filmed, Rafal decided he was finally ready to accept that private equity offer. On the 9th of February 2026, it was announced that InPost was to be sold to FedEx and a consortium led by the PE firm Advent International for a staggering $9.2 billion. InPost is a success story that shows how Europe's tech companies can rival and even beat the traditional US players. Hi, it's June Sarpong here and I'm so excited to share this episode with you. But before we begin, I'd like to ask for your help if I may. Can you please take a moment to subscribe? Go to cultureconversations.com or you can check us out on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. It will make a huge difference to myself and the Culture Conversations team. Please also be sure to join our LinkedIn community for more regular updates on all things good culture. Here is thanking you in advance. And for now, enjoy the show.
Hello, I'm June Sarpong and this is Culture Conversations, the global video and podcast series exploring the connection between workplace culture and corporate success. Top business leaders all know a company's profitability comes down to its people and that culture comes down from the top. I'm at the LSEG headquarters, home of the London Stock Exchange, to meet some of the world's top business people to talk about their leadership style and corporate culture. On today's episode, I'm delighted to be joined by the founder and CEO of InPost, Rafal Brzoska.
Hello. Hi. I'm good. I'm great. Thank you. You're Rafal to everybody else, but you're Raf to me.
Sure. Much easier. Both good.
Well, can I just say first of all what a pleasure it is to have you in the studio and also congratulations on everything that you've done with InPost and all of your businesses overall. It's incredible.
Thank you. But you know, it's not yet a success for me. We are very often — I say we are on maybe 18th or 19th percent of our way to the success. So it's still a lot, a lot to do.
I love it. So, as with any amazing entrepreneur, they always have an origin story. So, I'd love to hear yours. Where did it all begin and how did it all begin?
Okay, let's make the long story short. I was born in a small village in Poland. So, no entrepreneurial background at all in my parents. Zero.
So then I studied at a university of economics in Krakow and this was the place where the history started. Previously I was a little bit entrepreneurial, doing some like assembling computers for instance or trying to create some websites, but this was not the business. The real business has started in 1999 and I was still a student. When I was graduating, the company I've built in those two years was mostly focused on delivery of leaflets, printed coupons of the supermarkets, all the flyers. So this was the main channel of advertising in the '90s for most of the supermarkets. So digital marketing was non-existent at that moment. And it was really tough because studying and developing your own company. I started just in Krakow. So I started from delivering those leaflets on my own.
And how old were you then?
And when I was graduating my university, an American private equity firm came to me. They were already integrating such platforms across Central Europe and they offered like 12 million euro check to buy me out and I thought it's too early to retire. So I refused that.
And you came from nothing and you refused.
I mean the initial capital was just my savings from like holiday job, like €5,000 equivalent. So literally from scratch. And Poland at that moment was in a kind of aggressive growth mode. So privatization and turning from communism, state-owned capital into really like free market economy and this was of course a huge chance, a lot of risks. But then I started like thinking what's next, as the flyer business was all about to shrink because of digitalization. So I knew this will not be a sustainable business forever. So in 2005 I decided to enter into postal market and set up a private postal company.
There was nothing like that back then on the private side.
No, it was just state-owned Polish post.
Pure monopoly coming out of a communist system.
And the main barrier was the legal barrier, because I knew that I have everything. I have 7,000 people delivering those flyers, coupons, leaflets and so forth. We have like domestic coverage. And I thought it's so easy to go from a leaflet to a letter that it was like, you know, very childish idea. Let's jump into that business. And then I realized that there is one critical barrier that was created by the law system — that the Polish post may deliver all the letters below 50 grams as the only company in the country and nobody else can. I can just compete above 50 grams, and this was 2% of the market. Under 50 was 98% of the market.
And the beauty of entrepreneurship is finding the way. So I thought, okay, if I want to step into that market, I should convince my clients to make the letters heavier to be above 50 grams. But a traditional letter is five to six grams. So how to make it heavier to allow other companies offering a competing better service and better price. So we convinced them to glue on top of the envelope a metal plate. We named it a seal — a protection seal and advertisement seal, because you can engrave a logo for instance on top of it. And the weight of that seal was 50 grams. Means every single letter was 50.
Where did you get that idea?
That was — I'm very often I say this was the first and the most important innovation in InPost history. So yeah.
And was the company called InPost then?
Yes. That was the moment we named it InPost.
Wow. And in four years' time horizon we took over one third of the Polish postal market and became the fastest growing private postal organization in the world.
In the world. In the world. Oh my gosh. So, can I get to the sort of nitty-gritty of how you did that? How were you able to, you know, well, one, come up with the idea because it's such an ingenious, simple, but yet such effective idea, and two, mobilize your workforce to actually believe that they could take on the government effectively, isn't it?
