About
Colabs Startup Center is a membership based central hub for people who are sharing their passion for building startup companies.
The 600 m2 office and event space, the seed investment program and the special introduction system within its extended professional network makes Colabs the perfect physical and virtual environment to grow a successful startup venture.
Our story
Colabs coworking office (the predecessor of Colabs Startup Center) started its operation in a 130 m2 downtown flat in Budapest back in 2009 June. The place quickly became a workspace and inspiring hub for a small group of creative young professionals and entrepreneurs. In the evenings the office frequently turned into a clubhouse-like environment and hosted professional meetups and ad-hoc parties attracting hundreds of like-minded people form month to month.
In 2010, next to the coworking office several remarkable initiations were started getting off the ground involving at least two of the future Colabs Startup Center founding team: Gabor Borbely, Peter Nagy and Zsolt Bako.
The first Elevator Pitch Competiton was organized in April 2010, the StartupFlyer website and monthly meetups started in September 2010 and the first Startup Weekend Budapest was held in March 2011.
In January 2011, Gábor, Peter and Zsolt decided to join their forces and all their previous initiations to create the vision and plans of the new Colabs Startup Center.
In September 2011 Colabs Startup Center launched with 31 amazing members who are sharing their passion for building startup companies.
Operating management
Borbély Gábor
Co-founder and board member at Colabs Startup Center
He started his professional career at ikaland.hu when he quit from Budapest University of Technology and Economics where he studied computer science. Between 2005-2007 Gabor worked on Fesztival.net, the Hungarian festival database, as co-founder. Later he gained experience by developing complex web applications for Local Councils.
He is an active community organizer. He took a major part in creating 4K!, a civilian initiation that successfully reached out and mobilized thousands of young people from the Hungarian Gen Y. Also he was the fountainhead of creating one the most successful social media projects in Hungary called BKV-Pótló which became a mass movement during the public transportation strike taking place in January 2010.
Working as a freelance developer led him to co-found Colabs Coworking Office to create a special space and community which hosts the new generation of fellow freelancers and young entrepreneurs. The creation of StartupFlyer in 2010 September was the next step to knit the local entrepreneurial ecosystem tighter with a special tool that ignites interaction between professionals who didn't know each other before.
Bakó Zsolt
Co-founder and board member at Colabs Startup Center
He started learning how to build a startup company when he quit university in 2008 at the age of 22 and started his first venture that never launched. At the beginning of 2009 after returning from a short US trip he decided to found Budapest Startup Community and started to organize weekly gatherings like the Open Coffee Clubs. These meetups quickly evolved into casual coworking sessions called Jellies and in June 2009 he was one of the co-founders of the Colabs Coworking Office.
He is co-founder and organizer of the Elevator Pitch Competition (EPC) Hungary's professional startup investment forum that attracted more than USD 5 million venture capital and angel investment during 2010. The creation of StartupFlyer in 2010 September was the next step to knit the local entrepreneurial ecosystem tighter with a special tool that ignites interaction between professionals who didn't know each other before. Since 2008 he has still been learning how to build a startup company and passionately seeking new ways to improve the creative environment that makes ideas happen.
Nagy Péter
Co-founder and board member at Colabs Startup Center
Peter has been working with tech-startups and university spinoffs since 2004. He was involved in several early stage ventures as manager/consultant (BioBlocks, ComInnex/ThalesNano, Intellio). His first venture was the videogame controller solution 'TactoManic' spinoff from the 3D tactile sensor developer Tactologic Ltd. in April 2009 which crashed 18 months later.To popularize tech-entrepreneurship and to build a solid network of Hungarian university spinoff firms, he founded the Hungarian Spinoff & Startup Association in 2006 and he served as a CEO until 2009. He is co-founder and organizer of the Elevator Pitch Competition (EPC) Hungary's professional startup investment forum that attracted more than USD 5 million venture capital and angel investment during 2010.
Between 2004-2010 he worked for commercial and investment banks (UniCredit, CIB) and was involved in VC transactions and M&A advisory (Primus Capital, KPMG, MB Partners). He served as a member of the Education Comittee at the Hungarian Venture Capital Association (2007-2008) where he was a co-author of the Venture Capital Guideline.
Since 2011 he has been volunteering as a project leader at the Foundation of 'Resounding Talents'.
He holds an MA degree from the management faculty of the Budapest University of Economics and a BA degree in technical management from the College of Technical Automatization. He wrote his thesis based on his earlier publication in Managment Science magazine on 'Valuation Aspects of Early-stage Ventures'.
Advisory Board
Fadi Bishara
From 2009 he is a member of the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB). VLAB is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures by connecting ideas, technology and people.
Fadi is the founder of blackbox.vc, a global seed accelerator based in Silicon Valley focusing on supporting the growth of world class change makers and technology innovators. blackbox has taken the lead to "crack the innovation code" of Silicon Valley with the Startup Genome Project, a research project in collaboration with faculty from Stanford University and UC Berkeley to accelerate the pace of innovation around the world by exploring entrepreneurship as a management science. Prior to blackbox Fadi launched the Cofounder Network to help match hand-selected founders referred by 30+ seed accelerators and venture partners locally and across the globe. As the founder & CEO of techVenture, he's had 15+ years experience advising, mentoring and building teams for small venture backed technology startups, in the past 5 years alone, he's worked with 41 startups of which 14 have been acquired (bebo, Lala, Tapulous, CubeTree, MerchantCircle etc. …) and 12 others such as Zynga, Blurb, SAY Media, Causes, Splunk etc. … that are already profitable and growing.
Martin Hajdu György
Független pénzügyi- és szervezetfejlesztési tanácsadó, coach. Mindemellett 12 év kereskedelmi és befektetési
banki tapasztalattal rendelkezik, amelynek során 1997-2002 között a Concorde Értékpapír Rt. vállalati pénzügyekért
felelős igazgatóhelyettese, majd a Concorde Aquila Vállalati Pénzügyek Kft. ügyvezető partnere volt. Tranzakciói
között szerepelt többek között: AdNetwork/MFactory(2006); FHB (2003); Intercom (2000); Láng (1999);
Avonmore (1997); MTM-SBS konzorcium (TV2 1997). Tanácsadói pályáját a BNP-KH-Dresdner Bank Rt. befektetési
munkatársaként kezdte, majd a MeesPierson EurAmerica Ltd. tanácsadójaként folytatta.
György a Tőzsdei Szakvizsga Bizottság elnöke (1992-), a Közép-Európai Brókerképző Alapítvány kuratóriumi
elnöke (1997-), valamint a Centrál Fund Kockázati Tőkealap-kezelő Zrt. befektetési bizottságának tagja (2008-
). Korábban a Kürt Zrt. igazgatóságának, valamint a Magyar Kockázati és Magántőke Egyesület elnökségének is
tagja volt.
A Budapesti Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetemen diplomázott (1987), ahol később doktori fokozatot is szerzett,
valamint Oxfordban is folytatott tanulmányokat Soros-ösztöndíjjal.