I'm a Gardener, Not a Sprinter: A Conversation with Maciej Sawicki

Most founders raise VC money and end up on a treadmill: grow fast, burn cash, raise again, repeat. Maciej Sawicki chose a different path. After raising several million and building inStreamly to 150,000 streamers and brands like Samsung, Disney, and PlayStation, he walked away from growth at all costs and chose profitability. inStreamly is now fully remote, fully profitable, and fully independent across fifteen markets. He is not a typical founder either, with over twenty years in gaming, co-founding a streaming eSports venture in 2005 before Twitch existed and hosting shows with over 500,000 viewers.

What makes Maciej worth listening to is that he has genuinely rethought the defaults most founders never question: the raise, the office, the eight-hour day, the meaning of hard work. This conversation is about choosing profit over growth, running async teams, why gaming is where real attention lives, and what founders get wrong about scale.

Profit over the treadmill, honestly told

Maciej likes how the "we chose profitability over fundraising" story sounds from the outside, but he is honest that it is not quite true. inStreamly started in 2019 as a gaming company with a real problem to solve but no line of investors. Then COVID changed everything, people poured time and money into gaming and streaming, and within months their valuation jumped from 1.5 million to over 10 million euro. By 2022 it was clearly a bubble, and when Russia invaded Ukraine, investors stopped funding a company they saw as sitting a short drive from Kyiv. With about ten months of runway, there were only two roads: collapse, or switch to profitability within a year. They took the second, and the investors could not object, because the alternative was writing the company off.

Looking back, he is clear the VC money was necessary. It let them grow fast and use the momentum in the first 24 months, which is the thing you do not get twice. They made bad hires and bad bets, but they could only learn those lessons because they had money to spend. And his advice on choosing a VC is refreshingly unsentimental: the "smart money" narrative is mostly bullshit, at least in Europe. All you should really expect is to not pick an investor who is an asshole, and to have them answer the phone when you call.

Your identity is not your company

When the runway shrank, Maciej felt genuinely bad, because a founder's business is more or less their identity. He had gone from expecting a unicorn to facing the loss of the company within a year, and moving from "successful founder" to "founder who will probably fail" was brutal. He is candid that fusing your identity with the company is a bad thing, but also almost impossible to avoid. You can only escape feeling that the company's failure is you by also refusing to feel that its success is you, and very few people can truly do that.

That refusal to over-identify runs through his whole philosophy, including one of his most counterintuitive positions: vulnerability as culture. He disagrees sharply with the idea that a leader should hide a sick child or a hard day from the team. If you make vulnerability part of the culture, giving people space to say they are weak, sad, or exhausted, it makes the whole team stronger, because not feeling good is a deeply human thing. That, more than any perk, is what he thinks builds a durable team.

The eight-hour day is a fake

inStreamly is fully asynchronous, and Maciej is blunt that most remote-work failure is a misunderstanding of that word. The biggest myth is that an async company means people are never available at the same time, which is false. His team all work from Poland, most have a kid or a dog that gets them up early, and there are plenty of overlapping windows across the day. You do not need everyone present at the same time, all the time. The single-source-of-truth setup means the worst case, actually needing to call a colleague, is rare, and no company collapses because someone could not log in for forty minutes.

His deeper conviction is that the eight-hour workday is a fake, in the office as much as at home. Nobody stays in full focus for eight hours. He works maybe four to six effective hours on a good day, and so do his best people, and over half of his early team has stayed more than three years, which he values far more than someone grinding twelve hours and burning out in one. The two other remote myths that irritate him: that remote is for everyone, when some people genuinely need an office, and that you can go remote by simply closing the office and changing nothing else. When the physical space disappears, you have to reorganize everything, and the companies that do not are the ones who declare remote "doesn't work."

Hard work like a gardener

Asked about burnout after twenty years, Maciej flips the question: why do we ask founders and CEOs if they are burned out, but never a gardener who has tended plants for twenty years? For an entrepreneur it is the same, you just keep growing your plants. The difference is that a gardener physically cannot work ten cold hours a day, while a founder can run twelve meetings in a row, which is exactly the trap. He does not work hard in the way most people mean it, twelve-hour days, because building a company is a marathon you might run for thirty or forty years, and you have to manage your limited forces like a gardener, a little every day.

