I finished the last post writing about our move to the new office, and about how this allowed us to grow the team further, which we immediately started doing, with the additions of Dani, our internet marketing specialist, and Jose, Michael and Esther to the development team, taking our headcount to 15 people during 2009, and extending our areas of expertise further beyond NMR.

The early part of the year was marked by the 50th ENC, held at Asilomar. We arrived at ENC after also having a booth at the ACS Spring in Salt Lake City, and once at ENC we graduated into a full blown suite, Curlew, which has an excellent location in the middle of the Asilomar grounds, and which was very popular with visitors throughout the conference. We look forward to returning there many times in the future. The ENC conference was great, with many very interesting sessions, including an excellent, and very nostalgic, historical session with many of the big names in NMR as presenters. It was a privilege to be able to attend it.

After ENC, Chen and I went back to China and started a very positive collaboration, with our Chinese distributor, TLWB, a company with a large presence in the Chinese NMR community who has been doing a great job at promoting our software and opening new business opportunities. I blogged extensively on my trip to China on this blog at the time, so I will not add anymore here.

Also on the blog you will find summaries and stories about many of the conferences were we exhibited this year, ASMS in Philadelphia, ACS in Washington, CoSMoS in Boston, EUROMAR in Goteborg, IMSC in Bremen, ESOR in Haifa and SMASH in Chamonix. They are all also covered on the blog if you would like to find out more about our activities there.

The main event of the year, from a product point of view, was the launch of our LC/GC/MS plugin for Mnova, in September. This makes Mnova not only multivendor and multiplatform, but also multitechnique, representing a first step in our original objective when designing the application, thought out not only as an NMR software, but rather as a ‘Chemistry Software Suite’. Mnova MS has been developed in collaboration with Sierra and has met with an excellent reception from our customer base, with many people keen to evaluate it and many purchasing licenses already.

Towards the end of the year, we also passed the milestone of 50 academic campus licenses, many of them held by some of the most prestigious Universities in the World, and a number of corporate companies have during this year chosen Mnova NMR as their NMR processing tool of choice, continuing with a trend which we saw started last year. So, our project is meeting with great commercial success, the software is ever more popular, and this is giving us the opportunity to keep building both our internal development team and our network of collaborations, which will result on a series of exciting product launches and new features in the near / mid term future.

The last 5 years have been a very exciting ride, which has been made possible by the confidence and support of our many users (in excess of 20,000 paying licensees around the World), by our collaborators and by the hard working and dedicated team at Mestrelab. To all those, the Mestrelab founders want to extend a very heartfelt thank you. We look forward to continuing to work towards delivering excellent quality Chemistry software for the community, and to continuing to work in an inspiring market filled with creative and challenging (in a positive way) customers.

Over the next few days, I will publish one more blog, on the future, but this will be more filled with questions than answers (although there may be a few of those). We have some ideas about where we are going, but we really want to ask the community, once more, where they think we should be going and which needs we should be aiming to cover.

I hope you have enjoyed this historical series on Mestrelab, I cannot believe 5 years have gone by already! Any comments or questions are welcome.

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating 2009, LC/GC/MS, Mnova MS No comments Leave a comment

I start the post on 2008 mentioning something I forgot in 2007, which was the acquisition by Mestrelab of a new premises. We could see that Carlos’s apartment would soon be outgrown, and we therefore invested in a new office close to the centre of Santiago de Compostela. What we bought was a shell and therefore, part of 2007 and the whole of 2008 would be spent waiting for builders to finish the work they had undertaken to fit it for our purposes. Many say Spanish builders have suffered due to the financial crisis which would unfold later in the year, and that is undoubtedly true, but from our perspective, if we gave this kind of response to our customers, we would not expect to remain in business. 2008 was therefore frustrating from that point of view, as our in-house growth was somewhat curtailed by the lack of office space to place new developers, and therefore our headcount remained stuck at 10 whilst we fought with the builders.

