Nicolas Sharp: Founder and CEO at Attio on taking on Salesforce from Europe

0:00Nicolas Sharp:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. I'm here with Nicolas Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Atio. How are you doing today? Hey Seb. Yep, really good. Excited to be on the show. Long time LinkedIn follower and fan. So yeah, really cool to be here. It's good to hear. I am an absolute LinkedIn lunatic these days. It's good to see that some people are watching and enjoying it. But first, to kick off, I want to get into the announcement last week, the developer platform. So can you just touch on a bit about what that is and why it's important? Of course. It's a really big milestone for us because it marks Atio going from being a product to a platform.

0:40And I think this is the really big transformation that we're going through. Now, why it's particularly exciting for us is really twofold. The first is that CRM is such a big piece of software for a company. And it is something that has to be so tightly integrated to a company's way of working that the amount of features, the long tail of features, the long tail of integrations is absolutely massive. And what this allows us to do is better serve our customers in that long tail, you know, to offer sort of far more functionality and interconnectivity of other products and do that in a way which is really scalable.

1:23so allowing other people to build on top of atio and essentially make it into a platform the other reason that we think it's really exciting is that the democrat the democratization of code is is very very real um and you know we see this every day at atio in the way that we work people on on the marketing and operations team being able to spin up mini apps and and generate a ton of code. So that's really exciting. And us being able to give our customers the ability to generate code, have that run inside of their CRM to customize it, accelerates customization into the next stratosphere. So exciting for two reasons, but we think it's a pretty pivotal moment for us.

2:12Nicolas Sharp:No, it seems massive, right? The way that I look at it is almost like turning your customers and your clients into their own product managers within atio so that they can then like build and ship things themselves um because i wanted to get into how you decide what products to build and and here for there's two there's two things that are super interesting about atio specifically in the crr market the crr market is like everybody and their dog has a crm right there's like everybody has a crm so i guess like what's interesting about this and like i'd like to hear your kind of more thesis about this is like how do you decide what to build and who for because there must be so many feature requests and is this about enabling customers to build their own stuff instead of asking you yeah so so that's completely right the um there are a lot of investors there's a lot to build and historically when you've when you've gone shopping for a crm and the thing that you've been sold is a very, very long feature list.

3:13And in fact, that was the job of the product team was just to catch up, ship things, et cetera. We knew early on that that's not the path we wanted to go down. What we wanted to focus on was building an admittedly very horizontal platform, so there's still a lot to build, but we wanted to focus really on that being a platform. And what that means is that you build the core and you shook the things that are universal to 80 % or 90 % of your customers. But that long tail where 5%, 10 % of your customers need a feature can get built out by the ecosystem. And the analogy here is something like Shopify, where they sell a great out-of-the-box e-commerce product that's going to work for most people and have the features from 90 % of the market.

4:09But when you need a sales tax calculator for a niche product in a niche region, you're not going to be blocked. And what that allows us to do is make sure that the core platform is rock solid and we invest all of our time into that. It's already a big job. It's already a very horizontal product. And then we provide the tools for people to build this really, these amazing experiences on top of the product. Now, that will be a combination of apps in our app store that people will go and just one click install. But if your problem is even nichier than that, you might want to do it yourself. And fortunately, because of LLens, that's likely to be a single prompt away.

4:55Nicolas Sharp:Yeah, and when you talk about these people who are not just clicking on the box and enabling an integration or whatever bit of functionality, You're talking about these people who are going in and using both the LLMs and code to build their own functionalities or features. You know, I had to work in a RevOps role for a very short period of time when I was at a very early stage startup, essentially plugging a gap when the person left. And we were looking to hire for somebody and we were essentially looking for like a Salesforce expert. Yes. Do you see a future in which there becomes a whole new plethora of jobs, which are like ATEO experts, who don't just know a way around the CRM, but are also very proficient at building these niche or edge cases in the system itself?

5:39Yes. And we see this already today and it's awesome. So we have a really, really flourishing ecosystem of experts. And this is something we've been working on for a while now. It just grows every day, every week. We have an experts page up or a whole section of our website where you can go and find experts. You can see reviews. You can see the work that they've done, et cetera. So that's definitely something that we're seeing. But the goal here for us is to support those experts, of course, but also to make sure that the product is so easy to adopt, so easy to use, that the time you'll need an expert for is vastly reduced compared to the legacy platforms.

6:26And ideally, in a lot of cases, you won't need an expert until your business becomes very complicated and your demands become very, very big.

