Stefan Washietl, Co-Founder at Reference Management Software: Paperpile

Stefan Washietl

Paperpile was founded in 2012 by former researchers from MIT and the European Bioinformatics Institute — myself, Gregory Jordan, and Andreas Gruber— who share a passion for exceptional software and scientific papers.

Paperpile is a full-fledged reference management solution used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide. Paperpile helps researchers to collect, organize and cite their research papers. In 2018, we had the idea to bring the unique experience of our company to K12 and undergrad students. That’s when BibGuru was born. Our goal with BibGuru is to be the fastest, most accurate, and easy to use citation generator for students. With BibGuru students can focus on what’s really important – the quality of their content, instead of worrying about complicated citation rules.
 
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How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 

While working as active researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute and MIT, the three of us shared similar frustrations with the referencing management software available to researchers at the time.

Needing the collaborative and tech-forward capabilities to take your research with you anywhere you go, we felt we could introduce a better tool for researchers, by researchers. After a few years, we wanted to expand and bring our unique experience to K12 and undergrad students, so we built BibGuru, a citation generator for students, from scratch.

 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
As a remote-first company, Paperpile has been safe from many of the effects of the pandemic. Still, we have prepared several internal processes to ensure continuous delivery and taken on new staff to further expand our features and services.
 

What can we hope to see from Paperpile in the future?

 
At Paperpile, we’re always looking to be at the forefront of efficiency and optimization in academic research. While we can’t say too much yet, we are developing new ways to make research easier and more portable than ever before.