However, we grew in other ways. We grew in product range, as our agreement with Sierra Analytics Inc, also finalized in 2007, to develop an LC/GC/MS plugin for Mnova started to give us a more general appeal for chemists outside the specific NMR community, and thus made us start going to more general conferences. 2008 therefore saw our first attendance at an ACS National Meeting, at New Orleans in April, soon after having our first suite, the Forest Lodge, at an ENC, which was back at Asilomar for its 49th edition. So, we were growing in our attendance to conferences, and also in the size of our presence there. And we were also growing geographically, with our opening of an office in the US, in San Diego, CA, after reaching an agreement with Dr. Chen Peng, who became our new Business Development Director for US and China. We also attended, as vendors, our first MS specialist conferences, with ASMS in Denver and CoSMoS in San Jose being the first ones, whilst repeating at the ACS with a stand at the Fall Meeting in Philadelphia. As for NMR conferences, in addition to ENC, we also attended EUROMAR in St. Petersburg (great city, at least as a leisure visitor), SMASH in Santa Fe and the Spanish Bi-Annual NMR Meeting, held in Seville.

So, whilst World economies where rapidly swinging from a fear of inflation, with the petroleum barrel edging towards $150, to a recessionist panic after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, Mestrelab kept growing and expanding its range. In a year when the Lightning Bolt flew in Beijing and when the Baltimore Shark astounded us all by surpassing Mark Spitz, we were also racing, in our own fashion, towards a more international presence, which even took us to China too, which Chen and I visited in a business development trip at the beginning of November. Thus, as well as starting to open some significant business with the Chinese CRO and pharmaceutical industry, I was in Shanghai to witness the results of the US General Election, which saw Barack Obama become the 44th President and maybe justify his ludicrously awarded Nobel Peace Prize by the single fact of replacing George Bush (not that Bush could have stayed, showing one of the great features of the American Constitution). With this event, our conversations with American scientists became a lot more fluent, as they no longer felt the need to start by apologizing and explaining that they had nothing to do with the election of their incumbent president ;-).

New Office

Our New Office entrance door

And finally, in December 2008, in the middle of World financial turmoil, and just after the inauguration of President Obama and of the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, we also inaugurated our new office, to which  we moved on 12th December, thus gaining some much needed breathing space (anyone who visited us during 2008 will vouch for that) and the ability to grow our team again, which we started duly doing at the beginning of 2009, but that is another story or, at least, another post!

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating China, Mnova MS, US Office No comments Leave a comment

2007 was not only the year of the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU, and of Slovenia to the Euro, but it was undoubtedly a year of changes in leadership (Just take a look at this list, which is only the main, or best known, leadership changes in that year: Ban Ki-moon took over Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General, Nancy Pelosi became the 1st Female Speaker of the US House of Representatives and, more importantly, the first democrat speaker for a while, Nicolas Sarkozy took over Jacques Chirac as President in France and Gordon Brown over Tony Blair as UK Prime Minister, Yasuo Fokuda took over as Prime Minister of Japan from the resigning Shinzo Abe and President Vladimir Putin did the same in Russia over resigning Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkhov, paving the way for Dmitry Medvedev to become the new President, John Howard was finally defeated in an Australia Election by Kevin Rudd and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner became the new President of Argentina). And Mestrelab set off at the beginning of the year with the intention of continuing to work towards a change of commercial leadership in the NMR, and eventually Analytical Chemistry, software market. And to do so, we continued to work on our already not so secret weapon, Mnova, which we were convinced would at least establish a clear technical leadership in the industry.

But even before that, during February, and just after Estonia had become the first country to stage a General Election over the internet, showing the shape (and more importantly, the place) of things to come, we acquired an interest in the internet World ourselves, with our acquisition of a stake in eMolecules, the Southern California based search engine and ecommerce chemistry tool which is set to become the Amazon of chemistry. This was very exciting for us, as we were and remain convinced that eMolecules will bring great value to the same customers we are servicing with our software.

So, with a stake of eMolecules under our belt, Carlos, Nik and I set off for Daytona Beach, and the 48th ENC, ready to finally launch, and unveil, Mnova. The first commercial version of Mnova, 5.0.3, was enthusiastically received by most ENC attendees who visited our booth, and this greatly encouraged us and reaffirmed us in our conviction that we were following the right path with its development. NMR spectroscopists loved the flexibility afforded by its multipage interface, its multiplatform nature, the possibilities open by its architecture and by its unmatched scripting capabilities. During this ENC, we also signed a distribution agreement with Varian for Mnova, which we saw as further recognition by one of the main players in our market of the fact that Mnova was starting to be regarded as the best software tool available. Daytona was therefore very encouraging on that front, although of course, the sight of thousands of 4×4 trucks sporting massive fridges and sound systems being driven into the beach everyday by people who obviously don’t like to walk or be in contact with the sand, even on the beach, was fairly discouraging for Europeans long engaged in the climate change debate. Of course, the discovery, simultaneously to the ENC, of Gliese 581c, an Earth-like planet potentially capable of sustaining life in constellation Libra was a great relief for us.

