#FoundersFriday with Overleaf’s John Hammersley and John Lees-Miller: Part 1

We are very excited to be launching a new recurring series on our blog, #FoundersFriday, in which we will be interviewing the founders of different scholarly communication businesses, asking them to share their advice for others and their perspective on the industry as a whole.

For our first edition we have interviewed John Hammersley and John Lees-Miller, co-founders of Overleaf. They both had so many interesting things to say that we’ve decided to split their interview into two posts – so stay tuned for part two!

What made you guys decide to leave an academic environment and launch your own business idea?

JLM: So mostly that was by accident. Overleaf started out as side project of mine, it was then called writeLaTeX, it was basically something I wrote to help me and my lab group work together and it was just out there on the internet and people found it. I’d say I left academia fairly reluctantly, it took me quite a long time to leave fully. The main reason was that Overleaf kept growing and it seemed like a good opportunity to do something interesting.

JH: So I did a PhD in Mathematical Physics up at Durham, but then I wanted to work in industry to do something more directly applicable to the real world, so that was when I started working for a driverless taxi company. I was there for five years and I really enjoyed it. It was a small company and kind of a startup, even though it was building this big thing at Heathrow Airport. But I didn’t own any of the company, so I was putting in lots of effort and lots of work into something that wasn’t really mine. So when this opportunity came up to be in something from the start, well they don’t come along very often and I wanted to take advantage of that and see how far it could go. It was also a good opportunity to get closer to the world of research, but without having to do research.

What have been the biggest challenges for Overleaf and for yourselves?

JH: Not running out of money, that’s quite a big challenge early on. We originally said we would give it a year not paying ourselves anything and we didn’t pay ourselves for about 18 months in the end. The investment from Digital Science, we were pretty confident that was going to go through, but it took another six months to actually get everything signed, as these things often do, so that was a big challenge. I think the other challenge, that Bethnal Green Ventures (our accelerator) helped with a lot, was turning this product which people were using into a business that could generate money, scale and address a problem, not just for the users, but for someone who would be willing to pay for it.

JLM: I’d say the challenges keep evolving, so in the early days just building the product and figuring stuff out and keeping the site alive was a very real challenge. But now fortunately we’ve been able to hire some people who are helping with that. The challenges have evolved, now it’s more about hiring, that’s still a big challenge, hiring people, retaining people. There’s nothing in your academic career that prepares you for managing a business, so I think the challenges are always changing but that’s part of the fun, you get good at something and then there’s a new challenge.

What skills from academia do you think are useful in a business environment and what skills do you have to develop independently?

JH: So one thing that John and I probably both found that has been a blessing, it’s a bit of a curse at times too, is the attention to detail that we had to have in academia, where things have to be right and done with precision. I think that served us well for launching Overleaf, so when things get deployed we make sure we iron out bugs and go through as much as we can from a user perspective. I think the other thing is understanding the researcher workflow, we both wrote papers and then we wrote papers on writeLaTeX, so people who are using Overleaf, we kind of understand their mindset. I think the biggest thing that we didn’t have any experience of was the management aspect. You have to just keep making decisions and they’re not always right, but you have to make the decision and move on. That is something that academia can’t really prepare you for, unless you get really high up in academia and I never got that far!

JLM: The key thing that has helped is understanding why people write papers, what they go through, what problems they have. The biggest challenge is communicating that knowledge we’ve gained to all the other people we work with, who don’t have that, so the academic experience has definitely been helpful, but I haven’t actually optimized or derived any functions in quite a long time!

If there was someone out there, who had an idea for some tool or solution for a problem within the scholarly & academic space and they wanted to develop that idea, what would be your one piece of advice to them?

JH: If it’s a problem you’re solving which you have yourself then that’s a lot easier, because you already understand the problem. I think my biggest piece of advice would be work out what the minimum thing is you can build, build it, then get some feedback on it, see if people will actually use and if it actually solves your problem or not and do that as quickly as possible.

JLM: Think carefully about whether the problem that you’re solving is just an academic problem, or whether you could build a tool that would actually solve a larger problem, one that would also help academics. I think it’s important that there are tools, like Overleaf, that are very academic focussed, but I think in reality things like DropBox have probably had more of an impact on science than a lot of companies that set out to do something for science. Don’t limit your ambitions and the problems that you’re thinking of to just being science-based problems.

What would you say has been the value of being part of Digital Science, other than the money of course?

JH: We have a lot of experience of the researcher perspective, but we didn’t really understand the publisher and institutional perspectives, or know what challenges they face, so I think it helped us grow into solving problems for those stakeholders a lot quicker than we would have done on our own. Also being around a lot of other people who are working on similar problems, you get quicker validation, quicker feedback on stuff. We’ve also been able to hire Mary Anne and Shelley in the US and we have a developer in Romania, which I think would have been a lot harder to do without Digital Science

JLM: A lot of it is about the mentorship and the connections, people who’ve already tried to do similar things to you, they can point out obvious things that you should or shouldn’t do, that advice can be very short and succinct but yet very valuable. Being in an environment where it’s easy to get that kind of advice is very helpful.

JH: Those were all kind of internal things, but I think externally the credibility that Digital Science brings as a reputable company who are doing innovative things has helped us. When we’ve gone to publishers and institutions we’ve been able to demonstrate to them that we have the support of a wider company , so they’re more willing to trust that we’ll still be around and we know what we doing, which is very valuable, especially in getting the first customers.

Stay tuned for part two!