6:38Nicolas Sharp:Yeah, the expectation here really is that for most people, this is going to be far, far, far easier to adopt than legacy platforms. Got it. Okay. And can we touch a bit more about your product building thesis more generally? I think I've read something, I don't know if you've referred to it as well, but like you're like an engineering led organization. Is that right? And I know you've got a lot of experiences in engineering, but is that how you describe the culture? Yeah, we would call ourselves a product led organization. And I think for us, product encompasses engineering, products and design, EPD.

7:15Nicolas Sharp:Got it. Okay, that's become the interesting description that I was seeing in my head. And I was looking and I couldn't find that many product managers at Atio. And so I was trying to see, what's the rationale there, I guess? So the rationale is that in the early days, me and my co-founder were the product managers. And our job was to deliver on this, to find product market fit, to deliver on this great product and essentially be working on that every single day with customers. And we didn't feel like that was something that could be outsourced early on. It was our P0 for the company, find product market fit.

7:55And since then, things have evolved and we've started to build out a product organization now. So we do have fantastic PMs. But again, we still share that burden amongst many people. So in a lot of organizations, VMs are the sole source of product direction, quality, etc. At Atio, that load is quite evenly distributed across the team. And we hire product engineers. The key word there being product. So you are an engineer at Atio because that's what you want to do. You want to ship a finished end product, not just write code. and the same goes for our designers who again have big responsibility to actually get something that's brilliant into production.

8:46And so what that allows us to do is have a lighter product management layer and share their load more evenly.

8:54Nicolas Sharp:Yeah, that makes total sense. Before starting this, I worked in the product team at Deal and it was very, very product obsessed. And I actually often believe that often engineers should be much more closely aligned with product and help shape the roadmap a lot more. I also want to go back to like, when you first started Atio, you were building a long time before you launched. Yeah. During that time, what was your, how did you choose what to build then? Because my view from the outside looking in was that you guys had a product vision. You know what you wanted to build, which is sometimes quite unusual.

9:32Nicolas Sharp:You know, a lot of the consensus is like, ship something see what happens if it's rubbish like you know iterate really quickly keep shipping iterate you know listen to your customers whereas it felt like you had this sort of master plan of like we have we have this an idea for a new type of crm and you did have some customers in the early days but it felt like they were sort of helping you achieve your overall vision rather than that sort of like shipping short sprints product iterate yeah that's right that that's that's So we had real conviction of where the platform was going. So we had a really clear idea of what we were trying to achieve on a five, 10-year scale.

10:12And that level of conviction allowed us, I guess, to build in the shadows for a little bit longer because we were just so convinced that this was the right path to be on. Now, what we did need to help with from early customers and beta testers was the exact implementation and the refinement of those things. So we still wanted to get feedback about how something was implemented, how easy it was to use, how performant it was, all those sorts of things. And that was a really important part of the process. But we had a very, very clear idea of what we were ultimately trying to build as a platform.

10:53now i think the reason this was important for asio was because none of these things make sense um alone and so if we were to ship part of the platform if you if you didn't know about all of the other bits and how they were all going to connect that that thing in of itself wouldn't be very helpful and um and we had to just have face that the the sum of all of these parts would be you know it would be greater what the platform would be greater than the sum of all of the parts and and that was challenging at times because you're you're you're a couple of years into this build you thought okay i really really hope we're right about this um and there are definitely moments where your your your kind of conviction wavers um but thankfully you know for for whatever reason, we stuck with it.

11:47Nicolas Sharp:How did you find that on a personal level? I mean, you know, I started my own media business a few months ago. And, you know, in content and in media, you get those quick wins really easily. You know, you can quickly sign a contract. You can put some content that really resonates with people. And that motivates you to keep going on and to like show you that you're on the right path. Yeah. How did you find it in those early years? But I guess you didn't, you know, you weren't actively selling so hard. you know it must be really difficult to see that the path ahead of you was the right one to be on yeah and i think actually the truth here is that um we we can sort of retrofit lots of uh lots of sort of good good sounding sound bites about you know why we did things in that particular way but i think the reality is that i don't feel like we i think we we didn't feel like we had much of a choice.

12:39And there's a couple of reasons for that. And the number one is we weren't surrounded by lots of tempting opportunities. So we were building in London. We hadn't really been exposed to much of the tech ecosystem. At that point, I'd actually never been to San Francisco. And so we were very much outside of all of the cool things that were happening in the startup world and because of that there is a sort of uh there was a sort of vibe of well we've just got to make this work we don't really have another option other than making this work um and and i think that you know if i'm if i'm like totally honest that was probably the driving force behind us just carrying on was was kind of lack of lack of options um and so you know when you're like when you're very very determined to make something work um often you do yeah it's like an there's an

13:37Nicolas Sharp:amazing lesson in there we just like uh like what do they call like burning the boats you know there's there's like no going back now exactly exactly and start on the job exactly i wanted to also talk about some of the traction that you've seen it there's a couple things it looks like you've signed some really amazing clients especially new clients that are coming out of this kind of like AI native world, who are some of the leading AI companies. And you've talked about growing 4x revenue on this year. I want to talk about where that growth is coming from. Is that coming from new hyper growth companies?

