Bogár Bence: Álmodj, alkoss, rombolj és kezd újra! -- TEDxYouth@Budapest 2011

When I heard Bence's presentation I was very glad.
I thought he is much braver than I had been.
He does not feel the need of sticking to doing one thing for 30 years,
or even getting university education.
After a few short-term projects, he can dedicate his time and passion
to encourage young enterpreneurs.
Let's listen to him.
Bence Bogar: Dream, create, destroy and restart
Hello. My name is Bence.
I help young teams realise their dreams.
What kind of dreams?
I will talk about it a bit later on.
First let me tell you how I got here to stand before you to tell my story.
As I child I was extremely fat. You might not want to picture how fat.
I was stuffing myself all the time.
No wonder that my first thoughts were related to food.
Once when I was eating cottage-cheese balls (sweet traditional Hungarian dish),
I told my grandma: 'Grandma, I don't like you, because I can't eat you.'
I guess you are getting the feeling that I thought about certain things
in this young age differenty than others.
A bit later on I was involved in a car accident.
I fell into a river in a Polski Fiat (a tiny car from Poland).
As you see, I miracoulously survived the accident safe and sound.
Not long after the accident I went home and read the car's manual.
I still remember the picture of that small car's ruins after an explosion.
In theory two one-metre-long steel bars saved my life. In theory.
I made a decision, I wanted to be a professional safety engineer,
and not small-scale, I said at Mercedes.
I found a genius to follow the footsteps of, Béla Barényi,
who put down the foundations of the safety of modern cars in the late fifties.
I wanted to climb the ladder as an employee,
and grow a belly that fits into bigger and bigger Mercedes models.
While other children were drawing giraffes and houses,
I was drawing broken cars, steering wheels and air bags.
This led to me ending up in Budapest University of Technology.
I got admitted to the Industrial product design engineering programme.
The very first moment at the university was a shock for me,
because I went there like, "Hi, I know this and that, and would like to achive that and that."
The university asked me things I did not know.
As an Industrial product design engineer I failed thermo- and hydrodynamics and applied mathematical statistics.
I wanted to show what I knew, and I got in my face everything I did not know instead.
Having spent 18 years working for my dream and after 3 years struggle at the university
you can imagine how it felt to make the hardest decision of my life and leave the university.
If I look back at those 18 years, it is a steep ascending graph and I
wondered what can you do when you drop out from school and leave your childhood dream.
After that in the family business I had the chance to experience
what it is like when you are not an employee, but try to build your own business.
I learned why it is so important to pay taxes,
why it is even more important to have a good accountant,
and why it is probably the most important to have clients, especially clients that pay.
Slowly my creativity came back and I continued design.
I drew mobile phone designs and naively uploaded them on the web.
The third phone I uploaded, a whole future concept of a phone was published under the name Asus Aura.
I liked the brand Asus that time and I tried to 'help them' this way.
In a few weeks this phone reached 80 million hits on google.
How could this happen?
I published my phone just after Apple's first Iphone was introduced,
and before the biggest technology fair in the US.
And the world for some reason believed that the phone is Asus's reply to Apple's challenge.
It was not the case.
Anyway, I got hundreds of letters, my website was shut down due to the enormous traffic
they must have thought it is a really pervert content that lures so many visitors.
I got to know the owner of the biggest shipping company in India,
who ordered a prototype of the phone no matter how much it cost.
He did not get it. I tried hard, but it did not happen.
Anyway, it remained my hobby. Despite all my efforts to grow bigger it remained a hobby.
A few weeks later I got a letter from the marketing director of Asus
ordering me to take their logo off the phone and remove the content from my website.
It was a bit disappointing.
I wondered why.
It turned out they got so many inquiries about when and where this phone would be available,
that they were fed up and removing all the content seemed to be the easiest solution.
I was disappointed despite the fact that a few weeks later I got another letter from them
in which they offered collaboration because they liked the phone.
As I said, this had only been a hobby for me.
I worked as a graphic artist.
Of course I eat bread, drink water
and pay phone bills (if I can),
so I accepted all the orders that came in at 8 pm with the deadline 8am next morning,
and the ones that came in at 8 am with the deadline 8 pm the same day.
What is the result of that? Three things for sure.
After a while I was wearing pajamas all the time,
I was eating three meals a day, by meal meaning cold coffee,
and on Fridays and Saturdays I was not invited anywhere,
because my friends got used to me working all the time.
As a child I felt I would eat the world when I become an adult,
and I got the feeling the world was eating me up slowly instead.
A friend of mine found me in the best moment with his idea to build a coworking office with me.
What is a coworking office?
