ResearchGate's Ijad Madisch's lifelong ambition of winning a Nobel Prize for changing the way scientific research is undertaken piqued the interest of Valley investors several years ago.
Now with more than $35 million in funding from investors like Bill Gates, Benchmark, Founders Fund and Accel, he's running one of Berlin's flagship startups with 3 million scientists using the site.
It wasn't such an obvious journey. Madisch had been working as a medical doctor in Boston several years ago. He asked for permission to go half-time on being a doctor, so that he could spend the other part of his time working on what would become ResearchGate, a LinkedIn-like social network for scientific researchers.
His manager told him it was a “birdshit” idea and that scientists by nature weren't very social.
“I always was convinced that ResearchGate can change the world,” Madisch said. “The World Wide Web was created to exchange knowledge and now you can buy shoes online, but science is still the same.”
Cohler, who sits on the board, brought experience from his days as an early team member at LinkedIn and Facebook.
One of Cohler's early pieces of advice to Madisch was to forget about revenue until the network was valuable enough to command it.
“We need to really create value for the scientists first. If we succeed with this, then we can start worrying about making money,” Madisch said. “You have to be very brave and experienced to give this advice. I wouldn't have gotten it from any East Coast or German VC investor. And it was the best thing we could have done.”
Madisch said the site, which attracts 1.4 million uploads of papers per month and 1,300 data sets uploaded every few days, had led to a few breakthroughs.
Cohler said that Berlin has many of the right ingredients to be a strong startup hub, with a decent pool of technical talent, a low cost of living and a place at the intersection of technology and many other industries and cultures.
Source: Techcrunch
