Startup Safari Budapest: Interview with chief organiser Péter Kovács

Today, for the fourth time, Startup Safari is launched in Budapest, with over 300 programs open for thousands of visitors at over 100 locations at the two-day intensive startup festival.

Behind the success of Startup Safari Budapest is Péter Kovács, co-founder and CEO of the IseeQ headhunting company and xLabs startup, who is also the co-founder of Global Startup Awards, which has been held in 60 countries and three continents since 2012. The exclusive interview is here:

Daily News Hungary: Please, tell me briefly about your life and what started your relationship with startups!

Péter Kovács: Since the age of 16, I’ve been doing business and working constantly, smaller jobs first but then gradually more serious ones. After graduation, I got into the world of recruitment accidentally, more precisely, the world of tech recruitment, where I became successful very quickly. This was mainly because I started this whole profession with a community building attitude.

It was around 2008 when I first started to encounter companies that labelled themselves as “startups”. I instantly sympathised with their mentality of problem-solving, which differed greatly from corporates’ and large companies’. I specialised in recruitment for startups and worked at Prezi for one and a half years as one of the first recruiters.

Not long afterwards, we founded ICQ for the express purpose of international tech recruitment and later, I turned to building the startup ecosystem. This led to the founding of xlabs, the organiser of Startup Safari Budapest.

So, this was my path leading to where I am now, and it all started with the love of startups.

DNH: When was the turning point when you committed yourself entirely to startups?

Kovács: Around 2008, I met a developer who invited me to a community called OpenCoffee Club. It was already an international brand with the sort of “underground” meetup events that brought together like-minded people. I met my first startup clients in this community, of which some don’t even exist anymore, but others became successful. This is where the love began.

DNH: You currently work on a couple of startup projects; can you talk about them?

Kovács: I’m currently working on two main projects. One is the Budapest Startup Safari, of which I’m co-founder. Safari has been running for four years now, and it grew out to be quite a big event. The other project is the Global Startup Awards, the world’s largest independent startup ecosystem competition, and it currently runs on three continents in more than 60 countries, which means we cover 32% of the world.

DNH: Please, tell us more about the Hungarian startup scene. From when can we talk about a serious startup ecosystem here? What are the main strengths of Hungarian startups?

Kovács:

The Hungarian startup scene started to form in the second half of the 2000s.

We’ve seen some success stories before, like Graphisoft, but these were isolated and didn’t have an ecosystem around them or investors backing them. The first big breakthrough came with Prezi, and Budapest became a reference point in the global startup scene. Western investors started to take Hungary into consideration beyond industrial investments. Things started to really kick off around 2012-2013, and development has sped up in the last five years.

And what are our strengths? I would say our strength shows more in our skills than in certain fields or industries. We are quite successful in natural sciences, like Mathematics or Physics; however, we lack around 50-100 years of business experience because Hungary has always been an agricultural country, rather than an industrial one. This backlog, nevertheless, has started to dissolve quickly with the latest generation, who have access to digital information and have the possibility to study abroad. Another advantage, in my opinion, is that for historical reasons, we’ve learned to survive with fewer resources, which is a useful skillset if we talk about an early stage startup where there’s less money, and still a steady background needs to be generated quickly. This is absolutely an advantage, although we lack the confidence to utilise it fully – we need to develop that. If a Hungarian has to cope in the Western startup scene, they will most likely underrate themselves, and that is a problem.

DNH: Let’s have a look at Budapest Startup Safari. Tell us about the beginnings! What was the first festival like and how will this year’s Safari differ from that?

Kovács: Startup Safari was originally the idea of a Polish guy. He lived in Berlin and saw a market opportunity in letting his acquaintances and network connections in his office meet the employees and see the work process of a startup. By the time I first met him, this system worked quite well, and we decided to develop the basic idea from that. In the first year, in 2016, we aimed at 200-300, maximum 500 participants – in the end, 2200 people showed up. The Safari proved to be a market fit, and we had every resource to go on with the project. This year, we’re expecting 6000 people, and both the organisation, the structure of the event and the quality of the programs improved significantly since the first year. Of course, in four years, we hope that Startup Safari will be even better.

Structurally, there haven’t been any big changes. As the number of events increased significantly, we organise thematic routes, so they would be feasible for the visitors. No one would like to read the description of 300 individual events, so these routes can serve as guides for people who already know what their interests are. The system hasn’t changed, but the quality of it did: we’ve learned from the experience of previous years and created a more transparent structure. Another difference is that this year, we were able to bring more big names from the global startup scene than ever. Also, our partners at Central European Startup Awards will be invited to look at the innovative side of Budapest, meet companies and employees.