Mariusz Cieply and the business hidden inside a conversation

On the day LiveChat’s market value crossed one billion złoty, Mariusz Cieply came into the office, congratulated the team and encouraged everyone to keep improving the product. There was no grand speech or champagne ceremony. A stock market milestone had arrived in Wrocław. The software still needed attention.

That was November 20, 2015. Cieply was happy to see investors rewarded, including employees who had bought shares. But his company had made more of another occasion: passing 10,000 customers. The distinction tells you something about his preferred scoreboard. A valuation moves when people trade a stock. A paying customer has to find a reason to stay.

The scene is an unusually useful place to begin his story. It puts the public achievement beside the daily work, without pretending either is trivial. The company had reached a number that attracts headlines; its co-founder was interested in the people using the thing. Eleven years later, his language has moved toward artificial intelligence and revenue from conversations. The underlying question remains familiar: what does this software actually help a customer do?

Six cassettes and an Atari

Before there were shareholders, there was a chair and six cassettes. As a youngster, Cieply traded games at a local computer market, displaying two rows of three tapes. He played enthusiastically on his first Atari. His father ran a computer-game shop, giving him a close view of the business of selling something people wanted.

Cieply remembered the shop’s closed sign appearing just when people were getting off work. It bothered him. The observation is small enough to escape a business-school case study, yet it contains an entire customer-service problem. Having the goods is only part of the job. You also have to be available when someone is ready to buy.

He went on to study computer science at Wrocław University of Technology, attending from 1999 to 2004 and graduating from its Faculty of Electronics. His route into leadership began in software development, then moved through project management. The engineer did not disappear entirely. Years later, programmers still encountered his old code and teased their CEO about it. His defense was practical: it worked.

There is something reassuring about a founder whose early work can still be inspected by colleagues. A title may discourage criticism. A surviving piece of code gives the critics something specific to discuss.

Building it, then buying it back

In 2002, Cieply founded LiveChat with Jakub Sitarz and Maciej Jarzębowski. His partners brought experience from Bankier.pl. The initial proposition was direct: let a visitor to a business website talk to someone at that business. In a shop, asking a question barely needs a thought. Online, the missing conversation could leave a prospective buyer stranded.

The early company worked with individual customers locally. Its eventual shift to subscription software changed how the product could travel. Instead of treating each installation as a separate undertaking, LiveChat could offer access to a service. The business adopted the SaaS model in 2010. A Polish software team could reach buyers much farther away without repeating the original local approach for every account.

Ownership took a less tidy route. GG Network, part of Naspers, bought control in 2008. Cieply later described an anticipated Allegro deal that ended up being settled through advertising within the group. The advertising brought no customers. Corporate proximity, it turned out, was a poor substitute for a customer acquisition plan.

In 2011, the founders and key employees bought the company back. Cieply had found inspiration in Richard Branson’s account of a management buyout. Here was a business book with a rather consequential afterlife. The story mattered enough to borrow the mechanism, then put it to work on his own company.

An American customer could arrive through a Polish website

The recovered company concentrated on international demand, with the United States becoming central to its business. By the time of its Warsaw listing, it had established a North Carolina presence. Cieply and his colleagues were building an export business whose delivery vehicle was software, rather than a shipment leaving a warehouse.

LiveChat debuted on the Warsaw Stock Exchange on April 11, 2014. The listing placed a public market around a product already being sold abroad. It also made the company’s progress visible in a different way: financial results and shareholders joined customers and developers among the people following its decisions.

The selling process had an egalitarian streak. Prospective customers signed up through the same website procedure, regardless of their size. Even the US State Department had to go through it. A famous institution did not require the software equivalent of a private entrance and a velvet rope.

That arrangement made the product carry more of the introduction. The chat window on a customer’s website was also a demonstration to the next potential customer. Someone could encounter LiveChat while shopping elsewhere, experience it, and decide to use it for their own business. Cieply had helped create a product that could appear in the very places where its value was easiest to understand.

The sales idea was there before the AI

In May 2011, LiveChat introduced Intelligent Triggers and a Conversion Meter. The names were plain, almost stubbornly so. One helped initiate conversations with website visitors. The other measured whether invitations and chats led to purchases or sign-ups. Together they asked a commercially useful question: can a timely conversation change what a visitor does next?

