Zsolt Weiszbart

Please, introduce yourself briefly (What do you do now, what was the road leading there? What motivates you in your work? What do you think is the most important about you?)!

Since 2001, for 14 years I have been executive officer of IFS Hungary Ltd. (www.ifsworld.com). IFS is a Swedish software development company, employing 2,600 people globally in more than 30 offices. I have also been an active actor in the Hungarian start up world in the least 4 years, as founder of WhiteSummers Cofounder (white-summers.com/cofounder) and as business angel. I met my wife at the University of Pécs, and this May is the time when the little brother of my 9-year old son, Bálint and of my 7-year old daughter, Lilla is born.

What major stations would you mention in your life and work since you finished Pécsiközgáz (either in your profession or private life)?

After graduating from FBE (in 1998), the next step was the MBA programme of Ohio University, allowed by a scholarship I was awarded at Pécsiközgáz. After spending two years in the USA I moved to Budapest in the autumn of 2000, and I have been working for my first Hungarian employer, IFS Hungary Ltd. since then. I joined the then new Hungarian team of IFS as marketing and sales manager, and just after 8 months – in the week of 11 September 2001 – I was appointed executive officer. The team of 10 people then grew to 30 people over the years and became a dominant actor of the markets of business management systems in Hungary. In 2008 I felt I needed new impulses and I submitted a successful application to the Graduate School of Business Executive Masters programme of Stanford University. Fortunately I was supported in this by IFS, and I was given a one-year educational leave in 2009-10. The integrated programme allowed my family, grown to four persons by that time (3-year old boy and a 9-month girl), to experience the unmatched milieu of the Stanford and the Silicon Valley. This is where my interest in the world of start ups started, and since I came home I have been active business angel.

What does success mean to you (either in your professional career or your private life)?

Success is a series of smaller and bigger events that give you further ammunition to experience daily work and activities not as a burden. The experience of success if basically very subjective – apart from the financial, measurable acknowledge – and it very important at the level of the individual to be aware of what success is for them exactly. It may be a feedback from a client, a colleague, spouse, it may be an interview in a trade magazine, the successful implementation of a task with a deadline, or completion of a 5-kilometre running :-)

What did Pécsiközgáz give you (What are the values and experiences that you got from the Faculty? Why was (is) it worth attending the Faculty?)?

The FBE was a very dynamic, juvenile medium in the mid-90s, where one continuously felt that there are no limits, if you had a good idea or concept, you could always find partners and resources for it.

It was very good that, coming from the size of the Faculty, almost everyone knew everybody else, so I was not a student in an impersonal mega-institution, a large part of my friendships are still people whom I met at the Faculty. It would be difficult to make a list of the experiences and knowledge that I experienced here in five years, but the Ohio programme that allowed me to travel as a scholarship holder to the USA was definitely a dominant milestone in my life.