// SCOPE: WORDMARK + SITE + SYSTEM
SUBJECT / 01
35.6762N // 77.5946E
Nikhil Ballal.
Hiring engineers & designers for a decade, now he is building with them.
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01/WORK
Four surfaces, one operating system for hospitality.
Live
app.ediblefactor.com/login
// PLATFORM: iOS + ANDROID + WEB
// SHIPPED: 4 OUTLETS, 15 DISHES, 0 PAGER DUTY
// 20 YR TALENT LEADER, STATIC ASTRO BUILD
02/TRAJECTORY
A decade of finding the people who build the future, then building it with them.
Nikhil spent nearly a decade inside the engine room of tech hiring. At Arctic Wolf he was the partner senior engineering leaders called when a role had been open for three quarters. At Proximity Works he was the first talent hire, the one who set the bar for everyone who walked through the door after him.
He learned, slowly and then all at once, that the best builders kept describing the same software that did not exist. So in 2025 he stopped looking for the people to build it and started building it himself. Edible Factor and Plate are the first two pieces.
He still picks up calls about hiring. Mostly though, he ships.
03/ON SCREEN
Worked the other side of the camera, too.
Also fronted big-budget traditional media: a national trampoline-park TVC, a leading cellular network campaign, and the Samsung Galaxy launch shoot at the Opera House on Brigade Road for the Korean investor reveal.
04/CONNECT
// AFTER HOURS
Champion, in another timeline. →
04/WRITING
Notes from the battlefield.
- I closed my first client on two bars of 4G on a rooftop. The deck was elegant, but it stayed in a tab. The selling happened in the conversation.
- I don't think I'm a pioneer. But. Two months ago I changed every product's font. A month later YouTube Music followed. Then Anthropic. Coincidence? Probably.
- Innovation from necessity. I built Co-Director for myself. A few weeks later it had become a business conversation.
- I moved from Netlify to Vercel to Cloudflare. Here is why Cloudflare won. An honest reading of three platforms across three products. Cloudflare did not feel like a deploy platform.