We Ignored Silicon Valley Advice for 3 Years | Nicolas Sharp (Attio)

The half-life of product-market fit has fallen. If you rewind 10, 15 years or something, you could have an idea for a product, it could work, and then you could build a company off the back of that feature, that idea, for a decade.

It is a very, very different game today. The biggest change is that the expectations around our growth rate and the expectations around the end goal are just much higher than they've ever been before. I was actually a sole founder with no team, went the sort of full lean startup route, all of the kind of startup Kool-Aid about being embarrassed about what you share, about getting your first paying customers as quickly as possible.

And I found there were so many issues with that philosophy of company building. Once you're like, "Great, we have product-market fit, we're now in scaling mode," we've got to hit these increasingly large revenue targets. People yo-yo up and down on their opinions about how things should be done.

And then you start to lose your product-market fit and you've got to refind it. And so the best companies have to do these two things concurrently now, which is be in this continual paranoid R&D, ship fast, iterate, build a team that is comfortable experimenting, throwing things away, etc.

You've got to do all of that. All the things that you used to do at the beginning of the company, you've now got to continue doing. And at the same time, you've got to build.

Nick, welcome to New Economies. We finally managed to make this episode happen.

Yeah, thank you. Very excited to be here. And yeah, good to be chatting.

Likewise. Well, I'm excited for today's chat, but I thought it'd be helpful to start with the early days of founding Attio. You know, most founders who I speak to really just want to get out there as quickly as possible, find as many customers as they can, build in public a little bit.

But you decided to actually take the complete opposite route and build in stealth for 1,000 days. Why?

Yeah.

Good question. And a long and kind of nuanced answer, so I will try to, I'll try to make this somewhat concise. Because really the answer, the origin of the answer comes from before Attio was started. And it was because we built another company, another product called Fundstack, where we did the exact opposite, where we essentially shipped the product as I was actually a sole founder with no team.

And I shipped the product as quickly as I could. I had a product in customers' hands, in market, making money long before I had a website or anything like that. And

went the sort of full lean startup route, you know, all of the kind of startup Kool-Aid about being embarrassed about what you share, about getting your first paying customers as quickly as possible, solving a narrow pain point, all those sorts of things.

And Attio was really just a reaction, a sort of a counteraction to that. Because we found, or I found, there were so many issues with that philosophy of company building that I actually wanted to do the complete opposite, which was build something that was really well thought through, really well architected, that I felt would be sort of enduring and scale and all those sorts of things.

And also because

we had real conviction about building a platform, a real CRM platform that could compete against the kind of big incumbents. And we were super paranoid that if we shipped really quickly and didn't do the fundamental work to kind of build the architecture well, that we would end up inevitably becoming some kind of point solution or not being able to scale to the level that we wanted to.

So it was a real counteraction, you know, to those things. And we were lucky in that sense that we'd gone through the opposite experience of shipping quickly, shipping things we were embarrassed about, you know, making money as fast as we could, and learned some lessons there.

And for the kind of product we wanted to build and kind of a company we wanted to build, we could see that that wasn't theright route for us.

You know, I can almost imagine, and I meet a lot of founders who experienced this, 1,000 days is a long time. It's like nearly three years,right?

Yeah.

How did you deal with the frustration personally when things weren't going well? And how do you just, you know, have that mentality to keep on going?

Yeah. So it's interesting because during that time, we had revenue from the first business. So this was pre-VC funding. We didn't have, we'd never raised money for Attio at that point. So we were in this weird time around the beginning of COVID.

We had some money coming in, tens of thousands of dollars a month coming in from the previous company. And initially, we were in this blissful period of just building software. And it was kind of awesome. Me, my co-founder, a couple of good engineers.

In the middle of COVID, when there was no temptation to be doing anything else and with no real concerns about runway or anything like that, because we had this trickle of cash keeping us going, there's nothing to spend money on.

So being sort of ramen profitable was all you needed during COVID. And I would say the first 18 months were fun. It's just building.

Then comes this moment of

thinking, well, it has to come to a conclusion at some point. And you start to get these existential questions about product-market fit and whether what you're building is theright thing and opportunity cost and all those sorts of things.

And also start facing other problems, like it becomes quite difficult to hire. So when people can't see your product, there's no validation of it, etc. Your own team and future team members, etc., start to ask questions and you've got to, you're fighting harder and harder to kind of keep things together.

And so that was a pretty, I guess the final year leading up to when we went GA were tougher. But we did a few things along the way to kind of get us through it. So the first thing is that we did start getting customers on board.

