Contributed by Luke Goetting, presentation specialist at Puffingston

At the end of June I had the exciting opportunity to represent Puffingston at the Prezi Experts conference hosted at Prezi’s international headquarters in Budapest, Hungary. It was an action-packed, productive week made especially rewarding because I had the opportunity to collaborate with both the Prezi staff based in Budapest and the 25 other Independent Prezi Experts who flew in from all around the world to share ideas on Prezi and how to make it an even better presentation platform.

The main part of the conference was based around two days of breakout sessions where we—the assembled Prezi experts—met with numerous department heads at Prezi and offered input and feedback on the platform and how to make it more successful going forward. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the Prezi staff we got to collaborate with:

• Co-founder Adam Somlai-Fischer
• CEO Peter Arvai
• Head of Product Jim Banister
• Leaders of departments relating to the Prezi editor, sales team, Geo-managers, training and certification programs, user experience, design team, support team and Prezi Expert program

Overall, it was an excellent chance to talk to the people responsible for the platform we work with on a daily basis and it was encouraging to see how Prezi’s employees embraced our ideas and feedback.

8 Insights from the Prezi Experts Conference

1) Prezi is a “real” company and growing fast

• While Prezi employees consider themselves a startup and embrace the startup culture, the company itself has nearly 200 employees in the Budapest office and 75 more in the San Francisco office. Considering how many alleged “PowerPoint killers” have emerged to much fanfare in the cloud era only to disappear shortly after, it’s important to note how successful Prezi has been in building a company and adding over 50 million users in the past six years.

2) Prezi is committed to improving the way people share ideas

• The “sharing ideas” mantra was referenced often during our interactions with employees and especially embraced by employees in leadership roles.

3) Prezi is a very international company

• In Budapest alone they have employees representing about 40 different countries, so it’s especially encouraging to know that ideas and input from all around the world are shaping the platform.

4) Prezi has visibility on user issues and complaints

• It’s hard to know whether complaints and feature requests ever get heard by a company once you hit the “submit” button, but I was especially encouraged learning how closely they monitor these types of requests and the consideration it receives in the product evolution.

5) Prezi is “growing up”

• Once a niche presentation tool with quirky capabilities, Prezi is working hard to make the tool functional and appealing for the everyday presenters—especially in professional environments.

6) Employees “get” Prezi

• Every employee has to create a “prezume” to be considered for a position and new hires often have years of experience using the platform for real-world presentations before starting to work for Prezi.

7) Prezi has big ideas for the future of the platform

• Prezi continues to explore and research methods to innovate the presentation experience in dynamic new ways.

8) The Prezi Experts are a talented group

• What can I say, we’re awesome 🙂 ! It was amazing to meet all the fellow experts who share our passion for dynamic, engaging presentations and have helped create some of the most iconic presentations given around the world since Prezi debuted in 2009.

To learn more about what we’ve been up to, check out the Puffingston blog!