I had 10 lawsuits against me, against the company from the Polish post and, you know, the unions and so forth that we are breaking the law. And finally the court decided it is not — this is, you know, something what's a seal protecting the letter with a logo on it exactly. It happens to be 50g. And by the way the service was including that metal plate, which is, you know, a very costly element, was 40% cheaper than the rates offered by the state-owned company.
So this shows you very clearly where you have state-owned companies versus private business. The innovation is coming mostly from one side.
We're going to really get into all of that in this conversation. I'm so excited. The great thing about you is obviously the mothership as it were in InPost, but with your holding company in terms of what you do with integer capital, there are multiple facets to your business overall and I'd love to know what do you see yourself as first? Do you see yourself as an inventor? Because you are, you know, you are also an engineer. You're not just an entrepreneur. Well, to be able to come up with all of that, it's so simple.
It's not. If it was simple, Raf, everybody would be doing it. It's not simple. I'm telling you, it's very simple because if you can identify that this is the barrier, and you know that to win against that barrier, you have to invent something — it was pretty logical. So the first case was to glue a small bag with the sand on top of that as a kind of marketing tool, because sand was the cheapest physical option to increase the weight. Metal was pretty expensive of course, so with the first 100,000 letters with the sandbag, the chief of the regulatory office called me, 'Mr. Brzoska, are you crazy?' And I said, 'Why?' 'Really, sandbags on the letters.' And then I had to change that pattern into the metal plate and that was digestive for the chief of the regulatory office for the postal market. So, it's all about, you know, identifying the barriers and then trying to find the right solution. And this was the same with the lockers that came later on.
If you know what's holding you back, it's much easier to than trying to find a way.
Yes. And you will always find a way. In every single business, even highly regulated, you will find a way. If that's the focus.
Yeah. So, I'm not an inventor. I'm rather encouraging my people, encouraging smarter people than me to find a way.
Yeah, I love it. I love it. And within that framework, so you're not an inventor, you're for sure an innovator. Do you see yourself more as an entrepreneur? And then obviously you also run the business. You know, you founded it, you came up with the idea, but you're also the CEO. So what comes most naturally to you?
I think really successful companies are companies led by entrepreneurs.
As long as you have that oversight, what's important, what's less important, how to motivate people, how to have a kind of aligned goals — your personal goals as a CEO, your personal goals as a founder and your personal goals as an investor or shareholder — this is the proper pattern and that's why most of the companies still led by the founders are outpacing companies that became like a corporate with hard guns, you know, and the leadership position. So I'm a combination of all those aspects and I know everything about the company, every single detail. My people, they know that. So it's nothing to hide and it's nothing bad if we make mistakes. It's all about trying to really keep this lessons-learned rhythm because everyone makes one mistake. If you don't learn from the mistakes in the past, that's the problem.
That's a problem. So tell me how has your leadership style evolved over the years? Obviously you've been in business now over 20 years in terms of as an entrepreneur in your various companies. How would you say, you know, when you first began what you were as a leader to what you are like now with a workforce of over 14,000 people around the world?
Yeah, I think first 10 years — because I started very early at 22 — so up to 30 I would say I was naive, I was childish, I was very arrogant, specifically when you've got first successes. Come on, a 12.5 million euro check in your early 20s. That's, I think, too early for most of the young people to properly think about what should be next. And then the next phase is, I think, between the early 30s and 40s, where again you have to reinvent yourself. You need to learn on your mistakes and this is the moment where most of the entrepreneurs make the biggest mistakes in their career. And I'm lucky that I think I learned a lot from the mistakes I made.
Can you tell me some of that?
Yeah. For instance, we've been developing — because after the postal business, again the cycle has shown me that letter business will be over. I mean, people are not sending letters. The banks, the insurance companies, they turn to digitalization and people don't even want to receive letters in the same way. Now it's better to get a PDF file versus, you know, a physical letter. So in 2010 I knew this business will come to an end and I have to move on to the next step of that development. And then I looked around, you know, what's next is the parcel business surely. So I participated in many conferences, postal and parcel conferences, of course at the beginning being focused on the letters. But then, you know, I participated in those panels where all the CEOs of big courier companies like the DHLs...
They were complaining that there is a crazy moment because end users, they started ordering e-commerce goods and they don't want those parcels. They want B2B parcels where it's a very simple, very profitable way of just dealing with companies. And users are demanding. They are creating a hassle and a much higher cost because when they want their parcels be delivered to their home, they are not there.
They're not there. And this is the failed delivery stop. Come back again.
Exactly. And the cost is increasing. That means that, you know, this business is not a future for them. And that was 2010 and I thought, you know, okay, I want to be in that business. And I thought it will be much easier. It wasn't, because I very quickly noticed that in Poland we've got really a reduction in terms of pricing because all the giants — FedEx, UPS, DHL, DPD, TNT at that moment as well — already were in Poland. And the quality was the best in Europe and the prices were the lowest in Europe.
