Paul Teshima is the co-founder and CEO of Nudge.
Tell us about Nudge and the journey to where you are now.
Nudge is a relationship intelligence platform that helps you find and grow the right relationships that drive sales. We do that by tracking which relationships are important for you, which ones are strong, and which ones you are losing touch with. The outcome is you build stronger, more important relationships for your business.
And at Nudge today, we have just started hiring a sales team, we are growing the company rapidly, we have over 20,000 users on the platform, and we track over 60 million business relationships.
How does company culture contribute to your success?
The way I see Nudge growing, in terms of the company culture over the next couple of years, is probably a little different than what we did at Eloqua. We were a very distributed team, we had executives in 7 cities, and today at Nudge, we actually want to keep the team as close together geographically as humanly possible – and Toronto is one of the best ecosystems in the world to build great companies
What are the opportunities for the future of Canadian tech?
In my opinion, some of the best opportunities are here in Canada – I’ll tell you some things that aren’t the standard fare – I think that the first thing is that you have second and third-time entrepreneurs coming back to Canada, or staying in Canada to build the next big startup. And that is really helpful for an ecosystem that needs to learn how to do bigger things. So that’s the biggest opportunity that I’m seeing happen right now, aside from talent, and more capital that people are talking about.
What are the challenges you see for the Canadian tech ecosystem?
I think the biggest challenge, is that I still feel that there are a lot of startups that are trying to solve not big enough problems. Yes, they get some initial traction, but in a very competitive market that’s easy to enter, you’re going to have a lot of competition really early. Companies will find it’s hard to grow past a certain point unless they’re trying to tackle a really hard problem.
What’s next for Nudge?
When I think about what’s next for Nudge, I really do feel that we are just scratching the surface on how artificial intelligence can help sales professionals, build better relationships. It really is about an interesting intersection of what’s going on in the buyer’s world and the sales person’s mind at the same time. And I think if we can really tap into that and really make those connections valuable, we’re going to see sales professionals really flourish using a product like Nudge.