The idea behind MindMeister was first devised when the two founders, Michael Hollauf and Till Vollmer, were working together using Writely, which had been recently acquired by Google Docs,[7] and the mind mapping tool MindManager. At the time, MindManager had to be installed locally, which made it hard to share mind maps externally or with anyone who had not installed the software. While using Google Docs and MindManager together, the idea was born to combine the two, forming a collaborative online mind mapping tool which could be easily shared and edited, via the cloud.