European Entrepreneurship Budapest Castle at Sunset, Hungary
LogMeIn’s corporate customers include 3M and IBM, and as this article is being completed, the Wall Street Journal reports LogMeIn have recorded a fourth quarter profit rise of
since then Záboji has been a prime mover in establishing Budapest as truly a startup city. The EEF’s regular program of accelerator programmes, ‘e-breakfasts’, and business angel forums have reached out to a new generation of entrepreneurs in Central Europe, particularly in Hungary. “Once I stopped teaching
(at INSEAD) and
had the time to look around the region, it quickly dawned on me that it was very much like the late 90s and the dotcom revolution in Germany and France, i.e. youngsters with great, working ideas, but no business knowledge,” Záboji said in a 2012 interview with The Financial Times online.
Of course, while the EEF was the first, there are now several such incubators operating in Budapest, including Colabs, a startup centre and ‘tech
hub’. They are actively looking for promising startups and typically source investments of between 15 thousand and half a million euro for early stage companies. Another business ‘incubator’, as such entities are known, is the newly launched i-Catapult. They’re a Budapest based. European technology accelerator and business development company whose mission is to take European technologies to the global market: in particular the United States.
So much for incubators and accelerators, what of successful Hungarian entrepreneurs to emerge from this new hothouse environment? Let’s begin with Márton Anka, the co- founder of remote access software pioneer LogMeIn, who attended the Számalk Institure here in Budapest.
8.9 percent. Their headquarters are in Massachusetts, but they retain development centres in Budapest and Szeged deep in the Hungarian hinterland. Meanwhile, the founder and CTO of Ustream, one Dr. Gyula Feher, still makes his home in the Carpathian basin. The Ustream technology was originally created because Feher and his colleagues wanted a way for soldiers stationed in Iraq to communicate with their families back home. These days however you can watch everything from cute animal channels to red carpet arrivals on their streaming site. Prezi is another Hungarian web tech success story, born from an idea that seems artistically inspired: the ability to zoom in and out from an image during a presentation, to make storytelling more dynamic, compelling, even filmic. You could say Prezi is the new generation Power Point, and you would be in good company. Prezi’s founders are Adam Somlai-Fischer, an architect and visual artist, Peter Halacsy, a scientist and Budapest University of Technology Professor, and Peter Arvai, self styled ‘serial entrepreneur’. All good, solidly dependable Hungarian names, while the company’s headquarters are split between San Franciso and Budapest. On their website’s job page, Prezi offers would-be employees all the perks of a startup, under which they include a ‘well stocked fridge’ and ‘ping-pong tournaments’
as well
as more traditional incentives such as equity and competitive benefits.
41 entrepreneurcountry
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