Nick Taylor has spent his career inside three of London's most important AI and fintech companies. He worked with high-growth neobanks like Monzo and Revolut during his time at Onfido, watching the company pivot from background checks into an identity verification leader. He then joined Synthesia through its hyper-growth phase, helping scale the team from 40 people to over 600 as the AI video platform went global. Now he leads customer success at Granola, the AI notetaker that's quickly becoming something bigger.

In this episode, Nick explains why he sees customer success as a flexible role built around one goal: getting clients to value as fast as possible so renewals take care of themselves. He talks about Granola's real ambition, building a "central cortex" for business context by capturing what actually gets decided in internal and external meetings, and why LLMs only get useful once they're fed an organisation's specific context. He also shares his "landlord" analogy for handling unhappy customers: listening for the human frustration behind a technical complaint before jumping to a fix.

Nick also gets into why he's changed his mind about needing deep technical expertise to build good products. In an AI-driven world, he argues, having more ideas matters more than having more code.

If you're thinking about customer success, AI-native tools, or what it takes to scale through hyper-growth, this one's worth your time.

Sacha Vauclin cold DM'd the founder of BeReal and talked his way into the French social app in its earliest days. He then ran the "underground" playbook that cracked the US market, campus ambassadors and frat party sponsorships, until the product hit product-market fit. From there he moved to London for Vauban, the platform that digitalised SPV creation and let angels back companies like SpaceX and Revolut with smaller tickets, before it was acquired by Carta.

Now he's in a go-to-market role at Scarlet, a health tech company that certifies software and AI-based medical devices. In this episode Sacha explains why traditional notified bodies, some over a century old, are built to certify surgical gloves rather than AI that ships updates every week, and how Scarlet uses expert teams and technology to run fast, software-focused reviews instead. He makes the case that certified ambient scribes could claw back the 40% of a doctor's day lost to admin.

He also shares the through-line behind every move: deep curiosity, and a habit of interviewing not just power users but the people who quit the product. If you care about GTM in regulated markets, or building things that matter, this one's worth your time.

Shadow AI is already inside your company. Employees are plugging proprietary data into tools like ChatGPT without authorisation and most businesses have no visibility into it. Alex Padgette has seen this movie before. She was at OneTrust when GDPR landed and forced every company in Europe to take data privacy seriously. Now at Vanta, which just hit $300M ARR, she thinks AI governance is about to do the same thing.

In this episode of Inside the Pipeline, Tris Tusa sits down with Alex Padgette, EMEA Partnerships at Vanta, to talk about what compliance automation actually looks like at scale, why the question has shifted from "Are we secure?" to "How are we governing our AI tools?", and what it means to be at the centre of that transition twice in a career.

They also get into partnerships. Alex's take is that strategic alignment is overrated. What matters is measurable KPIs, tangible results, and having a real internal champion at the partner organisation. She explains how Vanta built its partner ecosystem across AWS and beyond, and what makes EMEA genuinely different from the US market when you're trying to scale internationally.

And she talks about starting as an SDR. Why she thinks the hunting skills you build early are the foundation everything else sits on, and why she'd make the same choice again.

If your business is using AI tools, thinking about SOC 2, or building a partnership motion in EMEA, this conversation has something for you.

Mitchell Powers has spent the last decade building go-to-market teams inside some of fintech's most important companies. He started out coaching rowing at Oxford and trading physical commodities like coal and biofuels, then broke into tech sales by building the B2B function from scratch at Pact Coffee. At GoCardless he was the first head of SMB sales, ran the UK market top to bottom, and helped drive the company's move into enterprise, contributing around £100M in contract value. After leading enterprise and open banking sales at Trustly, he's now VP of Commercial at Pleo, running a 120-person team across account executives, SDRs, account management and partnerships.

In this episode Mitchell breaks down how he scales sales teams as they grow, the "Why Now, Why Anything, Why Us" framework he's used to anchor enterprise deals at both GoCardless and Pleo, how he hires for character and resilience over polish, and where AI actually helps in sales versus where over-relying on it gets in the way. A practical look at what it takes to build and lead go-to-market teams in financial technology, and how the enterprise transition stretches every part of a business.

