5 years of Mestrelab (year 1) - The first conferences and collaborations and a few extra people
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.
