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 has been at the centre of some of the most important go-to-market stories in tech.

He was one of Facebook's early employees, he built Slack's sales organisation from the ground up and he helped scale Glean to $100M ARR before it became one of the most talked-about AI companies in the world.

Now he's running his own fund at Tenacity Capital, backing the next generation of B2B businesses.

AJ came into our London office for a conversation that covered everything: what the early days at Facebook actually looked like, how he thinks about building sales orgs and the go-to-market lessons from Slack that most people don't talk about.

We also got into his investing philosophy - what he looks for in a business, what makes a go-to-market motion defensible and how to tackle enterprise sales.

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

Episode 6 of Inside the Pipeline brings one of the UK's most exciting voices in SaaS sales to the throxy office. Holly Allen is the Founding Account Executive for UK&I at FullEnrich - a platform helping sales, RevOps, and marketing teams enrich professional emails and mobile phone numbers through waterfall enrichment across 15+ data sources.

Holly's story is one of the most honest you'll hear in sales. Six months before this conversation, she was ready to quit the industry entirely. Today, she's closing the biggest deals of her career and building a personal brand that has decision-makers coming directly to her on LinkedIn.

In this episode, Tristan and Holly get into what it really takes to turn things around - the mindset shifts, the self-belief, and the practical stuff that moves the needle. They talk cold calling, growing a LinkedIn audience and harnessing it for sales, 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 that most sales teams can only dream of.

If you're in sales and wondering how you can harness your personal brand to beat your targets every month, this one's for you.

Next up on Inside The Pipeline is Georgie Candy from PROfounders Capital, who joined the firm in 2024. Georgie qualified as a lawyer at Allen & Overy, where she worked on a number of insurtech deals. After taking part in an early Harvey AI pilot, she was inspired to make the move into venture.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable conversation, and we’re grateful to Georgie for taking the time to speak with us.

Throxy are very excited to welcome Oscar Lanzendorf from ElevenLabs as our next guest on Inside The Pipeline!

Many of you will have heard of ElevenLabs. Having grown from zero to $300M ARR in just three years, now valued at $6.6BN and with a team of 400, they’ve become a dominant force in the voice AI space.

Oscar himself has had a fascinating career, having worked at Nico Rosberg Ventures before joining ElevenLabs just under a year ago.

In the podcast, Tris and Ben speak with Oscar about hyper-growth cultures, the ultra-competitive ElevenLabs application process, GTM strategies in 2026, and many other interesting and exciting topics.

We’re very appreciative of Oscar’s time, so thank you for joining us, Oscar!

If you’d like to message him after listening, his LinkedIn messages are open — just please leave a note to let him know why you’re getting in touch.

Enjoy!

Episode 3 of Inside the Pipeline brings one of Norway’s finest, Christopher Mjelde, to the Throxy offices for a fascinating conversation.

Having been through Y Combinator a couple of years ago, Chris has been quietly building his latest venture, Kenobi, in stealth mode. The release of this episode neatly coincides with the initial launch of Kenobi’s automatic website modifier, which gives every website visitor a personalised page based on their characteristics.

We also spoke about the tricky parts of founding a business: getting rejected, pivoting, letting employees go.

It was a very natural and open conversation, and we thank Chris for coming in and spending time with us to record!