I don’t run companies by controlling execution.
I run them by making direction explicit.

My role is best described as a coach, an on-field striker with a free role, and the skipper of a competitive sailing team, all at once.

I set the course.
I create clarity when things get ambiguous.
I step into the game only when it matters.

At Nlockd, that translates into building a decision intelligence layer for digital commerce. Not another tool. Not another dashboard. But a system that forces choices to become explicit before automation, optimization or scaling even starts.

I surround myself with people who are better than me at their craft, engineering, data, product, operations. My job is not to out-execute them. My job is to make sure they are playing the same game, toward the same objective, with clear boundaries and ownership.

I’m optimistic by default, but not naive.
Opportunistic, but allergic to chaos.
Always solution-oriented, but only after the real problem is understood.

I believe most companies don’t fail because of lack of data or talent.
They fail because decisions stay implicit, political, or endlessly postponed.

That’s the gap I work in.
Making decisions visible, defensible, and durable.

Founder & CEO at Nlockd.
Decision intelligence for digital commerce.


Rob Gent

I started running again this week.

05:30. Six kilometers. Back home by 06:00. Day starts clean.

When you're building a company, the default mode is reactive. Slack. Email. Problems. Someone always needs something before you've had a chance to think.

The run changes that. Thirty minutes where nothing can reach you. No notifications. No decisions. Just movement and whatever's in your head.

I'm not going to tell you morning routines are the secret to success. But I will say: the days I run, I think better. The ideas are clearer. The problems feel smaller.

This week I also had some of my best Claude sessions in the morning after the run. Head clear, ideas sharp, things actually got built.

Find your version of the 05:30 run. Whatever gets you in front of the day instead of behind it.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce #running

Rob van Gent

AI-Operators (agents) will take-over e-commerce, it all starts with insights. Building Nlockd for €2M+ brands that want to lead that shift. | Founder Nlockd | 19+ yrs in e-commerce | Amazon, bol.com & AI-Commerce.

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I've been in e-commerce for almost 20 years. I've seen a lot of shifts.
Nothing compares to what's happening right now.

The last few weeks have felt different. Like things are clicking into place faster than expected. And some of what I'm seeing I almost hesitate to say out loud, because it's going to affect a lot of people.

Here it is anyway: AI agents are going to run e-commerce operations. End to end. Without humans in the loop. Not eventually, but within a few years.

The pushback I get is always the same: "There will always be a need for human judgment." Maybe. But I think a lot of that argument is self-preservation dressed up as wisdom. If I were in an operational e-commerce role today, I'd be doing one of two things: learning AI as fast as possible. Or making a career change. I'm not saying this to scare anyone. I'm saying it because I wish someone had said it to me earlier.

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nlockdbv

Most e-commerce teams are still asking if AI is relevant. Amazon already answered that question.

They introduced a formal AI Agent Policy last week. Every automated tool accessing their platform now needs a kill switch, so Amazon can shut it down 
on demand. That's not a technical update. That's a power move.

Amazon is closing the data pipeline for third-party AI tools while quietly rolling out its own. Seller Assistant. Opportunity Explorer. Ads Agent. All agentic. All Amazon-owned.

The AI takeover of e-commerce operations isn't a prediction anymore.
It's policy.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #amazon #agents #commerce

Last week I was on a ski slope in Austria. Family, mountains, and bad coffee at overpriced lodges.

I still had some calls and Slack with the team. That's just how it goes when you're building something. But I was largely off the industry radar. I came back to my inbox on Monday and found: Amazon had formalized a full AI Agent Policy. Visa and DBS completed the first real agentic commerce transactions. AI executing payments. No human in the loop. Google announced checkout directly inside AI search.

One week. The industry moved without me. That used to be fine. Take a break, catch up, carry on. The pace allowed for it. I don't think it does anymore. Not in this part of the industry. 

I'm not saying don't take holidays. I'm saying: if you come back from a week off and nothing meaningful changed in your space, you might be watching the wrong space.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce

I had a call with an agency this week. Good people. Serious clients. Solid revenue.

I asked them how they're using AI in their e-commerce work.

"We have an intern exploring it."

One person. Part-time. No mandate. No budget. No urgency.

I get it. It feels responsible. You don't want to break what's working. But this is exactly the pattern I saw in 2012 when I asked agencies about mobile. "We're looking into it."

The brands and agencies pulling ahead right now are not exploring. They're rebuilding workflows, replacing manual steps, and running operations with a fraction of the headcount they needed two years ago.