14:13Nicolas Sharp:Is it coming from old established players that you're willing to, that you're able to convince to come off their existing providers? And then also what's the geographic split of the, of it at the moment? Okay. The easiest one to answer is the geographic split so let's start there we are essentially um our revenue is pretty evenly split between the us and europe about 50 50 it's in reality it's it's probably more like 50 40 with 10 coming from the rest of the world something like that um so um so yeah so us our biggest market by uh or our biggest country let's say um by by far um and then you know europe in totality a close second.

14:57So, yeah, so that's on the geographic side. On the sort of segmentation, we have about half of our customers are tech companies. So a few thousand tech companies. And we find that most of those are, especially now, I mean, as all good startups, should be an AI company of some sort. I think it's just the default now. I think it's very difficult to build good software if you're not building very, very deliberately and thoughtfully with LLMs. And then we have a real long tail of all sorts of other businesses. So we have a very fast-growing S &B segment. We have a very fast-growing services segment.

15:47So that could be everything from agencies to law firms to VCs, all those sorts of things. And actually a very diverse customer base. So we have very little sort of concentrated risk in our customer base. There are definitely people, a growing number of people that migrate from other CRMs. And that's now becoming a pretty substantial part of what we do. We've worked on building lots of migration tooling, et cetera. and then of course because this is the crm market where it's a near ubiquitous piece of software you have a ton of new um new buyers on the market every day yeah so every single day companies are deciding they need a crm companies are being started etc and and crm is one of the first pieces of software you buy as a company it's not something you defer till when you're 100 people and so that's that's also a really really big aspect of what we do and do you do you have a

16:46Nicolas Sharp:Given the range of your customers is super diverse, do you have a specific go-to-market method for trying to target specific niches? Is there somewhere you want to focus more on? Or are you quite happy with that risk being spread out? So there are two ways that we think about this. And I think this is important. One is that you do have to be really, really thoughtful and fairly narrow in your ICP, especially when the company's small, because you need something to focus on. It's very difficult to build a campaign, a marketing campaign, a landing page, etc. for everybody. And especially in the early days, you don't need the entirety of the market on day one.

17:31So the way that we thought about this is that we can be much narrower in the ICP of our marketing and our go-to-market than we can in the ICP of our product. the danger of being narrow in the icp of your product is that um it becomes difficult to expand it to new markets when that's necessary and you and so what we've what we've tried to do is being uh is think about the product much more as a platform one that's going to be very horizontal one that's going to be very uh customizable to different verticals but uh but been very deliberate in our marketing strategy. Now, the ICP that we've chosen from a go-to-market perspective, which is essentially high-growth tech companies, happens to have the benefit that these are often halo companies.

18:19There are a lot of people on the peripheries who are paying attention to the startup ecosystem that aren't necessarily startups themselves, but carry that same energy and ethos into the way that they built their business. And so what we found was that even if you target high-growth tech companies, you also end up getting a lot of penetration into other sort of adjacent markets. And that's worked really well for us.

18:50Nicolas Sharp:Yeah, that's super interesting. I like seeing people like, I don't know, some of your clients, like Granola or Lagora, like seeing those people use it. You're right, it's quite inspiring for everybody else who wants to be like them in some way exactly but it's also super interesting i think when you talk about this horizontal product you know crm because it's so broad you sort of have to build the full suite of products and features and functionalities from day one even if you are only targeting that niche yeah which is like i think it's such an interesting business model and i think why you can build such massive businesses um but it'd be interesting to see how your gtm approach changes over time as that customer base diversifies and you sort of kind of gain market uh yeah sharing that niche um i also wanted to talk like one one more last question before we do some quick fire yes boss you're obviously like an ai driven organization you know you're very like very public about this i keep part of your marketing and uh your usp i guess i wanted to ask what kind of ai tools are you using internally either as you know you as founder ceo or kind of tools across the organization that you're adopting to kind of help 10x 100x your team yeah the approach that we've taken is very much for this to be a um is to be a sort of we want bottoms up adoption so from you know from the from we will have we'll have top down enthusiasm and support for the adoption of tools And obviously, we have a team of people who are extremely ambitious and innovative and naturally want to play with the latest tools and are constantly trying to make things better.