We just did it in a very manual way. So there did come a point where we were like, well, we really actually do need to get people using this product. And if we don't, we're not going to make theright calls.

We need validation. And so we started, we launched a waitlist and we started picking people out of that waitlist to get into the product. And so that really reinvigorated us because we were putting probably five people a week into the product, getting really good feedback from them.

And just the mere fact that it was now a production-level product and that people were using it and that you had to ship things that worked and you had to fix bugs and if there was downtime, it mattered.

All of those things really changed the vibe. But it wasn't, it was tough. It was a really, really tough period for us for sure. Because the opportunity cost question is always in the back of your head. And it's difficult to explain how much one cares about what they're building and how much you want it to succeed.

And that kind of desire for it to succeed sometimes can be extremely detrimental, actually.

For sure.

Yeah.

You know, if you were to launch this today, you say five customers a week takes three years. I mean, this is basically what Loverboard,right, has done. If you take them for comparison, you can literally build something in a few days.

If you were to launch today, would you spend a couple of weeks building and just a couple of weeks just figuring out, like, let's just go for us and launch?

I don't think so. I mean, I think we obviously learned a lot. So if we were the same group of people building it again, we could do it much faster than three years. And the other thing is that

the tools available to help you build things are amazing. And you're just unquestionably, in order of magnitude, more productive than you were when we started building the product. Having said that, the kind of care and attention and obsession we had over the initial architecture of the product has really paid off for us.

And so I'm very, very glad that we did it because it is now a foundation which is really paying dividends. And it means that now we're building a product that's scaling super well, that will continue to scale really well, and that importantly, can serve the workloads and the quantity of workloads and data that's needed in this new AI world.

It can serve them really, really well. So we've ended up in a very good position. And I'm glad that we did it. Now, there's always the thing of like, you know, you've just finished a marathon and someone says, "Do you want to run the marathon again?"

You might be like, "No, I've just done it." So the idea of having to do that all again doesn't sound very appealing, but I'm glad that we did it.

You know, things have changed so much. This was in 2019,right, when you guys kind of first launched.

Yeah. So we started, the first line of code for Attio was written in November 2019. Yeah.

And now, seven years on, so much has changed. In November '22, there was this thing called ChatGPT launched. Not sure if you heard of it. And since then, it's completely changed how we all live and work and it's going to change forever.

You guys have just launched our Attio, which I think is really interesting. When in the Attio journey, did you actually realize that, okay, if AI is potentially going to change how we work, we have to make changes now, so run that marathon again in order to stay relevant?

So we actually, when ChatGPT launched,

we used it very, very early. Very, very early. And actually, I remember, I can honestly remember the exact moment that Jamie, one of our engineers, kind of pulled everyone over to his computer because we just got access to ChatGPT and we were playing with, it was before ChatGPT was actually ChatGPT.

So it wasn't a chat interface. It was a, it was write some text, press generate, and it generates the next, you know, the next X number of tokens.

And we started playing around with it then and we're like, "Okay, this is kind of cool. This is going to be, this is going to be, this is going to be really, really powerful." Now, even before that point, I think that we had a really big inclination that the sort of high-resolution data and being lossless in the way that we think about data was going to be really important.

We didn't know that it was going to be quite as important as it's turned out to be, but we had a pretty big inclination that even with the sort of classical machine learning techniques that have been available for a while, there was really cool stuff that you could do.

And we built Attio off the back of the idea that using this really high-resolution data and email and calls, etc., we could automate a lot of the manual work associated with CRM. So even the version of the product back then would do things like on email ingestion, it would automatically create contacts, it would look at footers for information, it would pull out domains and descriptions and job titles and all that kind of stuff.

And it would then go and do data enrichment for companies and everything like that. So we had this idea that it would be important. The big pushback we got at the time is there's too much data in the product.

It's messy. Why? I don't want all of my every single email in CRM. I want to like hand-select the relevant ones. And that's how the products at the time worked. But, you know, we're sort of fortunate that that again turned out to be a good decision because now that high-resolution data and all of the investments that we built in those ingestion pipelines and the storage layer and the encryption layer, etc., are obviously very, very, very important.

Yeah. And so we sort of, we jumped onto the LLM bandwagon pretty early and then have just been trying to continually rethink the way that we build a product with every new model generation.

Super cool. I tried it out today and what I love is it's quick, it's easy, and just super like UI design-wise, just super, super nice,right? How would you actually describe it though to a user? Do you describe it as an AI agent inside your CRM?

Is that the easiest way to describe it?

