Péter Sebestyén

Péter Sebestyén

fellow of Bridge Budapest, BOOKR Kids, Budapest, 2016

The Beginning

I remember seeing the Bridge Budapest Fellowship program at the end of July for the first time. It immediately caught my attention, and it was no question that I would send my application right away. After successfully completing a few tasks and one Skype and one personal interview, I was chosen to participate in the program. This meant that I had the chance to work for six months at one of the most innovative and most promising Hungarian companies. It was a great pleasure for me because I have become more and more attracted to startups at the end of my university studies. But where did I land exactly? At a place where the main activity is centred around an extremely cute idea: to digitalize storybooks for kids. During the first days I didn’t understand the processes completely but the picture cleared out quite quickly. We wrap up the printed books into an app which is narrative and interactive at the same time and it is loaded with games and animations. This of course needs a great team of developers, graphic designers, illustrators, marketing managers and others.

Here is a short video about what BOOKR Kids offers.

The first thing I learnt was that a startup’s life is never calm. This is understandable because time is one of our biggest enemies and we must compete with it. The completion of some projects is essential. Besides these there are of course projects that focus on business development and projects that strengthen existing relations with partners. You really cannot imagine how diversified the operation of a small enterprise like this is. For sure I have already felt in the first days that I will like this and I am at the right place. I was already invited to participate in a few meetings before my first official working day. This way I could look into the current projects, I could meet team members; in short I could catch up with the tasks. I can clearly recall our first “round-table” talk where we negotiated the next steps of application development, compiled a list of necessary elements of the stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair and held a brainstorming session about the video on the B2B site at the same time. Wow!—I thought to myself so few people work on so many things simultaneously. But what is my role in this dynamic environment?

Please read my next post!