I’ve been out of the office for a few days now. My cough/throat infection still keeps me quarantined at home and largely unable to speak (I can make uncoherent noises, though). Nonetheless, Jan, Paul and I were able to have some Skype calls to discuss current issues: They talked, and I had my microphone switched off and replied by typing answers into the chat window. I really felt like a classic Bond villain sitting behind a curtain, giving instructions to the minions of evil. Except that they weren’t really instructions, and my co-founders are neither minions nor particularly evil.

So, the crazy thing is: During my brief absence of four days, Mendeley has moved into a new office, and two more people have joined the team! I promise to do a photo tour of the new office once I’m back; meanwhile, let me introduce the two newest team members (in their own words):

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Fred Emmott is a software engineer for Mendeley Desktop. Having spent most of his life before university at music school, he changed tracks and graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in computer science in June 2008.

In his spare time, he works on Slamd64 (a 64-bit port of Slackware Linux) and several smaller projects. He also spends way too much time playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Amir Rahbaran is a Ph.D. student in the field of strategic entrepreneurship at the University of Oldenburg. Entrepreneurial endeavors have fascinated him for a long time, which is why he’s studying them and why he is going to build up his own company in the near future.

He has joined Mendeley on a project basis as part of his Ph.D. thesis titled “Entrepreneurial Bricolage: an Ethnographic Study of Internet Start-ups”. Working for Mendeley is an integrative part of his empirical data collection as a participant-observer. Thus he observes everyone (including himself) and participates by helping to reach out to the academic community.

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When Amir contacted us, we were immediately fond of the idea that Mendeley itself would become part of someone’s Ph.D. research. As for reaching out to the academic community, you can see that Amir is already on the phone!

Also, I’m struck by what a musical company we’re becoming. Stefan is a former professional DJ who helped build Last.fm, Mike plays Jazz bass in his spare time, Steve plays guitar, Fred plays piano, guitar and flute, and I spent a long time playing bass and singing in Punk bands while working for Sony Music/Columbia Records and Revelation Records. Why are we writing code?! We should be writing songs!