10 Jun 2026Live from Cherry Ventures Summit
Hermann Hauser (Amadeus Capital Partners): ARM, Tech Sovereignty & Europe's Scale-Up Gap
Hermann Hauser recounts founding Acorn and ARM, ARM's licensing business model, its ~100% smartphone share, and why low power is now pushing it into data centers against Intel. He discusses Europe's tech sovereignty, the newly launched EIC Scale-Up Europe Fund, Europe's scale-up and management-talent gaps (with the Celexa/Illumina story), and why DeepMind and ARM hubs can reproduce the Silicon Valley flywheel in London, Cambridge and beyond. He also comments on the coming mega-IPOs, Europe's lack of a Nasdaq equivalent, Amadeus' focus on quantum, AI and synthetic biology, and closes with the story of ARM's first chip working without its power pin connected.
Zaro Out of Stealth: Michael Bajwa & Chen on the Context Layer
Michael Bajwa and Chen, who built web agents at Convergence before its Salesforce acquisition, come out of stealth with Zaro and announce a $5.1M pre-seed led by Cherry Ventures, with angels including the Hugging Face co-founder and GitHub's former CEO. Zaro is a context layer giving agents long-horizon memory; they argue data, not the model, is why agents fail. They explain they deliberately avoid frontier models to control token costs, run the entire business on Zaro itself, and describe hiring a 13-person team in 11 weeks.
Filip Dames & Dinika Mahtani (Cherry Ventures): Why Now for Europe
Cherry Ventures' Filip Dames and Dinika Mahtani join mid-AGM to explain why now is Europe's moment: global founder ambition, top engineering talent, and a closing capital gap (with growth-stage funding still lagging). They describe backing founders with a unique edge and unfettered ambition, from repeat entrepreneurs to young university research teams, and how they separate real enterprise signal from innovation-budget experiments while weighing durability. They note rising Series A bars (companies approaching $10M revenue in year one) and argue Europe must build in sovereignty, defense, energy and AI infrastructure this decade, citing portfolio companies like Zaro and their first defense investment.
Varun Anand (Clay): Audiences & Go-To-Market Engineering
Clay co-founder Varun Anand previews Clay's new 'audiences' concept: a dynamic place combining first-party data with world signals, where agents take autonomous actions and humans build creative workflows, with examples like reactivating closed-lost accounts. He argues the best go-to-market teams are importing engineering practices such as CI/CD, observability and the 'GTM engineer' role, and points to SDR/BDR as among the fastest-growing LinkedIn job categories. He also outlines Clay's roadmap (agent-based architecture beyond the spreadsheet, MCP access for reps and marketers) and its culture of psychological safety paired with high performance.
Break / Interlude
After Varun's segment the hosts tease the next guest (Jill Ellis) and cut to a break. The remainder of Part 1 is hold music and interstitials with no further discussion.
Harry Wetherald (Maze) on AI Cybersecurity & the 'Mythos' Effect
Harry Wetherald of Maze discusses the fallout from the 'Mythos' AI security moment: though seen by security practitioners as partly a PR stunt, it pushed CEOs and boards to finally green-light and accelerate security projects. He argues defenders have no choice but to embrace AI since attackers won't slow down, calls out AI-washing among vendors, and describes buyers now demanding near real-time speed and precision. He also teases upcoming product launches focused on finding novel, previously unnoticed attack paths and pushes back on the idea that AI software is now easy to build.
6 Mar 2026UK’s £40M AI Lab, EightSleep’s $50M, Clay Founder Joins
Clay's Varoon on the London Launch & Brand Activations
After an Airwallex ad read, the hosts hand Varoon of Clay a 'Grow' cap and catch up on Clay's London expansion, one month into the new office. He describes the launch party and city-wide brand activations — coffee carts, tube-station umbrellas, ice-cream deliveries, agency workshops and an OpenAI hackathon — crediting his marketing team for the ideas. London won out for its talent and AI ecosystem, with plans to grow from there into Paris, Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordics.
Clay's Ads Product & the GTM Engineer Movement
After a detour into Clay's limited-edition branded shoes, Varoon details Clay's newly launched ads product, which automates ad-targeting workflows and lifts match rates from roughly 20% to 60% on Meta and from 50-60% to 90%+ on LinkedIn. He then discusses the GTM engineer movement now seen at hundreds of companies: centralized ops teams removing manual work while background agents — like a closed-lost agent that reads Gong calls and emails and reaches back out — run on the team's behalf. The hosts connect this to Marathon Management's point about companies running small internal bets and leading 'internal series A's on the winners.
Varoon on Distribution, Authentic Marketing & PMF First in London
Varoon argues that as tools like Claude Code and Cursor commoditize coding — with top engineers now orchestrating agents — distribution becomes the scarce, hard-to-hire skill, and go-to-market teams must ship at engineering speed or lose to faster competitors. On media strategy, he says Clay's marketing works because it's authentic in a feed full of AI-generated content, recalling from his four years working for Hillary Clinton how press coverage reduced her public persona to a 'shell' of herself. He advises London startups to chase product-market fit before marketing, notes Clay is hiring locally and planning a June summit, and signs off.
3 Dec 2025etn. Episode 14
Varun Anand: Clay, GTM Engineering & the Europe Tour
Clay co-founder Varun Anand joins after the tech issues, discussing his SaaStr AI fireside and Clay's month-long European launch tour (Lisbon, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Stockholm, London, Paris) with events alongside Lovable, Legora, Miro and Granola, and shows off his one-of-one Clay sneakers made in Florence. He explains Clay's thesis — an open canvas of data and growth primitives beyond systems of record, which effectively coined "GTM engineering" — and what's next: a rep-friendly surface and AI that finds more customers like your best ones. He covers Europe's differences (GDPR, relationship-driven culture, community-led marketing), the yachting lead-scoring use case, B2B marketing stunts from the Marvel-style customer video to the Snoop Dogg clip, and his career from Hillary Clinton's campaign through Google to startups; the interview is cut off at the end of this part.
Clay Co-Founder Wrap-Up: Cold Emails, Kareem & First Customers
The Clay co-founder finishes his interview by telling how he cold-emailed Kareem while Kareem was on a silent meditation retreat, connected with co-founder Nikolai instead, and joined just as the team shrank to a few people — launching with cold-email marketing agencies as Clay's first customers. He plugs tonight's event at the Intercom office on go-to-market engineering and tomorrow's Paris event with Dust, and shares where to reach him (LinkedIn, Twitter, varun@clay.com). The hosts thank him and close out the segment.