ef.
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Brand · Site · System
edible factor.
Wordmark, site and design system for the consumer dining app, drawn end to end.
ediblefactor.comCurrently building Edible Factor
NIKHIL BALLAL
Hiring engineers and designers for a decade. Now building with them: Edible Factor, Plate, and the brands around them.
Selected work
Five surfaces. One
operating system for
hospitality, and a shelf
for the nights you keep.
Restaurant OS
Plate
The restaurant operating system by Edible Factor. Menu intelligence, claim-to-onboard, operator analytics. Sold over a rooftop demo on two bars of 4G.
plate.ediblefactor.com
Consumer app · AI
Edible Factor App
Real-time budget and calorie tracking together, an AI sommelier, menu scanning. iOS, Android and web from one Next.js codebase.
Read the case study
Brand · Web · Commission
Gautam Shetty
An executive portfolio for a twenty-year talent leader, shipped end to end: brand, build, deploy. Blank page to live domain.
gautamshetty.me
PWA · On-device OCR
Remember.
A ticket-stub collector, a shelf for the nights you keep. Snap a stub, it reads itself on-device. No backend, no account.
Open the appDrag, swipe or use the arrow keys
The trajectory
A decade finding the people who build the future,
then building it with them.
Nearly a decade inside the engine room of tech hiring. At Arctic Wolf, the partner senior engineering leaders called when a role had been open for three quarters. At Proximity Works, the first talent hire, the one who set the bar for everyone who walked through the door after.
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.
Stealth Startup
2025 / Now
Now spinning
Builder, CEO & Founder
Built and shipped Edible Factor and Plate. Customer calls in the evenings, ships in the mornings. Treats the product, the pitch and the press release as one craft.
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.
Off the clock
Off the
clock.
Salt, sun, and a clean main branch.
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.