EP01-Chaos to Clarity: The Journey That Led Me to Found UniPrisma

The Sailor Who Learned Responsibility at Fifteen

I was born in Budapest in the mid seventies a city of contradictions. It was still shaped by the Cold War, full of structure but also limits. When I was seven, my father, who was a seaman, took a job in North Africa. We moved as a family to Libya, and for almost two years I lived in a completely different world. The air smelled of salt and sand. The streets were loud, the heat constant, and everything around me felt unpredictable.

That experience changed me forever. At an age when most children live inside the walls of their neighborhood, I saw a different kind of life. People looked, spoke, and thought in ways that felt completely new to me. I remember walking through the dusty streets of Tripoli or the endless dunes of the Sahara desert and realizing that the world is far bigger and more complex than we are told. There is never just one truth, never only one way to live. When we returned to Hungary, I noticed how small our old world felt. My classmates talked about things that no longer made sense to me. I could not fit back into the bubble. That early exposure gave me a kind of vision that I would later use in everything I built. It made me curious, adaptive, and comfortable in any environment.

But the real turning point in my life came when I was fifteen.

My parents divorced. My father moved out and disappeared from our daily life. My mother was in a deep emotional crisis and my younger brother was angry and shut down. Overnight, I became the adult in the house. There was no money and no safety net. The fridge was empty. Bills were unpaid. I remember standing in that apartment and understanding that childhood was over, not in theory but in practice. No one was coming to help. I had to act.

So I started to work. After school, I took whatever jobs I could find. I carried boxes, cleaned, worked in warehouses, anything that paid a few forints. It was not noble, but it was necessary. I did not complain or look for sympathy. I simply decided that survival was my responsibility. And in that process, something very important happened. I stopped being afraid of problems. I realized that responsibility gives you energy. It gives you focus. It creates structure when everything else is chaos.

Those years built the foundation of who I am today. Most people avoid responsibility because it feels heavy. For me, it became my oxygen. It gave me direction. It made me feel useful and grounded. I learned that when everything collapses, the only thing that remains is character. And character is not what you say when things go well. It is what you do when nobody watches and when the outcome might not matter to anyone but you.

The years between fifteen and nineteen were the hardest of my life. But they gave me a strange kind of peace with uncertainty. I learned not to panic when things fall apart because I had already seen what that feels like. I learned that control is an illusion and what truly matters is how you navigate through uncertainty. That mindset became the core of how I lead and how I build.

Sailing as My Mirror

During that same period, sailing became my second education. My father had taught me to sail when I was a kid. By ten, I was racing in local competitions, and by fourteen, I was part of the national league. Sailing was freedom and discipline at the same time. It was also my therapy.

The sea gives you instant feedback. It does not lie. If you are lazy, you lose. If you are arrogant, you capsize. If you are afraid, you freeze. Every movement has a visible result. During the chaos of my teenage years, sailing was the one place where effort always led to outcome. If I worked smarter and harder, the boat moved faster. If I made the wrong call, the result was obvious. It was measurable, fair, and real.

Sailing also taught me how to think about structure. Structure matters, but it should never be a cage. The wind changes all the time. You have to adjust, not resist. The shortest path is rarely the fastest one. Sometimes you have to move sideways or even backward to reach your destination. These lessons became metaphors for everything I later did in business. They are still visible today in UniPrisma’s DNA. We build structure that moves, not structure that controls.

Fear, Pain, and Performance

People sometimes ask why I stay calm in difficult situations. The answer is simple. I have been through worse. When you have experienced real loss and hardship, business problems look small. You stop fearing loss because you have already lost. You stop fearing failure because you have failed and survived. That does not make you careless. It makes you free.

There is, however, a shadow side to this mindset. Growing up in survival mode wires you to perform constantly. I became an overachiever, but not for recognition. I was driven by the need to stay safe. I pushed myself harder than anyone else ever could. I believed for a long time that pain was the price of success. That belief gave me strength but also rigidity. In the last decade, I have learned to question that pattern. You do not need to suffer to grow. You can achieve with balance and still stay ambitious. But you can only understand that after you have gone through the other side. You have to prove to yourself that you can endure first.

