Startup Spotlight #94: CoLab

CoLab Software simplifies design review that lets teams build the future—faster.

Mar 05, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Adam Keating, co-founder and CEO of CoLab, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

CoLab was founded in 2017 with the mission of helping engineering teams build better solutions, faster. Today, CoLab helps industry leaders ranging from high growth startups to Fortune 500’s cut their review cycles by more than 50%, eliminate costly mistakes, and deliver better solutions through its proprietary Lean Engineering Agile Design Review (LEADR) software. CoLab is a Canadian company, venture-backed by some of the top Canadian and Silicon Valley Investors as Atlantic Canada’s first Y Combinator company.

Adam is one of the co-founders and the CEO of CoLab - a St. John's based company setting the standard for agile engineering design review and issue tracking. Adam is a Mechanical Engineer and previously worked on one of the world's first hyperloop vehicles, an electric propulsion system for large-scale aircraft, a biology-guided radiotherapy system, and several multi-billion dollar energy projects. His passion for giving engineering teams a better set of tools to do their job motivated him to move from being a mechanical engineer to building solutions for mechanical engineers and their teams.

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Startup Spotlight: CoLab

Adam Keating, cofounder and CEO of CoLab.

Problem: The hardware engineering world is two decades behind the software engineering world, forcing engineers and their teams to waste more than half their time on manual work, work with incorrect data and overlook critical errors. The market for CAD/PLM technology is very mature as a system of record, but the day-to-day collaboration systems are hacked together with internal solutions or repurposed generic solutions that cause engineers to do extra work, not automate work for them.

Market: CoLab was built for engineering teams building complex products in the manufacturing world - globally the market is $14B USD and expanding quickly as the demand for collaboration and remote work solutions grows.

Solution: CoLab is a collaborative design review and issue tracking solution to help engineering teams efficiently collaborate, slash review cycles, build higher quality products and do what they do best - innovate. Think Jira and the Github PR process for hardware engineering.

Team: CoLab is a Canadian company (located on an island in St. John’s, NL) venture backed by some of the top Canadian and Silicon Valley Investors as Atlantic Canada’s first Y Combinator company. We’ve grown to 30 people this year and are actively hiring 12 more, with expectations to be double our size by YE 2021.

Recent Success:

Keating: Listening to customers. We’ve made a million small mistakes with our product, market positioning, sales, and strategy, but we’ve always been super close to our users and it’s helped us build a product that is now shaping the way engineering teams work. Our customers are put first in almost every decision and we always try and put ourselves in their shoes - by doing so, we have become focused on building solutions to problems and not features. We view ourselves as partners to our customers and we put value in them trusting and believing in us. In doing this, we’ve learned what they like, and more importantly what they don’t like, and have been able to iterate and grow much faster. In the last few months this has really paid off for us - one customer saved 2600 hours of drawing review time (51% of the overall time) and another identified millions of dollars of cost savings - all using the same design review engine.

Recent Struggle:

Keating: Being laser-focused and saying “no” is very hard, but it’s mission-critical. Honestly, it’s been one of my personal biggest challenges. Failing to be laser-focused makes everything else impossible as a small team. Who do you sell to? Which feature is most important? What marketing language do we use? The list goes on and on. CoLab is a vertical SaaS solution for manufacturing and there are so many problems in this space that it’s VERY easy to get pulled in a million different directions - all of a sudden you aren’t building a SaaS business anymore. We’ve found ourselves most vulnerable when we chase after massive enterprises too early without solving the core problem. Over the last year, we’ve become much more disciplined in what we do, what we will do in the future, and what we will never do. Telling a key customer “hey this will be in 2022, let’s reconnect then” is way better than chasing a bunch of related, but different paths and never really making anyone super happy. The big customer who waited will be there in 2022, and they respect you for delivering on your word.

Founder Advice:

Keating: Build the right team - don’t cut corners at any cost! It’s so easy at the beginning when funding is tight and you “need to ship a product” to be tempted to hire people that don’t align with the company mission or values but are technical fits. Do not do it - it will be a short-term win, but long-term pain! Picking an amazing co-founder and an early group of employees is a moat that you will really appreciate when times get tough and you try to scale. I’ve been super lucky to have Jeremy as a co-founder and an amazing team - without them, CoLab would have failed in 2018. A number of entrepreneurs shared this with me when we started and it’s saved us so many headaches as I watch other startups I know the struggle because they don’t have the right team.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Keating: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Li-an Delos Reyes, Founder of Milksta: Milksta innovates healthy lactation brews designed to help nursing & pumping moms naturally boost their breastmilk supply through plant-based lactogenic food ingredients.
Brett Vokey, Founder of BreatheSuite: BreatheSuite’s mission is to allow patients to use their inhaler properly without the need for separate training devices.
Scott Stevenson, Founder of Rally: Rally is a web app where users can manage their contracts and company’s legal documents in a frictionless manner and entirely on the cloud.

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