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October 29, 2013 11:39 pm GMT

ResearchGate: Forget About Revenue Until The Network Is Valuable Enough To Command It

ijad-madischResearchGate’s Ijad Madisch 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 the 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. Madisch went his own way, ultimately relocating back to Germany to build the company. Today on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin with Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, he shared a few nuggets of wisdom from his path so far. “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. The pair really synced on the idea that ResearchGate needed to put off building a revenue model in favor of focusing on product and generating network effects. 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 1300 data sets uploaded every few days, had led to a few breakthroughs. There was a Nigerian scientist named Emmanuel Nnadi, who was studying pathogens and found a baby in a local hospital who had died in 28 days. The cause of death was a mystery. Nnadi collected samples but had no equipment to

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kKIRGHrVvUI/

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