Nakul Patel’s Post

📣 Excited to share that I’ve joined Gradient as an Advisor! 🤖 Chris Chang, Mark Huang, Forrest Moret, Tiffany Peng & the team have built a production grade AI Automation platform that is already delivering cost efficiencies to businesses — particularly those with a lot of unstructured data. 👇 As just one example, you can read about how Sinpex partnered with Gradient to develop an AI-powered data extraction automation within the KYB process — creating significant ROI and ease-of-use for their customers. 📞 If your data teams want to make better use of their unstructured data or you’ve got a large operational team doing manual data work, please take a look and comment below if you want to learn more. 🚀 Let’s go!

Next Big Shop has quickly become a vital tool for me. I'd describe it as a next gen. Store Leads. They make it very easy to create lists of brands/merchants using plain text, but they also curate their own lists of interesting companies, for example Shoe Brands with $2-10M in sales, Outdoor brands with $5M+, or breakout brands in the Beauty category (see screenshot). Thanks David Hoffman & Samir Rayani for building a very useful product, and Sydney Sykes for the intro to the team!

Yesterday Vinod & Arnaud announced that the Big Sur AI Sales Agent is now generally available to all Shopify merchants. We're currently live with a handful of early design partners including two of my family's favorite brands — Rad Power Bikes & Wyze! Stephanie Roberts (CFO @ Rad Power Bikes) had this to say: “We are impressed with the pilot results showing significant lift in sales. For our customers, purchasing an electric bike is a major decision. We have various models with different features and the real-time assistance facilitated by Big Sur AI's solution has been instrumental in converting browsers into buyers.” Finally, we shared news of our seed financing round, led by Lightspeed and an all-star group of angels and advisors (Guru Chahal, Sydney Sykes, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Dawn Dobras, Margaret Coblentz, Wendy Yang, Bruce Falck, Josh McFarland, Oliver Heckmann, Ben Zises, Bret Rasmussen, Johnny Hou, Sib Mahapatra, Dantley Davis, Jacob Bank) Onward!! 🚀

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the team at Big Sur AI on a fractional basis. There is a massive opportunity to redefine both the merchant & shopper experiences for the AI era, and Big Sur’s mission is to ensure that these advancements benefit all merchants — not just the biggest players. Vinod and Arnaud are brilliant founders that previously helped build Chrome, Android, and Google Shopping — some of the most successful consumer and advertising products ever. They’ve built an exceptional team and I’m excited to help them accelerate growth. If you’re an e-commerce merchant on Shopify, please get in touch to learn more!

I’ve spent the last few months partnering with a few AI startups/Founders to help them build out their early GTM motion & teams — one of which I’ll share more about next week! I also started a sales & growth-focused consulting/advisory firm called Wayfinder GTM in anticipation of doing more such work. Figured I ought to be back on LinkedIn to share the news. Please drop me a line if you'd like to reconnect. I'd love to hear about AI startups you’re most excited about or just catch up!

mmhmm is now SOC 2 compliant! 🔐

Good presenters know that their message is more important than their slides. Steven Sazant is an excellent presenter! Over the next few weeks he's setting up office hour slots to help people transform their legacy decks into more memorable stories. 30-minute, 1-on-1 sessions. Please comment below if interested! 🤚

At mmhmm we try very hard to build a 'high-trust' culture. As Phil Libin says, companies should 'give people the space and time to do meaningful work. Trust by default.' It's hard, but it's worth it.