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 Leave a comment