Nicholas (Nicky) Bell
Washington, DC · nicky.bell@gmail.com · nicholasjbell.com · LinkedIn
In every role I’ve held, I’ve designed the conditions that let people feel safe with change. I’ve sat with the FDA to earn their trust in my statistics and win authorization of an AI device to predict breast cancer risk, led RevOps and CS for an AI platform for health plans, and taught 750+ students and operators to use data and AI responsibly. Customer enablement is where those threads meet. I am seeking a zero-to-one enablement role at a Series A/B AI startup, where I build the playbooks and programs that turn rollouts into adoption. Remote or DC. Available immediately.
Experience
Chief of Staff & Customer Success Lead
Remote · November 2025 – August 2026
First Chief of Staff, reporting to the CEO, as Keywell pivoted from analytics consultancy to an AI product company. Jointly served as Customer Success Lead.
Guided customer engagements from pre-sale call to delivery, leading sales calls, scoping and writing SOWs and pricing proposals, and running kickoffs for new work.
Owned account health end-to-end, holding weekly customer value meetings tying delivery to business outcomes and securing an expansion that grew monthly receipts by 50%+.
Built customer onboarding and rollout readiness for a 2-week go-live guarantee, creating demos and docs from zero and ensuring DevOps readiness for AWS and Azure deployments.
Turned customer feedback into product, prototyping features with AI coding tools for client demos and converting reactions into the technical specs engineering built from.
Stood up GTM and product operations, growing top-of-funnel pipeline 400% through TAM scoping and an ABM list, and running the executive cadence against quarterly OKRs.
Took internal AI agents from prototype to production, including automated sales call prep and an AI Chief Strategy Officer delivering real-time market intel.
Founding Director of Data Science
Remote · April 2022 – March 2025
Early employee (post-Series A) and first data hire; owned the clinical evidence program across engineering, product, and regulatory groups; promoted from Associate Director in 2023.
Wrote the analysis that won the first FDA authorization of AI to predict breast cancer risk, representing Clairity live and async with FDA reviewers and signing off on all statistical output.
Built the evidence and C-suite understanding behind a $40M+ Series B, teaching the CEO, board, and investors what the results meant and how to talk about them.
Defined the official evaluation benchmark that became the target engineering built to, the requirement product shipped against, and the basis for the claims marketing planned to make.
Kept 2.1M+ medical images and records audit-ready for engineering and product, owning the data pipelines and quality checks against a zero-defect, externally audited standard.
Worked directly with hospitals, clinicians, and external consultants to generate data and assemble clinical evidence against fixed FDA deadlines.
Managed and coached two junior analysts with 100% retention over two years.
Data Analytics Instructor
The George Washington University
Washington, DC · January 2022 – May 2026
Designed a data course from scratch for 140+ student journalists, teaching them to produce, consume, and communicate data responsibly in the AI era (materials on GitHub).
Data Analytics Instructor & Graduate Researcher
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA · August 2015 – March 2025
Taught data analysis skills to 150+ professionals, emphasizing best practices for business cases and how to responsibly use AI as a coding partner.
Public Projects
Launched getcircuit.app to give non-technical people the instincts of experienced data analysts, built using an AI product and engineering team I created; announced live at posit::conf(2026).
Built and launched a self-paced course teaching professionals to validate the credibility of any data analysis, and taught three live Lightning Lessons on Maven to 500+ operators.
Education
Ph.D., Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA · August 2015 – December 2022
Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students
M.A., European Studies
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Amsterdam, NL · September 2012 – July 2013
Prize for Best Master’s Thesis in European Studies
Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship for Graduate Studies
B.A., International Relations
The College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA · August 2008 – May 2012
Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa
Skills
Enablement & Adoption
Customer enablement · Customer onboarding · Product adoption · AI adoption · Change management · Customer journey mapping · Customer discovery · Customer product training · Product demonstrations · Behavior-change measurement · Knowledge management · Product analytics (PostHog, Amplitude)
Education & Training
Customer education · Instructional design · Curriculum development · Adult learning · Self-paced course development · Live instruction · Workshop facilitation · Webinar development · Learning management systems · Training design and measurement · Learning analytics · 1:1 coaching · Data communication · Non-technical communication
Customer Success & Operations
Customer success · Account health · Value reviews · Renewals & expansion · Customer retention · Churn reduction · Stakeholder management · Executive communication · SOW scoping & pricing · Go-to-market strategy · TAM · ABM · Product operations · Technical specs · OKRs · Cross-functional team leadership · Start-up leadership · Salesforce · HubSpot
AI & Data
AI agents · Multi-agent systems · MCP · Context engineering · AI-driven development · Claude API · Claude Code · Claude Agent SDK · Prompt engineering · LLM evaluations · ML model evaluation · Responsible AI · Python · R · SQL · Experimental design · Causal inference · FDA regulatory submissions