The Mekentosj Story

It all started out as a hobby driven by a long-time interest for both design and technology.

I was introduced to the Mac when my dad brought home one of these "portable" classic Macs when I was about 14 years old, and almost immediately I started experimenting with Photoshop et al. During university I earned some money in my spare time by designing and building websites, but it wasn't until about the time I started by PhD that Apple introduced Mac OS X and with it came the free set of developer tools that finally made it easy enough for someone without the classical IT background to start building his/her own Mac applications.

Together with my best friend and fellow PhD student Tom Groothuis we started building a number of tools for molecular biologists, which we distributed for free under our "mek en tosj" monicker. It didn't take long before the hobby started to get out of hand as the popularity of our programs started to soar.

When the time came to pick a postdoc I knew one thing for sure, the programming was something I was so passionate about that it should be part of the postdoc rather than a spare time project. That's why I picked the text mining group at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge UK, also driven by an interest in the changes that were/are ongoing in the scientific publishing industry. I applied for a two year EU Marie Curie fellowship which I was fortunate to get, however it would take a few months between the end of my PhD and all the bureaucracy before I could get started in Cambridge. This was when I decided to build Papers. I got the idea for this "iTunes for PDF files" already two years earlier, but never had the time to do it. I did tell everybody I knew about it, but no one had done it and now finally I had some spare time on my hands.

The first beta of Papers was released right at the time I started my postdoc and it was a success right from the start. In fact it was so successful and offered so many opportunities that it was soon difficult to focus on my actual postdoc and after a year I realised that this was the thing I was really passionate about and was what I wanted to concentrate fully on. That was when I decided to quit my job and become the company founder of Mekentosj Inc. ;-)