Peter Arvai, Prezi: “Creativity outweighs experience”
[Translated parts of the interview were not included in the text at Venture Village.]
An online service for creating presentations with scaling effects Prezi with headquarters in Budapest and San Francisco recently introduced new statistics: as of September, it was used by 29 million people, and by the end of 2013, the company plans to attract 36 million users.
A month after that, the CEO and one of the company's founders, Peter Arvay, arrived in Kiev for the IDCEE conference. I met him among hundreds of startups, participants, investors and mentors in the corridor of the NSC “Olympic” to learn a little more about what the service is waiting for and what drives its creator.
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- Please tell us a little about yourself.
- I was born and grew up in Sweden, I studied as an engineer. After that, he was an employee of number 4 in a startup, and then he founded his own company, which provides information about hospitals. With this service, the user can compare hospital "A" with hospital "B" in all procedures and indicators such as mortality, infectious diseases, etc.
The reason why I became interested in health care was sad: my father died of a heart attack, and then my mother fell ill. And then I saw an amazing thing: I could go to the store for a toothpaste and compare its types right there, at the counter, by price, effects, composition and manufacturer. However, when I went with my mother to the doctor, I had no idea about him and the hospital in which he worked. It seemed to me wrong that society made every effort to ensure that the manufacturer of toothpaste was responsible for its product, and that healthcare providers did not.
- Did the work in this startup motivate Prezi?
- We thought that the main users of the site with the comparison of hospitals would be patients, but it turned out that doctors and nurses came to us most often. Those who were smarter took on the experience of other hospitals and could optimize their processes. This experience has shown me that I can really move society in a positive direction with the help of entrepreneurship.
The same thought motivates me in my work on Prezi. I believe that when we help people share ideas, we accelerate the development of the whole world. I believe that everything good and important in the world at a fundamental level depends on the dissemination of ideas. For example, if you are a researcher who is looking for a cure for cancer, and you need to talk about your work over the past two or three years, you will need Prezi (or PowerPoint) to describe your research. And today we know that Prezi in such a situation helps such researchers to be heard and understood.
- Do you think you and your team are the most professional users in the Prezi community?
- We constantly learn from our users. When we started the service, we didn’t have any evidence that it was a good tool for creating presentations, except that we liked it. But in the last couple of years, with the help of a real scientist, we were able to learn much more and understand that the Prezi mechanism is in many ways consistent with the mechanism of human thinking.
Say, here's a simple question: what kind of cooking utensils do you have?
- Uh ... Frying pan, forks, microwave, stove, coffee maker ...
- Here. I think that you have just imagined your kitchen, and then consistently focused on its individual parts. This is exactly the case, because our brain understands and remembers information based on visual and spatial information. Prezi works the same way: presentation objects are dependent on each other visually and spatially.
Now I can say that with a good presentation made in Prezi, listeners better understand and remember your story; Moreover, they like it more. This format corresponds to the basic principle of human thinking, because in the narrative in this way visual and spatial thinking is used.
What I'm telling you now is the principles of cognitive science, the science of thinking. I communicate with researchers from Harvard and Stanford; they explain that spatial-visual signs are otherwise referred to simply as landmarks. You need to get out of the cave, turn right for the stone, then - to the left in front of the tree, and there will be edible berries. If our brain could not perceive landmarks, we would not live to this day. Accordingly, this is how a person memorized information over millions of years.
- So, you created Prezi, not knowing the whole theory?
- We had no idea about this. We and many other people just liked this format, but without knowing the scientific part, it is difficult to explain the reasons for positive emotions about this.
- When you added the ability to download audio tracks to presentations in Prezi, you said that this was done based on the wishes of users. How much do users and their requests affect the new functionality of the service?
- Pretty strong. We roll out new features and capabilities of Prezi every two weeks (actually, we have several versions of the service working in parallel with different sets of functions in parallel) and look at the feedback. If users like innovations, we leave them. The user community is very important; we, of course, have an internal vision of the product and its prospects, but without Prezi users would never have become what it is.
- In one of the previous interviews you mentioned that users started using Prezi as a tool for brainstorming.
- Yes, that is right. One of the important trends that we see is that planning horizons are becoming shorter and shorter. Say, if you had a five-year plan 25 years ago, it was a sign of professionalism. Now, on the contrary, if you plan only for the week ahead, you will be considered a professional - flexible and dynamic. This, in particular, means that people simply do not have time to conduct separate brainstorming sessions, and then also make presentations.
- Do you somehow help such users, make Prezi a more convenient tool for them?
- Yes of course. We gave them the opportunity to work together online: even if you access the Internet from different places (or from one room, but from different devices), you can connect to the same common workspace and quickly add your ideas.