Yeah. So, I mean, that's how we talk about it internally as well. So we have,

we think about, it's really interesting because when we started building these features, there's a big question about whether you personify the agent and whether you say, there's Attio, the CRM, and then there is, you know, there's Lucy, the CRM agent that helps you use the CRM and is going to go and do work for you inside of it.

That felt to us like the sort of early days of touch UI and skeuomorphism and all of these sorts of things where we were like, well, people know like old software and then this agent thing, so let's make that a person.

And we actually, we made the call not to do that. And what we actually did was we made the call that the agent is Attio. If you ask the agent who it is, it will tell you it's Attio because this is now what the product is.

The product is now this intelligent thing that you can converse with, that will do work on your behalf, that will keep your data up to date, that will push recommendations to you, all of those sorts of things. And it is not something outside of the product that sort of interacts with the product.

It is the product. And so that was a sort of, yeah, a decision we took very, very early that Attio is now the agent.

And again, I think, yeah, you know, if you try it, if you say, "Who are you?" it will say, "I'm Attio."

Super cool. What I find so interesting about these startups, and especially ones who are launching new AI models or built-on AI models, is fairly simple to do, but actually getting customers to use it is probably like the biggest complex task,right?

And I think this question will be helpful for a lot of founders who already have products built and are looking to launch agents of some description. You built our Attio, and then the next task is, how do you actually get customers to use it?

What does that distribution kind of factor look like? Do you launch all in one go to all customers? Do you do it 1%, 2%, 3% of the time? What does that look like?

Yeah. So it's going to be a little bit different for our Attio versus other products. So I might answer this in two parts because for our Attio, we've got a lot of distribution. We've got tens of thousands of companies that use Attio and a very active user base.

And so the activation strategies there are different

versus going to go and find new customers for a product that's not in market. So on the our Attio side, again, launching a product to an active user base, we get people into testing pretty early. And we essentially run a few versions of

user testing groups. So we start off with alpha testing. Alpha testing is always with our internal team and a select group, a very small group of customers who we think are going to benefit from the product, are going to provide good feedback, etc.

And also going to be tolerant and patient as we make these big changes. And so we'll do that as early as we plausibly can. And sometimes the product looks very different to the one that we actually ship. The UI will be very rough.

There'll be lots of difficult setup things that we have to do manually, etc. But we try to do it as quickly as we can. Once those kinks have been worked out and we're starting to feel pretty good about things and we feel like the product's starting to get to a good place, then we'll go into a closed beta.

And the closed beta will be a much larger group of customers, again, with a certain tolerance for rough edges, etc. But at this point, it should be providing value and we should feel confident that even though you're participating in this beta, knowing that it's not going to be perfect, you should still kind of net out in a pretty good place.

And then we will often go into a public beta, which is open to all of our customers and we go and find, finish the last sort of couple of percent from a polish perspective. And then by the time we launch, we're pretty confident in the way that things are working.

Now, having said all of that, these stages can happen quite closely together and shipping quickly is really important for us. So we're not, yeah, we're in a world where you've got to take a bit of a leap of faith and things move really, really fast.

And if you don't ship, then you're not going to learn fast enough. I think rate of learning is now one of the most important metrics for a company. And so, yeah, we do try and ship things and get things into customers' hands faster than we have done in the past.

Now, that's not super helpful advice for anyone who's trying to get net new, you know, the first customers. And I can talk maybe a little bit about how we did that when we actually built Attio for the first time and how we tried to get people to use Attio as a product for the first time.

So the first thing that we did was we tried various pitches of the product. So we put marketing material together. We put a website together. We started putting tweets together. I don't know what they're called now, Xs, whatever.

Something like that.

Yeah. We started putting the messaging about the product into the world and we tweaked it a lot. So we did a lot of Attio is XYZ, Attio is ABC, and we just saw which message resonated more. So we were like, you know, if we say CRM, is that too much of a loaded term?

Is the space too crowded? Should we call it a relationship intelligence platform, a customer workspace? You know, we tried all these different versions of messaging and

ways of talking about the product. And we saw which one worked. And we started to build this waitlist. Now, waitlists are really, really good if you interact with people on the waitlist almost immediately. But the half-life of someone on a waitlist is very, very short, especially for a product like CRM, where once someone has, they're in the market for a CRM, and if you reach out to them nine months later, they wouldn't have waited nine months.

You know, if you're building a product that has very low switching costs, all those kind of things, which is like additive to people's existing stack, etc., might be a different story. But for CRM, we found out that the half-life of the CRM, of the waitlist, was very, very short.

So what we would actually try and do is when people got onto the waitlist, if they were interesting, we would reach out to them as fast as we could. And then we would try and onboard them to the product as quickly as we could to start getting feedback.

