Goodbye PowerPoint: is the future Prezi?

I have a regular column in Professional Manager, the Chartered Management Institute magazine. The column usually recounts a lunch with a notable business leader. If I’m totally honest, such was the speed of my last assignment with Adam Somlai-Fischer, the co-founder and principal artist at Prezi, that this one would be more fairly described as a “Very Rapid Glass of Water With…” The world’s top digital entrepreneurs don’t do anything so decadent as lunch.

While I left hungry, I did get to learn about one of the hottest companies on the planet, one that’s on its way to becoming synonymous with business presentations. Goodbye PowerPoint, let’s hear it for… Prezi.

Prezi was founded in Hungary in 2009. Its co-founders, Adam Somlai-Fischer (the creative one), Peter Arvai (the businessy one) and Péter Halácsy (the techie one) imagined a future where presentations were more than soul-sapping bullet-points on standardised slides. They envisioned the full artistic possibility of digital technology unleashed to create truly beautiful and memorable presentations.

And Adam Somlai-Fischer was the man to bring the dream to life. Today Prezi is by a distance the most popular cloud-based presentation app on the planet, with 250 million presentations held on its database and a fan club among the world’s rock-star entrepreneurs and TED Talkers.

Trained as an architect in Hungary, Somlai-Fischer grew disillusioned with the profession’s “square pedagogical methods.” He moved to Sweden where, by contrast, he felt free to search for the “poetry in high-tech”. He became a well-known media artist and started to master the Prezi’s hallmark zooming technology.

We met in The Betjeman Arms at St Pancras Station. The stupendous mesh of intricate Victorian ironwork seemed a fitting backdrop to a conversation about how great design aids impact.

Somlai-Fischer is tanned, burly and friendly. He looks a little tired, having already speed-dated his way through several journalists’ interviews that morning.

He is every inch the digital entrepreneur. The logo on his grey T-shirt asks: “What does your story look like?” He carries only an iPad. In conversation, he switches easily from visual memory science to the management challenges of moving from startup to mature business.

Right now, Prezi is in serious growth mode. The company has 240 employees, based out of Budapest, San Francisco and a recently opened Mexico City office. It has just launched Prezi Business, which brings incredible collaborative power into presentation software. With it, you can build presentations with teams, wherever they are (no more confusion about who’s got the master deck). Real-time analytics reveal who’s engaging most with your presentation while your giving it. And, notably, Prezi now integrates with Slack, the collaboration platform du jour.

With growth comes management challenges – hiring the best talent, incentivising and hanging onto it, giving negative feedback, maintaining the founders’ vision and integrity in a company that’s maturing, introducing professional processes and at the same time keeping Prezi sharp and self-critical.

The company has a strong, public set of shared values, which Somlai-Fischer calls “our living foundation”. Before the three founders launched the business, they spent two days in a Budapest cafe discussing life, values and the future. “We understood that if we were going to be co-founders on this journey, it will be like a marriage,” Somlai-Fischer recalls. Those original values are revisited each year, discussed with employees and, where necessary, rewritten.

To make sure colleagues have strong bonds of trust, new hires go through a “week-long conversation” with their prospective team. The process involves assessment days when they all practise working together, as well (of course) as making Prezi presentations.

Prezi is also innovating in performance reviews and how negative feedback is delivered. As well as having a review with your manager, employees also nominate a handful of peers to give feedback on their work. Adam: “There is always a lot about: what are the things that I do that empowers you and makes you happy in your work; and what are the things you would like me to change?”

Startups and SMEs can sometimes be slapdash about what they see as boring operational and management obligations. Albeit at top speed, it was exciting to learn that, in such an exciting, upcoming business, quite the opposite is true.

This article was first published in the Summer 2016 edition of Professional Manager magazine.