I have been in business since 1992. I have never been an employee, apart from student jobs, and even those were more of a training ground than work. I studied control systems at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, and right after the revolution I found what turned out to be my element: building technology companies from zero.
Thirty years online: from assembled computers to the first Eastern European PPC network
In 1995 I co-founded NEXUS, a company assembling and selling computers. We hauled designer cases back from CeBIT in Hannover while everyone else bought ugly boxes from wholesalers. No plan, no market analysis, no startup ecosystem. Just a spreadsheet that always told the truth.
Then came telecoms (MBC, the first alternative operator in Slovakia), a call centre (AWE group), and in 2001 IT Job Planet, an international portal for exporting Slovak programmers. It died on September 11, 2001, along with the towers. The market stopped existing overnight. We had a two-million-koruna debt and no idea how to repay it.
That period taught me that fear is the worst emotion in business. It ties your hands and keeps you from moving forward. From the wreckage of IT Job Planet we launched Etarget in 2002, the first PPC advertising network in Central and Eastern Europe, about six months after Google launched AdWords in the West. We taught Slovaks what PPC was.
We expanded Etarget into seven countries, sold it to a strategic investor in 2007, and I formally exited the company in 2009.
Modrý koník: from a side project to the only company I run
In 2006 we had several community websites running. Modrý koník was just one of them. But we kept seeing that something different was happening here: women whose world had turned upside down after having a child were giving each other what they could not find elsewhere. Understanding and support from people in the same life situation.
After selling Etarget we gradually switched everything else off. We sold the wedding sites, the housing sites, ended the smaller projects. We wanted to do one thing properly. Modrý koník expanded into Czechia and today it is the largest community of women dealing with family, children, the household, relationships and their lives in each of those countries. Hundreds of thousands of women meet on it every month in both SK and CZ.
Why Modrý koník has held me for twenty years
Modrý koník is a social network built on helping. Not on time spent on the site, not on engagement metrics, not on ad inventory. It works because every month hundreds of thousands of women help each other with things you cannot google. Discussions and reviews that are real, because real women write them about real experiences.
At a time when social networks are drifting toward artificially generated content and algorithmic manipulation, this is a rare commodity. And as it turns out, a strategic one too.
Today I run Modrý koník with a team of fifteen. After twenty years I know that the quality of the product and the quality of the company are one and the same thing. I build the team so that I would want to work in it myself, because otherwise no one could carry the company. Without these fifteen people, none of what makes Modrý koník what it is would exist.
GEO, and why Modrý koník is in an unexpectedly right place for the AI era
The topic that holds me most right now is Generative Engine Optimization. It grew out of the shift in search from ten blue links to AI answers. When people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews "which car seat do you recommend," they do not click results. They take the answer.
The old rules of SEO are no longer enough. AI models do not look for what is technically best written. They look for what there is the greatest consensus about among people. Social validation. And that is exactly what Modrý koník has been built on for twenty years.
From this angle Modrý koník turns out to be a fairly unique place: we have the highest density of real user discussions and reviews in both SK and CZ for the female and parenting audience. For a brand that wants AI to recommend it, Modrý koník is a place not worth skipping. Because without social validation from an authoritative local source, to an AI a brand is just one of millions of strings.
GEO did not arrive out of nowhere for me. Running portals the size of Modrykonik.sk and Modrykonik.cz meant years of hands-on work with SEO, learned and tested directly on our own sites rather than on someone else's. I have been doing that since 2018. GEO is where that work leads next.
I speak as a GEO strategist, not a theorist. I do it in the daily operation of Modrý koník, I test hypotheses on real data, and I gradually carry it over to clients who want to exist in AI recommendations through us. On 19 November 2026 I will speak about GEO at Marketing RULEZZ in Bratislava, the largest marketing conference in Slovakia. What gives me the standing to speak on this topic is not a title. It is a platform with real data and twenty years of authority in the local context, which is turning out to be in an unexpectedly right place for the AI era.
Writing
I write a regular commentary on Generative Engine Optimization for Forbes Slovensko, and longer analytical pieces for the Modrý koník B2B site. Both in Slovak.
- Najlepší text o vašej značke ste nenapísali vy. Napísal ho zákazník, ktorého nepoznáte
- Miliardy ľudí sa už pýtajú AI, čo kúpiť. Ak vás neodporúča, pre zákazníka neexistujete
- Share of Model: Nová kľúčová metrika. Viditeľnosť vašej značky v AI.
- Prečo v ére AI potrebujete Modrého koníka viac než kedykoľvek predtým?
A constant outside business
I am a father of two and a long-time husband. My wife and children are the one constant that nothing has ever replaced, and never will, through all those business cycles, company sales, failures and restarts.
I am sporty by nature, and sport is also one of the biggest shared passions my wife and I have. It keeps us in shape, it keeps us together, and it keeps the whole carousel in balance.
Five things thirty years of business taught me
- That focus is everything.
- That persistence beats talent.
- That you have to build a company you would want to work in yourself, because otherwise you cannot carry it.
- That the fear of mistakes is more expensive than the mistakes themselves.
- That when a technology wave breaks, you usually only understand in hindsight when the right moment to jump in was.
That wave is breaking again right now. And that is what still keeps the work interesting.
Let's talk
If you are working on how your brand shows up in AI answers, or you organise an event where this topic belongs, I am glad to talk.