Entrepreneurs of Budapest: Ákos Maróy, Aero Glass

Entrepreneurs of Budapest is a deep-dive into some of the people and stories that are building startups (often not their first) in Budapest today. We invited local startup founders and teams to tell us about their personal entrepreneurial journeys, their thoughts and impressions on building a company in Budapest, and their hopes and desires for the future startup scene in Hungary.

Ákos Maróy, founder of Aero Glass, co-founder of the 9-year-old New Tech Meetup Budapest’s first tech meetup of its kind, and co-founder of the newly Pulitzer Memorial Awarded atlatszo.hu, sat down with us to give us his take on innovating and working as an entrepreneur in Budapest.

In a few sentences can you tell us about Aero Glass and where the inspiration for this startup came from?

Aero Glass combines 3 different passions of mine — one is flying, I’m a very enthusiastic pilot, the second is augmented reality, I’ve been doing augmented reality related media art since about 2005. We’ve exhibited at venues like the Venice Biennale, the NTT IC in Tokyo, the Yamaguchi Center for Art & Media in Japan, and the Prix Ars Electronica Festival so that’s something I’ve been doing. And the third is startups, which I’ve done before. I’m doing commercial software development and let’s just say, startup spinoffs have happened to me before.

At the time we founded Aero Glass I just exited from my previous startup, so the timing got together. The actual timing pressure or trigger that made us start Aero Glass is that head worn displays or smart glasses were going to enter the market, which basically allowed us to buy smart glasses that we could use for our own purposes.

So we are looking at a very typical lean startup approach, combining off the shelf stuff with our own ingredients and creating something that’s our own, without replicating something that is already on the market. This is how we started about 2 years ago.

When you’re prototyping an idea or product, what is the point that you decide to spin it off into a startup?

At EU Edge, we have our own internal lab called EU Edge Labs, where we do all sorts of funny stuff. Some of it is just self-indulgence really, you try out things and see if it’s cool or not. Some of it doesn’t go through our technical prototype phase, sometimes we do a mini project that goes from start to publish basically like a startup in itself, and then sometimes it grows bigger.

When do we decide to make a project bigger? It’s kind of a gut feeling. It relates to viability, passion, and of course possible economic outcome, a combination of these things.

Tell us about your first startup, from a personal perspective, why the startup world?

Well, my previous startup is called Scarab Research, which we founded with Viktor Szathmáry my business partner, and István Hernádvölgyi, one of my team members at the time. We were working for an online retailer in the US called FreshDirect, and we saw all the effort and energy they put into increasing revenue — that’s what an online retailer wants to do. Then Istvan, who has a machine learning background, had this insight that they could increase revenue through machine learning.

So basically he started his own research into this field and he came up with better and better product models of what people would want to buy, and we ended up with quite convincing results. We figured that this was something worthwhile to follow up with.

Our first customer was Bookline, and the idea was that this could be used with established online retailers, or in other fields. This went on, of course, there are highs and lows, and research cycles, and everything else that comes with the package.

What motivates and inspires you to work as a startup entrepreneur?

Me, I’m not hung up on the term startup. I think it’s a new term for doing highly risky innovative stuff — sometimes it’s not even innovative, just risky. I’m really interested in specific fields of tech, mostly where society and tech come together.

This is a topic that has interested me since childhood basically and you can approach this topic in various ways. You can observe and comment, you can write essays, you can do media artwork that plays on this theme or do something as a company and be an initiator of this kind of tech change. I have taken all of these positions at some point in my life, including the entrepreneurial one.

This is something that is exciting and I like to be part of it, and that’s a stronger motivation for me than the possible economic outcome of stuff. Some people really are focused on the numbers, making money, and that’s fine, we need that attitude. But I’m more interested in the actual research or product. Of course you need the economic backdrop to make it possible, to finance it and make it sustainable but I find that is actually just a means to an end.

For me, it’s more about the power to create.

What are the major challenges that you have faced in your journey?

Well, doing a lean startup is a lot of stress. Basically you are trying to create a solution for something that really hasn’t been done before. And usually people are doing it in parallel with you so it’s kind of a race, but you also want to do it in a really resource constrained manner.

So the challenge is multiple, it’s not just technological, it’s also an efficiency and organizational challenge. You need to involve and motivate people, sometimes with basically just the promise that if this turns out right, it is going to be fine. And that’s difficult.

Motivation does not always work as you would expect. Sometimes people do not get motivated as you would assume they would, sometimes it’s the other way around.

For me, the sweet spot of the whole process is a tech advancement. When the solution works and a teammate experiences that, uses it and puts it on, that’s the spot.