It is a social environment for pajama people like me
who are looking for creativity and inspiration on a low budget.
These people move into this social environment, and work on their projects,
but at lunchtime we really wanted to encourage talks among them to create mutual dreams.
Although we did not do anything about it
apart from putting a bunch of really curious people in a space,
they started to talk. They started to think in mutual dreams.
In January 2010 there was the general strike of the public transport employees in Budapest.
We realised our first dream.
Just like everyone else we got to work much slower than usual.
For me. it was an hour and a half long trip instead of 15 minutes.
We decided to come up with a solution for this problem,
as we definitely identified it as a problem.
We created a very simple game in 12 hours.
Each passenger takes an A4 size sheet and writes down their destination.
The same applies to car owners.
In the bus stops there are no buses, therefore these will be the connection points.
There they watch for each other's signs and if the destination is the same,
car owners can take passengers and continue the journey on together.
We were really excited to see if there would be at least another 50 people
among our friends playing the game with us.
Well. I can say we created the biggest offline parlour game in Hungary.
There were not only 50 people but tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people.
In a way it was a working alternative of the non-functional public transport.
That was the moment when we realised there was a problem that we turned into an opportunity and then gave a solution to.
I think this is the right moment for me to return to the beginning of my presentation.
Hello. My name is Bence. I help young teams realise their dreams.
I meant dreams like that.
Startup-type dreams like that. What is a startup?
A startup is a problem we all face every day with a chance of converting it into an opportunity.
If we do not see a problem as a problem any more,
and we can turn it into an opportunity, we have just taken step one to have our own startup company.
If we can pass on this faith, our belief in our solution to the problem, to someone else, too,
we have made the crucial step two.
I work at Kitchen Budapest where we found a problem for ourselves, too.
The problem is: we are aware that many of you have wonderful ideas,
yet there is very poor guidance for you
to reach the project stage from the idea, the startup from the project stage, and finally success from the startup.
We would like to help you in that.
In a programme I was given the opportunity to travel to the US
in order to research the secret of success.
Why is it that in the US startups like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and many others succeed?
What is their secret?
I spent one month researching. and came across fantastic ideas,
spoke to people with exceptional expertise, met great teams and saw hard work.
I must admit I found the secret and I will share it with you now.
There is no secret.
I came back home after a month and saw that there are good ideas,
expertise and hard work here, too.
I am sure, I believe that you can be as successful as startups in the US.
A few weeks ago we organised a startup competition, I was an organiser
until Saturday morning at least, when Peter Arvai,
CEO of one of Hungary's most successful startups, Prezi.com, gave an inspirational speech.
After the speech I grabbed the arm of a good friend and told him
we would be creating a startup right away.
The startup competition is an event where you need to come up with an idea,
create a mini-project from it and present it within one weekend, i.e. 48 hours.
It is a kind of learning process of how a startup is done.
In 12 hours we reached a certain point.
Let me briefly share the startup's concept:
We wanted to replace cardboard boxes used when moving house with plastic boxes.
We did hell of a lot of calculations, in theory it could work as a business,
but we had the feeling something was not right.
When the mentors came to help us, the last mentor had a comment:
'Guys,it seems to be a great business. but are you sure you want to spend your best years among boxes?'
We were standing there and agreed with him that startups are not just about making money.
Of course you can do that.
But, in a way it is about changing the world in a good way.
We rewised the basic concept and changed the number of rental plastic boxes from 15 to 14 + 1.
We were aware that every move comes with old items being thrown out: toys, clothes, books.
We did not want these items go to the waste bin, but to the other colour plastic box,
that when everything else has been moved, goes to charity.
I think the project was more tempting this way.
When we presented the project in three minutes, we came second in the competition.
What is more important: we could pass on our passion to four people,
who at the end of the evening came up to us and said they had faith in us
and would give us the 50.000 dollars (the same amount as the first prize), 'let's do it'.
Now I am standing here in front of you, you heard my story,
I told you about my mistakes and successes,
and I truly believe that in the past 15 minutes I managed to pass on my faith.
You are the ones who can change the world with your ideas, knowledge and hard work.
Dare to dream big and realise these dreams. Thank you.
Bence, about the impressive series of your projects I only have two questions.
Among all these projects in which were you involved actively the longest?
And which ones are still alive producing profit?
Well. the longest was the coworking office,
I was in the project for a year and a half as co-founder.
Speaking about profits, we have to define what we call profit.
If we talk about money, all the projects closed with a positive balance in a way,
but I believe it is more important that these projects were small but good examples
that there is a way to succeed not only as an employee but as an enterpreneur, too.
- Thank you. - Thank you. Goodbye.