It was the summer ot 2016, and the walls were closing in on Rafal Br-zoska. The then-38-year-old Polish entrepreneur had spent nearly two decades transforming In-Post, a college dorm-room business that shoved supermarket coupons through letterboxes, into a $120 million-a-year commercial mail business. But competing against the government's postal service was taking a toll. He had $65 million in debt and was frantically trying to find new investors while staving off the repo man. "One of my key points with the new investors was, 'I want to repay all the bonds, all the banks, all the people that have lent us money,'" recalls Brzoska, who is now 43. "The investors wondered why, and I told them, 'I want to live in this country, and you only have one name, one face.'" Those investors weren't interested in Brzos-ka's dying postal business but in the automated e-commerce lockers spinoff he had started in 2010. Amazon and other online retailers ship packages for pickup to these refrigerator-sized street lockers, which cost around $20,000 to install. They are popular because mailmen in Europe will rarely leave a parcel unattended on a stoop. That effectively stops porch piracy (54% of Americans say they've had a package swiped), but if you miss the doorbell you're in for a slog to the post office.
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