After ENC, we attended an excellent EUROMAR and Iberoamerican meeting at Tarragona, Spain, where we also had an exhibitor booth, and then the first SMASH meeting held at Chamonix, in France, an spectacular setting used again in 2009 (and it seems as if planned for 2011) and on which I have blogged elsewhere. Chamonix saw the consolidation of our tradition of holding User Meetings at SMASH, with a meeting attended by over 60 people, who outsized the room we had booked for its celebration. Mnova kept proving extremely popular, and our software sales took a huge hike, still well below those of Harry Potter’s last instalment, ‘The Deadly Hallows’, which sold 11 million copies during its first 24 hours in the market and left us thinking ‘if only’ ;-). But we were also doing fine, and industry were starting to take us really seriously, with the end of 2007 seeing Worldwide adoption of the software for general deployment by a couple of very prestigious, multinational pharmas and biotechs which I don’t have permission to mention. All this meant we could keep growing the team with confidence, and we did so with the addition of Pablo, a new Applications Chemist, and Santi, a beautifully named software developer. NMR For All also kept going strong, although of course, it paled into insignificance when compared to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Marktoum’s largest ever charitable donation of €7.41 bn (this was of course when things in Dubai were going better).

So, with Mnova well established, eMolecules on the road and our first corporate deals under our belts, and whilst witnessing the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy, the signing of the treaty of Lisbon and the accession of 9 former Easter countries (well, 8 plus Malta) to the Schengen Treaty, and with a careful eye on the UN Climate Change Conference held in early December (déjà vu) in Bali, we waved goodbye to 2007 and marched, full of enthusiasm and hope and with an strengthened Mestrelab, into 2008. And that will be my next post.

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating, Conferences Daytona ENC, Mnova 5.0.3, Mnova launch No comments Leave a comment

So, we made it into 2006, and the year started with Mestrelab’s first incursion into India, with a trip to Mumbai and Hyderabad, a stand at the Advances in Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology conference and visits to a few companies in the area, some of which are still our customers! At that same time, Ehud Olmert was replacing Ariel Sharon due to illness and Hamas were winning the Palestinian election.

Introducing... the one and only Stan Skyora

The year also started with our agreement of a development collaboration with Dr. Stanislav Sykora, which has now been successfully going for nearly 4 years and which has yielded many very pleasing results, such as, amongst others, our spin simulation system, our Bayesian DOSY toolbox and, just lately,  our GSD (Global Spectral Deconvolution) algorithm and module. We continue to work with Stan on several areas of great interest to the community and we are hoping to be in a position to make some announcements very soon.

This year also saw our first ENC, at a very rainy Asilomar. We had a 10×10 ft table at the Nautilus room, and again our stand was hugely busy, leaving Carlos and I very little time even for going running (of course, the lures of Suraj’s suite also have quite a lot to answer for that ).

Felipe, Isaac, Nik and Maruxa

From a software development point of view, this was a transition year. Carlos was still working hard on MestReC, but Nikolay, now in Santiago, Isaac and later also Maruxa and Felipe, who joined us during the year, were already working on our future software, Mnova, which condensed many of the ideas and feedback we had being elaborating in the previous years. Even though, ENC saw a couple of posters from Mestrelab, most notably with our new Whittaker Smoother baseline correction algorithm, published in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance (J.C. Cobas, Michael A. Bernstein, M. Martín-Pastor, Pablo García Tahoces, J. Magn. Reson, 2006, 183, 145-151).

After watching Italy win the Football World Cup and learning with misplaced relief of the permanent ceasefire announced by ETA in Spain, we also attended SMASH 2006 at Burlington, VT, were we had our first ever User Meeting attached to the SMASH conference (this has now become a Mestrelab tradition), and we sponsored and had a booth at the Spanish Bi-annual NMR Meeting, held in St Joan d’Alacant, on the Spanish Mediterranean Coast.

