Why I joined Electric Twin
About the Author
Yoanna is a member of the technical team at Electric Twin. Her background is in Physics with a MSc in AI from Imperial. In her free time, Yoanna can be found hiking through the Himalayas at +5000m, or scuba-diving at -30m. She's currently at the top of the Electric Twin tennis league.
In my spare time I develop quant trading strategies for the sports markets. I love quant trading because you have to continuously work to gain an edge. You need to keep out-innovating everybody else to make it to the top. It’s just like startups in that sense. I did this for some time but felt it lacked a human element. I thought - joining a startup looks fun and it would fit my skills well. Because I loved what I was doing with sports trading, finding a company and idea I really cared about would be hard.
As I was interviewing with people, many of the ideas seemed inorganic and forced - as if people were trying hard to find a problem to solve. When I came across Electric Twin, most of the information that I found about the founders, Ben and Alex, was scattered across witness statements from the Covid enquiries. It was a great resource to understand them as people - not everybody gets to read their founders’ life story written under legal obligation!
Both Ben and Alex had evidently led large projects, scaled teams and had an anything-is-possible attitude. More importantly, it was clear how much they really cared about advancing our understanding of human behaviour. I could see their frustration with the lack of effective models for humans during the crisis. If I was to join a company, I wanted the founders to persevere through tough times - I think this sort of motivation naturally arises when people truly care about the issue they are solving.
Now I can see that Electric Twin brings technology and people together. We’re trying to solve the problem of how we model human behaviour, something which is bold and ambitious - so much that it sometimes seems unsolvable. Because life is short, you should give yourself the maximum chance of learning something great in the process, especially when the process is difficult. That comes from being surrounded by winners - highly capable people who can show you different ways to tackle problems. When you make up a large proportion of a team that’s attempting something this bold, you learn to quickly up-skill yourself in every area. You end up having unavoidable ownership so you can aggressively tackle challenges.
There is nothing better than working with exceptional people towards a meaningful but challenging goal - at Electric Twin, we have this nailed.