Now, in the early days, this was a very manual process. It was literally.

Like getting on the call.

Get on a call and quite literally be like, you know.

This is how the product works.

This is how the product works. Is this kind of, is this interesting to you? Like, how does your company work? We would sit there, we would help them set it up. And then we would end up

following them, you know, keeping on top of them, etc. Until we got to the point where there was a group of people who were consistently logging back in and we would look at their user sessions for the last couple of months and they're like, no, these are daily active users.

And then we sort of built the confidence to start pushing on pricing and seeing if they were using it because it was free or if they were using it because it was valuable.

Super helpful. Super smart. You know, I kind of feel with how this whole category of AI, SaaS tooling, whatever you want to call this,right, part of this product market fit is also changing so quickly. So you start with a couple of users, you figure out like this whole waitlist strategy, then it's like, actually, like what is product market fit?

What product market fit is today is very different to what it is when you guys first started.

Totally.

Tell us what's happening. What is product market fit today?

Totally. I mean, I think, again, the half-life of product market fit has fallen. So if you rewind 10, 15 years or something, you could have an idea for a product, it could work, and then you could build a company off the back of that feature, that idea for a decade.

So

the playbook became pretty established. An investor saw you had product market fit and they were like, great, this is it. Product market fit, we found another one. Like, pump money in, run the playbook, and let's scale this, you know, scale this through all of the revenue milestones and whatever, you know.

And over the years, we have more and more people who know how to do this and it becomes quite kind of programmatic. That's completely changed because the half-life product market fit has changed. So once you're like, great, we have product market fit, we're now in scaling mode, you start to lose your product market fit and you've got to refind it.

And if you had product market fit for GPT-3, then you didn't have it for GPT-4 or GPT-5 and it will change again at six. And so you have to do these two things concurrently now, which is be in this continual paranoid R&D, ship fast, iterate, build a team that is comfortable experimenting, throwing things away, etc.

You've got to do all of that. All the things that you used to do at the beginning of the company, you've now got to continue doing. And at the same time, you've got to build a scale. And it's a much more interesting time to be building a company because most founders really enjoy the product building part of it, the iteration, the experimentation, etc.

And then you also have this new additional challenge of, well, we're going to scale go-to-market. We've got to hit these increasingly large revenue targets, etc. And so it is a very, very different game today.

Also, to touch on that, how to stay relevant. I've definitely seen Attio around a lot more. I mean, I remember when you guys were first launching, 2019, I think I was sitting in TechHub in London in Shoreditch and Attio started kind of popping out.

Maybe it was a bit before that. Anyway, but I definitely started seeing Attio around a lot more. And I think one quite smart tactic you guys have done is actually partnering with B2B creators. We're super happy to be partnering with you guys and love that partnership.

How effective has that been to find new audiences and find new ways actually to say, hey, this is who we are and this is why we're relevant?

Yeah. And I think this is the interesting thing about company building is that it is so multifaceted and you have to be good at all of these things. And so we've spoken about keeping the product relevant, scaling your revenue org and all of that kind of stuff.

And the thing that's also massively changing is distribution and marketing. And so that's another whole massive part of what we do is in this very saturated market, it's a brilliant market, it's a big one, there's lots of customers, all those kind of things, but it's very saturated.

And in this very saturated market is how do you get your message out and how do you keep on top of channels and always have a new channel ready for when the one that's been working doesn't work quite as well, etc.

And again, it's not that, building a company is not that dissimilar to building a product, which is that you're constantly adapting it, you're learning, you're changing things, you're refactoring parts of it, etc. And that was, I think, the really big shift for us was understanding that the product that we're building is not just what we ship at attio.com, it's also the company that builds that product, that markets that product, that sells it.

And so on the marketing side, we've been through a ton of different iterations of the things that work, that didn't work, etc. Right now, what works really well for us is that

we get a lot of organic traffic. About 75% of our inbound is organic. And that is because that's a lot to do with creative partnerships and having trusted voices delivering your message. It's a really, really big part of it.

And specifically today, where there is so much change in the market, that people are really looking for guidance and they're really looking for, they're really looking for help because every day people wake up, they're building their businesses, they know that they could be doing better, they know that their tooling could be better, they know that there's, they know in the back of their mind that there is this AI thing happening that means that the companies are changing and they want to work out how they can be one of those companies that's on the forefront.

And that's what Attio does. It helps you become a very AI-native company by helping you kind of uplevel the way that you deal with your customers, the way that you interact with your customers, etc. So for us to get that message out in a way that kind of helps people to navigate this change is really, really powerful.