Apart from all this, we continued to work on the much anticipated release of Mnova, which was falling back into 2007, although towards the first Alpha version of Mnova was offered to around 100 users to start comprehensive testing of our quickly developing new software. However, we cannot mention this year without remembering one more event, in October, when we had the honour and personal pleasure of meeting Prof. Richard Ernst, Chemistry Nobel Prize, at an event organized in Santiago de Compostela.  You can see some photos of this event, which we were very proud to take part in, below.

Santi Dominguez giving our software to Richard Ernst

Carlos Cobas, Richard Ernst and Javier Sardina

And so 2006 finished, with Mestrelab boasting 7 people in the payroll and eagerly anticipating the release of Mnova which, being in 2007, falls in the next post. Still on this post, however, before the year was out we witnessed the sentencing and execution of Saddam Hussein in postwar Iraq, the first successful Nuclear Test by North Korea and the Somali and East Timor’s crises. And, of course, a new terrorist attack by ETA at Madrid Airport, which abruptly ended their ceasefire. The end of the year also saw the sale of YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion (these guys were definitely growing quicker than us, amazing to think Mestrelab was founded just before YouTube) and the release of the PS3 and the Wii, just in time for the Christmas consumer craze.

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating, Trips and business development No comments Leave a comment

So, in my previous post we got to January 2005, in Carlos’s bedroom. 2005 was not only the costliest year for natural disasters on record and the warmest since records began (including a new World temperature record of 70.7C in the Lut Desert, Iran), but it was also the year of Mestrelab’s initial consolidation as a fledgling start up. In January we interviewed for an Office Manager, and Cristina finally joined us in March. Also in January, we met with Nikolay, who had written to us from Moscow curious about our project and who soon decided to join us (after a few days of wining and dining in Galicia). Of course, having to deal with Spanish bureaucracy meant that Nik did not actually start work until November (in Spain the multiplier between job permit for footballers and proper working people is times 25).

With Cristina’s arrival, we needed a proper office, and we solved this issue by kicking Carlos out of his apartment, which we quickly habilitated as an office, and which Carlos and Cris started working at in March, quickly followed by Isaac (April) and then myself, finally full time, in July. People often forget, but at this same time YouTube was coming online, although probably growing quicker than us.

So, after 6 months, we had a small but convenient office in the city centre, and 4 people working in it, as well as a Russian Head of Development on his (slow) way to joining us. We also kept getting good support from our users, some of whom turned to paying customers, allowing us not only to pay these 4 people, but also to put some money aside for our first conference, SMASH 2005. And we had started building our Scientific Advisory Board, then made up of Mike Bernstein (AZ), Manuel Martin Pastor (University of Santiago de Compostela), Carlos Pacheco (Princeton), Istvan Pelczer (Princeton) and Manuel Perez (Pfizer).

SMASH 2005 was held in Verona, a few days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, at the Leon d’Oro Hotel, an excellent location in a very beautiful city, in Berlusconi’s Italy (he had just reformed government, which is of course a common occurrence in Italy). We had an exhibitor table there and, with this being the first time we were meeting our customers face to face, our table was incredibly busy. Carlos and I were doing demos all day, from breakfast until late at night - conveniently, the exhibitor tables were located in the foyer by the bar, which is an excellent SMASH tradition, maximizing the opportunity for exhibitors to meet customers and show their wares, whilst getting drunk and exhausted at the same time. And we did get exhausted. By the time the conference finished, we run off to Venice for the afternoon, for two reasons, the first, it is always worth visiting Venice and, the second, we did not want anything else to do with NMR for the day! (of course, every SMASH attendee had the same idea, so that did not quite work). The most important thing about SMASH, however, was that we met a lot of our users, which was great at a personal level, and we had fantastic feedback, with a lot of encouragement and many good feature suggestions, so we went back to Santiago full of ideas and energy to keep pushing the software, and the business, forward.

