CEO Spotlight on GoPubMed’s Dr. Michael R. Alvers
This week our CEO Spotlight shines on Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO of GoPubMed. Dr. Alvers has extensive management experience in various high-tech companies in positions such as Bioinformatics Director, Product Marketing Director and Business and Product Development Director. In addition, he has considerable experience managing large software projects. He is the initiator and creator of Proteomweaver, an award-winning software package for biological image analysis. He has total responsibility for the company’s strategic business direction, corporate finances and staffing.
Dr. Alvers received a Masters degree in Geophysics and holds a Ph.D. in Geophysics, both from the Free University of Berlin. He has studied and worked in Berlin, Stanford, Munich and La Plata, Argentina. He has attended and conducted various expeditions to the Central Andes and to the North Pole and also holds a private pilot’s license.
Welcome, Dr. Alvers. Please Tell me about GoPubMed, GoWeb and Transinsight … What is the the evolution/structure of your organization? How/when did you found Transinsight and what came next? When was GoPubMed founded and how was it funded?
In 2004 I met Dr. Michael Schroeder at the semantic web conference at MIT in Boston. He gave a talk on GoPubMed and semantic search in the Life Sciences. At that time I was pushing Groupweaver, a Folksonomy platform with shared dashboards. We soon found out that the two products would be an ideal combination for scientists – especially for scientists working in early stage pharma developments. We created a business plan and raised seed funding and secured a private investor. Once we raised enough money, we got started here in Dresden, Germany in November 2005. Since then we’ve developed rather quickly. Today we are 16 people and already profitable.
What is GoPubMed’s mission? Who are competitors in this space?
Our mission is to create the next generation search engine for the life sciences, which makes search much better than it was/is today. We are working to realize our vision “towards answering questions,” meaning to ease the process of getting answers. Although GoPubMed is the only semantic search engine on the web which works like ours – left tree for your own ranking / filtering and statistical overview of the search space – there are other companies targeting the same market. But I must say that our USPs are strong. Unilever saw that two years ago. Others are jumping on now. Though, good technology based on eight years of research is difficult to beat.
Where are you based? Do you have offices in other countries as well?
We are based in Dresden, Germany a rather small city with half a million inhabitants but with a great spirit! I like to compare Dresden with Stanford – where I spent one year as research scientist – and MIT. Not in the numbers and quality of publications – or even impact factors, but – like I said – in spirit. For instance, Dresden’s highly motivated teachers and students. Our friend and partner Professor Michael Schroeder is 37 years young and has been published in more than 120 publications– that’s amazing! We are working hard … and if we continue to be successful our next office will be in Palo Alto!
Please talk about being an internationally focused business.
Our customers and users cover the whole world. We have to be international since the search engine is used from literally every country worldwide.
Do you think it’s possible to communicate effectively across so many borders (and languages)? What’s the key to being successful in the international space.
To be clear: the language of our search engine is English. 95% of all articles are published in English. Although we do have customers asking for multilingual support – like navigating the ontology in English with Russian translations in the background and getting results in Russian. The advantage there is tremendous! Assume you’d get 50,000 search results in a language you cannot understand. You are dead immediately. By using our navigation tree – the ontology – to narrow results down in your own language (!) to let’s say 10 – it helps a lot. And then you translate these 10 because you can be sure that they are relevant for your search. To summarize: for a small company like ours to be internationally successful, you have to try harder to understand customer needs.
Who is your target user? Who is using GoPubMed now?
Today our target users are researchers in the life sciences and medical doctors interested in scientific research. These are also the users of GoPubMed today. Here is a partial list of corporations using GoPubMed: Unilever, Glaxo Smith Cline, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth, L’Oreal – literally the Who’s Who of Pharma and drug development, and also big research institutions like Stanford University, MIT, LMU in Munich and Harvard.
How are you marketing GoPubMed and getting the word out?
Our marketing is GoPubMed itself! It’s free of charge and people can check on our quality. Most people try us online and then approach us to obtain more information on customized solutions. The key here is what I’d call advanced simplicity. Meaning– having it as simple as Google while avoiding automated ranking. In GoPubMed the user is in the driver position by navigating the left tree (which can be seen as a table of contents). That’s simple enough in itself, but also offers time savings so that people adapt to the concept.
Do you have a marketing budget?
Yes, but we don’t spend too much on marketing anymore since GoPubMed seems to market itself. Ten years ago Google did not market much either – as far as I remember. They were just good – better than AltaVista. I hope we can continue that way.
Some personal questions: Please tell us where you were born/raised/do you have siblings, paint a picture of your early years.
I was born in Dresden, former East Germany and became a porcelain maker in 1983 (handcraftsmanship) at Meißen. I was not allowed to visit the high school for political reasons so I learned something practical. No siblings. Just me.
Have you always been on the same professional track (in other words, have all your endeavours been leading up to this)? What did you want to be when you grew up?
No, not really. I always wanted to become a pilot, but since I grew up in former East Germany becoming a pilot was only possible via the military. A NO GO for me under that political regime. Therefore I left Dresden in 1986 to West Berlin. This was three years before the wall came down. I studied physics at the Free University of Berlin and got a Ph.D. in geophysics. During my work I got into model optimization. I used evolutionary techniques and started working with biology. Great stuff! Then I worked in Munich for 6 years with Gerd Binnig (Nobel Laureate physics in 1986) at Definiens. A great company with great vision and – today – a powerful image analysis software for biomedical images. It was during this time that I learned to appreciate the complexity of biological systems. Finally I ended up running a company and creating a new search engine… I always liked what I was working on and that’s always been most important to me. By the way I made my dream come true by getting a FAA private pilot license from the Stanford Flying Club.
How did you and (your wife and partner) Dr. Liliana Barrio-Alvers meet?
We met in (West) Berlin where she got her Ph.D. in the same institute as I did. Than I went to Stanford and she went back to Buenos Aires to become professor for geophysics. Some years later I was heading an expedition in the central Andes in Chile where Liliana participated as a scientist … well, then some time later we got married 
What’s the long term vision for GoPubMed? Is it a resource for lay consumers or primarily science professionals?
Our long-term vision is to ease the process of answering questions as said above. We do not only focus on the life sciences, as you might see from our customer list, and hope to also get a share of semantic knowledge-based search. We are also working on the lay customer version not only because we know that the market is huge but also that we think that our technology could be of great use to people with (for instance) high blood pressure or who want to find out the latest insights about aspirin in the context of heart disease. All of that is easily possible within our infrastructure, but still too difficult for someone like my father. 
Also a big new field for us is branded under the slogan “Together We Search Think and Write.” We now have a platform á la Facebook or LinkedIn for scientists. Collaboration, community and communication are the future, in my humble opinion. I expect a small revolution – not only on our site – in coming years, when the “Wiki-idea” is extended to knowledge networks and the collaboratively creation of agents “doing something useful on the semantic web.” Tim was early – as many big thinkers are. But a much more semantic web will come. There is no other alternative.
Natalya Murakhver is a freelance writer/PR consultant based in New York City.
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