Interview with Peter Arvai, CEO Prezi

1.Could you tell me a little about your background and how you came to be the CEO at Prezi? What is the one thought that keeps you wanting to innovate at Prezi?

Since university I’ve been interested in how to combine storytelling with technology in way that will help people make better decisions. Before Prezi, I co-founded omvard.se, a company that aggregates data on treatment outcomes for hospital patients. I also developed the world’s first mobile newsreader so people could follow TED talks from their mobile devices.

I joined forces with my co-founders Adam Somlai-Fischer and Peter “HP” Halacsy in 2008 because we wanted to create a more memorable and engaging way for people to share their own stories. And 160 million Prezis later, I think we’re well on our way, but we believe that there is so much more that can be done before we reach our ultimate goal of empowering 2 billion people to share ideas in better ways.

2.Prezi is known to on-board all their employees from various locations in Hungary. Besides this, Prezi’s unusual “dream dinner tradition”, where you take employees out for dinner if they share their most personal dream is also much talked about. In this context, could you shed some light on how employee engagement initiatives translate to employee brand advocacy? How would you measure the ROI on this?

The dream dinners have had a huge impact on my leadership style for many reasons, but the most important takeaway I’ve realized is that all the material perks in the world could never live up to a genuine one-on-one conversation. You can't replace human interaction with processes or monetary compensation when it comes to motivating people, especially your employees.

At best, these dinners help Prezi people realize dreams deep inside them that they may have forgotten about and, if possible, help bring them to fruition. Talking about dreams also builds authentic relationships, which is the foundation for understanding each other and creating an engaging workplace.

In terms of value, being able to hear the personal story (behind a face) makes daily life so much more enjoyable for me, so I intend to keep the offer to hear my employees talk about their dreams for as long as I can.

3.From a technology perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges that your marketing team faces today?

This is a great question because the biggest challenge our marketing team faces (and I’m willing to bet all marketing teams also struggle with this), is actually the very problem Prezi was invented to solve: cutting through the noise so your voice is heard. That daily competition challenges, but also motivates, our marketing team to come up with better and more interesting ways to tell our story.

Today as a marketer, it’s not enough to be creative when it comes to messaging; you need deep understanding of the many different platforms and formats where ideas and communities gather. But being savvy about new technology is not enough. Because of the fragmented, status update oriented nature of the Internet medium, you need to have plan for how to help people connect the dots to create a story there where the art and science of today’s marketing comes to fruition.

4.It’s a well-known fact that you used a 20-minute presentation to convince TED to invest in Prezi. Similarly, how would you persuade SMBs to buy Prezi instead of opting for other presentation software available in the market?

First of all, when you think of TED, you automatically think of some of the best presenters in the world, so the fact that they were interested in investing in a technology to make presentations is an important validation.

These small and midsize businesses are looking to not only tell their story, but do it in a way that’s memorable and engaging. These difference can be measured: e.g. Salesforce says their audience satisfaction rates go up with 28% when they switch over to Prezi. We help these entrepreneurs and sales teams share their story with prospects in a meaningful way that static, preset slides simply cannot replicate.

5.Prezi as a presentation tool allows people to tell a story, zoom in and out, and collaborate. What’s next for Prezi, any new features or upcoming upgrades that you're excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?

Our key goal with all the work we do is to have your ideas come front and center and make the technology disappear in the background. This means Prezi has to work on any device, no matter where you are. Second, while Prezi was mostly adopted by individuals in the beginning, today we see more and more teams adopting Prezi. Prezi for Teams is the way companies are engaging with Prezi and we want to continue building out this experience.

6.Does Prezi incorporate user feedback in product upgrades? Is that how the multilingual versions of Prezi came about?

Absolutely, we keep a close ear to the ground on user feedback and do our best to listen and develop the product with the features our customer base would find most useful. We’ve seen a big uptick in sales and marketing professionals using Prezi, so we’re working hard to build features that will make Prezi even more impactful to these groups.

You’re right, localization of Prezi started with our user communities. Early on our users in Korea alerted us to the fact that Prezi did not work with Korean fonts. We had no idea how to solve this then but provided us with the first font sets to get us up and running. Today we have localized Prezi in 9 languages, including English, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Korean and Japanese. The Latin American market, in particular, has experienced explosive growth over the last few years. Even before we launched in Portuguese in 2013, we already had the 500 thousand users in Brazil. Two years later, in 2015, we now have over 2 million users in Brazil, four times the amount we had before launching Prezi in Portuguese.

Article written by Ankush Gupta, MarTech Advisor