Perhaps the door buzzer had failed, or maybe Adam Somlai-Fischer greets all visitors off the street. Either way, there is a lot of old-world charm about this Budapest entrepreneur that one doesn’t expect from a 32-year-old co founder of a start-up that has garnered 4.5 million users in two-and-a-half years – two million in the past three months.

“Our people like this place – it’s easy to cycle to,” he says, wriggling past bikes lining the stairs. Inside a large, open plan office, programmers and researchers quietly go about their business in a relaxed atmosphere. The discussion room is filled with custom-made beanbag furniture.

Somlai-Fischer, who studied architecture in Sweden, is the man behind Prezi, a web-based presentation system that replaces slides with a single screen onto which information whizzes around and zooms in and out. “Prezi, visually, is very powerful, very engaging. It’s just one large map or space of your ideas, and you can focus in on whatever you want to,” he says.

Like its user base, the company is growing fast. From three people in April 2009, it now has 36 in Budapest and 10 in San Francisco. “What I loved about designing spaces is that you could create an environment for people to socialise, to be creative and enjoy themselves. But if I wanted to do that, I’d have had to wait 50 years,” says Somlai-Fischer. Computers offered more instant satisfaction. “I didn’t need to wait for the licences and many years of work and all the financing. I could create interactive spaces and art. So I became an artist,” he recalls.

A series of successful exhibitions led to invitations to give talks – and to the creation of ‘zuiprezi’ (from ‘zoom presentation’) – a form of prototype Prezi. “I could never squeeze all these pictures and ideas into the slides. I needed a good storyline, I needed somehow to flow these things together. So, I hacked together a very simple computer programme that allowed me to zoom in and out of a large map of pictures on one frame,” he says.

Audiences loved the presentations, and friends began to ask if they could use the programme. One of these was Peter Halacsy, a computer scientist, around 2006. But though he loved the results, Halacsy wanted to improve the software, which he found tedious and cumbersome.

At this point nobody was thinking of monetising the software – it was Chris Mattheisen, the chief executive of Magyar Telekom, who first saw such potential. Lacking business backgrounds, Halacsy and Somlai-Fischer trawled the web for ideas of how to found and manage a start-up. “We realised that we couldn’t make it work alone. We found Peter Arvai, a Swedish-Hungarian with business skills. He loved the software, and we made him our third partner.”

One of Arvai’s first suggestions was to simplify the name to Prezi – local IT slang for ‘presentation’ – as the three got behind locked doors for six months to prepare for the official launch. “Peter helped us tremendously to get away from the tech-savvy context we had been in,” Somlai-Fischer admits.

Amazingly, such was the commercial interest in the prototype Prezi software (which all spread by word of mouth), the three were able to finance the nascent company during the preparatory period.

The trio opted to use the ‘freemium’ model – users access the software gratis, so long as their results are open for all to see. Only those who want to keep presentations confidential pay – though many migrate to paying accounts. “It’s an inherently viral product. Many business people’s kids introduced them to Prezi. And it’s not that expensive either, about $150 a year,” says Somlai-Fischer.

While take-up immediately after the public launch was “exponential”, the team soon decided on the need for a US office. Growth across neighbouring European countries would have been easier, but the size and speed of response to new tools in America meant it was a ‘must-do’ market.

It was also a protective move: “We thought that if, say, Prezi starts to get popular in Germany, and some kids from Silicon Valley see it and make a copycat, they could grow much faster from the US. Since having the office in San Francisco, we’ve found most US customers really prefer to deal with a US company,” he says.

The product already has prominent admirers, including Michael Fauscette, an executive at software analyst IDC. “Prezi is revolutionary – there’s nothing quite like it on the market,” he says. “Almost every time I use it, I get converts. For me, it’s a much more effective presentation and collaboration tool than PowerPoint.

“That's not to say it's ‘better’. They're quite different and so hard to compare. Nevertheless, PowerPoint is ubiquitous for a lot of reasons. It is used by a lot of business people, is very familiar to the ‘masses’ and is even taught in most grade schools, so replacing it is unlikely. Still, I think Prezi will continue to gain share and do well in the market.”