Okay. So how to enter with your secret sauce being cheaper, better, if they are the best, they are the cheapest and they are the most efficient.
So I almost dropped that idea to conquer that market, but finally again suddenly I realized that 70% of that cost is last mile. So if you can avoid 70% of your cost and somehow you may encourage people to go and pick up parcels on their own, you are competitive.
But Poles are very — and that was the best thing — very early adopters. So they love to test and if they like something, and this was, you know, with the banking services, with NFC, with plastic cards even — very early we were the most advanced in terms of the development of those businesses. Then I said, okay, it must be super sexy, convenient, and then it can be cheaper as well if they pick it up from a fancy machine. And that was the beginning of the locker business in Poland. First two or three years it was a disaster. We were loss-making, heavily loss-making. We deployed like...
How did you convince your investors to stick?
That was difficult because we spent like 30 million euro for initial few hundreds of machines and the average monthly revenue was €500. 500 from an investment worth €30 million. Come on. So every single supervisory board I was banged by, you know, the supervisory board members, 'Hey, shut it down. Focus on the letters.' I said there is no future in the letters.
You know, the beauty of that, if I may interrupt just briefly, is what I'm noticing with you, Raf, is you have a real ability to envisage the future. And it's, you know, in my industry, which obviously is television, one of the biggest examples of this is the difference of the story between Blockbuster and Netflix, where Netflix was able to see the future and Blockbuster, which was this behemoth that thought it could never fail, went under. So, where does that come from? How do you develop that?
I think I'm a good observer of what's happening around me. I can listen. I love to listen to people who are smarter than me. So if I noticed again last year that a new revolution is coming, AI revolution is coming, I connected few dots and I think I was one of the first people in the industry saying that AI will change the way of people shop online. And few months ago it has started with OpenAI saying that we want to offer AI shopping agents to help you finding the right product and ordering it very — on a very cheap way, because you mean less returns as well. Less returns for first. Secondly, you spend less time on shopping which is a hassle. You know, now to find something you spend like from 10 to 30 minutes. It depends on your basket. If you have a personalized shopping agent that knows your habits and your preferences, product preferences, this can be closed within one minute.
And then someone has to deliver it. That's why currently InPost is making a huge bet on AI shopping and we will be absolutely first choice for all consumers. So it's all about connecting right dots. I think it's not easy, but you do it trying.
You're trying. So, let's talk about the culture of InPost because the thing that really fascinates me, you know, with this series, we're interviewing some incredible leaders and most of the people we have on the show are from quite big economies. And obviously the wonderful thing with Poland is it's one of now the fastest growing economies in Europe, but for a long time it wasn't, as it was coming out of communism and as you say going into the free markets. How were you and your team able to believe a company out of Poland could be a global player? Because that in itself is huge. And then where did you — how were you able to motivate the team to truly believe that? What was the culture that you were able to create to facilitate that?
I think this is the most difficult task. As Poland is in a trap. We have a pretty big internal market, almost 40 million people. So many Polish entrepreneurs, they can build immensely big businesses just with the home market.
And that's a trap because most of them they become too lazy to risk and go abroad. You have a completely different setup with Scandinavia. You look at Sweden — Spotify, whatever, I mean, Volvo, Ericsson and so forth, recently — you see that the smaller the country is, the more you have to focus on the free market. You have no choice.
Yeah. Because your home market's too small. You have no choice.
So InPost unfortunately is currently just one of few examples where a Polish brand is trying to conquer other markets. We are now on nine markets. We're number two in France because we made as well the biggest private acquisition. We bought Mondial Relay in France four years ago. UK is the most important market for me personally as well because it's the largest e-commerce market, means the most prospective in terms of the future development. It was very fragmented in terms of quality of the delivery. Far away from our home market, I can tell you that in our country 99.5% of parcels including smallest villages are delivered next day before noon. That's our InPost standard in Poland.
We had that here, I'd love — and I promise to you, yes, this will happen in the UK.
Well, we acquired recently Menzies and Yodel. We are in front of a huge transformation from door-to-door delivery. That was a core business of Yodel. I apologize to all of the people who will be influenced by that transformation but believe me, give us 12 months, you will see that we will be the best delivery company to APMs. We have already 12,000 machines across UK. Next year, I strongly believe we'll hit 20,000. So, we are developing the network here much faster than we did in Poland.
Wow. How do you decide a location site? What's the criteria?
It's all about the traffic, but also the convenience for the end consumers. And you asked me the question, how to convince your team that this may fly also elsewhere? This is all about being a hard user of the solution on your home market. If you understand what's behind our success in Poland and you're an InPost team member, you know that every single end consumer across Europe loves to have fast, convenient and cheap delivery.
