If you ever get a chance to meet Zoltan, he will come across as your friendly next-door neighbor – always smiling, always happy to lend you his tools. watch the full hour-long conversation between him and our CEO, and you’ll be mesmerized by the depth of his thoughtfulness as they both go down quite a rabbit hole discussing the future of proxies and scraping.
Hailing from Eger, Hungary, Zoltan has always been curious. Today, he has a whole basement filled with different machinery, and he just finished setting up an underground sprinkler all by himself – but he reckons that this derived from his curiosity about AC outlets as a child.
You know how we always try to keep our children away from danger? Well, that didn’t work out so well for him as a kid – as it turns out, Zoltan learned to ask “why” from a very young age. He’s always had that ‘engineer’ gene working inside him, and this led to his younger self disassembling a table clock to see how things worked underneath. Now he’s turning materials into concentric shapes – just for the fun of it!
Zoltan’s arc – the challenge he needed to overcome – was a little more philosophical than what we have seen in previous Rayobyte Stories. In his own words, he used to think that he knew everything. This led to a little bit of arrogance in his work, where he felt whatever he was doing was the best way to do it simply because he was doing it. But, today, a wiser, humble man has learned to accept that this was not always true, and it changed his life forever, for the better!
This put him into the right career trajectory, and he started his first startup called Fishbole. This adorably-named enterprise was actually a video presentation & classroom app that he worked as CTO for a few years before eventually moving to the CTO role at ScraperAPI. Although Zoltan’s involvement with ScraperAPI was delayed due to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, he became the captain of their ‘tech ship’ soon after!
We are standing at the forefront of AI. And there are many unknowns circling the application of this technology in the scraping industry. Unsurprisingly, Zoltan had quite a few interesting thoughts to share.
He believes that in its current state, generative AI can certainly parse data of raw website into a structured set; however, it may not come with the level of consistency required to do the job well. So, on a large scale with multiple thousands of requests per second involving AI to parse the data wouldn’t work. However, AI can be a great tool to create parsing rules.
Zoltan believes that in time our shared industry will turn away from the “cat and mouse game” between scrapers and site owners trying to block them from access, and will become more collaborative in a way that benefits both. And while that might mean the death of anti-scraping technologies that ScraperAPI currently specializes in avoiding, companies like theirs will continue to exist in the market. Because at the end of the day, people don’t care about success rates or even about scraping as a concept – they care about clean data, and Zoltan and his team are the experts when it comes to getting it for you.
ScraperAPI is a product we’re proud to be involved with. And Zoltan shares the same admiration for Rayobyte too! In his own words, he said, “We at ScraperAPI found Rayobyte a few years ago, and onboarded them as one of the multiple hundreds of proxy providers we work with – just to realize a few months later that we rely on their good quality IP addresses so much that they simply became our largest provider. If they can handle all the challenges we throw at them, they can handle everything.”
ScraperAPI allows even non-technical people to simply use their APIs to gather the structured data you need and start building…well, whatever it is that you want to build! Zoltan has always been passionate about taking something super complex in his hands and turning it into something simple, and his current enterprise is a great example of his thoughtful, considered philosophy of development.
Zoltan is also building a great transactional email tool. We wish him all the best and can’t wait to see what he builds next!
Where bravery meets freedom – we couldn’t find a better picture to express the Zoltan Story!
Rayobyte, LLC., 233 S. 13th St,Suite 1100, Lincoln, NE 68508, USA
Rayobyte, LLC., 233 S. 13th St,Suite 1100, Lincoln, NE 68508, USA
