Harmonic is the startup discovery engine: Darri Atlason, Head of Growth at Harmonic

0:00Scaling Europe:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Thank you for following along. Today we've got a great conversation from our time at Slush and the conversation is supported by Databricks, whose unified platform power source on everyone's FY2026 target, becoming a truly AI-driven company, and Harmonic. Harmonic is the startup discovery engine used by leading VCs across the world to find their fund returners. Check them both out. Thank you. Hello and welcome back for the final interview of the day. I'm here with Darri from Harmonic, who are, of course, sponsoring the coverage.

0:30Scaling Europe:So thank you very much. It's great to have you on board. Can you just like quickly introduce what kind of, what's your role? What does Harmonic do for those who don't know?

0:38Darri Atlason:Yeah, absolutely. I'm the head of growth. For Harmonic, we call ourselves the startup discovery engine. The reason we use this discovery word is that we think it encompasses the sourcing, screening, and evaluation part of just dealing with startups, whether you're investing in them or selling to them or just generally interested in them. and we sell to people who are any of the above.

1:00Scaling Europe:Yeah, amazing.

1:01Darri Atlason:How's it going so far? It's been great. This year specifically has been tremendous. The business kind of hit a bit of an inflection point around, honestly, around slush last year, kind of things started to take off for us. We had a unicorn outside of the yesterday, so maybe that had something to do with it. We're seeing use cases spread into corporate and growth capital and stuff like that, but obviously our bread and butter and backdrop of the operations is serving VCs and we're lucky to work with some of the best funds in the world.

1:32Scaling Europe:Amazing. Can you touch on some of the use cases, some stories from how people have used it to source and select to evaluate companies?

1:39Darri Atlason:Yeah, absolutely. I think the funds that have the most differentiated deal flow through Harmonic are the ones that have a strong thesis around where talent is centralized and a unique one. And they marry it to their ability to win those deals. So if somebody is really interested in cybersecurity, they will be monitoring people inside of Polo Alto Network, seeing those that have fast progression and talking to them even before they decide to start a business. Like seeding the idea of starting something, going beyond stealth, which is kind of... That's pretty interesting to see how far down the line the market is moving.

2:23Scaling Europe:People are just having to get earlier and earlier because of the technology that's available. I was talking to an investor who was friends with a DeepMind scientist. They're on LinkedIn and all they did was update the end date of their role from DeepMind. It was from a few years ago, but they just never had said that their job had ended. They clicked it and then they had loads of people reach out to them. And so people are having to force to go earlier and earlier to find people before they're at DeepMind, right? Or before they're thinking about leaving. And I think it's super interesting. I think one of the best stories I heard was Harry talking about PKI.

3:00Darri Atlason:Yeah.

3:01Scaling Europe:That video went super viral. They found it on Harmonic. Within like 24 hours, they had a term sheet ready to go. And that was like six months ago or something. And they just announced a Series A on Monday this week. So it's like an amazing investment that went from zero to four million AR. Absolutely.

3:16Darri Atlason:And it's like those signals, the deep minds, the Palantirs, the renowned universities, table stakes at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just getting snapped up immediately. So if you're not a huge brand name VC that just has demand flowing inside the door, you're going to have to figure out a way how to differentiate your opportunity set. And I think the most important takeaway for me is fish in pools where you have some reason to win, like industry expertise, traction, connections, whatever. Because otherwise it's a waste of time.

3:50Scaling Europe:Amazing. Amazing. Let's talk a bit about your role, your growth, right? And Harmonica's seen amazing growth. Can you talk a bit about what your role actually means? What are you accountable for and how do you go about achieving it?

4:01Darri Atlason:I hate the name, how to growth. This is just a made-up name for people that don't want to say marketing, I think. But it's essentially what it is. Marketing. It's driving demand. It's building out the brand. It's doing a little bit of product marketing stuff. Essentially everything that goes on before we hand over a qualified lead to the sales team. So that's formulating a deep understanding of what our customers' challenges are and figuring out how to influence product and messaging and all that stuff to make that stick. I don't mind the marketing word. That's actually what it is. But I guess the industry doesn't like it.

4:35Scaling Europe:Growth is, I don't know, does it sound cooler? It's interesting. like head of growth is a title that can mean so many things at different jobs yeah but like i want to get into you know head of growth so marketing they always like budget holders right and they're always experimenting they're always trying to see some new things i want to get into some of the best things you spend money on versus the worst things and you know the unicorn example is a great one because last year you put the unicorn outside the investor day at slush things like that what crazy things have you tried that worked well not worked well yeah i think i

5:06Darri Atlason:I mean, that's the best example of like an out of the box thing that we've done. It's pretty much the Sam Blond way of approaching an event. It's like never just buy a booth and show up. Like that's just deciding to lose in a sea of sameness. If you're going to go, go big, put a unicorn outside the investor day, figure out how to make your mark outside of the kind of normal channels. And then for us, I think the other component, especially when we're starting early, like dealing with this kind of cold start issue. Figuring out how to partner for distribution. We're so lucky to have a platform that people who have a voice with our audience, they want to use.

5:48Darri Atlason:Harry is a great example. How can we figure out a way to have him just share how he's using the platform? And that's going to be tremendously valuable for us. And then gives us the opportunity to carry the conversation forward once we have that initial distribution.

6:02Scaling Europe:I think I spoke to Harry about that video because he's just so good at content. Yeah. And I don't think it was even, and it wasn't even like organized with you. It was very authentic, very organic. We just woke up to it. Yeah, yeah. It was pretty cool. He was like, yeah, we just made it because it was like, that's what happened. I thought it'd be good content and I liked the harmonic guys. And I was like, that's the best customer feedback and advocate that you can have.

6:23Darri Atlason:Absolutely. And the other piece of content that he created was just this random LinkedIn post one day that a tiered one that he'd been walking around Hyde Park with. Yes. Found five out of the last nine investments on Harmonic. That was the biggest day in the history of Harmonic.

6:37Scaling Europe:No way.

6:38Darri Atlason:Which is kind of hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Just a single LinkedIn post.

6:41Scaling Europe:And it's not planned, right? No, it's just... You build those relationships, and those relationships then pay dividends over time, which is amazing. Yeah. Well, look, Dari, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for, like, helping out and sponsoring the coverage. You're an amazing partner, so... Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

7:03Thank you.