‘If we don’t please our customers, we don’t get to the next month!’ He’s also turned down several buyout offers, preferring to remain his own boss.

‘We started with the product, and our creativity has been used to grow the company – we have been cashflow-positive from the moment I started selling ChemDoodle back in 2008,’ Theisen says. ‘The company is growing, and I have hired several people this year – we now have 10 employees from all over the world – but I do still try to do as much of the creative part as I possibly can.’ Word of mouthĬhemDoodle’s early success ensured that iChemLabs remains solely Theisen’s interest – no venture capital or other outside investment has been required. ‘Each new problem that comes around is more challenging than the previous one, and it’s both exciting and fun,’ he adds.

‘It was a difficult choice, but the right one for myself and the company.’Īs well as managing the company, Thiesen continues to program. ‘After a year, I wrote up an MSc, and started running the company full time,’ he says. But he soon realised that pursuing a PhD and running a company are both full-time occupations. Labware to softwareĪfter graduation, Theisen headed out west to work on simulation methods with Berend Smit at the University of California, Berkeley. He developed the ChemDoodle chemical drawing software, which gained a lot of support in the chemistry community, and the company iChemLabs was born – all while he was still an undergraduate. ‘I released them online for free, and the response I got was phenomenal – it gave me the enthusiasm to mix a software career with chemistry.’ Over the next couple of years, Theisen’s interest in chemistry software tools grew. ‘I created an application to draw a molecule, and then simulate its proton and 13C NMR spectra,’ he says.

Theisen particularly enjoyed Heinz Roth’s course on spectroscopy, and realised spectra are essentially puzzles to reveal chemical structures – a problem ripe for computational deduction. ‘It’s trying to apply what research has taught us to computers to optimise the way things are done in the lab, or the way we create content for chemistry. During his undergraduate studies, Theisen increasingly spent his free time programming, and realised that software development is seen as a service for the research community, rather than considered a science in its own right.

Chemdoodle online