And then the other thing that's changing is that we are LLM discovery, people finding, going to retrieve information, get guidance, get help from Claude or ChatGPT, etc., is obviously exploding. And that is, again, something that we put a lot of, we put a lot of effort into.

So making sure that Attio is very discoverable by agents and LLMs, that we have all of our content, all of our help documentation, etc., is presented in a format that's easily digestible by these products is another area that we've really, really focused on.

That's super interesting. So you get excited by these AI models, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we're starting just to see that search is still important.

These things, you know, these shifts in many ways happen very quickly. In many ways, people are quite habitual. And so search is still important to us and still an area we focus on. But it's undeniable that LLM or so large language model optimization is a rapidly, rapidly

rising, rapidly rising sort of skill that you need to have inside of your company. And something we've invested, we're now quite deep into this. We've invested in it for a while, but it's been very important for us.

Super interesting. You know, we partner and invest in a few YC companies. One of them actually was a company called The Prompting Company. They do exactly this, get startups citing these AI models. And it's only going to change,right?

Because you have to stay relevant, you have to have a distribution, and you have to have a sticky product.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it'd be also helpful to talk about the fundraising kind of market. You guys raised $50 million last year, $150 million today. Super exciting. How has the fundraising market changed since pre-AI to where we are today? Did that journey look different?

So I think the biggest change is that the expectations have changed a lot. And there is a lot of capital available, but the bar to be on the receiving end of that capital is much higher. And so if you think about Attio now as a Series B company,

the expectations around our growth rate and the expectations around

the sort of end goal, etc., are just much higher than they've ever been before. And so if you think about how fast Attio is growing now, it would have been very uncommon for a Series B company to be growing at this rate five years ago, ten years ago.

But now it's really the expectation. And you look at, I mean, I just saw amazing news that Matty from 11 Labs put out that they just done a $100 million quarter, which is just stunning. I mean, it's staggering at a company of that age.

And so that is the bar. That's where, you know, that's where the dollars are being distributed now. And so I think there's a lot of cash. It's harder to get it, especially at the growth stage. And you've got to be, you've got to build a company that's just growing faster.

And for me, it's kind of crazy because when we first started building the product, when we looked forward about all these revenue milestones we would have to hit, I never thought that we would be at the stage now where we sort of have this accelerating revenue growth and we're growing at the rate that we are now at the scale that we're growing at.

So it's very, very cool. But it's also, yeah, it's a much, much harder landscape for sure.

I don't know how you do this. I find it really difficult, especially when we're covering all these AI trends, how to, there's so much noise and there's so many distractions. How do you kind of find that balance of actually not being distracted, find this new product or feature that's super interesting and should maybe spend some time on it without just getting caught up in all the noise?

It's really difficult. And I think one of the really difficult things in, one of the really difficult things about building a venture-backed business is how quickly trends, opinions, etc. shift. And they are, if you just sort of watch the vibe in the industry, it goes from hire as many people as you can to build a super lean team and have mass layoffs in the course of like six months.

And people yo-yo up and down on their opinions about how things should be done. And I think that the best companies are attuned to those things, but they're more grounded than that. And they sort of like, you know, you have this long-term vision and you're very, very focused on it.

And you have to, to some extent, tune out the noise and sort of not react to every new kind of vibe shift because if you do, you'll end up in this sort of perpetual pendulum mode and it'll be exhausting and probably not a very good business.

And so there is this balance of being

forward-looking and really sort of like aiming for a very clear goal, but also absorbing what's happening and making course corrections as you go. And I think

that's obviously difficult and getting that balance perfect is impossible, but we obviously, we try our best. And then the other thing is that

we're really close to, we're very, very close to our customers. We're very close to our technology, the things that we use. And we try to just really obsess over those things and tune out a lot of the noise that's happening in other areas that are less important to us.

So yeah, we try to just kind of keep our obsession rooted in our customers and our product and stay pretty focused and think pretty long-term with a healthy dose of short-term paranoia.

I love that. Also, inside the team, the way product teams operate, finance teams, legal teams operate, like basically the full stack, that also changes all the time. How does Attio and yourself and your co-founder think about making sure that our team is completely up to date with how to become the best possible people they can be by using AI?

Yeah.

Because the reason why I ask is like the way teams operate in the future is, and already is,right, looks so different, but the skills they need to stay relevant is going to change as well.

Yeah. And I think the way that we think about this is that

we could try and figure that out for the company. And so we could go and sit in a room and pontificate about the future of software engineering and what tool is going to win and how these things are going to happen.

