5 Years of Mestrelab (year 0). From MestReC to Mestrelab
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.
