Chris Abbott
Founder, TNT Research · Founding Chairman, TNT Foundation
I spent fourteen months at American Express building highly concurrent financial systems. Before that, over a decade running DetectRight, a device detection system that competed globally: billions of requests, customers who didn't care about architecture, only whether it worked.
I've also written five books on video game sound and music technology. One was a creative biography of composer Rob Hubbard where I reconstructed his development timeline by analysing his source code in forensic detail, tracing how his abilities changed over three years and connecting that to real-world events.
Somewhere along the way I became godfather of the C64 remix scene. I arrived in 1994, saw what needed doing, and doggedly did it for almost 30 years.
I'm also a self-taught orchestral arranger: my 8-Bit Symphony project took video game music from the Commodore 64 era and arranged it for full orchestra, performed in front of the BBC's "The One Show" and recorded in Prague by an 80-piece orchestra. Over six years I ran a string of successful Kickstarters raising over £500,000 for C64 music projects, which meant actually delivering quality product to customers who'd paid upfront. That kind of work requires holding the big picture and the nitty-gritty detail at the same time.
I also have a Psychology and Statistics degree, which is a polite way of saying I'm not a neat career narrative. Recruiters like stack stability and sector continuity. I'm more of a Venn diagram of one.
The upside is that patterns learned in one place show up useful somewhere else. Analysing how sound chips work teaches you what survives transformation. Finance teaches you what breaks when numbers meet incentives. Distributed systems teach you what fails at 3am. Put those together and you end up caring about causality, provenance, and consequence as things that ought to be primitives rather than afterthoughts.
I'm also founding chairman of the TNT Foundation, which is being set up as the non-profit that will hold the core temporal technology. The short version: the forensic tools TNT Research uses are built on infrastructure designed so it can't be acquired, rug-pulled, or priced out of reach. That matters to me. The full story of how it came to be is on the Foundation site.
What I'm trying to do isn't "add a dashboard" or "sprinkle AI on analytics". It's to make consequence legible: to trace why something happened, replay it, test what would have changed it, and produce an evidence chain you can follow and defend without hand-waving.
If you've lived through the modern reality of performative work (endless meetings, brittle processes, people optimising for appearances because incentives are miswired) you'll recognise why I care about this. Most organisations have plenty of data. What they don't have is a trustworthy causal story connecting decisions to outcomes.
TNT Research is my attempt to provide that: temporal forensics that traces decisions through time, tests what would have changed the outcome, and gives you evidence rather than narrative.