TwinLabs.ai Turns One: Highlights, Challenges, and Lessons

TwinLabs.ai is one year old!

12 months ago we launched TwinLabs.ai, spinning out from NTT, and bringing with us nearly a decade of experience innovating for major events like the Tour de France. Now, we’re standing on our own, building an exciting new company that we believe can change how live events and venues are managed.

So one year in, here are some reflections and learnings – and a glimpse of the exciting future ahead.

Your team, and teamwork is everything

Rob, Tim and I have worked together for 10 years. It’s fair to say we know each other pretty well, but I can’t understate how valuable it has been having a core team who trust each other, have each other’s backs, and can enjoy a laugh along the way.

In many ways a startup team is similar to a sports team - we all have different strengths and different roles to play. Rob is our deep thinker, designer and visionary. Tim is always experimenting with(and breaking) new tech and usually has at least 20 things on the go at once. And I try to steer a path through the chaos, balancing our future strategic vision and right here/right now pragmatism.

We’ve grown this year and are incredibly fortunate to be joined by individuals that share our passion and bring their own creativity and unique experience to the team.

One of the most refreshing aspects of starting a business is the ability to create your own rules for how you want to work and collaborate.

We’ve made conscious choices about the how we’d like to work as a remote-only team, and what collaboration tools make this easy.

For example, working in the open and having conversations on the right channel on slack rather than DM’s means that everyone is in the loop and encouraged to contribute and share ideas.

Bringing the team together in person is also a game-changer. Video calls are great, but there's an undeniable magic that happens when we can build real human connections. That’s why we’ve used TwinLabs.ai’s first birthday to bring the team together, toast our successes, and set ourselves up for an even more exciting year ahead.  

‍You’re moving faster than ever, but it’s never fast enough

One of the great advantages small startups have, is the ability to move at speed. We make quick decisions, with clear focus and energy. It’s exhilarating and rewarding to see how much we have achieved in a short space of time.  But at the same time, it feels like we are never moving fast enough. We know where we want to be, and we’re impatient to get there. “Are we there yet???”
 
As founders, we have to wear many hats: business admin, finance, HR, tax,legal, investor, business development, marketing, etc. They are all important things, but they can easily distract us from the main game, which is building a product that is valuable to our customers and getting it in their hands.

One practice that we have found useful is identifying key business milestones and be constantly asking ourselves, “Will this get us to that milestone?” and if not, “Do we really need to do it now?” Maintaining a strong focus on these key targets has helped us avoid getting too distracted by the many good things we could be doing and move faster as a result.

‍There is no such thing as failure, only learning

Fortunately, we knew going into this that we would make lots of mistakes, make decisions that we would regret, and have to throw things away and start again.

The simple reality is that we’re doing something that no-one has ever done before, which is super exciting, but also means there are no perfect playbooks. We’ve been doing our best to be students of the industry, experiment with new tech, and make sense of the often-conflicting advice out there. But at the end of the day, we must pick a course of action, and recognise that sometimes it doesn’t work as we had planned.

We have seen this most clearly in the tech space. The tools and technologies we are working with such as AI, spatial computing, real time data pipelines and IoT are changing rapidly, and the tools are often not yet fully baked. We also know, having worked in live events, that you have to test things in real life, and that is when you really find out what is going to break. 

Being able to work with some fantastic pilot customers has helped us to learn so much about what works, and what doesn’t. (Thank you 🙏)

Innovation can’t stop

I am convinced that we are at a pivotal point in history. The increasing pace of technology innovation, particularly AI, means we need to start imagining the future we want to create (and the future we don’t want to create). We deliberately chose to include “.ai” in our name, because we could not imagine a future where a next generation product like ours was not AI native.  

We have been working with AI and machine learning for many years, but like everyone, we have been astounded at how quickly large language models likeGPT-4o have evolved and what they have shown to be capable of.

This offers a massive opportunity for a startup like ours to use these capabilities throughout our product, but also a huge challenge to stay across the pace of change, and ensure we are positioned to take advantage of the latest innovations.

Here’s how we’re managing this challenge:

1. We’re embedding AI in our daily work, using it to make us more efficient, and learning by doing.
2. We are architecting our platform with an eye to future AI capabilities that we believe will radically change the way software is developed and used.
3. We are creating space for ourselves and our team to learn and experiment.  

‍Take time to celebrate the wins

When you’re moving so fast, it can be hard to appreciate progress amidst the rush to the next goal. But it is important to pause, appreciate what you’ve achieved, and celebrate the team that got you there.  

For us it looks something like this:

1. We created a new company!
2. We’ve continued to work closely with our friends at NTT Data to deliver tech innovation at the Tour de France and Tour de France Femme avec Zwift.  
3. We have built a really cool new platform – which we can’t wait to show you!  
4. We have partnered with some fantastic pilot customers
5. We won the Confluent Data Streaming Startup Challenge!
6. We have built a fantastic team

Definitely time to pop the champagne!

So, what’s next?

Here’s what’s top of our list right now:  

• We’ll be working with NTT Data to deliver our 10th Tour de France, and 3rd Tour de France Femme avec Zwift. Make sure to look out for all the live data, and race insights in July.  
• We’re trialling some new key features on the Twinlabs.ai platform for our pilot customers.
• We’re looking forward to bringing on the next batch of event, and venue customers. Please connect with me if you’d like to be included.  
• We’ll also be looking to raise seed funding to officially launch our digital twin platform in early 2025. If you’re an investor in this space – please reach out, we’d love to chat.

One year in, I can honestly say it has been a brilliant ride, and I can only thank the many people who helped us get started, offered advice, connected us with people they know, allowed us to test our pitch deck on them, and offered encouragement along the way. I won’t try to name them all, but they know who they are. Thank You!
 
Still so much to do, but TwinLabs.ai is well and truly off and running.

Give us a follow on LinkedIn and join us for the ride!  

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