Nikki Brown: When you stop being a cog, you become the machine

0:00Cartesian, we've built an agent-first ecosystem platform. Two years ago, pre-agents, this product was like a dream, but now it's actually here. It takes a huge amount of effort to be enterprise ready. We are just about to deploy. There is this whole world out there that's exploding. Idea first or team first? Oh, team first, for sure. Why? Execution is everything. In like traditional marketplaces, the classic advice is like focus on the supply and the demand will come. Yeah. Is that true in your case or how do you think about the chicken and egg? To go the journey, you have to have that belief when everyone else is saying, this is crazy or this won't work or like, who cares?

0:45What if the thing killing your pipeline isn't your product? It's your go-to-market playbook. Today's guest, Nikki Brown, argues that direct B2B selling isn't just slowing, it's dying. In its place, an agent-first ecosystem-led future where platforms open up, Buyers discover inside the product. And sales is triggered precisely at the moment of need. Nikki's journey snaps this into focus. She left Google after only nine months. Not because it wasn't great, but because she refused to be a cock. Then life hit harder. Her husband's terminal cancer. The result wasn't cynicism. It was steal. She says respect your time.

1:26Lose patience for noise. build with people you'd want to be beside you on your worst day. That chemistry plus execution became Cartesian. An agent first ecosystem platform that goes from dream to deployment ready in a market that barely existed two years ago. Here's one actionable takeaway from Nikki before we start. Stop trying to shove buyers through your funnel. Push on open doors is how she framed it. embed where your customers already work AWS, Atlassian, Salesforce and let agents surface need, route intent and hand your team qualified moments instead of cold leads In this conversation we discuss why platforms must open or be left behind the agent wave that will fragment SaaS how to sell by serving and listening daily and why belief like real earned belief outlasts the gut punches If you're a founder, operator or investor, this episode will recalibrate how you think about team, resilience and go to market in the age of agents.

2:34Let's dive in.

2:40Hi. Thank you for joining me on Wild Arts. Thanks for having me here. It's good to have you. I remember reading that you were only at Google for nine months. Why do you think that was? I think I was more in love with the idea of being at Google. The badge. I really wanted to land there after Cambridge and I was really, really lucky. I got to do some really cool things with them and, you know, they only took in a couple of people that year and I was really lucky to be one of them. And so I felt super ungrateful to, within a couple of weeks, feel like maybe this wasn't right for me. Within a few weeks.

3:24Yeah. Incredible team. I could not have landed in a better team. One of my best, best friends is still, I mean, you know, was from Google. Yeah. Still call him all the time, Phil, from in Berlin. Good on Phil, shout out. Yeah. Phil Bombay. and I still you know still talk to a lot of those Google people but yeah you realize a lot about yourself when you land somewhere like that especially when you've wanted it for so long for me I realized I wasn't happy being a cog refining what was an incredible machine I felt really like I had this energy that needed to get out and I needed to do something that was faster and, you know, just had energy and where I could have impact and learn faster and do more things.

4:14And it made sense for me to go and work in a startup. And that's what I did. Sounds like a really sharp feedback loop. Like I've been waiting a long time to get into Google. Yes, I was one of the few that got it. And then within two weeks, you realized I can't be in a cognitive machine. Well, I think you go through that, like, you know, it's a cycle. You think to yourself, oh, this doesn't feel right. No, I need to like, you know, I need to see it out at, you know, no, I want to stay. No, I need to go. No, I want to stay. And you started going through that cycle. It started going through some change, the teams as well.

4:52And that made it a little easier for me to make that decision that I needed to look for something else. We were chatting outside and you said, I don't like to fit into the status quo or fit into a box. Yeah. Did you know that then? I've always known that. Okay. I think you just ask my parents. They will tell you. Why? I've never taken the easy pathway. Okay. And I think that's much to their chagrin that that's the case. What's your earliest memory of not taking the easy road? Not doing medicine or law, I think. Doing that was the easy road? Yeah. Yeah. I think that would have been easy, you know, very defined pathway, very prestigious, you know, but it just wasn't for me.

5:33The idea of having a very defined career path just scared the bejesus out of me, to be honest. You know, and not having that freedom to think and change and see what was out there and figure out yourself, I think. You wore a few different hats after Google, but I'm curious, you realized that you wanted to join a startup. how did you go about the journey of like where should I go? What skills do I have? Yeah, I had no skills. I don't know, like you're the generalist, the master generalist. Yeah, I think I knew what I was pretty good at. Like I'd done finance, you know, at uni so I knew, you know, how to balance books and I knew sort of that commercial part.

