News - mikroElektronika celebrates 10th birthday! - December 12 2011 07:47:00 AM EST

mikroElektronika celebrates 10th birthday!

by Nebojša Matić | December 12, 2011

For the last decade we have been giving our best to bring microcontrollers to every engineer, student, hobbyist, professional and enthusiast. We are only here because of you.

Now when I look back, it is almost incredible how we managed not to disappear. So many things could've gone wrong, and only this fine balance of wise choices and love towards our work lead us through this incredible journey - from the one man idea to the world-known company.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"

Having only 200 Deutschmarks in my pocket, and a will of a lunatic, I began building my first development board. Those first home-made boards were soldered by hand. Preparing and soldering 10-wire flat cables were my specialty. I did it all with my nail-cutter :) I made one board per day. It took me 12 hours of work. Those first years I slept for 3 hours and wore only one sweater and one sweatpants which I washed once a week. This way I didn't loose time thinking on what to wear. I had to focus only on my work.

In following months, as sales have started to rise, we began building more new boards and EasyPIC was one of them. We had our first employees.

First $5.000 order

When mikroElektronika was founded first orders were processed over 2CO account of a friend from Australia. He was of great help. A complete stranger and a millionaire who liked us and our enthusiasm. He wrote an E-mail and offered to help us until we had our own 2CO. We accepted his help. Our world-wide audience accepted us very quickly. Our first big orders were from France and USA. You may imagine how drunk we got when we received our first $5.000 order from Lextronic, who is now our distributor. The same night I had a car accident and spent following 25 days in the hospital writing a book called "Introduction to PLC controllers". It was a major success and a top seller later on.

Writing our own Compilers

As crazy was to start a company with no money it was crazy to write our own compilers from scratch. We wanted to do something completely different, to give the world an alternative that was easy to use, friendly and powerful at the same time. mikroPascal, mikroBasic and later mikroC were exactly what embedded programmers needed. Easy to use, fast, with lots of tools, libraries, examples and they had a choice like nowhere else in the world - that they could choose between three popular languages: C, Basic and Pascal.

mikroElektronika today

Only someone with no experience could say that great companies are a result of one man's work. I once thought like that, and I was soon proven wrong. Company is not the money, the buildings, not even products. Company are people that work there. I often like to say that we are worth half a million dollars at 9PM in the evening, and 50 million dollars in 9AM in the morning. People are the real value. Creative and imaginative people can make anything. And they did.

What makes me really proud

We were the first company to have On-Board USB programmer (2003). Two years later, we were the first to put mikroICD - In-circuit Debugger on the board (2005). Today, we are the only company besides Microchip with our own proprietary code to have ICD support for all of Microchip microcontrollers. Two weeks from now, when we introduce new ARM compilers, we will be the company with largest number of embedded compilers in the world (18 of them). You can find our advertisements in more than 15 magazines every month. We have almost 400 products, 38 distributors world-wide, and our own factory for making those great products.

What's next?

This summer we bought a new building. Our plan is to expand production and to employ 100 new bright young people. Team of architects is working around the clock to make the coolest and refreshing new look of both exterior and interior. We plan to have full-grown orange trees in our offices, and lots of sunlight. We will continue to make great products and to bring electronics in everyday life of the people around the world.

Yours sincerely,
Nebojsa Matic,
CEO of mikroElektronika