2005 also saw our first few collaborations started. In July, we completed the agreement to include MestReC Lite with ChemDraw Ultra, which we figured would be good for exposure, and in November we signed our agreement with Modgraph Consultants, which would later give us the opportunity to integrate NMRPredict Desktop, and therefore NMR prediction capabilities, in Mnova. November was a momentous month, with the arrival, finally, of Nikolay, and with the launch of our NMR For All Program, designed to give people in less developed countries free access to our software.

Of course, ours were not the only news. In 2005 George Bush was inaugurated for the second time, Yasser Arafat stood down as Palestinian leader, Angela Merkel became Chancellor of Germany, Charles Windsor and Camilla Parker-Bowles were getting married in an England were Labour had been re-elected, Catholics were getting a new Pope whilst the North Koreans were announcing that they have nuclear weapons (unlike Iraq) and France saw its first state of emergency of the century due to rioting (reminiscent, but very different, to 68).

On the sporting front, Lance Armstrong won his 7th consecutive Tour de France, Wales managed to win the Six Nations Rugby Grand Slam after 30 years, England won the Ashes (cricket) in a momentous series and Liverpool FC came back from 3-0 down at half time to win the Champions League (I guess, as a concession to US readers I should also mention that the Patriots won their second Superbowl).

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating No comments Leave a comment

It seems incredible that it was on 1st December 2004, already 5 years ago, when Javier, Carlos and I went to the public notary in Santiago de Compostela to found Mestrelab Research SL. It was a horrible, wet, dark and rainy December day, and that has not changed, today is still a horrible, wet and rainy December day, but many other things have changed quite a lot! Over the next few days, I am going to try to write, for those of you who are interested, a small biopic of Mestrelab (and I will also explain below why we are focusing these celebrations around the 10th, and not the 1st, of December). We often get asked many questions about how the whole thing started, about our growth, etc., and here you will be able to read a little bit about it. At the end of the series, I will write one article looking forward, and we will also start asking you what you think we should be doing with the next 5 years.

The birth of Mestrelab – Year 0 of the Mestrelab Era

I am not the best qualified person to write about the early years of MestReC within the University of Santiago de Compostela, maybe Carlos or Javier will add to this, or contribute their own article. The fact is that, for a number of years, Carlos had been developing MestReC, after an initial request from Javier, and had shown the foresight to make initially free, and then continuously renewing evaluation versions available on the internet. This had built a significant following for the application, both in academia and from industrial users, due I guess to the lack of other such multivendor software tools for NMR in the marketplace and to the usability of the software. This status quo was fine for a long while, and it went on for years, until the University decided to stop funding the project, and Javier and Carlos had to make a decision as to what to do with MestReC. This is when I got involved, at the beginning of 2004.

After a few discussions, we decided that it made sense to start a commercial company marketing the software. We knew we would have to do a lot of development work (both software and business) and we in fact already had ideas to change the software into what is now Mnova, and the only way to muster the resources and time to do this was to launch a company. After lots of meetings, business plans, etc., and a very long process for choosing the company name, finally on 1st December 2004, we went to the public notary to create Mestrelab. However, and this is Spanish bureaucracy, the official foundation date, which is the one we will stick to for the purposes of these celebrations, is 10th December, the date when our filing was approved and rubber stamped.

And thus Mestrelab was born, although, for the previous 2-3 months, with the help of the University of Santiago, which allowed us to invoice under their name, we had already collected a few orders for licenses from customers (I don’t have express permission to mention many of them, so I will not), the first one being, curiously, for University of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia!

So, at a time when George Bush was just celebrating his re-election (no comment), when the Iraqi elections where being postponed for the first time, when the Ucranian opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko just managed to survive a poisoning attempt, when the second largest ever earthquake was about to hit Southeast Asia and when both the tallest skyscraper and the tallest bridge in the World were being opened in the same month, Mestrelab started, just with Carlos on the payroll initially. We did not have a garage, like the Microsoft guys (this is a big difference in way of life between Spanish cities and American suburbs, we live in apartment buildings with communal garages not suitable for start ups – maybe one of the reasons for the US economy being better than the Spanish one at generating new companies? ;-), so we started in Carlos’s bedroom instead. This was ok, as it was only Carlos working full time, and as we could use Javier’s very elegant office at the University for meetings and recruitment interviews, which we did for a few months. But that is for the next post!

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating No comments Leave a comment