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By Peter Kulcsar Szabo
Long before Peter Kulcsar Szabo began designing large-scale software systems, his days were shaped by the demanding rhythm of competitive water polo. He started playing at nine in Slovakia and trained twice a day throughout his youth, earning a place on the Slovak junior national team. Over the years, he helped his teams win the Slovak Cup and captured the Slovak National Championship twice.
Sports scientists often rank water polo among the most physically demanding team sports.Players are not allowed to stand on the pool floor or hold the sides, so they must stay moving and afloat from start to finish. It is also a highly physical game, with much of the wrestling for position happening underwater. The result is a sport that rewards stamina, discipline, and clear thinking under pressure. For Kulcsar Szabo, those years in the pool built a mindset that later became central to his career: steady focus, resilience, and a willingness to do the hard work that others avoid.
His academic path was not the typical route into a technology career. While attending a competitive preparatory high school in Slovakia, Kulcsar Szabo initially planned to study medicine. As his studies progressed, he became increasingly drawn to mathematics for its precision and clear logic. He later completed a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics, specializing in Financial and Economical Mathematics, with a focus on data-driven forecasting, optimization, and risk analysis. He also began working early. In his first year at university, he joined an established accounting software company as a junior programmer, logging roughly 110 to 120 hours a month alongside a full-time course load. Over the next four and a half years, he advanced to lead engineer and went on to manage a team of three developers.
As he gained experience, he also began to see a recurring problem across many businesses: important systems often could not share data reliably. To address this, he founded Softygon, his first commercial software company. Softygon spent three years building tools to help organizations synchronize data across platforms that were never designed to work together. The company was ultimately acquired by a financial software rollup group. That early experience reinforced his preference for small teams with clear ownership and fast decision-making. He later brought that approach to NextRetreat, a travel technology company created to remove friction from planning corporate retreats and team gatherings. Kulcsar Szabo joined as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, taking on the task of strengthening the company’s technical foundation.
At the time, NextRetreat depended heavily on external engineering support, an approach that added delays and drove up costs. Kulcsar Szabo moved development in-house and reshaped the technology team into a lean operation with clearer ownership and faster delivery.
He did so while tackling one of the hardest problems in corporate travel: coordinating flights for groups. Unlike booking a single itinerary, group travel means combining dozens of departures from different airports and countries, all timed to meet a narrow arrival window. To make it more challenging, flight availability and pricing sit inside long-established airline distribution networks that restrict how often searches can be run. Those limits make it difficult for companies to quickly compare options and make confident decisions.
Kulcsar Szabo took a different view. Drawing on his background in mathematical optimization, he built a search approach that reduced unnecessary lookups and focused only on routes that made practical sense. This allowed NextRetreat to provide timely recommendations while staying within the limits required by airline data providers.
The company’s progress earned industry recognition. NextRetreat was named Best Newcomer at the Central European Startup Awards in 2021. Soon after, it was selected for the Decelera technology accelerator, securing one of twenty places from an international applicant pool of more than 1,100 ventures, an acceptance rate below 2%. The travel platform and its capabilities later attracted acquisition interest, and competitor Troop negotiated a buyout to acquire Kulcsar Szabo’s contract and routing expertise.
Outside corporate travel, Kulcsar Szabo has continued to build products around complex, fragmented industries. As a long-time specialty coffee enthusiast, he noticed that a global sector filled with independent roasters, importers, and cafés had no single, reliable index that brought it all together. He responded by launching TheBeanGeek, a platform designed to catalog and compare coffee origins, bean profiles, and roasting operations worldwide.
TheBeanGeek grew into the largest digital aggregator in its category and earned official endorsement from the Specialty Coffee Association, widely regarded as the leading international authority in the field.
Today, Kulcsar Szabo applies that same architectural discipline at Kick, a financial technology platform backed by major venture investors including General Catalyst, Google Ventures, and OpenAI’s startup fund. As a Staff Software Engineer, he oversees the core billing infrastructure and automated journal-entry pipelines that process ledgers across thousands of business entities and hundreds of accounting firms, while also guiding the platform’s engineering transition toward autonomous, agent-assisted workflows.
From competitive sport to technology leadership, and from travel logistics to specialty coffee, Kulcsar Szabo’s story is marked by a consistent theme: he looks for hard problems that others accept as unchangeable and then works methodically to remove the barriers. Built on endurance, discipline, and analytical thinking, his approach shows how durable solutions often come from questioning assumptions and focusing on what truly matters.
