Overleaf: The founder's perspective on reaching four million users worldwide, and what lies ahead

3 Jul 2019, 09:45
30m
31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre

CERN

105
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Speakers

Ms Harriet Walsh (Overleaf)Dr John Hammersley (Overleaf)

Description

Overleaf is a collaborative, cloud-based writing platform with over 3.9 million users worldwide as of early 2019. It's helping to make the process of writing, editing and publishing scientific documents quicker and easier for students, teachers and researchers alike.

Overleaf was founded by two mathematicians in 2012. They had been working on a project involving many partners to build autonomous cars, and work between team members had been challenging. So they built a light-weight, LaTeX-based collaboration system and used it for writing their research papers. It was simple to use - all you needed was a web browser.

Overleaf has since seen rapid adoption across science and research, and its market-leading collaboration technology is now in use in universities, labs and industry worldwide. These include major institutions such as Stanford and Caltech, with Overleaf becoming an important part not only of research collaborations but also of undergraduate teaching.

Most recently, Overleaf acquired its nearest competitor ShareLaTeX, and their combined team has worked together to build an even stronger next-generation platform to take collaborative writing to the next level.

Presentation materials