Hi, I'm Nick.

I grew up in a small business. My father built a grocery store business in Salthill, Galway, Ireland — the kind of place where regulars were family and the staff knew every customer by name. I worked there after school, on weekends, and full time every summer and holiday. It taught me something you can't learn from a textbook: a local business is much more than a business. It's part of the community. My brother runs it today, and it still is.

That experience gave me a foundation that shaped everything after it: start with the customer. In 15+ years in Silicon Valley — leading product at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, deploying machine learning at Rakuten that saved millions within months, and running startup accelerator programs for Cisco, NEC X, NetApp, Alchemist Accelerator, ZF Group, Ericsson, and SanDisk — the thread was always the same. Complex technologies, brilliant teams, but the ones that won were the ones that worked backwards from the customer experience and designed the technology around it. Across 60+ teams, I helped startups find product-market fit, land venture funding, and — in some great cases — get acquired by companies like Google, Meta, Workday, and Rakuten.

It's clear to me that the coming wave of AI technology is going to amplify what individuals and small businesses can do — how they serve their customers, how they operate, how they compete. This isn't hype. In the next few years it will become obvious to everyone. The businesses that embrace it now will operate on a completely different level.

I built 1770Labs to help the people who are passionate about using this technology — not to replace what they do, but to enhance it. To serve their customers better, strengthen their communities, and run their businesses the way they've always wanted to.