5 years of Mestrelab (year 3) – The advent of Mnova
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.
