Entrepreneur · Adviser · Senior product leader

Nicholas Oliver

Building products with purpose.

I'm Nicholas Oliver, British entrepreneur, adviser and senior product leader. In twenty years I've founded two venture-backed companies, people.io and FORTYEIGHT.ai, taken an app to #1 trending on the UK App Store, launched a world-first data product with Telefónica, and rung the NASDAQ closing bell as one of its Rising Stars. Before that I was Global Creative Technical Director inside WPP, directing emerging technology for Ford Motor Company across a thirty-market global network. The work has always had one shape: see what a technology makes possible, then build the product that proves it.

The timeline matters. I came up through creative technology into the leadership of the world's largest advertising group, then crossed over and built my own companies: people.io, a personal-data platform grown past 150,000 users, and FORTYEIGHT.ai, an AI transparency company deployed with Twilio and Formula 1. Around and between them sits the rest of it: scaling a national HIV testing service for GlaxoSmithKline's ViiV Healthcare, innovation strategy for Maserati, and countless products and platforms of my own across pharma, entertainment, advertising and automotive. That breadth is deliberate. It's how you learn to recognise what a new technology will actually do, rather than what its demo promises.

What holds it together is purpose. I've spent a decade arguing that technology has to answer to the people it acts on: I founded people.io on data ownership years before GDPR forced the point, and FORTYEIGHT.ai on AI transparency before it became the question of the decade; words I wrote were read in both Houses of Parliament. Today that conviction shapes how I work: embedded with founders and executive teams as an interim Chief Product Officer or Head of Product, building daily with agentic systems and LLMs. I operate at the intersection of strategy, vision and purpose, deciding what should exist, why it matters, and then making it real.