Dillan
Patel
Ahoy, I'm Dillan 👋. I've spent five years in product scaling seed to Series A startups. Now I'm using tech and AI to automate my dad out of his job.
I’ve helped scale the B2B marketplace Qogita from seed to series B, consulted to engineers at NASA, Toyota and Amazon, and built product at Mercedes-Benz, Hive and Fisher & Paykel!
Now I’m using what I learnt in tech to direct every AI and automation tool at one target.
What I’m about
Less is more
Though cutting features and process is often harder, it leads to better outcomes.
Give it a crack
It’s fun to build things and often I learn more that way. Might as well give it a crack instead of overanalysing.
Find the bottleneck
Obsessively look for the bottleneck and solve that. Working on anything else is a waste of time.
Build magic, not slop
Someone has to live with whatever I ship. It should bring delight rather than be something to endure.
No ego
Empathise and listen first. The joy is in making something great, not in coming up with the idea.
Ask the dumb question
I’ll keep asking until I actually understand, like Feynman. Anything is interesting when you dig deep enough.
Experience
From designing medical products, to scaling wholesale tech startups, below is a snapshot of my experience.
Head of Technology at Nalsun Imports:
First tech person at a 30-person FMCG wholesaler. Built the function from pen-and-paper: ERP, MCP server, AI enablement for the whole company.
Product Manager at Hive:
Hired to build the B2B arm of a series A e-commerce fulfilment platform. Took on the delivery team a month in, which manages 40% of revenue.
Senior Product Manager at Qogita:
Employee #12 at a B2B wholesale marketplace. Joined at seed, scaled through Series A, owned company-level supply OKRs and led 5 delivery teams.
The Leaders' Lab at Mercedes-Benz:
Two-year executive leadership programme. Product, growth and corporate venturing across Daimler — MBUX, fleet SaaS, and the mobility-data marketplace.
Sales Engineer at 3D Hubs:
Owned the company OKR to validate injection moulding as a new product line. It is now the second most profitable product Hubs sells.
Product Development Engineer at Fisher & Paykel:
Became the company expert in monofilament extrusion in two months with no plastics training, then ran a multimillion-dollar line. Came back to it after interning here in 2014.
Financial Risk Management intern at KPMG:
Built a Bloomberg and Excel procedure that valued whole client portfolios in one pass, replacing case-by-case derivative sampling. Stretched beyond financial risk into IT, anti-money laundering, forensics and audit, and finished on a solo secondment to BNZ, which KPMG doesn't usually give interns.
Director of Operations at Savy:
A charity teaching financial literacy in New Zealand schools and universities. Scaled it from 900 students in one city to 7,500 across three, opening the Wellington and Hamilton branches, and recruited, trained and managed 49 facilitators across 250 workshops.