Or we could empower 50 software engineers at Attio to go and experiment and we could parallelize that discovery by sort of, we have 50 threads of discovery. And then we can pull all of that information back in, learn from it, and sort of

start to circle the Attio way of doing it. And that's the route that we've gone for. So we've tried to build a team and a structure that allows people to experiment, that gives people permission to go and try new tools as soon as they launch and do all of those things.

And what we'll find is that a new model will come out, a new harness will come out, a new tool will come out. A number of people on the team will go and try it. They'll then post updates.

We have lots of internal Slack channels. We keep you on top of this stuff. They'll post updates. More people go and try it if it's good, others won't if it's bad, etc. And we sort of have this continual exploration and learning happening.

And then as that happens, we then feed back into the sort of, you know, into the company-wide way that we do things. So at Attio, the way that that works is we have teams for different areas of the product, but then we have regions for different areas of the code base.

And one of those might be, for example, our developer experience region, which is a group of engineers at Attio who all kind of agree on the way that we'll do DevEx across the board. And so you have this, each person does all this experimentation, they bring it back to the region, bring it back to the team, and then we can update the way that we work as a company.

And I think that's the only way that you can do it now. But having a sort of central command for these things is just too slow.

And also just having that central command on where the company is going all the time, staying focused, is so important,right? Take me inside Attio.

Exactly.

If I was joining Attio tomorrow, like take me inside, is it Revolut-style team? Are you like super focused on like 24/7, like hustle so much? Is it a little bit more informal, like what is the company culture if I was joining tomorrow?

So I think the company culture is, I think it's extremely determined, extremely ambitious, but

it is a quiet determination. And in the sense that it is not performative. It is, you know, we are maniacally focused on the brilliance of the people that we bring into the team and making sure that the people in the team are the very best people we could have.

We have lots of things that we look for. So at Attio, people tend to be, you know, tend to be kind of very, very independent and take ownership of something and sort of independently drive that forward. So there are lots of things happening in the company that I don't know about until they become bigger things because so many people are kind of experimenting with ideas and that kind of stuff.

And we then try to create a company that gives people permission to go and do these things. So an engineer can say, "Hey, for the last couple of days, I've been trying this thing and I think this is a really exciting direction for us to push on for this feature or this part of the product."

And a lot of the stuff that we build comes through that. Now, of course, we have our vision and our sort of, you know, in the direction that we want to go and the pillars, the product that we want to push forward.

But the exact way that we get there has to be something that's distributed amongst a large group of people.

What else? We focus a lot on onboarding and context sharing. So your first couple of weeks at Attio should give you a very good overview of the entirety of the company. If you're onboarding as a marketer, as an engineer, as in sales, etc., you'll end up knowing about all aspects of the company.

And so we have a pretty structured onboarding. About a year ago, we moved to onboarding cohorts. So every month, we do two cohorts of onboarding, two weeks each. Everyone goes through exactly the same onboarding program and we'll have sessions with people across every department.

If you are a salesperson, you'll understand our code base to some extent. If you are a software engineer, you'll understand how we do sales and how we pitch the product, etc.

And

then we have a very good culture of sort of open metrics, open channels in Slack, and really spend the first couple of weeks hammering into people that if they need data, they can have it. If they need to speak to someone, they can just go and speak to them and all those sorts of things.

It's important,right? You know, especially in this very AI competitive landscape, talent is dense. Talent can be snapped up very quickly, especially these AI models where they have plenty of cash behind them. They can make crazy offers. But I do think it's really exciting.

One thing I think, which has been pretty cool to see and I'd love to get your take around is, you know, before this pre-AI era, pre-ChatGPT, any company which was based in Europe, if you go and raise a unicorn, a lot of people will be very skeptical.

A lot of people will say, "You guys just focusing on little European market, we'll focus on US,right?" Now it seems actually Europe can really build big companies with the likes of you guys, Fuse Energy, Granolas, and Fusia, and probably a bunch of others.

Can Europe now, yeah, can Europe build huge companies in today's market?

Yeah, I think we've kind of crossed an inflection point for sure. And I think there's a few things that have happened. Firstly, it's been done, which is helpful. So people can see that it's possible. And then I think that there is also a new determination from European founders to build European companies.

And I think the reasons for that are obvious. I won't get into the politics too much. But there is a newfound kind of desire to build companies in Europe.

There's always been the talent here. And so if you just, you would have seen the news this week or last week that OpenAI are opening their first big international office here. We already have DeepMind and Facebook with a huge engineering presence in London, etc.