- Last year, you rolled out localized versions of the service in Spanish, Japanese and Korean, this year - the Portuguese version. How important do you think localization is in a product like Prezi?
- Very important. There are many people in whose local cultures English is not sufficiently accessible and convenient. A good example is Korean localization. Korean users were so interested in Prezi that they started sending us Korean fonts, because we didn't know anything about this language at all. And it was they who first of all helped us launch a localized version.
- Speaking of languages. I know that you speak fluently not only in Swedish, Hungarian and English, but also in Japanese, and in general are passionate about the culture of this country. Does this affect your work and specifically Prezi?
“Now my Japanese is nowhere near as good as it used to be.” But in general, this language and culture have greatly changed my outlook. In Japan, the culture of caring for others and their interests is much stronger than about themselves. It helped me shift my point of view, to focus on the people around me and what I can learn from them, rather than closing in on myself. It was a very rewarding experience.
There is one more thing, more practical: thanks to the Japanese language, I understood a lot about visual communication. In Japanese, as in Chinese, hieroglyphs are essentially images. For example, the hieroglyphs for the word "love" are mother and child. Contrast this with the letters, LU-B-O-B-b. I remember returning from Japan to Europe and thinking what dry and uninteresting languages we have.
- Do you plan to launch Russian localization and learn other languages of Eastern Europe?
- I think that gradually we will enter all large markets, it is only a question of resources. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time; if my will, we would already have all the localizations. But over time we will come to this.
- Do you have any ideas how to apply Prezi to Google Glass and generally wearable computing trends?
- I have a lot of ideas. I never discuss the planned features of the service, but I can say that I thought about it.
- Thank you, Peter. What else would you like to add to what has already been said?
- There is one really important and interesting thing, which we again learn from our users. The people who use Prezi today understand that creativity is becoming more important today than experience. We see how many companies invest huge amounts of time and money in new processes and new ways to solve old problems.
The current economy is steadily accelerating. The average life expectancy for the most successful companies has already decreased from 60 to 18 years. The only way to survive in these conditions is to constantly re-invent who you are and what you do. And in this situation, we see from our users that in many cases creativity outweighs the experience, and I think this is one of the main reasons why Prezi is popular.
They understand that it is not so important to make another presentation, how to come up with an idea that people want to share with others. And in this field, Prezi is very powerful, because such presentations are easy to remember and understand, and this format can make you rethink the ideas you work with. This is a key trend that no one can afford to ignore. It is worth thinking seriously about this if you are building your business.
An online service for creating presentations with scaling effects Prezi with headquarters in Budapest and San Francisco recently introduced new statistics: as of September, it was used by 29 million people, and by the end of 2013, the company plans to attract 36 million users.
A month after that, the CEO and one of the company's founders, Peter Arvay, arrived in Kiev for the IDCEE conference. I met him among hundreds of startups, participants, investors and mentors in the corridor of the NSC “Olympic” to learn a little more about what the service is waiting for and what drives its creator.
')
- Please tell us a little about yourself.
- I was born and grew up in Sweden, I studied as an engineer. After that, he was an employee of number 4 in a startup, and then he founded his own company, which provides information about hospitals. With this service, the user can compare hospital "A" with hospital "B" in all procedures and indicators such as mortality, infectious diseases, etc.
The reason why I became interested in health care was sad: my father died of a heart attack, and then my mother fell ill. And then I saw an amazing thing: I could go to the store for a toothpaste and compare its types right there, at the counter, by price, effects, composition and manufacturer. However, when I went with my mother to the doctor, I had no idea about him and the hospital in which he worked. It seemed to me wrong that society made every effort to ensure that the manufacturer of toothpaste was responsible for its product, and that healthcare providers did not.
- Did the work in this startup motivate Prezi?
- We thought that the main users of the site with the comparison of hospitals would be patients, but it turned out that doctors and nurses came to us most often. Those who were smarter took on the experience of other hospitals and could optimize their processes. This experience has shown me that I can really move society in a positive direction with the help of entrepreneurship.
The same thought motivates me in my work on Prezi. I believe that when we help people share ideas, we accelerate the development of the whole world. I believe that everything good and important in the world at a fundamental level depends on the dissemination of ideas. For example, if you are a researcher who is looking for a cure for cancer, and you need to talk about your work over the past two or three years, you will need Prezi (or PowerPoint) to describe your research. And today we know that Prezi in such a situation helps such researchers to be heard and understood.
- Do you think you and your team are the most professional users in the Prezi community?
- We constantly learn from our users. When we started the service, we didn’t have any evidence that it was a good tool for creating presentations, except that we liked it. But in the last couple of years, with the help of a real scientist, we were able to learn much more and understand that the Prezi mechanism is in many ways consistent with the mechanism of human thinking.
Say, here's a simple question: what kind of cooking utensils do you have?