20:34So it hasn't needed much effort from us to kind of create that excitement in the team. But what we've really tried to encourage is this sort of bottoms up adoption and automation of any task that can be automated. And so when we look at what we've been able to do in the last year, the adoption of AI internally has been absolutely awesome. and we're now doing things like all of our a lot of our reporting a lot of what a lot of this is done in atio a lot of our triaging enrichment a lot of the work that would normally have had to be very human is now all fully automated um there is also a the way that we build things has changed a lot um again so um another area where we've been able to see really big productivity gains is is in engineering um and we're now in a really good cadence of um of some of the you know a lot of code generation through ai which allows our engineers to spend much more time doing hard things um thinking on the sort of system levels and making sure that we um making sure that we can scale output and um scale kind of productivity without having to scale headcount at the same pace.

21:58So, yeah, it's been, I mean, it's a very, it's a very, very exciting time to be building a company because it's, I've said this a few times before, but it just feels so uncharted that it actually feels like you're making kind of, you know, met new decisions and no one knows the answers at the moment, which is really cool.

22:23Nicolas Sharp:yeah i mean it's amazing i mean i'm not a very good coder and all the skills that i've had have been kind of self-taught when i've needed to do something because an engineer has been unavailable but yeah just just playing around with the the coding tools the ai tools available it's just insane and my wife's engineering manager so like i'll try and code something and i'll ask the llm and it'll do like 90 of the work and i'll show it to my wife and she'll be like that's almost 100 % correct. Yeah. It's the no zone. To finish off, I want to do some quick fire questions if that's all right. Of course.

22:56Nicolas Sharp:Yeah, let's do it. Three about US versus Europe, one about future growth and a couple more. So you've just, you raised your 52 million Series B this year. Next year, a couple of years, you may be looking at Series C. Yeah. Who do you want on the cap table, US or European VCs? um i don't mind and uh that's a very unsatisfying answer sorry i can't provide you with a hot take we really we focus mostly on the individual and we have we have two american board members and one european board member they're all absolutely epic and um and will you know we we don't go out with a particular geography in in mind we go and find the best person we can And actually, that's very much the philosophy of Atio, actually.

23:46When you go out to higher, it's somewhat similar.

23:49Nicolas Sharp:Interesting. Okay. Link to that question. Yeah. Potential IPO in the future, US or Europe? I think this one's an easy one. If the capital markets stay like they are, then it would be the US, just because of the liquidity and it's the economically rational thing to do at the moment. Yeah, makes sense. and engineering product talent, US or Europe? I honestly think it's pretty neck and neck. And we hire engineering EPD in Europe. We find incredible talent here, truly incredible talent here. And we are seeing American companies land in Europe and build incredible EPD teams. So I think from a talent perspective, Europe is exceptional.

24:41and um and you know i'll give one to to team europe almost one love to hear it i hear that

24:47Nicolas Sharp:all the time the talent european phenomenal it is unbelievable yeah it's really brilliant uh linked to talent in office versus remote i like to be in office but we we we also in you know in an effort to make sure that we hire the very best people that we can we also have a lot of incredible remote colleagues so personal preference is in office uh i have two young kids so again just just the rational thing for for me to do so to to get out the house every day um but um but i'm also you know i also some of the best people that work at atio are remote um two more questions so you're interacting to forex revenue this year do you have any projections for 2026 um we do they are they are being they are being uh spotly debated internally but i think i think we are the question is um is uh you know is is how how how much can we turn up the heat and we're just we're in the process of just really really working out how we can turn all of the you know push all of the levers levers to to full steam ahead so um we'll we'll we'll tweet something when when we have more confidence in in the projections but i think um we're feeling pretty we're feeling pretty bullish amazing love to hear it that sounds yeah sounds like a man with a plan who's feeling confident um final question as a founder ceo do you prefer building or selling i love i i think it's really hard to separate these two because i love selling a product that we're proud of yeah and uh it's not it's really unsatisfying to build something that people don't use and it doesn't get sold so i would say it's awesome to sell a product that you're super super proud of um and um and i would hate to build a product that you didn't sell so i'm gonna i'm give you another kind of unsatisfying answer i love selling a quad up that we're that we've built extremely well yeah that makes total sense it's still that very early stage founder mentality right where you have so much responsibility for the product that you are so happy to get it in front of clients and sell it um well nick we're over time i'm conscious i don't want to take any more of your time but um thank you so much for joining me thank you sab and yeah and keep up keep up all the good work um we're really excited to see where what you're doing i love it and if i I can never help at all.

27:22Nicolas Sharp:Let me know. I love what you guys are building. I love banging the drum for European tech companies. Cool. Thank you. Nice chatting. Bye-bye. See ya.

27:51Thank you.

28:21Thank you.