Roots and Boots: The history of sociomantic labs

Roots and Boots is the story of where sociomantic labs came from, how we got here, and where we’re heading next. This is the first installment of a three-part series we’ll publish over the next few weeks.

Our humble beginnings. Don't worry, we've painted (and moved) since then.

That said, let’s start at the beginning — the Roots of sociomantic labs.

Roots in Books: Our Academic Start

Put simply, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai go way back. Eight years to be exact. The pair met when working  at the Institute for Electronic Business, an affiliate institute of the Universität der Künste Berlin, where both were completing Diplom degrees in electronic business. According to Nicolai, this was a pretty raucous time to be living and studying in Berlin; nightlife aside, they had the incredible opportunity to learn from the best in the biz, digital visionaries like  Axel Zerdick and Joseph Weizenbaum.

“Everybody had a story to tell,” Nicolai recalls.  “We were truly taught by the pioneers of the digital revolution.”

At the Institute for Electronic Business they had a professor from the University St. Gallen in Switzerland, one of Europe’s premier economics universities. Their connections with this professor eventually led both scholars to pursue PhDs as research associates at the Institute of Media and Communication Management at St. Gallen. While Nicolai focused on scalable search technologies, Kirchhoff explored the world of information retrieval and social network analysis, and from their research emerged the academic groundwork that would one day lead to the birth sociomantic labs.

As a part of his research fellowship at St. Gallen, Nicolai designed a search platform for all of the research papers written at the university. This project would be the inspiration for his thesis, which focused on compiling the web’s wide research offerings into one centralized search portal. In 2006, the combined research of Kirchhoff and Nicolai resulted in the their first collaborative project, the ScientificCommons, a highly successful academic search platform for research repositories worldwide. Today the site gets more than two million unique visitors per month.

A Missing Piece

After the creation of the ScientificCommons, the pair began to dream up the possibilities for starting a company together. Although their ideas seemed enticing, there was still a little something missing — namely, a team member who could get their product into the hands of companies that could use it — so they put their business concept on the back burner for a couple of years. In the meantime, Kirchhoff stayed busy managing digideep, the web’s largest underwater photography community, a site he created in 2001. Nicolai would soon begin his work as the Director of Web Services at zanox in Berlin, where he was responsible for developing the company’s backbone web service from the ground up.

It was at zanox that Nicolai would discover the missing piece to the sociomantic puzzle: sales guy Thomas Brandhoff. The major component that was missing from the business idea was a way to actually generate revenue, and this is where Brandhoff would come in. As the Global Industry Manager for zanox, Brandhoff led an international sales and management team — experience that would be vital to the success of a young company. After they were introduced by mutual friend Dr. Florian Resatsch, Nicolai began to press Brandhoff to join the team.

“I tell you, it was hard to get him out of zanox,” Nicolai remembers with a grin, “but at the end I didn’t give him a choice.”

Labs, at Last

In 2009, our three musketeers were first united under the sociomantic banner. Their journey together began with a week-long strategy meeting in Appenzell, Switzerland. After many, many hours of tactical meetings and a seemingly infinite number of flip-chart pages, the company began to take shape. The trio took a challenging hike through the beautiful surrounding mountain scenery up to Hirschberg, a scenic test of wills to make sure that the team match was really one that could last through the inevitable trials of starting a business.

Charting and graphing and plans, oh my!

It was after this meeting that they began the actual development of the sociomantic social graph. They had yet to prove to themselves, much less to everyone else, that their idea could hold water. Driven by the belief that the data collection methods and analytics used to create the graph were best in class, all three left their current positions and dove into the risk, heart and soul.

After several months of web crawling and analytics, the sociomantic database had collected information on more than 30 million individuals. In a comparison of our automatically-generated data to the organically grown social network data from the Xing website, they found more than 80% overlap, a sure sign the sociomantic systems were doing just what they were designed to do. The creators stepped back to look at all they had made, and they saw that it was good.

But that doesn’t mean they got a moment’s rest! There was still much work to be done, but at last our heroes could rest a little easier  in the assurance that they had  not just an idea, but a good one.

That’s part of the beauty of being a bootstrapped company. Although bootstrapping entails a great deal of risk (and many sleepless nights), nothing can compare to the feeling of having done what you set out to do, and done it all without the help (or handling) of investors. Next week we’ll be back to a little talk more about why we chose to bootstrap, and what bootstrapping means to us.