Adam KeatingCo Founder

Canada - St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

Outside of family, nothing meant more to my Dad than being an engineer.

In high school my Dad was battling cancer and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I chose engineering to be like him.

For the first semester, I hated it. The second semester was better and my first work term changed everything. I knew that this was the career I needed - it’d allow me to be a professional problem solver.

During that first work term, I lost Dad to his battle with cancer. I became obsessed with engineering at that point and it fueled me to do things that would have an impact he’d be proud of.

In 2015 I joined Paradigm Hyperloop to compete in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Hyperloop competition when the concept was nothing more than a napkin sketch. Two years, thousands of hours and many failures later, a team of students from a remote island in the Atlantic and Boston had outperformed 1200 teams and came second in the world.

During that time I worked on several multi-billion dollar energy projects and patented an electric aircraft engine (US11059599B2). I also had the opportunity of a lifetime to honor my Dad by contributing to RefleXion Medical’s biology guided radiotherapy machine in the fight against metastatic cancer.

Throughout each of these experiences it was clear though that innovating new complex products was way harder than it should be. All of my friends building software products seemed to have solved these problems decades ago and moved 10X faster.

Every time a group of engineers had to make a decision, the tools available to collaborate slowed us down. File sharing was complex. It was hard to keep track of feedback and revisions, leading to missed mistakes and wasted time.

Meanwhile, Jeremy - my close friend and hyperloop partner - was experiencing exactly the same thing. At Tesla no less. If industry leading companies were feeling this pain, how much worse could it be for everyone else?

That’s when we realized the true impact of this problem - it was slowing life changing technology from getting to market by years. So we left Silicon Valley, moved back to Newfoundland and started CoLab.

Now, we’re building the world’s first Design Engagement System to help engineering teams deliver better products, faster.

Learn more at colabsoftware.com