Sophia Arora did what most people from a consulting background talk about but never do. She left McKinsey, moved to New York for Oddity Tech, then came back to London and joined Jack & Jill as their Founding Growth hire - a seed-stage AI startup building an AI career agent for the next generation of workers.

In this episode, Sophia talks about what it actually looks like to go from structured corporate environments into the chaos of an early-stage startup. She gets into how Jack & Jill is trying to flip the job search model on its head, why most people are making huge career decisions with almost no real visibility into the market, and what it takes to grow a consumer product when your competitor is basically LinkedIn.

We also get into the harder stuff - what the job search felt like when she was doing it herself, the burnout, the compromises you nearly make, and why the best time to look for a job is when you don't need one.

If you're thinking about making a career move, building a consumer brand from scratch, or just curious about what early-stage growth actually looks like, this one's worth your time.

Will Caplan is the co-founder of Tano, an AI-native influencer agency that's automating everything agencies used to charge a fortune for - sourcing, contracts, payments, and rights management, end to end.

In this episode, Will talks about how Tano landed some of the fastest-growing companies in tech as early customers (e.g. Lovable), why the traditional influencer model is broken and how he's using AI to build something that actually delivers real brand evangelism rather than just paid placements.

If you're thinking about influencer marketing or just want to understand where the whole space is heading, this one's worth your time.

AJ Tennant was one of Facebook's early employees, built Slack's sales organisation from the ground up, and helped scale Glean to $100M ARR before it became one of the most talked-about AI companies around. Now he's running his own fund at Tenacity Capital, backing the next wave of B2B businesses.

In this episode, AJ breaks down what the early days at Facebook actually looked like, how he thinks about building a sales org from scratch, and the go-to-market lessons from Slack that rarely get talked about. He also gets into his investing philosophy: what he looks for in a business, what makes a go-to-market motion actually defensible, and how he thinks about enterprise sales from the investor's chair.

If you're building, scaling, or investing in SaaS, this one's worth your full attention.

Six months before this conversation, Holly Allen was ready to quit sales entirely. Today, she's the Founding Account Executive for UK&I at FullEnrich, a platform that helps sales, RevOps, and marketing teams enrich emails and mobile numbers through waterfall enrichment across 15+ data sources, and she's closing the biggest deals of her career.

In this episode, Tristan and Holly get into what actually turned things around: the mindset shifts, the self-belief, and the unglamorous, practical stuff that moved the needle. They talk cold calling, growing a LinkedIn following and turning it into pipeline, why your data provider might be quietly killing your connect rates, and how Holly went from struggling to build pipeline to consistently hitting call-to-connect rates most sales teams only dream about.

If you're in sales and wondering how to build a personal brand that actually helps you hit target, this one's for you.

Georgie Candy trained as a lawyer at Allen & Overy, working insurtech deals, before an early pilot of Harvey AI changed her mind about where she wanted to spend her career. She joined PROfounders Capital in 2024 and now invests in the kind of AI and legaltech companies she used to work alongside as outside counsel.

In this episode, Georgie talks through what that Harvey AI pilot actually looked like from inside a law firm, why it pushed her toward venture rather than just toward using more AI tools, and what she's watching for in legaltech and AI in law right now.

If you're curious about how AI is changing legal work from the inside, or how a lawyer ends up on the other side of the table as an investor, this one's worth your time.

ElevenLabs went from zero to $300M ARR in three years and is now valued at $6.6BN, and Oscar Lanzendorf is inside the go-to-market team making that happen. Before ElevenLabs, he worked at Nico Rosberg Ventures, and he joined the voice AI company just under a year ago as it moved into hyper-growth.

In this episode, Oscar talks through what hyper-growth actually looks like from the inside, how brutal ElevenLabs' hiring process is and why it's built that way, and what go-to-market in AI looks like heading into 2026. He's open about what's changed in how the team sells now versus a year ago, and where the playbook is still being written in real time.

If you're building or selling inside a fast-scaling AI company, or just want to understand how a 400-person team keeps pace with $300M in ARR, this one's worth your time.