So I think that the talent has always been in London. We have four of the world's best universitiesright here. We have just a wonderful deep talent pool, very technical, etc. And I think that the capital has been here for a while, but it's here more than it's ever been.

And sort of all of the ingredients are kind of, you know, there's really no excuses or no reason why it can't be done anymore. And personally, someone who's very passionate about British European tech, this is awesome that it's finally happening and something that I'm extremely passionate about.

So it's kind of another dimension on company building. It's like, well, why are you doing this? Why do you put yourself through this? And it's sort of another, it's another dimension to the mission, which makes it feel worthwhile.

And you know, hopefully at some point, we look back, we look forward and look back in the next five or ten years, there's going to be this whole talent cycle,right? Hopefully Attio becomes huge, then a whole bunch of employees will become angel investors or start their own companies.

And that's just one company,right? Do that for a thousand companies.

Yeah, just look at some of the companies that we've just spoken about,right? So Fuse Energy, really good example. Andy was at

Revolut, learned a lot of awesome things there, learned a very kind of effective way of company building, and has now started a super impressive company, which is exactly what you'd hope to see. If you look at, if you look at 11 Labs, Matty was at Palantir.

Palantir have a really big presence in London. And so, you know, again, met some great people there and

sort of was able to then start one of the most impressive companies that Europe has seen. So we're starting to see that this, we're starting to see the kind of second turn of the cards. And it's the ecosystem effects are really taking hold.

And it's really cool. It's really cool.

So Attio in the next five years, let's do 12 months and five years maybe, you know, will is that kind of like end destination because things are changing so quickly?

Yeah, so quickly, in fact, that five years seems like a, you know, who knows? We'll do our best. We'll play a game and we'll guess. 12 months, I think, is something we can talk with some level of confidence around.

So we've got really, really ambitious revenue goals and product goals for the rest of this year. And we are, we're doing very well against those. So I'm feeling pretty confident that we're going to hit, if not exceed them.

And if we do that, I think we'll, you know, we'll be in a really, really strong position. You might have seen that Ramp put out this some transaction data a few months ago or six weeks ago, whenever it was, that has Attio as the fastest growing CRM in the world now.

And that's something that we'll continue to fight for our place at the top of that, at the top of that leaderboard. And then when we look forward five years, I think it's very difficult to know exactly where we'll be just because things are changing so quickly.

But broadly, what we'd like to do is we would like to be the world's number one CRM and the world's number one customer platform fundamentally. And the way that we get there is by making our customers very happy and shipping really good things.

And again, feeling very, very good about that. In the last 12 months, our engineering team has grown. We've brought in some amazing engineering leadership and some really brilliant, you know, some really brilliant folks. And I think we're on a really good trajectory in that regard.

And just got to keep beating the incumbents,right? So many of them are so slow.

Got to keep beating the incumbents. Yeah. Got to keep beating the incumbents. And then also got to keep beating the newcomers. There is a, it is, you know, there is, when we started Attio, the incumbents were looming really large above us and there was no consensus.

There was full consensus that they couldn't be beaten. We've now flipped the other way where there seems to be full consensus that they can be beaten. But with that consensus has come a lot of capital into the market.

So there are lots of well-funded startups too. And we've got to, we've sort of got to have eyes in both directions.

Obviously, one of your big incumbents is one of the big CRM systems,right? We won't mention the name, but it's got a blue logo. One of the big opportunities, I think, actually is someone should build a new company that does a better job of Slack.

Slack teams, they're all so old, they're so expensive. I don't know what you guys use, but so expensive. Create a new one.

So I'm kind of hoping that

I would love Notion to do that. I think Notion are really well placed to build a really good Slack competitor. So

I will have a chat with Ivan about it, but I think

I think that'd be cool.

Super interesting. Hey, this has been amazing. Before we finish, we have a quick rapid-fire questions. I'll say the question and you can just answer in a few words. How's that sound?

Yeah. Yeah, great.

Awesome. So your favorite company out there now and why?

My favorite company is probably,

I have a few. So the companies, I think the most obvious oneright now is Anthropic. And I think that Anthropic is a truly once-in-a-generation type of company. Feels very, very similar to the early days of Google, something like that, where you have a team that is just constantly, constantly getting callsright and getting callsright very quickly in a very distributed manner.

So it's not just that you have one brilliant leader who's just kind of visionary and has this thing that you have a company of a few thousand people that collectively are making great calls and are able to pull things off like Claude Code, which is not some centrally planned vision thing where we will like, next quarter we'll ship this thing.

