Becoming a co-funder with a crazy person
Hi,
I’m Gabriel, and I want to tell you about my story: where I came from, how I got into startups and entrepreneurship, how I met Viktor (our CEO at VixT), and how I got to where I am today.
These last five years have been an incredible journey, as I’ve travelled across the globe doing all sorts of things ranging from working as a chef in Korea, to leading the development of a revolutionary new app here in London.
And I’ve learned a lot in the process. It’s been humbling and eye-opening, and I have no doubt you can learn a lot successes and especially from my mistakes.
So without further ado, let’s get started:
I met Viktor several years ago now. I was in Bristol at the time, working at a shitty job. Like most people in dead-end jobs, I spent most of my time there asking myself where my life was going and praying that the weekend would come sooner rather than later.
I feel like I had already had several successes in my life by that point: I had led several successful online projects for Hungarian brands working as a manufacturing engineer, I was working as a marketing advisor and I had gained a large following while blogging about Facebook before the social media ‘boom’.
On top of that, I also had an online magazine for iPads that covered everything from social media to new technology and gadgets. I worked very hard on this project but it never quite took off, even though I was working roughly 20 hours every day.
To this day, if you ask me I would say it didn’t succeed because I was too early to the scene. Sure, we were a creative team and we were putting the hours in, but it was too early and the market wasn’t ready for what we were offering.
But I did learn something from this venture, and it was the importance of having a great team by your side. Creativity is important but it is not enough: you need to have a dedicated team with a powerful vision, otherwise you’ll never be successful.
I learned this lesson the hard way, and after a year running the online magazine, I flipped the tables over (literally) and I decided to quit. I paid my bills and with the money I had left over, I flew to South Korea and started working as a volunteer.
I was happy working as a volunteer. It was deeply satisfying, there’s no denying that. But when you’ve been running your own business for a year and you’re a naturally creative, entrepreneurial type of person, you can never be happy with another lifestyle.
As such, fate caught up with me. Volunteering had been good for clearing my mind but one year later I was back in Hungary as part of another startup, while working on another two projects and organising local meet-ups.
Once again, I had a great team but life had another lesson in stock for me, and that was the importance of chemistry. Just like in relationships, you can have a great girlfriend or wife but if there’s no spark or chemistry between you, after a while your life will just fall into a set of routines and you’ll feel bored.
And in the end the boredom was such that I decided to break up with the startup life once again, and I moved back to Korea to work as a chef in a restaurant.
Just like the first time there when I worked as a volunteer, I enjoyed being a chef. It’s incredible how you can always learn new things wherever you go and whatever you do, like for example when cooking for forty guests at the same time.
Whenever you find yourself in a position where you’re not happy life will force you to make choice, even if it’s just so you can have a healing period. Hungary was too small for me so I decided to move to the UK, but in the UK you’re going to struggle getting a job unless you’re a highly specialized professional like a developer or a scientist, so I had to start from a low level working once again in a hotel kitchen.
That was when Viktor called me and told me about this idea he had for a startup. He said in his own words ‘what would you say if you, as a creative person, had an app that turned your text messages into video mashups? Imagine you just speak some words and the app creates a video mix from small one-word videos that users have uploaded.’
That’s when I said ‘this is it’. This was what I wanted to work on, and put my precious time and knowledge into.
Viktor was already a close friend of mine, even if I had just met him twice in my life, and even as the crazy guy that he is, I still felt a huge amount of respect for him and his work. You may not know this, but he had already been a famous dancer, a dance choreographer, producer and ratio show speaker in Hungary. After he moved to the UK he started his own podcast, which was just as crazy as him.
When he called me I realised that not only there was great chemistry between us, but there was also the idea of a great product. Viktor is a true hustler, and him and I are always ‘in the flow’ when we’re together.
Shortly after that we met the developers and the rest of the team at VixT, all pretty much at the right place and the right time. That’s when things started to fall in their place and our dream started to look as if it could become a reality.
One year later of tweaking and fixing things, and a lot of dedication and hard work, our product is well and alive, and our app VixT is finally available on the App Store.
I like to think that everything I’ve done during these last years drove me to where I am today. I feel that I’m on the right track right now because I am right where I want to be. I’m on the move, my team is on the move, my brain is bubbling and my energy is focused on something that I care deeply about. And quite possibly, this is closest thing to happiness an entrepreneur can be. I honestly wish all of you could feel how I feel right now, because it’s a powerful feeling and it’s helped me a lot.
There’s still a lot to do and no doubt we’ll make changes to the application as VixT continues to grow, but if there’s one main lesson I have learned from these last years it’s that everything happens for a reason and we as humans have to learn from every little moment in our lives.
