mesh retro
date
Jun 6, 2025
slug
mesh-retro
status
Published
tags
story
summary
Retrospective of our journey so far
type
Post
On 23 October 2023, I was crammed into the ground-floor cafeteria of BME’s Kármán Dorm with Gergő Czehlár, Péter Tallosy and János Mózer. We were first-year physics-engineering students buzzing about how much faster we could learn if we just built things together. That lunch became the first page of what is now mesh.`
Three days later we proved it: a weekend-long sprint, 72 hours, and a working machine-learning solution delivered to a real client. The cheque was nice, but the real reward was watching everyone walk away saying, “That was the most intense - and fun - thing I’ve ever done.”
So we kept the momentum. Every Thursday evening we hijacked an empty seminar room at BME and taught each other the foundations of ML, whiteboard style. Those nights weren’t lectures; they were campfires. Each week someone else lit the flame.
Then came the call: a mentor had an early-release Apple Vision Pro. We borrowed it, fired off a midnight invite at my home, and four days later more than fifty curious builders queued to try technology that wasn’t even available in Europe yet. It was the first time our community felt bigger than our friend group.
Space quickly became our bottleneck, so we squeezed into a small room at Demola Budapest, started to build in the nights and weekends and told friends: If you want to build, bring your laptop and some stubborn optimism. Our lamps in the office stayed on until sunrise.
Last summer Entrepreneur First’s scout, Dominik, messaged: “Come to London to meet.” János and I flew out with two backpacks and no schedule. We spent hours on the Underground dreaming up a structure for MESH, hopping between Cambridge and Oxford to study how other ecosystems nurture builders. Those train notes still guide our ops playbook today.
Back in Budapest, autumn 2024 exploded. Exams by day; meet-ups, demo and mentor sessions by nights and weekends. The energy convinced us we weren’t just a club - we were becoming an engine.
November brought another passport stamp: we travelled to YC’s Startup School week in the UK. Five days, our friend's living room was packed with sleeping bags, and more “aha” moments than I can count. This time the whole core team felt the London spark.
We celebrated our first “MESHmas” in December - pot-luck style, because nothing bonds a team like too much bejgli - and in January 2025 we moved into a daylight-filled office big enough for soldering and 3D printers. Seeing laptops open at 8 a.m., not just midnight, was surreal.
Most recently, we kicked off the Builder Launchpad. Twenty teams (a lot of them from abroad!) sprinted for six weeks; last Friday the winners cashed the first prize pot funded by our sponsors. Watching them standing there smiling reminded me of our own 72-hour origin story.
Throughout it all, two things have remained constant: food and conversation. There have been pizza-fuelled discussions, balcony breakfasts and late-night debates about ramen that have left whiteboards scarred with half-mad diagrams. Community isn’t just a Discord channel; it’s the people who stick around when everyone else has gone to sleep.
I’m grateful to every volunteer who now steers MESH in their “free time,” every mentor who picked up the phone, every sponsor who said yes before we had proof, and every builder who still believes curiosity beats comfort.
What’s next? Bigger bets, tougher problems, and rooms filled with the kind of laughter that only happens when nothing works - yet. If that sounds like your idea of fun, my DMs are open. Builders, let’s build more.