“Ecommerce sites and brands can now initiate the conversation with their potential customers,” Cieply said. A visitor encountering a checkout error, or lingering on a page, could receive an invitation to chat. The software was designed to act before a frustrated shopper simply disappeared.

This is a revealing bit of continuity. Today’s vocabulary gives AI agents much of the attention. Cieply was already talking about approaching hesitant shoppers fifteen years earlier. The technology available to him has changed substantially. His interest in the moment between uncertainty and purchase has a longer history.

By 2018, he was describing an ecosystem around LiveChat: applications, outside developers, partners and users who helped shape the service. He also emphasized analytics, reporting and immediate technical support. A chat box could look modest on the surface while the business behind it acquired more moving parts. Cieply’s work increasingly involved deciding how those parts should fit together.

Advice without taking the wheel

His experience also traveled into other companies. In January 2016, a group including Cieply, his fellow founders, Szymon Klimczak and Bartosz Olchówka bought an 11.5 percent stake in Brand24 using private funds. Cieply joined its supervisory board. Michał Sadowski’s social-media monitoring business was looking for knowledge about acquiring customers internationally.

Cieply compared Brand24 at that point with LiveChat around 2010, when his team was building its first thousand customers in the United States. He said his job was to advise without getting in the founders’ way. He could explain what had happened at LiveChat; Brand24’s team would decide what to do with it.

That is a specific, useful understanding of experience. A previous success supplies examples, including mistakes. The next founder still has to make the judgment. Cieply expected learning to run in both directions, arguing that nobody held a monopoly on knowledge in a changing software market.

His connections have continued through company governance. He serves on Unfold’s supervisory board, while Sitarz is its CEO. At Text, Jarzębowski chairs the supervisory board and Sitarz is vice-chairman. The names from the beginning remain part of the company’s public structure. The relationships have acquired new job descriptions along the way.

A constitution with room for rebellion

In 2020, Cieply set out an ambition that extended beyond customer totals and revenue. He wanted the company to change internet communication and to be remembered for doing so. His foreword to its Living Constitution made that ambition unusually explicit.

His call for rebellion is more restless than the quiet office scene of 2015 might suggest. He warned against settling into safety and competing only through lists of features. He wanted customers to feel involved in a mission, using a Mars expedition as his analogy.

The space references have another appearance in his working life. A former colleague, Emilia Mosiewicz, recalled an image of the first moon landing on his office wall. Her description emphasized the team behind the achievement and portrayed Cieply as someone who encouraged others to become the face of the company’s success. It is a colleague’s account of his leadership, rather than a personality test, and it fits the emphasis on collective work.

Outside the office, his published biography lists marathon running, tennis and wakeboarding. They are ordinary pursuits beside the planetary ambitions. A founder can have an expansive company mission and still spend an afternoon trying to stay on a board.

“I want us to be rebels and fight the status quo.”

Mariusz Cieply · 2020 CEO foreword

What happens after a chat is “resolved”?

LiveChat Software became Text in September 2023. The broader company had added ChatBot in 2017 and HelpDesk in 2019; the Text platform launched in May 2025. Its products now cover live conversations, support workflows and AI agents. Cieply remains founder and CEO, with a company serving more than 30,000 businesses in over 150 countries.

In April 2026, he published a short piece called From Chat to Cash. He reported that Text’s agent resolved 74 percent of conversations. Then he asked, “how many of those ‘resolved’ chats were actually lost sales?” That is his question about the metric, and the percentage is his reported figure. Closing a conversation and helping someone complete a purchase measure different outcomes.

He described custom skills that let businesses instruct the AI in ordinary language to qualify leads, capture intent and move deals forward. His stated aspiration was to make the technology less visible. The person asking a question should be able to get on with the conversation, rather than spend time negotiating the machinery behind it.

The ambition brings his career back to a recognizable place. A young games trader notices a shop is closed when customers are available. A programmer helps put a conversation onto a website. A CEO asks whether the conversation produced anything useful for the buyer and the business. Across the buyout, the listing and the new company name, Cieply keeps returning to that exchange. Someone wants something. Can the business be there, understand the question and help?