Peter Arvai’s case for a wider view

Peter Arvai helped build a company around the pleasure of seeing the whole picture. Yet one of its early lessons was rather small: the currency symbol beside the price. Prezi initially charged in euros. Some American customers did not know what to make of them. Switching to dollars made the offer easier to understand. For a business devoted to communication, it was an economical education. Even the checkout needed to consider its audience.

There is a temptation to tell Arvai’s story as a contest between presentation programs. Three founders in Budapest take on Microsoft, Apple and Google; the little canvas meets the established slide. It is a perfectly serviceable plot. It leaves out the reason Budapest mattered to him, and why a company’s willingness to appear at a Pride march could matter as much as its willingness to appear at a technology conference.

His parents had left Hungary for Sweden. He went in the other direction. Along the way, he became interested in a question that can occupy a classroom, an investor meeting or a family dinner: how do you help somebody understand a world they have not experienced?

A return journey, with a business attached

Arvai grew up in Karlskoga, a Swedish industrial town, in a small apartment with Hungarian parents and limited family income. His father had left Hungary under communist rule, reached Italy and eventually found his way to Sweden through recruitment for Bofors. The family’s move carried the usual immigrant complication: an education and a history do not necessarily arrive with their previous status intact.

Good grades gave Peter choices. At KTH in Stockholm, he joined the first cohort of a new media technology program, studying there from 1999 to 2005. He also pursued business and journalism. The mixture had no tidy professional destination. The students had to work out what their combination of interests might become. Arvai later described that uncertainty as useful preparation for entrepreneurship.

By 2008 he was moving to Budapest, where his parents’ past became part of his working future. Encouragement was hardly universal. He later recalled an uncle trying to dissuade him from starting a company in Hungary. The wider financial crisis supplied a second, considerably less affectionate objection. He went ahead.

That decision gave his ambition a specific address. Building something in Budapest could offer evidence to people who doubted the city’s prospects. It also let him explore a heritage that had always been close at home and more complicated outside it. A company would become one way of making those parts of his life speak to each other.

Borrowing an artist’s way of looking

The visual idea belonged to co-founder Adam Somlai-Fischer, an architect and artist who had made a zooming tool to explain his own work. People who saw it wanted to know how they could do something similar. The answer initially involved more technical knowledge than most presenters would care to acquire before Tuesday’s meeting.

Somlai-Fischer, computer scientist Péter Halácsy and Arvai worked on making that approach available to others. Prezi launched in 2009. Their backgrounds mattered: the artist’s need, the computer scientist’s engineering and Arvai’s attention to product and users came together around a canvas on which ideas could occupy places and reveal connections.

A conventional presentation asks the audience to follow a sequence. Prezi lets a presenter move between an overview and its details. The difference becomes visible when several points belong inside one larger argument. A reader can return to the map. A speaker can show where the conversation has travelled. There is still work to do; movement cannot rescue an argument that has nowhere to go.

Arvai’s advice to presenters has consequently been fairly practical. Find the overarching story. Choose the main points that support it. Consider what the audience needs. The software supplies a way of arranging the material; the speaker still owes everyone a reason to listen.

The pitch had to travel, too

For the founders, the first stretch required more than an interesting interface. Arvai has said they went without salaries for a year and a half. He also took a flight to New York with the last of his money to pursue backing from TED. The organization’s interest in spreading ideas made it a plausible audience for a tool meant to help people explain them.

TED became an early investor. The connection also put Prezi in a setting where the product could be understood by watching it at work. In 2013, a TED and Prezi contest invited people to reinterpret existing talks visually. The winning entry reworked Bryan Stevenson’s talk about injustice. The experiment treated a presentation as something another person could revisit and remake, extending the life of an idea.

Arvai had an equally concrete explanation for keeping a substantial operation in Budapest. Engineers, costs and the life of the city all mattered. So did his family connection. In a 2013 account of the company, he described an annual two-day renovation project outside Budapest. Giving back had a place on the calendar.

The company’s international reach brought a rather ordinary managerial problem: colleagues could be working on the same mission while barely sharing a day. By 2016, Prezi offered fellowships of up to six weeks in its other office, with participants expected to bring back what they had learned. Shared experience required a plane ticket and some time together.

A company logo goes for a walk

In 2010, Prezi took its company logo to Budapest Pride. Arvai later named early colleagues whose support helped make that participation possible, as well as the support of his two co-founders. The detail matters because public openness is easier to praise once other people have already made it familiar. Somebody has to put the name on the shirt.

In 2013, Prezi, Google and espell launched WeAreOpen. Its purpose was to give employers a shared platform for openness and inclusion. Founding chief executive Melinda Miklós later recalled the progression from conversations in April to a launch in June. By January 2022, she counted 1,131 member companies and organizations. An internal company value had acquired a much larger circle of participants.

Arvai publicly came out in a Hungarian Forbes feature in 2015. His advocacy had an identifiable audience: young people who wanted examples of a career in which they could be open about being gay. He had grown up without the sort of visible business role models he wanted them to have.

“If a leader really wants to create an open and inclusive culture they have to start with themselves”

Peter Arvai, 2019

The principle creates obligations for the person at the top. Arvai talked about his own background during onboarding at Prezi. An incoming colleague could see how a statement about openness applied to the person running the business. The introduction gave an abstract value a human example before it became another paragraph in a company handbook.

Bridge Budapest, which he also co-founded, addressed a related question about possibility. Established in 2013 by entrepreneurs associated with Hungarian technology companies, it sought to encourage confidence in building businesses from Hungary. Its work put examples in front of people who might otherwise assume that an international career required a one-way departure.

The founder learns to hand over

At SaaStr in 2018, Arvai shared a session on visual storytelling with Pixar’s Jason Katz. Their discussion kept returning to revision: deciding what a story is trying to say, showing it to other people and accepting that it needs more work. Arvai emphasized the willingness to hear criticism. For a founder, that is useful advice well beyond the presentation screen.

Prezi’s own story was changing. In November 2019 it introduced Prezi Video, allowing a presenter to appear alongside visual material within a video. An interview with Arvai that month began with graphics appearing around him during their call. He was demonstrating the product while discussing it, an efficient arrangement for someone selling a different way of explaining things.

On July 28, 2020, he announced that Jim Szafranski would become chief executive the following day. Arvai would remain executive chair. He described the decision in terms of readiness: new products with room to grow, and a leadership team he trusted to take the company further. His thank-you included colleagues, investors, his co-founders and his husband, Matthew, whose support had often required moving their family’s life around the company.

Room for an unfinished recipe

There are smaller clues to the person beyond his titles. An early conference biography mentioned his half-written cookbook about everyday Japanese food. Years spent thinking about how to convey an idea had apparently not made every personal publishing project arrive on schedule. It is a pleasingly ordinary loose end in a career otherwise described in launches and milestones.

KTH named him its Alumnus of the Year in 2015. His lecture was called Creativity trumps experience. The former student whose degree program had no obvious career path was back to explain what he had made of it. His example gave the title some substance: unfamiliar combinations of skills had turned out to have uses.

Prezi’s current leadership page lists him as executive chairman and co-founder. In his handover essay, he wrote of wanting to bring entrepreneurship and activism closer together, and of helping people understand each other across difficult subjects. That ambition runs through his decisions more consistently than any particular software feature. The young person finding room for himself, the founder returning to Budapest and the executive discussing openness with new colleagues are parts of the same picture. Arvai has spent much of his career asking people to look at a little more of it.