An intern experimenting with AI is not a strategy. It's a comfort blanket.

The window to get ahead is open. I keep saying it because it keeps being true.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce

Replicating what works in the US seems like the obvious move when expanding to Europe. It's also where most brands go wrong.

I once helped set up a full PAN-EU marketplace operation for a brand doing 100M+ on Amazon in the US.

The brief was simple: replicate what works at home. And we did. Amazon Vendor. Pan-European FBA. Full focus on scaling across EU countries. What we didn't do: look left or right. Bol.com is the dominant marketplace in the Netherlands, bigger than Amazon there. Allegro owns Poland. Cdiscount is massive in France. These aren't niche players. They're market leaders in their own backyard.

We had zero presence on any of them. It made sense at the time. The brand knew Amazon. Amazon felt safe. But safe isn't the same as smart. If you're expanding to EU marketplaces, Amazon is a great start. Just don't make it the whole story.

#AI #eCommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #OS #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data

I have always wanted a team that builds what is in my head and tells me when, what is in my head, is wrong.

Took a while to find that.

We have a COO who goes deep on everything. Backend, frontend, LLM. Not surface-level deep. Actually deep. She can judge an idea on its technical merits, kill it if it needs killing, and improve it if it deserves improving. That is rare.

We have a marketing and automation team that built a complete sales and marketing machine from scratch. No big budget. No army of people. Just automated flows and agents doing the work that would normally require a full department. They figured it out themselves.

And we have a development team building the actual platform. UI/UX, frontend, backend, lead dev. Experienced, dedicated, fast. The backbone of everything we are shipping.

I started Nlockd because I saw a problem no one was solving properly. I am still here because of the people who decided to solve it with me.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce

Two weeks in a row. 05:30. Every day.
Week 2 of making it a real habit.

I've always been a morning person. But there's a difference between being up early and actually doing something with it. This is the something.

6km before the world starts. No Slack. No calls. No decisions yet. Just movement and a head that's already working by the time I sit down at my desk.

This week I noticed something shift. Not just less tired. Actually sharp. The kind of clarity that used to take until 10am to find.

30km last week. 5 runs. 2-week streak.

The numbers are a byproduct. What I'm after is simple: show up every day in the best possible state to build something.

05:30 is doing that.

Building a company is a long game. So is this.
See you on the (early morning) streets ;-)

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce #running

Bigger revenue doesn't mean smarter decisions. 

Five years ago, I saw large brands running on outdated dashboards and manual reporting. I thought: this is growing pain. It'll get better. Last week I got a déjà vu.

Same scale. Same problem. More data than ever, but still no intelligence. People manually digging through numbers to find what a system should have flagged automatically. It's not a lack of data. It's a lack of insight. And the strange thing is: the bigger the brand, the easier it is to ignore. Revenue keeps coming in. Until it doesn't.

#AI #eCommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #OS #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data

Five numbers your e-commerce team checks every week. Five numbers that no longer mean what you think.

Organic search traffic. It is down. But the demand is not. Consumers are searching on TikTok, asking ChatGPT, browsing inside Amazon. They found your category. They just did not come through Google first. A traffic drop is not a demand drop.

Conversion rate on your webshop. Looks stable. But an increasing share of buyers never visited your webshop at all. They converted on a marketplace, through a social shop, or via an AI-generated recommendation. Your webshop CR is measuring a shrinking slice of total demand.

Amazon BSR. Your rank held steady. But BSR is a relative number inside a category. If the whole category is being displaced by a competitor on bol.com or Zalando, your rank tells you nothing about your actual position.

Return on ad spend. Your ROAS looks fine. But if you are not measuring assisted conversions across channels, you are probably double-counting credit and missing where buyers actually made the decision.

Customer acquisition cost. Going up everywhere. But the brands obsessing over CAC while ignoring retention economics are solving the wrong problem. The cost to keep a customer has never been lower, relatively speaking.

These are not broken metrics. They are incomplete ones. The question is whether you know what they are missing.

AI makes weak decision systems fail faster.

Not because AI is dangerous.
But because it removes friction.

If the rules are unclear, AI will still execute.
If trade offs are unresolved, AI will still optimize.
If ownership is missing, AI will still scale behavior.

Automation does not fix ambiguity.
It institutionalizes it.

Just wrapped up a week in Austria with my family. First proper ski trip of the year. My two sons, a daughter, my wife. A week in the mountains with nowhere to be except on the slopes. 