“As a competitor to PowerPoint and Keynote, their thinking is fresh,” adds Philipp Moehring at Seedcamp, a London based seed fund for internet tech firms. “Prezi takes the possibilities to the digital age and I am sure much more is possible for them. It’s a great technology with very impressive user growth and tons of potential for revenue.”

Rob Campbell, one of PowerPoint’s founders, is “thrilled” to see a product challenging it. “I’m constantly amazed that PowerPoint, first developed in 1983, has managed to remain at the top of the presentation market for so long, but now it faces real competition,” he says. “Prezi has a marvellous approach to the visualisation of information – the freshest I’ve seen since the 1980s – and certainly has the potential to gain shares over PowerPoint.

“Having said that, software value does not necessarily translate into user value. Prezi is a really interesting tool, and I applaud it, but the company still has a lot of work to do. With PowerPoint, we had to show people why they needed it for their presentations. Prezi has to show people – individuals and large corporations – that it is a comprehensive presentation tool.”

Somlai-Fischer is coy about the number of his paying clients – although he insists the company has always been cashflow positive, with user communities in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Korea. In addition, many testify that designing storylines with Prezi in itself stimulates new approaches to the subject material.

So, why the pressing need to expand the numbers of researchers and designers? “For a lot of people it is still a challenge to start using it. Kids can often get it right straight away, but for people who’ve used slides, it’s a big challenge; you have to change your mindset,” he says.

Hence Prezi continually tests volunteer guinea pigs to evaluate new materials and guidelines. And, despite a good pool of local talent, Somlai-Fischer scours the world for the right staff, even if, as with the latest recruit – a Chilean designer – it means taking on heaps of office visits for the necessary papers. All recruits are given a trial period to ensure they fit in with the relaxed, yet productive, company culture.

“If you recruit motivated people who share the vision, they produce 10 times more. And then you have a lot of freedom during the day, to play table tennis, or musical instruments – have you seen them in the next room? A lot of us play.”

Somlai-Fischer insists he has no immediate plans to sell the company and his immediate quest is to find a top class chief technology officer, capable of managing the technical staff without upsetting the company culture.

“First of all I want everyone using a computer to share an idea using Prezi. If there is a synergy with another company, we could consider it; but half the acquisitions in internet technology fail. The cultures clash. There are a lot of beautiful stories, then they get bought up and disappear. I don’t want that.” Additional reporting by William Turvill

HUNGARY FOR KNOWLEDGE

With its strong mathematical heritage, Hungary has long been a centre for innovative IT. In the early 1980s, Gábor Bojár, a physicist working at a state institute, pitched for the then most challenging design project in the country – the cooling system for its first nuclear reactor. He wrote a programme to view the system in 3D on a desktop calculator with a 64-kilobyte memory. “Because of the restrictions on computer imports to Hungary at the time, we were forced to use this simple machine,” he says.

Bojár then developed this first crude programme for architectural applications. A quarter of a century later, he sold his company Graphisoft, along with its acclaimed ArchiCAD software, to a German rival in a €100m deal.

Then there is Kurt Computers, founded by two brothers, which salvaged data from thousands of hard drives discovered in the wreckage of the World Trade Center after 9/11. It remains a niche name in both data recovery and internet security.

Peter Záboji, who teaches entrepreneurship at Budapest's CEU Business School, says: “I can tell you of dozens, perhaps scores, of very interesting IT entrepreneurs here, both proven or poised for success.”

He cites Marton Szoke as one example. Szoke, after making money as a student (selling temporary barriers to airports), founded IndexTools, a internet analytics company that produces software for analysing hits on websites. “Marton sold the company to Yahoo! in 2008 for an undisclosed bundle – my estimate is more than €100m,” says Záboji.

There's also 3G Multimedia, an internet music company that bagged $1.7m in venture capital funding this year, and CE OnDemand, the first cloud services provider in the region, currently operating throughout 11 countries with more than a million users.

“Budapest is full of brilliant IT guys. Building an ecosystem around them, we can kiss them into life,” says Záboji.