As the Talent Unleashed Awards entries close we sat down with Movio Chief Technology Officer, Kalman Bekesi, to understand what got him to where he is today, what the next big trend in technology is, and of course, the best piece of advice he was given.
1. What do you think are the most important qualities in a great entrepreneur?
The ability to handle failure.
Entrepreneurs are most often trying to achieve new outcomes. The entrepreneurial path is full of challenges, failures and eventually successes. As we embrace failure and learn from it, negative experiences have positive outcomes.
2. What’s the best piece of advice you were given and by whom?
“Let fires burn”.
My tendency is to err on the side of perfectionism and hence early in my career would often run around headless trying to solve every issue. At that time, the advice the CEO gave me was to use the “Urgent/Important Matrix”. It’s still a challenge but I try to focus on important issues leaving the unimportant ones behind – even though they may be urgent.
3. Tell us about your big break?
I didn’t really have a big break. My story is more about small steady steps being rewarded for doing the right thing. Each opportunity in my career has been the result of good decisions and hard work in the previous role. As a leader, I’m always trying to spot the people who are going the extra mile, putting the team’s goals before their own, and building others.
I often refer to ‘A’ players when I talk of these people and have managed to surround myself with them.
4. What was your biggest failure?
I stepped out of a well-paid salaried position to start my first company which ended up being a miserable failure. We saw a gap in the “Christmas Tree” market and created a venture to address it. My business partner and I poured ten’s of thousands into the venture before cutting our expenses. After a great deal of soul searching, the gold appeared in the lessons learnt; we stepped into an industry that we knew nothing about, I had come from technology and loved it. I learnt to focus on my strengths and leverage the strong industry experience I had gained. Secondly, was a reflection on my leadership role: I am an acceptable leader but an excellent second in command with the ability to drive and challenge executives, particularly with forward thinking technology. It’s a formula that is been very effective at Movio.
5. What role will technology play in the future of your business and business in general?
I am a “Passionate Technologist” and tech will be at the centre of any role that I undertake. My strengths are in building businesses around technology – especially software. I have strong (and biased) view that tech will play a major role in peoples lives and therefore businesses. We’re moving past software “making things easy” into a world where we cannot operate without it.
6. What’s the next big trend on your radar in technology?
Definitively Big Data; a term that is very broad and thrown around a lot. We have reached a threshold where it is now feasible to retain large amounts of data. According to a 2012 IBM study, 2.5 exabytes – that’s 2.5 billion gigabytes (GB) – of data was generated every day, with about 90% of all the data in the world creating the previous two years. I can’t even imagine the vertiginous numbers we are now reaching.
What interests me with the concept of Big Data is how it will change people’s lives: for example, by making sense out of data we will soon be able to treat people before they get ill. We’re not there yet but it is what the future has infinite possibilities.
The Big Data challenge we are facing at Movio is so exciting; we’re at the verge of a break through to make a real business difference.