You just, you have a system in place that allows people to kind of innovate and make good decisions and ship things that work really well. And so it's been amazing to watch. It's been amazing to watch them, you know, to penetrate into Attio and all of the models and tools that we use and all that kind of stuff and shipping really great products.

So I think it's a company that's, yeah, we're fortunate to kind of have an, whenever we get an inside peek into how things work, it's really awesome. So I think that's probably number one for me. I think from a, which other companies do I think are really interesting?

I think that, I think it's been very cool to watch a lot of companies adapt to this new AI landscape really successfully. So companies that have had a product that worked and have now had to make a big shift into this sort of new way of building things that have done so really quickly and successfully.

So two standouts for me there. I think Intercom is a really good example of that. And we actually have a, we're doing an event with them next week, which I'm really excited about. But they've done a really great job of sort of reinventing the company, reinventing the product and have shipped something really brilliant.

I think Notion is another one that has reacted very quickly, successfully, and has somehow, even through all of the change they've made through their product and through all of the kind of chaos of that, have managed to keep their quality bar super high and are shipping really good things.

Yeah, I mean, I could go on, but I'll let us get to the next question.

Who would think Notion, I think they're valued $9 billion now for a note taking out. I mean, times have changed,right?

Yeah, totally. And they've done amazingly to scale, you know, so far beyond that. And that they're now the sort of, you know, this, you know, something so much bigger than that.

I agree. Good takes. Which is your favorite AI leaderright now? You've mentioned Anthropic, so let's maybe not cover them. Somebody else?

Yeah, so I think, so Anthropic, I mean, it would be number one, but the company that I also think is pretty awesome and we really like the products of Google. We use a lot of their models internally and they're really good models.

They've done a really good job of, again, they had a, for the people that invented all this stuff or a lot of it, they had a slow start, but have really picked up pace and are shipping really awesome things now.

I think it's cool that, you know, Damas is becoming more public and it's been really cool to sort of learn more about him and the way that he thinks about things, really, really interesting. So I would say that after Anthropic would be Google.

Yeah, I think Damas is one to watch. I think he's going to be a mighty powerful player in the next few years.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, a little bit more on the personal side. What is the least founder thing about you?

The least founder thing about me?

Goodness.

I think that, okay, I have to think about what's sort of stereotypical of founders.

You seem very chill.

I'm chill, but I'm chill in a, I don't, I'm very good at dealing with stress now. So I think that that's, and I rarely, I rarely lose my temper and I rarely, I rarely get kind of visibly stressed.

That's actually something that's, it's a learned behavior. So it's not necessarily something that is, it's not how it started. And actually, there's a process that you go through.

And I can remember, I can remember when I first started building startups, I had this moment of thinking, when we raised, we'd raised a little bit of money in angel round and I couldn't sleep the night before signing the term sheets.

The concept of having, you know, whatever it was, 150,000

lent to me, not, you know, given to me, lent to me by someone else and having to be responsible for that was just crippling. And the idea of being responsible of someone's career and all of these things and, you know, having so many people rely on you, et cetera, was just crippling.

And then the sort of knock-on thought is like, well, if I can't do this, how the hell am I going to build a company? And it was all very, very stressful and intense and all those kind of things.

And actually, at that point, I was really like, I'm just not cut out for this. And so I went through this real process of working out how to deal with stress, how to deal with responsibility and all these sorts of things.

And over the last, you know, many years now, I've got quite good at that and have, you know, I've spent a lot of time working out

how to still deeply care and really want to win, really want to succeed, but how to do it in a way which is kind of sustainable and enjoyable. And if you think about lots of people with incredibly, incredibly high pressure jobs and responsibilities, you know, much, much more so than I have, then, you know, there is, you know, I'm nowhere even near that level.

You know, obviously aspire to continue to go in that direction, but nowhere near it. And so there's still a long way to go. But I think that's a skill that has been really helpful as the company has scaled and as the responsibility has grown and as the pressures have grown, is just learning how to be able to still be as engaged, you know, if not more, and how to really, really care and really want to win, but do it in a way which means that you can also enjoy life.

It's super important. You know, there is, you know, even if founders run their companies for five, six years, it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, you can pick up again, but it's super important to take time and be healthy, sleep well, not enough people talk about it, and most founders post the show.

Yeah, and to, and honestly, just to enjoy it.

Exactly.

Because there are, it is a very tough, it is a very tough job and it is very intense and it's a really long journey. So you do not want to spend years and years of your life in a miserable, you know, unenjoyable environment.

I do denode. Hey, Nick, this has been amazing. So many great lessons. Can't wait to see where Attio is next.

Yeah, thank you, Ollie. Awesome.