Marek Mihok  has spent the last decade launching and scaling successful ventures. After selling one, he’s back with a new app. NYU Abu Dhabi was his incubator.

What inspired your latest startup?
After selling Combyne, my first startup app for fashion-forward Gen Zs who come together to play, connect, and express themselves through fashion and creativity, I wanted to encourage teens and young adults to pursue their passions instead of spending time on social media. My new project is called Offline Pets, a gamified product designed to motivate people to become more aware of their phone usage while having fun. We’re onboarding beta testers now and have a couple of NYUAD student interns helping with development. We expect to launch in the summer.

Explain how your career has crossed multiple domains in the startup world.
It has been a journey of exploration. After NYUAD, I returned to Europe to work as a consultant with KPMG in their mergers and acquisitions department, helping founders and investors with different types of financing. I then worked for a large central European bank before joining a venture capital firm, investing in some cool companies. Working with excellent founders made me realize that the fun part of entrepreneurship is getting my hands dirty, which led to my first startup.

Have you always been drawn toward entrepreneurship?
When I came to Abu Dhabi to study, I thought I would be in finance. However, the entrepreneurial spirit of NYUAD in those early years rekindled my passion for becoming an inventor — it was the first job I wanted at age four! At NYUAD, I majored in economics and minored in visual arts practice and found that great artists and businesspeople are very similar. You need to understand the fundamentals and what drives change and impact. You can make something powerful if you eliminate all the noise and understand what strikes people.

How did NYU Abu Dhabi influence your entrepreneurial path?
NYUAD itself was a startup. I loved the entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to bring it into my professional career. Back in the day, we launched new projects and clubs that I now call startups: a hiking club, a design collective, a sustainability conference.

I took an Intro to Entrepreneurship study abroad class at NYU Stern, and our professor wanted us to come up with a startup idea, validate it, and present it. We decided to develop a real-time system on the NYUAD campus that would update people on the occupancy of different buildings.

The idea actually got pretty far. We built a prototype and had initial talks with investors. It was my first attempt at a real startup ten years ago, and I experienced it at NYUAD.