Responsibility as Energy

Responsibility has been the constant rhythm of my life. It motivates me more than money or recognition. If I do not carry responsibility, I lose interest. It is what keeps me alive and focused. In every company or fund I build, I look for the same energy in others. I want people who take ownership, who act before they are asked, who understand that responsibility is not a task but a mindset.

Of course, taking on too much can also become a weakness. Sometimes I take responsibility for things that are not mine to carry. It is something psychologists call parentification. It starts when you grow up too early. You start to believe that the world will fall apart if you stop holding it. I still have that instinct, and I manage it carefully. But it is also the reason I thrive in chaos. When others freeze, I act. When uncertainty rises, I focus. It is not heroism. It is habit.

The Root of My Leadership

If you remove all the business strategies, the frameworks, the metaphors, my leadership philosophy is very simple: take responsibility, stay calm, keep moving. Leadership is not control, it is rhythm. It is the ability to keep motion when others stop.

When I build teams, I do not look for the most experienced people. I look for those who are curious, who take initiative, who think like builders. Expertise can be learned. Ownership cannot. When chaos hits, expertise hides, but ownership acts. That is why the right mindset always beats the perfect resume.

What It Means Today

Looking back, I see a straight line between that fifteen-year-old boy in Budapest and the leader I am today. The experiences were not accidents. They were the foundation of everything that came later.

When I talk about navigating chaos, it is not a metaphor. It is who I am. When I say use what is on the boat, it is not just an idea. It is a survival principle. When I say the shortest way is not always the fastest one, it comes from lived truth, not theory.

I grew up learning to move through uncertainty with clarity, to build rhythm inside turbulence, and to find freedom through responsibility. That is who I am. Not a corporate manager, not a venture capitalist, not even just a sailor. I am a navigator. Someone who builds structure in chaos, because that is where I come from, and that is where I do my best work.

Timecode:

00:00 – Introduction: A Sailor’s Beginning
00:31 – Moving to North Africa: The First Big Shift
01:00 – Discovering Sailing and the Meaning of Responsibility
02:19 – Forces Greater Than You
02:50 – The End of a Dream
03:52 – Six Years Away from the Water
04:16 – An Introvert’s Bet: Entering Sales
05:07 – Lessons from Danish Mentors
06:05 – From Candles to Code: Transition into IT
07:00 – A Global Career Across 50 Countries
07:28 – Discovering Venture Capital
08:14 – Building Ventures and Funds
09:13 – The Gap in the Startup World
09:49 – The Birth of UniPrisma
10:16 – Closing Reflections: Taking Risks Together

Links:

Uniprisma: https://uniprisma.com/

Transcript:

My origin story started in Budapest, where I was born and raised. I had a great family and a younger brother. One thing that really characterized my family was the openness to other people. I think part of it was because my father was a seaman, traveling all around the globe on a commercial ship.

He always brought back something—stories, spices, whatever it was, presents. Early on, at the age of seven, we moved to North Africa for two years. That was obviously a huge change, but also extremely inspiring for me. It opened up my little world. When I came back, I was already a different person.

I knew that you can look at things from many different angles. And just because we do things in a certain way doesn't mean that that's the right way or that's the ultimate truth. Again, because of my father, I started sailing. He was also sailing. I started very early, at the age of eight, and at the age of ten, I started racing, through that until I was 20.

That again, that was, I would say, one of the most important, influential components of my origin story, of who I am. Basically, I'm a sailor. I'm a lifelong sailor, for sure. But what it means to me is responsibility in my decisions. I sailed solo for most of the time. So you have different kinds of boats.I really liked solo as well. But when you are sailing solo, there is just no one to blame. You have to take it all—the success, too, but the hardship and decisions and everything. The other big lesson I learned there, which is also part of my origin story, is that there are always greater forces around you.