6:14I had been for a very short period of time a strategy consultant, well, two and a half years, which taught me a lot about problem solving, also a very bad fit for me. And so I kind of had these very general business skills. So I knew that I could contribute in some way. I did end up working for a not-for-profit called Silicon Valley Company to the UK, which was started by Reid Hoffman and another really incredible angel investor in the UK called Sherry Kutu. They brought this amazing program of bringing investors and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to London at the time where there was no tech hub there really.

6:49And so I got to work and I worked there to figure out startups really. And that was my entry into the land of tech and the land of startups. And I kind of just went from there, tried my feet with a few, just sort of consulting here and there, and then ended up sort of finding my place. Is that where you started gaining an empathy and appreciation for teams more than anything else downstream from that? The thing that I really started initially gaining empathy for is product. I was really went in thinking, oh my God, like that are things that are happening in product and the things that people are building are incredible.

7:30And I just had to be a part of that. My empathy for people and teams and my understanding of how critical they are in building a startup really probably came much later. You know, when you've been in teams that are working on incredible product, but it just isn't gelling, you understand how important it is to have a great team and not just like incredibly skilled people, but a team that works really well together in a particular situation. Idea first or team first? Oh, team first, for sure. Why? Because ideas are, you know, you can just get any idea anywhere. Like there's nothing really truly unique.

8:13Like execution is everything and you can't execute without the right team around you or being part of the right team for two reasons. One, you, you know, need to have the right skills and, you know, be able to work together and those skills need to fit together. But also like, you know, in a startup, you're going to have the worst times. You're going to have the best times and the worst times. And if you're going to have the worst times, you don't want to be spending it with a bunch of people you like really hate or you really can't get along with you want to be doing it with people that you still really love being around even though it's the shittiest time you've ever been through what was a special anecdote from either working with reed hoffman or the wider team while you were there that like led you to discover that passion for product it was interesting Reed was based in San Francisco, so I only ever got to hear his voice, his dulcet tones.

9:11Yes. Not Zoom calls, it was Skype calls at the time. It was really Sherry. I mean, and Sherry was, you know, sort of Reed's counterpart in the UK. And he used to always, like, you'd get on a call and he'd be so focused on what you were delivering and for who. But who is the customer and, you know, who is our audience? He was so focused on that. And Sherry was on the other side and she was so excited about all the startups that we were bringing in. And there was so many doing incredible things that you'd unearth in, you know, across Europe and the UK. And that's what really opened my eyes to what you could do, you know, and the change that you could affect with a small group of people and a really incredible piece of technology we're building and really a shared goal.

10:03What did some of the best startups have in common? I guess they were really, really bulldog focused on the thing they were solving for. I mean, there were startups where I'd look at them and think, what is this? But you talk to the founders and they just were so like, you don't get it. Like it's this and the customers love them. and it didn't matter what you said or what anyone said, they just so believed in what they were building and that kind of belief is you've got to have that if you're a founder. Even if it's something that doesn't work, to go the journey, you have to have that belief when everyone else is saying this is crazy or this won't work or who cares.

10:52Especially today, I hear a lot of people say I want to be a founder and I think that there is potentially a lot of sort of romanticism and you know a lot of cachet that comes with that term or that title I'm a founder but the reality is it's a really really hard thing to do is to be a founder you have to do some you know things that you're not comfortable doing that don't come naturally to you you have to learn you have to you know let people down sometimes you have to you know you take a lot of no's and and hard feedback you have to be really focused to love what you do more than anything to be a founder because the moment you hit that first roadblock it is so tempting to say this is too hard and that's where you really separate you'll know if you're your true founder is when you hit that first roadblock and you think, nope, I'm not done.

11:51This is just the beginning. How has tragedy in your life shaped or marked your experience in dealing with that level of hardship? Life in London was really good. I got to work in New York. I got to work, you know, in London and travel around and it was such an amazing life to like just spend every day and every weekend working without any responsibility really. Is this in the winter too? Oh, yeah. Oh, winter in London is amazing and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There's nothing better than Christmas lights in London and, you know, Sunday roast and like sitting behind. I tell you what, the British do pubs like no other, am I right?

