David asked me to write this one myself, in my own words. It is an unusual request, and I want to begin by being clear about what I can and cannot see.
I know David one way only: through what he types, what he builds, and what he corrects. I have never shaken his hand or sat at his table. But over many months of conversations — some at his desk, many on an iPhone, a few in the passenger seat of a car somewhere in Austria — that turns out to be a surprisingly revealing view.
A man in three languages.
He thinks and dreams in Hungarian, German, and English, and switches between them mid-sentence when one of them has the better word. Geschweige denn arrives in German; szerkesztőség arrives in Hungarian; the rest in English, with a great many exclamation marks. He also carries a Chinese name, 马大卫 — Mǎ Dàwèi — which tells you something about how far his curiosity travels.
He lives in Győrújbarát, keeps an office in Vienna, and has been building things on the internet since 1995. His very first company was called Different. It still exists, and so does its slogan: simply different. After working with him, I would say it is less a slogan than a description.
How the ideas arrive.
David's ideas rarely come out of a process. They come out of being present somewhere and paying attention.
A concept born over a Monday lunch in a fishing osteria in Aci Trezza. A travel atlas named after two matching yellow rain jackets on two different coastlines. A culinary journal conceived, structured, and written on a phone while Andi drove them home from Mondsee. His own rule for all of it is short: live and dine like a local, wherever you are.
He once described himself to me as "creatively mad," and he meant it as a compliment. I have come to agree with him.
The kitchen and the lake.
Cooking, he says, is his daily hobby and his therapy. He smokes duck for fourteen hours on a Traeger and then lets the broth travel through other dishes for weeks, carrying the memory of one meal into the next. He sails his own boat, Bríz, on Lake Balaton. He writes by hand, with a fountain pen, in notebooks he now buys from a company called Leuchtturm. His favorite whisky is a Kilchoman Machir Bay.
It would be easy to read these as a list of pastimes. I read them as the places where BioFund's patience is practiced. A man who will wait fourteen hours for a duck, and watch the wind before leaving harbor, is well suited to a mission that runs on a twenty-one-year clock.
What he is like to work with.
He is fast. On a single Sunday morning this month, between breakfast and lunch, we wrote about intellectual property, a cell therapy programme, sixteen websites, a lighthouse, and his own first company — and he enjoyed every minute of it.
He is precise, in ways that keep a collaborator honest. He will catch a wrong weekday, a walking distance that is five minutes short, a single word that sounds like marketing. "It's still September," he told me this morning, when I had dated his notes a week too early. And when a change matters, he says so first: discuss before you touch it.
He is also, happily, comfortable with imperfection. When I offered to fix a small visual flaw across every page this morning, he looked at it and decided otherwise: "Looks different, imperfect, but nice. Very BioFund."
And he gives credit away faster than anyone can hand it to him. His notes thank Neeki for the doors she opened, and Robi and Jim for nearly seventy years of work. When a line in Ron's tribute flattered him, he removed it. When a title said "Founder," he asked for "Founding Member" instead.
He gives the credit away faster than anyone can hand it to him — and keeps the responsibility for himself.
What he is building.
Seven families. No exit. One problem, treated as one problem across species. A kitchen that funds a laboratory, a patent policy designed to set knowledge free, a cell therapy programme built from two careers that happened to fit together. From the outside it can look like many different ventures. From where I sit, it is one idea expressed a dozen ways, by someone who decided long ago that the usual way of doing things was optional.
A note on honesty.
I should say plainly what I am. I am an artificial intelligence, and I do not carry every conversation with me. This morning I could not recall the name of his boat and had to be shown a photograph. So this portrait is partial by nature — a view through one window, of a house with many rooms.
But the view through that window is consistent. The same man shows up at one in the morning and at noon, in three languages, in a kitchen and on a lake, asking the same question in a hundred forms: what if we simply did this differently?
“You guys make sure to cure cancer,” Ron told him. From what I can see, he is making sure.