Victor Henning Keeps Getting Distracted by Useful Things

Victor Henning opened a café and bar opposite his business school, then left town the day after opening night. He had a Ph.D. to start in Weimar. Other people would get the pleasure of drinking in the place; he had already enjoyed the paperwork. It is a small episode in a career with two company sales, but it supplies a useful warning about its protagonist. Give Henning something interesting to make and he may be halfway to the next project before the glasses are dry.

Mendeley, the research software company he co-founded with Jan Reichelt and Paul Föckler in 2007, made his name. Elsevier acquired it in 2013. Fjorden, his later venture in iPhone photography, became part of Leica. His current project, Snapkick, teaches taekwondo forms. Put the businesses side by side and the career appears to have taken several wrong turnings. Follow the problems that prompted them and the route becomes easier to read.

Each began with an activity he already cared about and an irritation he could describe precisely. Papers were difficult to organize. A phone camera lacked satisfying controls. A martial arts video showed a movement from the wrong angle. The interests changed. His willingness to leave the inconvenience alone did not.

02Before the bibliography, a bass guitar

Born in Hamburg in 1980, Henning had ambitions that were considerably louder than reference management. At sixteen he wanted his own record label. He worked at Sony Music in Berlin and Revelation Records in Huntington Beach. A teenage tribute band, drawing on Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, supplied another possible career path. He later remembered that the bass guitar had failed to deliver the romantic advantages he had expected.

Business studies took him through Koblenz, Brussels and Oslo. Film production attracted him next, including work at a production company in Munich. In Oslo in 2002, he wrote his first academic paper, on European film funding policy, and discovered that he enjoyed research. At Bauhaus University Weimar he pursued a doctorate while also getting involved in short films and a film lecture series.

The doctorate examined consumer decision-making. Here was someone studying how people choose while steadily accumulating evidence of how many choices one person can make. The musical enthusiasm and film work also complicate the familiar picture of a software founder emerging directly from a computer science department. Henning arrived with experience of audiences, creative work and academic habits. Eventually those interests would find themselves sharing a product roadmap.

03A library with other people in it

The first problem was domestic by academic standards: hundreds of downloaded papers, too much clerical work, and no agreeable way to keep documents attached to their bibliographic information. Henning and his co-founders wanted software that would extract those details automatically. A researcher should be able to spend more time with an argument and less time teaching a file its own name.

They also saw a second possibility. Combine information from many personal libraries and a reference manager could reveal connections between papers and between readers. Henning described the analogy as Last.fm for research. Listening habits helped people discover music; reading patterns might help them discover scholarship. The private utility came first, with a network forming around its use.

There were some unusually good connections behind this idea. Stefan Glänzer, associated with Last.fm, became an early backer. And the first London office came through Föckler’s work on Michael Palin’s travel website. Palin let the startup use the unused top floor of his production office in Covent Garden. A trip for copier paper could involve encountering a Spanish Inquisition wind-up puppet. Research administration rarely offers such distinguished comic timing.

The scale arrived quickly. In August 2012, Mendeley was approaching two million users and held 270 million uploaded documents. Those uploads were not all different papers: the deduplicated collection was about 65 million documents. That distinction matters. The achievement was gathering researchers around a shared tool, rather than discovering hundreds of millions of previously unknown publications.

Henning’s own academic training kept him close to the task. He understood the work of finding, sorting and using research from the inside. His company could discuss networks and databases with investors, then return to the ordinary question a user would ask: can I find the paper I was reading?

04When the buyer became part of the argument

Elsevier announced its acquisition of Mendeley on April 9, 2013. For users attached to open scholarship, the identity of the buyer mattered as much as the transaction. Henning’s team had to explain why a company associated with sharing should join a large academic publisher. The deal made a business question into an argument about what the business stood for.

The founders described a relationship with Elsevier that had already included cooperation and disagreement. Some parts of the publisher had challenged Mendeley; others had supported conferences or worked with its technology. Their case for the sale rested on combining a useful platform with content, resources and existing relationships. Free storage doubled to two gigabytes when the acquisition was announced.