He and Syed dig into what "hard work" even means, and Maciej agrees his work is hard while insisting he does not work hard in hours. The most important factor in a startup, he says, is consistency, patience, and resilience, doing your stuff every day, a little more, through whatever bad things hit your business and your private life. He also describes himself as a creative generalist who can dig deep into product one day and HR the next and hold his own, the kind of person AI has made even more effective, connecting dots across domains rather than being the top one-percent expert in any one.

Your company is always for sale

Maciej sold a previous company in 2019 and says exiting is far harder than building. You should sell when everything is going well, not when you are tired and want out, which is the mistake he made, getting a far worse outcome than if he had sold two years earlier. So his mindset now is that inStreamly is always for sale: if someone brings a number he considers very good, it is a deal, no problem. Part of being ready to pay off your investors is being ready to sell anytime a good offer comes, even while the company is growing two times year over year and heading toward a million euro in EBITDA.

The through-line is a founder who has designed his work and his life around his own nature rather than the founder mythology. He never misses the office, because he was an unhappy, unsupportive boss in a physical space, and is a better CEO remote. His biggest ongoing challenge is not something that keeps him up at night, because he refuses to let anything do that, but recruitment, which he thinks is fundamentally a gamble that depends more on luck than skill. And he is, in his own words, a gardener who is happy in his garden and does not expect to ever be done.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

VC money can be necessary, and honest. It let them capture a once-only momentum window. But the profitability pivot was survival, not a noble choice, and "smart money" is mostly a myth.

Don't fuse your identity with the company. You can only stop the failure from being you by also refusing to let the success be you. Almost nobody fully manages it, but the awareness matters.

The eight-hour day is a fake. People do real focused work for roughly four to six hours, in the office or at home. Optimize for that flow, not for a green Slack dot.

Async is a redesign, not a closed office. Remote fails when companies change nothing but the location. It also is not for everyone, so know what kind of player you are.

Your company is always for sale. Sell from strength, not exhaustion. Being ready to exit at a good offer is part of taking VC money in the first place.

Frameworks worth stealing

Work like a gardener

Treat building a company as a decades-long marathon, not a sprint. Manage your limited energy a little every day rather than in twelve-hour bursts, and optimize for consistency, patience, and resilience. The founders who last are the ones who protect their forces, physical and mental.

Design work around your nature

Figure out what kind of player you are before choosing how you work. Maciej is a better CEO remote and async because the office drained him, so he built the company around that truth rather than fighting it. Remote, hybrid, and in-person are tools, not virtues.

Async single source of truth

Run an async company on documented knowledge so that needing to call a colleague is the rare worst case, not the default. Optimize for four to six hours of real focus over eight hours of visible presence, and reorganize everything when you drop the office rather than just closing the door.

Always be ready to sell

Sell from strength, when the business is thriving, not when you are exhausted and want out. Keep the company in a state where a genuinely good offer can close, because being ready to exit is part of the responsibility of taking outside capital.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

I'm a gardener. I'm happy in my garden.

The eight-hour workday is a fake, in the office as much as at home.

Your company is always for sale.

And the reframe on burnout worth sitting with.

Nobody asks a gardener who has worked for twenty years if he is burned out.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Maciej handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Your company is always for sale.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? His father told him the important part of university was not the classes he hated, but the networking with his peers. He understood it too late to act on it.

What would you tell your younger self? Calm down. Working twelve hours a day is the worst idea, and if you feel you have to, that means you don't and you shouldn't.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Nothing keeps him up, by design. The biggest challenge is recruitment, which he sees as a gamble that depends on luck more than skill.

Favorite spot? The Polish forest. He thinks we should appreciate it more and spend more time in it.

Tool you can't live without? ClickUp. Internal email is effectively forbidden at the company, and ClickUp is the heart of their async setup.

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Maciej Sawicki is the co-founder and CEO of inStreamly, a fully remote, profitable platform that connects over 150,000 streamers with major brands across fifteen markets. He has spent more than twenty years in gaming and eSports. Find him on LinkedIn, where he posts daily, or at instreamly.com.