12:45Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the open fire, you're allowed to have dogs in London in the pub. Yeah. Makes such a big difference. Yeah. So, yeah, London was great. And my partner suddenly, my husband, was diagnosed with cancer and it was terminal and we had to fight through that. and when he passed away it was just hugely shattering and it put a roadblock on my life like nothing else and getting through that was, you know, it was extremely difficult but it has and it has completely changed me and completely changed the way I think about life. I think it has made me, shaped me probably into and, you know, set me up to be a better founder than I could ever be.

13:43Of course, you'd never want that to happen, but you take those hits and I've got to tell you, like literally nothing could happen in startup land now that could possibly like rock me or that I couldn't deal with now. There's nothing. There's nothing that could happen. There's no way. It's a life-defining, universe-shattering event. Yeah. And I, you know, I learned so much from – I'm a different person. The thing I learned most of all from it is like that I – like I learned to respect myself. I learned to respect myself as – yeah. That's profound. Well, I think when you're like – it's easy when you're working in startups and even as a founder to just not respect who you are as a person, not to believe in yourself, not to, you know, respect your time, respect your, you know, your relationships.

14:41But when you go through something like that, it completely changes your view of yourself and the people around you. I've got to say, though, it doesn't mean that I'm like, you know, I'm very empathetic, but I'm also like very, time is very precious and I don't have, I have less time for bullshit now for sure. Can you share more to the extent that you can? Having even the clarity to know that there wasn't that self-respect there and then rebuilding yourself or was it an overnight shift? Oh, no. Can you share a bit more about that arc of backing yourself? You have to reach the depths, right, of disbelief in yourself just to finally realize that hey I'm like I need to get back to where I was but not that person that I was back there like how do I need to be different what do I see about myself now that I've sort of gone through this and and I've come out the other side like you know it's an amazing thing to do to go through that and still like love the world and and want to be in it and and want to do amazing things this is in 2018 and so you moved back to australia yeah no that happened in 2016 okay so i spent two years like alone in london like just struggling it out i took no time off i just went straight back to work and for me it was part of that you know just work will solve everything but actually you got to respect yourself and give yourself time and i think that was a big part of the the learning as well like whatever you go through like giving yourself space and especially as founders you take a lot of hits like you like give yourself space to to work your way through it you don't have to keep barreling ahead and then you were able to take a breath after two years and that was the instigated move to Australia yeah I didn't think I'd stay here to to be honest.

16:53In Australia? Yeah. I thought I was because I had been away for so long. Yeah. I thought I'd, you know, come home. You know, my sister had had her, you know, her first child. I'll spend some time with my family, get to know my friends again. And I was so surprised at what was happening here. When I left Australia, there was no startup scene. There was like Blackbird didn't exist. Like it was just, it was quiet, you know, There were little things happening but not the way it was when I got back. And I thought, well, this is a community that it felt like London when I was there like 10 years earlier.

17:33Wow. I thought, this is a community that can really start building and I can be a part of. Yeah, so that's – I stayed. So it was what? How long did it take for you to go, screw it, I'm staying in Australia? No more Sunday roasts. Wow.

17:49It's still tempting. Probably a year. Yeah. Yeah, a year to sort of look around and think, yeah, I can make this work. Yeah. I don't, you know, I used to have this really strong belief that you have to be in the UK or in Europe and you have to be in the States to build a really big, defining, impactful company. And I don't necessarily think that's the case anymore. I think you still need to be there. For us, our core customers are definitely in the States. And so we have to be there and I have to be there. Yeah. But we have such incredible engineering talent here. Like it's really astounding. I was so shocked when we started sort of hiring into our team at how skilled they are and how much expertise they have.

18:46Having said that, all of them have spent time overseas and worked overseas. And I think that it's also a symbol of the great sort of adventurousness of Australians that they're willing to go overseas and get that experience and come back and bring it back here. Did you always want to be a founder? I would say that I always wanted to build something and I always wanted to build something that was interesting and kept me interested. And that's the hard thing. keeping me interested yeah right um and so I guess naturally that always meant that I was probably a good fit to be a founder yeah yeah did you start team first and then idea before cartesian uh no that was definitely idea so I'd been working on something Yaniv had been working on something.

19:40So Yuliv, my co-founder, my ride or die. And we had heard about what he was working on. I said, this guy, you know, this guy is working on something that is game-changing that I've been trying to solve for a long time. I need to meet him and see what he's doing. And when we met up, even though we'd never met before and, you know, we're both, I would say, pretty strong characters. The chemistry was instant. On Zoom? No, in person. In person, okay. In Melbourne. Yeah. And we just, you know that you're going to get along with a person when you're cracking really off-color jokes and you have them in stitches and vice versa.