And then of course let’s not forget there’s a fair share of personal wealth, and personal economic standing challenge was well. You risk your time and money, and what if it doesn’t work out? That pressure is also quite present. And maybe me being an older guy with a family, this pressure is quite strong. Maybe if I was 20 and living in my mom’s apartment, the pressure would be less.

Do you see trends happening here in terms of funding, resources or talent pool that would give an indication of where the local ecosystem is headed?

Resource-wise, the early stage funding, angel investment scene is improving. There are groups that are forming that seem to be more like the traditional style angel groups, where 10–15 or even more high net-worth individuals put together a money pool, and this money is being invested in kind of a fast decision making process.

The default investment terms are still bad, from what I see, so they’re kind of detrimental for a young inexperienced startupper. This is something that culture wise has to improved.

If you listen carefully, you can even hear it in a slip of the tongue — ‘Oh if a startup doesn’t fight our terms then we are skeptical, because they probably have a lack of business savvy.’ My opinion is, if you’re offering unfair terms, then why bother. Then you’re unfair yourself.

But it seems to be slowly going in a good direction. Fortunately the Jeremie funds are over. They have moved everything into a bad direction, I mean if we follow Forbes’ investigation into this topic, then it’s fair to say that it was a corrupt system.

And now there are more private funds appearing.

Yes exactly, like real money, like people’s money. Not somebody else’s money that we got in a questionable manner. Spending other people’s money is not the same as spending your own.

And yes, Hungary is small and you have to focus on export markets and stuff. Market access is a problem, and interestingly English knowledge is a problem, even with young people. You hear a lot of, ‘Ok I created something but I need to talk to this and that company in California, so that’s a big hurdle for most of these guys.

I really wish that we had a similarly aggressive approach to this problem as Finnland or Switzerland. they have permanent offices in Silicon Valley, or they basically fund the market access to the US through the state innovation fund. They say ‘Ok you’re a startup, here’s the money, go spend one year in Silicon Valley.’

Without that, you can’t shuttle diplomacy your way in. It’s not like, ‘Ok, I’m here this week and then I’m not here for 3 months. So that kind of access has to be accelerated somehow.’

It’s great to have an opportunity for a soft landing.

Yes, and it’s more efficient if you do it in an organizational manner. As I said I’m not a fan of state interference in this way, but funding individual startups to do the same is more expensive than having one single place where you assign a desk to someone. And if you have a place, you’re part of the scene, there’s someone at least permanently there, he’s there for at least a few years, he knows people, he has the network, so that’s very valuable.

And what do you think of the local Budapest community?

Community is really important. For example I was one of the three guys who started the Budapest New Tech Meetup 9 years ago. It was the first such event.

Now meetups are pervasive and that’s really good, I’m really happy about that. I think community is really important, I’ve been trying to nurture community and openness, exchange and sincerity. For example with the New Tech Meetup, our agenda was to encourage tech people to share their experiences, not sales people boasting about their companies, but people just sharing whatever they do.

You know, you’re never in a vacuum, you always need people around you and you need to understand how they are working, you need to be honest and share experiences and results, and criticism. Unfortunately what I said about the investment culture, that’s quite premature here, open discussion is non-existent there, or at least not that strong.

Do you think going on an accelerator abroad is a good alternative?

It depends what stage you’re in. So if you’re the proverbial guy who just got out of college, Startup Chile or any of these incubators in Europe is a good place to go, because at that stage in your life you can afford to go abroad. If you’re even a bit older and you have a family, or you have a team of employees, this is not an option. You can’t convince employees of 5 years to move to Chile for 5 months. They have kids to take to school every morning.

So there is a demographic where this kind of incubator approach works well, there is one where it doesn’t.

Photos by Zsolt Pinter

That just about rounds up my questions. Are there any thoughts or wishes you have for the local scene that you would add?

Yes, what I would really like to see, not just in the startup scene but for social mobility, is an environment where any person, of any age group, with an idea, be given the circumstances to realize that idea. That is something that’s lacking at the moment.

A way to channel resources in the direction of new ideas just to see if they make it or fail. And not for lack of resources but for lack of viability or execution, at least to be able to say we tried it. But to have ideas that fail because they’ve simply never been tried, I think that’s sad and also detrimental to society at large. And that’s something I would like to see change.

This would mean there would be real social mobility. That just with the power of an idea everything comes together. That it doesn’t matter where you come from or what your background is, the idea would catapult you forward.

So that would be something very good to see. Hopefully this is going to happen sometime. That’s my vision. It’s a thoughtful vision, or maybe an optimistic vision for Hungary and for the world.