When you're building something from scratch, there's always a reason to keep going. One more call. One more thing to fix. The to-do list doesn't empty, you just learn to put it down. I won't pretend I've figured out the balance. Some weeks the startup wins. Some weeks the family wins. The goal is to make sure it's not always the same one.

This week, the family won.
Back to it tomorrow.

A stat that reframes everything for me: Consumer behaviour changes that took more than 10 years during the rise of e-commerce are now happening in 12 to 24 months.

Let that land for a second.

We spent a decade watching consumers move from offline to online. Brands had time to adapt, test, fail, and recover. That window is gone.
Last month, Visa and DBS Bank completed the first real agentic commerce transactions. AI executing payments autonomously. No human sign-off. Just done.

Google is building checkout directly into AI search. Amazon formalized its AI agent policy last week. The brands that are "keeping an eye on AI" are making the same mistake retailers made in 2010 when they were "keeping an eye on e-commerce." We know how that story ended....

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce

Elon calls it a supersonic tsunami. He's right. But no one is saying the quiet part out loud for e-commerce.

He talks about desk jobs disappearing. Emails. Spreadsheets. Customer support. Generic. Broad.

Here's what I see: the entire operational layer of e-commerce goes first.

Pricing decisions. Content updates. Ad budget allocation. Inventory signals. Marketplace monitoring. Every single one of those is a digitally-centric task someone at a brand is doing manually right now. Every single one is being automated.

The brands that are "keeping an eye on AI" are making the same mistake as the agency I spoke to this week. They had an intern "experimenting" with AI. One person. Part-time. Exploring.

That's not a strategy. That's a LinkedIn post about transformation with zero change underneath it.

The tsunami doesn't care how slowly you're moving.
https://lnkd.in/e3ehYanG

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce

"AI agent" has become a catch-all term. That is starting to cause real confusion.

A lot of what is being sold as AI agents right now is actually a workflow with LLM access. Automated steps, triggered in sequence, with a language model sitting somewhere in the middle. Not an agent. An automated process with a smart layer on top.

That is not a criticism. It solves the same problem. Faster decisions, less manual work, fewer people needing to be in the loop. The outcome is often identical.

But the terminology matters, because it shapes expectations. An actual agent reasons. It reads a situation, decides what to do, and acts. A workflow executes. It does what it was told.

Right now, most e-commerce teams cannot tell the difference. Vendors are not rushing to clarify it.

Know what you are buying. And know what problem you are actually trying to solve. The label is less important than whether it works.

There is no publisher, no platform, no newsletter that is purely focused on AI in e-commerce in EU.

Think about that.

The biggest operational shift in the history of the industry and there's no dedicated editorial voice for it. A few sections in broader e-commerce media. The occasional AI roundup. That's it.

What does that tell you? The people running brands are not yet asking the question seriously enough to create demand for the answer.

That is going to change. Fast.

When it does, the brands and teams that already moved will have a 12 to 18 month head start on everyone who was waiting for someone to explain it to them.

I keep posting about this not because I enjoy being early. I do it because I genuinely don't see anyone else saying it directly to the people who need to hear it.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce #publisher

Manual work is never neutral.

It is a signal.

It signals that:
A decision was deferred.
A boundary was never set.
A rule was considered too uncomfortable to formalize.

Teams call this flexibility.
Leaders call it pragmatism.

In reality, it is postponed clarity with interest.

My sister was here last week, visiting from Greece.

We had dinner, caught up properly for the first time in a while, and she brought her new book. "Sara komt thuis", the second in her Sara trilogy. A novel.

In a world drowning in AI-generated content, where more is produced every day than anyone can read in a lifetime, she sat down and wrote a book. A real one. Took the time, found the words, told a story.

I find that genuinely impressive.

Irene van Gent, If you like literary fiction in Dutch, worth a look.

Find the essence of your story | Writer | Ghostwriter |

Zo snel al - De eerste reacties op mijn boek komen binnen...

💚 Heb je boek bijna uit, erg indrukwekkend en prettig weer om te lezen💚 

💚 ik heb net Sara komt thuis uitgelezen. Wow!!! Ik vond Ik ben Sara mooi, maar dit vond ik PRACHTIG!!! Ik moest bijna een traantje wegpinken aan het einde. Je hebt echt iets heel bijzonders geschreven, dank je wel hiervoor. 💚 

Ondertussen ben ik al met deel drie bezig en maak ik me klaar voor de laatste drie events van de tour! Je kunt er nog bij zijn! 

