Nicholas (Atio)
7 Nov 2025etn. Episode 8
Nicholas (Atio): Hiring Personas & Anti-Patterns
Nicholas joins slightly early and takes the question Ricardo left: how Atio hires. He says people are the number-one thing that will define Atio's outcome and describes the company's big bet on London and European talent as its competitive advantage. He lays out four hiring personas—rising stars, impact players, hidden gems, and exceptional potential (a spark that could either light the rocket or burn the place down)—plus an anti-pattern: 'momentum catchers' who ride scaling companies from role to role and look like impact players on LinkedIn.
Atio's Out-of-Home Ads & the Brand Bet
Nicholas explains why Atio bet big on brand in the most competitive software category, starting out-of-home advertising in San Francisco and then London, where the campaign hit home since those were streets the team had walked their whole lives. He says the ads have driven strong top-of-funnel results as Atio massively scales revenue toward roughly 4x ARR growth, and describes how the brand now targets digital-native 'system builders' who have huge expectations of what software should do for them. He teases a big launch later that day.
Live Reveal: Atio's Developer Platform
Nicholas breaks the embargo live on stream: Atio is launching its developer platform, transforming the CRM into a go-to-market platform where users can build apps inside Atio—from simple integrations to custom user interfaces, actions, widgets, and workflow blocks. It's built entirely on JavaScript and React because LLMs are best at writing them, letting users one-shot apps, which he sums up as 'code has become the new no-code,' a leap beyond building Apex apps in Salesforce. He explains why now: old CRM hub-and-spoke architectures can't provide the full context automation needs, since humans used to be the LLM gathering context across tools.
CRM's Long Tail & Building in Uncharted Territory
Nicholas says the long tail of CRM is ginormous—used by agencies, SMBs, and mid-market companies alike—and that tailoring functionality and integrations, not just the data model, is make-or-break. He compares Atio to an iPhone that becomes a payment terminal or a scuba-diving forecasting tool without Apple building any of it, letting customers install or vibe-code what they need. The hosts reflect on systems finally adapting to how a company works rather than the reverse, and Nicholas notes this is an uncharted era for UI, UX, and model capability after 15 years of incremental innovation.
Atio's Series B & the Founder's Role at Scale
Nicholas says the Series B, closed at the end of the summer, funds an aggressive expansion: massively scaling R&D (with an open call for ambitious European engineers) and waging an 'all-out war' in go-to-market, growing the revenue team from two people a year and a half ago to about 30 today, more than half in the US. He then maps how the founder's role changes with scale: doing everything early, delegating past 20–30 people to a team better than you, then building systems for context, information dissemination, culture, and a present, high-context leadership team past 50–70. He hasn't committed code to the main codebase in a couple of years but still does code reviews.
Malta Offsite, Sponsors & Show Close
Nicholas describes Atio's Malta offsite, which grew from four people at the first one to around 100, as a rare moment of perspective for a heads-down, blinkered team, leaving everyone pumped for the next 12 months. After goodbyes, the hosts close the episode with sponsor reads for aci.dev, open-source middleware for governing AI access to tools and data, and Fora workspaces.