20 Years of GemBox, Madrid Edition

GemBox just celebrated its first 20 years!

You might be surprised that, although we have 7000+ customers and seven products, the entire GemBox team consists of just eight people. Even better, two of those eight people are founders (Josip and Zel), so the actual work gets done by only six people. A few of them have been with GemBox for more than a decade: Stipo 15+ years, Mario 12+ years, Marko 10 years, Marek 7+ years, Ercan 3+ years, and Mauricio 1 year. The founders had to pay for this work injustice by financing our first international gathering in Madrid. Since GemBox is a 100% remote company, we had colleagues flying from Czechia, Brazil, Turkey, and Croatia, meeting for the first time.

So, let us share a few mementos and funnies from 2005 to 2025.

This was GemBox website in 2005:

Yeah, we know. That was fashionable at the time.

In 2008 we rented a physical office in Palinovečka 19a:

That was both our first and last office. We thought that getting a physical space and fancy furniture would make us a more serious company. It didn’t. We were still learning the business of software and released products like Wise Pay-Per-Click Editor, which made exactly $0 (zero) in revenue:

In 2011 we decided that business focus was more important than fancy vision or office. So we canceled PPC products and our office. Josip started the remote work era by moving to his village on Krk, while Zel celebrated by working remotely from Thailand:

Remote work forced us to use proper project management tools, version control, and document all processes. It paid off and we started churning out products:

2012-02-06: GemBox.Document

2014-02-26: TestDome.com MVP (now a separate company)

2016-02-25: GemBox.Email

2016-11-30: GemBox.Presentation

2017-01-19: GemBox.Bundle

2017-12-27: GemBox.Pdf

2018-09-27: GemBox.Spreadsheet for Java (now retired)

2022-11-17: GemBox.Imaging

2024-10-23: GemBox.PdfViewer

Productive years indeed.

Now to 2025 and our Madrid gathering:

We learned that some of our tech didn’t change much in 20 years:

Stipo’s justification: “It loads our new website, why would I need a better phone? And it was able to transfer photos via Bluetooth better than your iPhone 15 😀”

Zel was excited about Duck Hunt:

So much so that everyone got a customized duck:

And everyone was excited about the company presentation:

Founders tried to destroy the company by buying everyone lottery tickets for a shared winning pool. The jackpot was 185M EUR, so 23M EUR per employee (before taxes). Imagine the founders’ delight when the results came in:

In the end, Stipo submitted a nice summary of work from that week:

Big thanks to all of the people who supported us, including but not limited to: Hercezi Promet, Citus, ImpactHUB, HUB385, Blagonic Brothers, Microsoft Croatia, FastSpring, TestDome, SmartVision and former colleagues Nenad, Damir and Samantha.