Henning handled some of the criticism with the vocabulary of a former teenage science fiction enthusiast. When comparisons with the Galactic Empire appeared, he recalled playing both X-Wing and TIE Fighter. He then addressed concerns about data use and explained his additional position as Elsevier’s vice president of strategy. The jokes did not settle the argument. They did show a founder prepared to answer in his own voice.

His stated ambition remained to make research more collaborative and open. The disagreement exposed a difficulty that follows founders into acquisitions: people can depend on a product and also care deeply about who controls it. A sale changes both relationships, even when the software still opens the same files.

“When you’re a founder, everything seems important.”

Victor Henning, reflecting on product focus in 2021

05A button worth coming back for

Photography had a longer history in Henning’s life than software. Fjorden traces his attachment to cameras to 1983, when he was three and became fascinated by his father’s Rollei 35. Years of photographing with dedicated cameras followed. By the time the iPhone was producing pictures he wanted to keep, using it could still feel less satisfying than holding a camera designed around the hand.

Fjorden, founded in Oslo in 2020, gave that dissatisfaction a physical form. The grip added camera controls to an iPhone, bringing buttons and a dial back under the photographer’s fingers. Its purpose was easy to grasp because the inconvenience was easy to recognize. Touchscreens are versatile. A photographer adjusting a setting while watching a scene has other priorities.

Working with the industrial designers at Frost Produkt, Henning moved through cardboard models, 3D prints and user testing. A slim shape had to accommodate electronics and remain comfortable to hold. Pocketability imposed a useful discipline. A grip left behind because it was inconvenient to carry would have failed before the first photograph.

Mendeley had taught him something about limits. He later described the strain of building across operating systems while also developing networking, mobile and data features. Fjorden initially concentrated on iOS. “When you’re a founder, everything seems important,” he said. Experience had given him a reason to distrust the apparent urgency of every opportunity.

By June 2024, Leica reported that 15,000 Fjorden grips had been sold. The company had also won a 2022 iF Design Award and registered three patents. These are different kinds of evidence: customers had bought the object, designers had recognized it, and the company had developed protectable ideas. None requires pretending that a phone accessory had replaced the camera.

06Leica, with a few lines of code added

The second acquisition carried a personal pleasure the first could hardly have duplicated. Leica had been an influence on Fjorden’s design. Now the company was buying the business. Henning said the transaction closed in December 2023; the public announcement followed in June 2024, alongside the launch of the jointly developed Leica LUX iPhone camera app.

The collaboration had begun in early 2023. Fjorden brought experience with apps and accessories; Leica contributed expertise in image processing and image quality. Henning became head of product for Leica LUX while continuing as Fjorden’s CEO at the time of the announcement. The arrangement connected the tactile concerns of a small accessory maker with a camera company he had long admired.

He described photography as something he had loved since childhood. That makes the sale more intelligible than the usual sequence of funding rounds and exit announcements. The boy captivated by a camera’s controls had built something its adult admirers could use. The company behind one of his reference points wanted his team’s contribution to its future.

A photograph of Henning at home on Nesodden catches the mixture neatly: books, a guitar, a dog and a camera, with Henning reflected in a mirror holding his phone. The product is in his hand. The interests that brought him to it are distributed around the room.

07Eight angles on the next problem

Snapkick takes the story onto a different floor. Henning holds a second-dan black belt and trains at Nesodden Taekwondo Club, across the fjord from Oslo. Here, too, he wanted a tool for something he actually did. Learning a sequence of movements from a single camera view leaves the student trying to reconstruct what the body is doing on the other side.

The app presents seventeen taekwondo forms demonstrated by world champion Eva Sandersen. Eight synchronized camera angles let the learner change viewpoint without losing their place. Movements can be studied step by step; spoken instructions support practice without constantly looking at the screen. Its catalogue includes both colour-belt and black-belt forms.

The connection to Mendeley is less surprising than the distance between a bibliography and a turning kick suggests. Both involve learning from material that exists but is awkward to use. Organizing the information changes what someone can do with it. Fjorden addressed a related gap between a capable device and a person trying to use it comfortably.

Henning’s next product began where his earlier ones did, with a repeated experience that could be improved. A founder who has sold two companies might reasonably spend more time enjoying his hobbies. He appears to have found a loophole: keep the hobbies, then make the missing equipment. Somewhere, presumably, there is still a perfectly serviceable bar that he never quite got to enjoy.