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

Nikki Brown is a Cambridge graduate who quit a dream job at Google after mere months. "I wasn't happy being a cog in a machine," she says. So she built her own.

Today, Nikki is co-founder and CEO of Cartesian, an AI-native platform backed by Blackbird that turns SaaS ecosystems into retention and growth engines. Cartesian's AI agents analyse user needs in real-time, detect buying intent, and connect users with the right ecosystem partners at exactly the moment they need them. No cold emails. No spray and pray. The result: users get personalised solutions, platforms deliver value, partners grow.

Nikki is building AI that works like she does: accumulating context and using it to connect meaningfully at the right moment. Finance gave her systems thinking. Tragedy gave her clarity. 120 conversations gave her deep customer insight.

In this episode, Nikki joins Mason to share why team beats idea every time, why relationships, not data, are the real moat, and why the foundations of sales never change: "People buy from people."

This one's for anyone questioning whether their "non-traditional" background disqualifies them - or wondering if their lived experience might just be the context that matters most.