It was a great way to start the summer for twelve Washington University students to travel to Hungary to experience the Hungarian entrepreneurial character firsthand through Olin Business School’s Venture Advising course.

Though our visit to the beautiful city of Budapest has involved touring and events presented by our gracious Hungarian hosts at Oriens Capital Management and its leader, Krisztian Orban, we quickly began work on three projects presented to us by Oriens.

Oriens is an independent, privately owned boutique investment management firm that focuses on firms located in Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia with activities in private equity and corporate finance advisory.

Our team, consisting of Olin’s Nelson Nolte (PMBA 34), Lena Wang (MBA ’15), Jaemin Ryu (MBA ’15) and Connor Jacobs (BS Systems Eng.), worked with startup !444! (http://444.hu), an edgy Hungarian language media site.  !444! asked us to investigate alternative strategies that !444! could implement to increase its revenue and profitability in the challenging world of online media.

We worked in Oriens’s offices and in Budapest cafes throughout the week and have often been busy late into the evening. We met with the !444!’s CEO and its founder to learn about !444!’s business and then met again to present an initial hypotheses and plan of action.

Additionally, we have received interesting and lively presentations from Krisztian Orban on Hungarian history, culture and entrepreneurial spirit.  Prof. Orban (he’s an adjunct at Olin), explained how Hungary has emerged from world wars and the fall of the Iron Curtain, how those periods destroyed an entire generation of wealth, and left Hungary without the equity to spur its own economic redevelopment.  Oriens has endeavored to raise the necessary international capital that Central and Eastern Europe need to guide it to a brighter economic future.

The real-world experience of solving entrepreneurial problems and our immersion into the Budapest culture has been an unequaled learning experience.

submitted by Nelson Nolte, PMBA 34