- Uh ... Frying pan, forks, microwave, stove, coffee maker ...
- Here. I think that you have just imagined your kitchen, and then consistently focused on its individual parts. This is exactly the case, because our brain understands and remembers information based on visual and spatial information. Prezi works the same way: presentation objects are dependent on each other visually and spatially.
Now I can say that with a good presentation made in Prezi, listeners better understand and remember your story; Moreover, they like it more. This format corresponds to the basic principle of human thinking, because in the narrative in this way visual and spatial thinking is used.
What I'm telling you now is the principles of cognitive science, the science of thinking. I communicate with researchers from Harvard and Stanford; they explain that spatial-visual signs are otherwise referred to simply as landmarks. You need to get out of the cave, turn right for the stone, then - to the left in front of the tree, and there will be edible berries. If our brain could not perceive landmarks, we would not live to this day. Accordingly, this is how a person memorized information over millions of years.
- So, you created Prezi, not knowing the whole theory?
- We had no idea about this. We and many other people just liked this format, but without knowing the scientific part, it is difficult to explain the reasons for positive emotions about this.
- When you added the ability to download audio tracks to presentations in Prezi, you said that this was done based on the wishes of users. How much do users and their requests affect the new functionality of the service?
- Pretty strong. We roll out new features and capabilities of Prezi every two weeks (actually, we have several versions of the service working in parallel with different sets of functions in parallel) and look at the feedback. If users like innovations, we leave them. The user community is very important; we, of course, have an internal vision of the product and its prospects, but without Prezi users would never have become what it is.
- In one of the previous interviews you mentioned that users started using Prezi as a tool for brainstorming.
- Yes, that is right. One of the important trends that we see is that planning horizons are becoming shorter and shorter. Say, if you had a five-year plan 25 years ago, it was a sign of professionalism. Now, on the contrary, if you plan only for the week ahead, you will be considered a professional - flexible and dynamic. This, in particular, means that people simply do not have time to conduct separate brainstorming sessions, and then also make presentations.
- Do you somehow help such users, make Prezi a more convenient tool for them?
- Yes of course. We gave them the opportunity to work together online: even if you access the Internet from different places (or from one room, but from different devices), you can connect to the same common workspace and quickly add your ideas.
- Last year, you rolled out localized versions of the service in Spanish, Japanese and Korean, this year - the Portuguese version. How important do you think localization is in a product like Prezi?
- Very important. There are many people in whose local cultures English is not sufficiently accessible and convenient. A good example is Korean localization. Korean users were so interested in Prezi that they started sending us Korean fonts, because we didn't know anything about this language at all. And it was they who first of all helped us launch a localized version.
- Speaking of languages. I know that you speak fluently not only in Swedish, Hungarian and English, but also in Japanese, and in general are passionate about the culture of this country. Does this affect your work and specifically Prezi?
“Now my Japanese is nowhere near as good as it used to be.” But in general, this language and culture have greatly changed my outlook. In Japan, the culture of caring for others and their interests is much stronger than about themselves. It helped me shift my point of view, to focus on the people around me and what I can learn from them, rather than closing in on myself. It was a very rewarding experience.
There is one more thing, more practical: thanks to the Japanese language, I understood a lot about visual communication. In Japanese, as in Chinese, hieroglyphs are essentially images. For example, the hieroglyphs for the word "love" are mother and child. Contrast this with the letters, LU-B-O-B-b. I remember returning from Japan to Europe and thinking what dry and uninteresting languages we have.
- Do you plan to launch Russian localization and learn other languages of Eastern Europe?
- I think that gradually we will enter all large markets, it is only a question of resources. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time; if my will, we would already have all the localizations. But over time we will come to this.
- Do you have any ideas how to apply Prezi to Google Glass and generally wearable computing trends?
- I have a lot of ideas. I never discuss the planned features of the service, but I can say that I thought about it.
- Thank you, Peter. What else would you like to add to what has already been said?
- There is one really important and interesting thing, which we again learn from our users. The people who use Prezi today understand that creativity is becoming more important today than experience. We see how many companies invest huge amounts of time and money in new processes and new ways to solve old problems.
The current economy is steadily accelerating. The average life expectancy for the most successful companies has already decreased from 60 to 18 years. The only way to survive in these conditions is to constantly re-invent who you are and what you do. And in this situation, we see from our users that in many cases creativity outweighs the experience, and I think this is one of the main reasons why Prezi is popular.
They understand that it is not so important to make another presentation, how to come up with an idea that people want to share with others. And in this field, Prezi is very powerful, because such presentations are easy to remember and understand, and this format can make you rethink the ideas you work with. This is a key trend that no one can afford to ignore. It is worth thinking seriously about this if you are building your business.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/198712/
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