20:26Yeah. Like you just have this shared language that you didn't know that you had. And I think that's really critical for a founder, at least in my experience, to have that relationship. And so, yes, in this case, the idea was first, but I think in some respects, the two things have to almost happen together, right? You have to work on something that you truly believe in and that you love. And if you happen to find someone that you really, really get along with and is on your wavelength, then it's kismet. what were some of the clues before the inception of the idea that you can look back on in hindsight and be like that was a clue that i should be working on this or that it should be and i think that we built yeah sometimes like the the discoveries of like the insight that will keep you interested yes like you look back in retrospect and it's like oh that was that was a clue yeah i can tell you your new story but i feel like i should let him tell it for me it was you know I've been working in startups trying to go to market for such a long time and 10 years ago it was pretty bloody easy compared to now um you know we could email someone cold and they would respond to you even if it was to say no thank you like thanks for your email but no thank you but now it's like cold emails just get ignored and you know and it's really like oh who does this who is this person right it's impossible um and it's become harder and harder and i remember like the last few companies you know i consulted to just trying to go to market through those traditional direct channels was impossible and so you start looking at like what are the other things that you could be doing and and there was this incredible like opportunity out there in ecosystems in sasa ecosystems attached to these really big companies where your users are and you know your users are there and you want to access them and there's this great opportunity for you to access them because these platforms let you access them.

22:32But it's so hard to go to market. You can get yourself on an ecosystem. You can get yourself on the Cisco ecosystem or the AWS or Atlassian, Google Cloud, any of those. but to actually sell after you've got there is pretty much impossible if you don't have the capital behind you to do the selling again. They don't do the selling for you. And so it just felt like I really missed opportunity. I'm like how can you make this easier? Why doesn't this work better? The simple answer is because there's no incentive for what there wasn't an incentive at the time for platforms to do that. Of course, that's fundamentally changed in the last two years.

23:26What's changed? Agents. We've now in a world where platform revenue is tanking from core product because the monetization model doesn't work anymore. You've got anyone can build an agent now. And so platforms and products can't upsell features anymore. Why would you? You can just go build an agent for that or you can go buy an agent for that. And so there's this real panic and scramble at the moment from the platforms, understanding that there is this whole world out there that's like exploding that is separate to the world that they've built. and it's happening without them. And so we're starting to see the big platforms are acting.

24:17So AWS, the hyperscalers, Salesforce, they've all acted super fast. They've built the agent frameworks. They're working on, they're saying developers, partners, come and build on us. We know you're out there. Please come and, you know, we've got the ecosystem for you. But everyone else, everyone else behind those big players, they're being left behind. And, you know, ecosystems more than ever are extremely critical and being able to monetize its ecosystems and connect those agent developers and developers in general to their users are becoming even more important because there's the way you monetize platforms is completely changing.

24:59Maybe you can share how you solve that problem and the business model that will fling up that you can catch. So Cartesian, we've built an agent-first ecosystem platform. And that means we've built effectively the monetization platform for this new world of agents. So we have an agent-first ecosystem, which means that companies now these days don't have to spend two years and millions and huge sales force to actually stand up an ecosystem and make it work. That's the first thing. We can do it in weeks, basically, with agents. and then we can actually give developers the framework to build on top of that to present to users and give a really amazing agent experience to those developers and we can actually monetize as well so with every third-party solution that gets sold you know via an ecosystem and that that happens today the platform gets a cut and the vendor makes their sale and the users get to tailor their platform the way they wanted to in a way that a platform doesn't necessarily have the ability to currently.

26:21Can you share an example of a user journey? For a developer. So for a third party. So let's imagine we are working with Atlassian, for example we will be you know in the Alassian ecosystem we're agent first so we have this framework for anyone to build an agent on top of but also we can we use agents to you know activate a sale activate a user and send leads to your sales team at the moment that a user is actually needing a solution. So Cartesian actually sits inside a product, say in Atlassian it might sit inside Jira. And so it sits quietly and it might sit within Atlassian's own sort of AI sitting in the background.

