This is the first part of the SlidesLive origin story, told by our founder and CEO, Vojta. It’s a bit scrappy, a bit chaotic—but very real. Before we were recording 100,000+ talks around the world, we were just a bunch of students trying to land an internship in Silicon Valley. Here’s how it all began.

It all started with a dream: Silicon Valley or bust

As a computer science student at Czech Technical University in Prague, I shared the same dream as pretty much everyone in my class: get a job at Google. Or any big tech company in Silicon Valley, really. Good salary, free food, nice weather… what's not to like?

One day, our school announced a competition. The prize? A three-month internship in Silicon Valley. YES! My team built an augmented reality tool for real estate visualization—and we won. YES again!

So off we went to California.

Real estate tech? Not for me. But something else was.

Silicon Valley was everything we expected—fast-paced, full of smart people, and definitely sweatshirt-friendly (unlike DC, but more on that later). But it didn’t take long for me to realize that real estate software wasn’t exactly my life’s passion.

What did catch my attention, surprisingly, was event videography. Capturing ideas, sharing knowledge—that lit something up in me.

The first version of SlidesLive: good idea, wrong model

Back home, things started to shift. We added Vojtech Drbohlav to the team—co-founder and all-around tech genius. Our first version of SlidesLive was a SaaS tool that let people sync presentation slides with video. The goal was to let event organizers upload their footage, we’d sync it with the slides, and voilà—easy, scalable content.

Only one problem: clients weren’t able to record good video in the first place. The footage was often unusable. Which made our software… pretty useless.

We spent two years pushing the SaaS dream. Spoiler: we didn’t get rich. Eventually, we gave up on being a platform and picked up the cameras ourselves.

That’s when things started working.

Getting behind the camera—and actually getting clients

As soon as we started handling the video production ourselves, people noticed the difference. We were reliable, high-quality, and didn't overcomplicate things. Suddenly, we were recording small events, then big conferences. One step at a time, we found our niche.

Then came the next challenge: making SlidesLive work in the U.S.

Washington, DC: A great city, just not for startups like ours

In 2015, I flew to DC to kick off our U.S. operations. I’d already registered the company in Nevada using John Vanhara’s IncParadise (big shoutout), packed my stuff, and landed in DC with big plans.

Only… nobody was waiting for me. 😅

I booked a hotel, went to meetups, attended conferences, and handed out business cards like candy. I was hustling. But after three months, I had exactly one client.

Looking back, DC wasn’t the right choice. It’s great for government and policy. Not so much for a bootstrapped event recording startup. My idea was to catch the wave of the 2016 election with campaign events—but that didn’t really pan out.

I did meet some great people, including the folks at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and collected a few contacts that helped down the line. But yeah, not exactly a booming start.

Oh—and the dress code? Let’s just say I’m more of a hoodie guy. DC expects suits. Silicon Valley doesn’t care if you wear sweatpants and a t-shirt while inventing the next billion-dollar idea. That vibe suited me a lot better.

New city, new mindset: Hello, New York

After DC, I knew we had to do things differently. We needed a real presence, real people, real operations. So I chose New York.

It meant committing—living there full time, opening an office, hiring locally. I was 25 and had never done anything like that. But I wasn’t scared.

Of course, we needed investors. I put together a pitch deck and started with Eduard Kučera, who had supported the DC trip. He liked the plan but told me my budget was way too low. He offered to fund half—if I could find someone for the other half.

After a long search, Václav Dejčmar came on board. That gave us the green light.

I moved to NYC, found an apartment and office space, and started interviewing candidates. But the paperwork for the investment was still being processed in Prague. The lawyers at White & Case found a signature issue that held up the funds. Rent was due.

So I called Eduard. He helped cover the first payments.

Eventually, I fixed the issue by asking the lawyers to move the signing to White & Case’s New York office. Done and done.

Finding the right people (wasn't easy)

Hiring in NYC was... an experience. Our first few salespeople didn’t work out. Some were unmotivated (aka lazy), others made big promises and delivered nothing. The job market felt overwhelming—so many candidates, but few who truly got what we were doing.

I also noticed a funny pattern: the best-dressed candidates often had the least to offer. Suits ≠ skills.

Eventually, we found Nick Dean. Not flashy, but smart, calm, and focused on clients. He brought in our first real deals. Things finally started moving. 🙂

To be continued…

That’s the first part of the SlidesLive story—how we went from a student dream in Prague to our first steps into the U.S. market.

The next chapter? How we scaled, built out our services, launched our robotic camera system, and became the go-to recording partner for some of the world’s biggest conferences.

Coming soon in Part 2.