I am a curious generalist. What looks at first like four separate worlds (business, public policy, education and culture) I have held together for two decades. One question connects them: behind the data and ahead of innovation, I look for the person.
Business
In 2006 I co-founded an agency called Pizza SEO, one of Slovakia’s first SEO agencies. Today it is Basta digital, a performance marketing agency with around 60 clients across Central Europe. As a founding partner I set company strategy and take on senior consulting work on select projects, from banks and insurers to ambitious startups.
In 2021 I co-founded ZaVínom.sk with Marek Farkaš, now the largest ticketing partner for wine events in Slovakia, where I handle marketing. I also sit on the five-person board of the CEE Digital Alliance (an alliance of 16 independent Google Premier Partner agencies), where I lead the marketing pillar.
Public policy
Public policy came before business. I co-founded and led the SGI Institute, one of Slovakia’s most influential think tanks in public sector governance (Executive Director 2002–2006). In parallel, from 2004 to 2011, I lectured at the Institute of Public Policy at Comenius University. Before that I was a Reuters correspondent (1998–2000).
Today I work as a monitoring and evaluation consultant for the World Bank, OECD, the European Commission and Open Society Foundations across Central and Eastern Europe. I worked on some of the region’s first counterfactual impact evaluations, with teams from J-PAL, the World Bank and CEU. Since 2020 I also work part-time for the City of Bratislava: I helped raise over €1.5 million, led the launch of the 10,000 Trees Initiative, and from 2026 I am introducing a foreign direct investment support agenda.
Education and culture
In education I build on my own experience: I earned the International Baccalaureate at UWC-USA (1993–1995), a BA at Brandeis University (1998, Wien Scholarship) and an MSc at the University of Edinburgh (2001, Chevening Scholarship). Today I help select Slovak students for UWC and raise funds so they can attend, and at Superar I lead a thorough M&E framework for a music-education programme for children.
And finally, books: in the From book to book club we meet, read and discuss, and we are currently preparing the Slovak-language publication of Sándor Márai’s Košická obchôdzka.