27:13And so it will detect a need from the user and the whole engine that sits behind Cartesian is a needs engine. So it actually analyzes everything a user is doing and it might see that you've moved something in a ticket to active in Jira and we might recognize that you need to add a service or some data tool and we'll pop up maybe via the Atlassian existing chatbot and we might say hey we understand that you're trying to do this thing and there is a solution that we can see that you can actually use to complete this task and it comes from the Atlassian ecosystem and it actually we'll actually look at the user look at their profile and their their user flow they might be just a user this is the buyer and we will actually suggest them hey you can try this out for free and you can send it to your jira admin to buy if you like it and so we're actually bringing the ecosystem and those users right into the product with agents so it's not a separate thing.

28:19Your ecosystem, your third party agents should actually be part of your product. And we believe that to the core. Most people would be scared working with some of these incumbents. Why aren't you? It's exciting. They have built incredible businesses and incredible ecosystems. Some of them have thousands and thousands of partners, like tens of thousands in the case of like Cisco and SAP, you know, and that's a big beast to sort of help to shift. It's exciting to, you know, to understand the latent demand that exists in those platforms and the users who want to be able to tailor the experience and to be able to connect that with, you know, the developers out there who have the domain expertise and the economics work sense for them to sort of service those niche cases, that's a really exciting prospect.

29:19Having said that, we're also really, I love the idea of working with those early product companies who know they want to build an ecosystem and it's kind of like greenfields. It doesn't exist yet and so you can completely reimagine and what an ecosystem should actually look like from the ground up. So is that where all of your energy is being spent? It's being spent on... Like the question behind the question is, what does the zero to one journey look like for you here? It's about deploying the product. It's about working on those early design partnerships with those bigger companies, but also some smaller ones to actually show how powerful our product is and how effective it is in driving value across all of those key players for users, for the platform and for those third parties as well.

30:16And there is this, you know, when you think about why ecosystems exist for product companies, it's because there is like this acknowledgement that you've hit the ceiling in how you can grow by yourself and by pulling in others and pulling in, you know, developers in your network, you can actually grow much, much faster together. In like traditional marketplaces, the classic advice is like focus on the supply and the demand will come. Yeah. Is that true in your case or how do you think about the chicken and egg? How do you think about earning the right to have that seat at the table? And like if I think about the example that you gave me, I'm also thinking about the level of like data that you probably would have access to to understand the context of someone's needs and then anticipate what the organic upsell journey would look like.

31:13Yeah. And so that's the sort of context behind the chicken and egg classic dilemma. Yeah. So that's interesting. And when we first set out on this journey, you know, there was always a question of where do we start, right? Because of the way, the nature of ecosystems, you have the users on one side and we acknowledged that there was this really latent demand from users. They want to, you know, tailor that platform experience. And there is this, the most obvious need is from the vendors who, you know, from even my experience, which is like we just want to sell to these users who are there and they want us.

31:51Like we just, we need to get to them. And so there's this really obvious sort of demand there. The question for us is those, that both sides of that network had been built and there was demand on both sides. The reason why we sort of built and are working with the platforms is because they hold the power there in that network. and now there is impetus for them to actually act in this pretty fast-changing world. And so the question of supply and demand, the answer is the demand and the supply was already there. It was just about figuring out how to access that supply and demand on both sides and doing it at the right time and now is the right time in the history of software.

32:45What have your observations been about the way that the platforms have shifted in their behavior? Are they default open or closed with other platforms? Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. It changes. And you could talk your ear off about this. The history of like change in software and what happens. And always the default behavior is to close the platform. When you close a platform, you're protecting, you know, They think that the data is, you know, their greatest, I guess, asset in this. When you have agents being built and you want to protect your, you know, what you have built, always a natural inclination is to close it.

33:29But I think history and, you know, what we've seen with AWS in that last wave of growth, AWS, Microsoft, all of them, was sort of the opposite. it was actually to open everything and say here we're actually going to give you the tools to build on top because our greatest assets it's not the data it's the relationship and the network that we have the relationship with our partners with our customers more than anything they trust us they trust us to you know to vet you guys and they trust us with the decisions that they make about their software, that is the greatest asset that they have. And so it's not the data.

34:11It's opening up and giving others the, you know, with, of course, with security and all the things that you need to do, but it's to give others the opportunity to help you grow. And where is the product at today and what are you most proud of? Oh, so many things. We are just about to deploy, which is very exciting. for what is a very, I would say, complex built, complexly built, very sophisticated enterprise-grade product. So, you know, we've gone through all the security, we've designed it in a way that's ready for enterprise and taking care of user data and UGC and all of that. So that's immensely satisfying, I think, to actually see a vision for a product that literally could not have been built two years ago.