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Abstract
The biggest question of the modern business and startup culture is how to overcome and adapt to theconstantly changing environment around us. It is clear thatestablishinga startup under thesecircumstances always has its risks, such as: financing, fitting the product in the market, or attractingcustomers. Theappearanceof the COVID 19-pandemic managed tochallengethe entire global startupecosystem, and outlined itsstrengthsand weaknesses. The question therefore arises: What are themain components of a stabile and sustainable startup ecosystem, how did the CEE startups survive thepandemic? Within the framework of this research, I approached this question by performing a linearregression analyze on the Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian and Polish startups, scaleups and VC fund
29levels in 2020, 2021 and 2022. This quantitative part of the research made it clear, that the Polish marketwas clearly outperforming the CEE average in Q3and Q4 of 2020 after the big fall of Q2 2020. Polandis the biggest and fastest growing startup ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe, therefore thequalitative part of this research is based on semi-structured interviews with Polish accelerators,incubators and startups, conducted by me in 2022. The aim of this paper is to study the impact of COVID-19 on CEE startups, and offer a better understanding of this regions startup culture. The data wasprovided by Dealroom.co and PFR (Polish Development Fund).Keywords:Startups, Resilience, Covid-19, CEE, Poland
