Since becoming Elsevier’s VP of Strategy, Mendeley Co-founder and CEO Victor Henning has been up to a lot of exciting stuff. Here he tells us a bit about his latest project, Axon, which is stirring things up by bringing together the best and brightest new startups in the fields of Science and Research at Le Web 2014.
Over the last few years, I have watched something interesting happen in the world of science: Tech startups and VCs suddenly care about scientists. Strangely, this wasn’t always the case.
When the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, its original purpose was to help manage and share scientific information about particle accelerator experiments. Yet, with the exception of a few search engines, document repositories, and journal databases, the web remained barren of well-designed tools and applications engineered for scientists.
Instead, the last 15 years witnessed the explosion of the consumer web and mobile apps, fueled by advertising revenue. Jeff Hammersbacher, an early Facebook data science employee (and now founder of Cloudera), summed it up as:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. If instead of pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads, they pointed it at great unsolved problems in science, how would the world be different today?”
How indeed? We might be watching hilarious cat gifs on the screens of our flying cars.
Around 2008, things started to change: A small wave of bootstrapped startups began building document management tools, social networks, and recommendation engines for scientists. Among them was Mendeley, my own company. Grown out of our own frustrations as researchers, my co-founders and I built Mendeley to make science more open, more efficient, and more collaborative. Getting started wasn’t easy – many VCs turned us down because they saw research as a “niche”. We nonetheless managed to convince a couple of angel investors (among them the founders of Skype) to invest in us.
After launching in 2009, we came to LeWeb to participate in the startup competition. I have the fondest memories of the event – a freezing, pre-Christmas Paris in December, and Dave McClure, the famously foul-mouthed Silicon Valley angel investor, tweeting his sexual arousal at seeing our pitch:
#lewebsc crap, disappointing @Mendeley already raised 2M… i was getting a woody there. #EuroStartupEnvy
— Dave McClure (@davemcclure) December 9, 2009
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Events like LeWeb helped put us on the map with international investors, press, and potential users. From there, Mendeley grew to a research platform connecting more than 3.5 million researchers in 180 countries, with institutional customers like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. In April 2013, we were acquired by Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of science and health information.
Without wanting to claim undue credit, quite a few Ph.D. students and Postdocs who became entrepreneurs themselves have told me that Mendeley was an inspiration for them: It proved that tools for researchers could go from garage to global audience, and it proved to potential investors that the “niche” could also deliver sizeable exits.
We are now seeing the emergence of a second wave of venture-backed research startups, offering a much wider range of scientific workflow tools. They help scientists keep electronic versions of lab notebooks, organize and share experimental data, order lab materials, write papers collaboratively, outsource experiments to other labs and to the cloud, get credit for peer reviews, launch their own journals, and even raise crowdfunding for their research projects.
It’s time to give this movement more visibility. Elsevier and LeWeb 2014 are teaming up to run a half-day event called Axon@LeWeb (in case you’re wondering – in the brain, axons are the fibres that carry impulses from neurons to other nerve cells). We want to bring together the most exciting science and research startups – the ones that build tools for the best minds of our generation, to help them crack those great unsolved problems.
Startups can apply online here, and we already have applications from amazing companies in the US, Canada, Sweden, France, the UK, and Germany. The 15 best startups will receive a free ticket to LeWeb 2014, as well as the opportunity to present at Axon@LeWeb and network with the hottest companies in this space. Even if your startup is not among the 15 selected to present, Elsevier is sponsoring a €200 discount on the regular startup ticket for all science and research startups that want to join us at LeWeb.
Applications for Axon@LeWeb close on Sunday, 16th November, at midnight CET, and the winning startups will be announced by Tuesday, 18th November.
Hope to see you in Paris in December!