You cannot be the top force in the universe. So you need to be humble, and you need to understand the context in which you operate. I wanted to be a sailor, by the way, a seaman. I was on the National League, so I had a very good chance to be a pro. I didn't become a pro, I think mainly looking back, mainly because of money issues.

As I grew up, sailing was cheap in Hungary. But then the Iron Curtain came down, and a new world started in the early 90s, which was my teenage years. Suddenly everything became very expensive. At that time, there were no sponsors. This whole sponsorship story was totally unknown here. So basically, from one day to another, I would have to come up with a pro budget, which I didn't have.

That was actually very, very tough for me because I couldn't imagine that I would do anything else. Fun fact: after I accepted this, that my life would not continue as a pro sailor, I actually didn't visit the lake for six years. I couldn't go there. That's all. And I cut off all my relations to sailing at Lake Balaton, at least. I still went to the sea.

I really didn't know what to do with my life in terms of occupation or mission or whatever. I was a very introverted person. So my friends would tease me, asking what kind of job would be the most far-fetched idea for a career to fulfill?

And they were jokingly saying, "You should be a salesperson," because then, as an introvert, it would be super challenging. They picked some of the advertisements, and they said, "Let's make a bet. If you apply for the sales job, then you get, I don't remember, maybe four beers for free. If you go to the interview, you get, I don't know, six. And if you get the job, then you have free beer for one month."

So I went there, I applied, I went to the interview, and for some strange ways of life, I got accepted. That's how I started my career. That was actually a Danish company, operating in Hungary, manufacturing and exporting candles. I knew nothing about sales.

I knew nothing about trade. I knew nothing about nothing. I just knew sailing. But the owners, two young Danish guys, were very, very open with me. They represented the culture and the mindset that was unknown to me before—like a trust-based relationship paired with accountability. I had to make myself accountable for everything, but otherwise, they would trust me.

That inspired me a lot. I wanted to bring out the best in me. So I discovered, slowly but surely, that I was making progress, bringing in money for the company, acquiring clients, and eventually I found out that I'm quite good at this. I still had my own ways. I was not like the typical American, vacuum cleaner agent that knocks on your door.

I was more the consultative sales guy, like good listening skills, understanding what really motivates the other person, not just in general, but on that particular day. Then from there, I moved on. I figured if I can do this, there must be another industry in which I can earn more. So IT was a new thing at that time.

So I went to ITC, and then I discovered software and all that. This is how I started my career. I got into venture capital by accident, probably. I spent about 15 years working for international companies all across the globe. Basically, I have worked in 50 countries. I have lived in five different countries.

A lots of traveling, for family reasons, I had to spend more time in Hungary, and I got hired by a holding company, which also had a venture capital arm. I was pretty bored in Hungary, to be honest, at that time, after all the traveling. But then I realized that so many people are reaching out to me for advice on how to go to market in the U.S. or Western Europe and so on.

And I discovered that there is something common in these companies: they are all startups. That's when I discovered and learned about venture capital and startups. And I was very happy with that because I discovered a whole industry that rewards my risk-taking appetite and my focus in building. I got myself immersed into that sector.

Then, moving away from that company, I built up my own consulting firm with two other co-owners, and we together initiated the launch of Vespucci Partners, a venture capital firm in Budapest. From that moment on, in the last decade, I spent time in the VC and startup ecosystem. I think I have experienced each side of the table. I tried myself as a startup founder and co-founder. I founded a startup accelerator, and by now, I played a key role in launching three venture capital firms.

So, having a decade of experience in venture capital and startups, one learning that arises above all for me is the method of how you actually build successful companies. What stands out to me is the limitations of the startup and the gap between what they would need in order to actually build what they want to build.

And usually what's missing is not the money, but it's more like the people, the talent. That's why I like the venture studio model because it's all about co-building with the right people. My last job at OUVC, we started to explore building up the venture studio. But over the last couple of months, I spun out the venture studio and started to build it together with Thijmen my co-founder and business partner.

When it all comes together, having this 25 years of experience—it's business, I built international companies, it's investments, it's the co-building. It sounds simple, but as simple as it is, it requires the right set of people actually taking the risk together instead of just advising.