Check alle events en reacties op de eerste vrouwencirkels: https://lnkd.in/e-Y38Y-t

If I had to name the single most common mistake brands make on marketplaces, it's this: they treat it like a side project.

Set it up. Sync the catalogue. Copy the content from the webshop. Done.
And then they wonder why it's not performing. Marketplace content isn't just product information. It's your sales rep. Your shelf space. Your first, and often only, impression. 

And every platform has its own rules: different algorithms, different search behaviour, different buyer intent. A title that works on your webshop will get buried on Amazon. Bullet points optimised for Bol.com won't land the same way on Zalando. The brands winning on marketplaces treat it like a full-time job. Because it is.

Not a channel you manage. A channel that manages you, if you're not paying attention.

Most e-commerce teams will prepare for the AI shift the same way most retailers prepared for e-commerce in 2010. Too late and too slow.

If you want to do it differently, start here: Map your operations. Pricing, content, ads, inventory, customer service. For each one, ask: what would it look like if AI ran this? That question alone will tell you where you're exposed.

Fix your data first. AI doesn't fix broken data infrastructure. It amplifies it. If your systems don't talk to each other now, that problem gets bigger, not smaller. Build with it now, imperfectly. The teams pulling ahead aren't waiting for the perfect AI strategy. They're running experiments, failing fast, and learning. That compounds.

The window to get ahead of this is open. It won't stay open forever.

#AI #ecommerce #Nlockd #SaaS #software #marketplaces #channels #entrepreneur #intelligence #data #agents #amazon #commerce

With over 20 years in high-growth, VC-, PE-backed, and publicly listed companies, I bring a pragmatic and performance-oriented approach to sales leadership. My focus is on helping ambitious teams move from reactive selling to scalable execution—aligning go-to-market strategy, sales structure, and leadership capability.

I work best with companies that have reached early commercial traction and now need to stabilise, optimise, or scale. These are often businesses at or beyond Series A, where sales execution must become more consistent, hiring more deliberate, and team performance more measurable.

Whether bridging a CRO gap, supporting international expansion, or retooling a sales strategy post-pivot—I help founders and leadership teams scale with intent.

What I Do
• Revenue diagnostics and GTM strategy refinement
• AE hiring, onboarding, and performance coaching
• Sales execution and deal-level support
• Interim or fractional sales leadership
• Advisory for founders and commercial leaders
• Leadership development* for founders and leaders

*Leadership Development - in partnership with LMI UK, I also deliver The Total Leader® programme—a structured, modular framework designed to help scaleups develop high-performing leadership teams. This complements my CRO work, particularly in later-stage startups where the leadership bench is in place and the focus has shifted from foundational build-out to performance optimisation, team effectiveness, and scaling with precision.

Tim Faulkner

Vertical SaaS is outperforming every other enterprise software category on quota attainment. Not productivity tools. Not finance & ERP. Not marketing software.
 
Worth pausing on the baseline: average quota attainment across B2B SaaS sits at 43%. Eight consecutive quarters stuck in the low forties. That's the waterline the rest of the market is treading...
 
Vertical software is pulling clear of it.
 
The reason isn't hard to find.
 
The value of software was never in the code. It was in encoding how a specific group of people does their specific work — the workflows, the judgment calls, the 10% that's idiosyncratic to a team or a desk. That's what makes software load-bearing. That's what creates real switching costs.
 
General-purpose AI can't do that. Not because it lacks capability — but because it's structurally built for every use case at once. It can't be opinionated about 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 process.
 
This is exactly what's playing out in AI applications too. The tools bringing the most impact aren't the horizontal platforms trying to do everything. They're the ones that go deep into a specific domain - with the context, the workflow logic, and the reliability a specific team actually needs.
 
The same principle applies at the strategy-sales interface in scaling B2B SaaS.
 
The GTM systems that work are the ones built with specificity: qualification criteria tuned to the actual ICP, sales processes that reflect how buyers in that market genuinely make decisions, feedback loops calibrated to what's happening in that specific segment.
 
Depth beats breadth. Context beats coverage.
 
The usage numbers favour horizontal. The impact numbers favour depth.
 
𝘋𝘢𝘵𝘢: 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘝𝘶𝘦 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘥 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘐𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘹 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘎𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘚𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘴, 𝘷𝘪𝘢 𝘢16𝘻 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘦𝘬 (𝘍𝘦𝘣 2026).

Fractional CRO | Sales, Strategy & Leadership Support for B2B Founders | Leadership Development

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