Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast3 Mar

The race for alpha: Varun Anand of Clay on inventing a new role and why GTM needs a new AI strategy

Most B2B software founders don't spend four years working on presidential campaigns. Varun Anand did - on Hillary Clinton's 2016 run - and he argues that startups and political campaigns share the same DNA: both rely on finding "alpha," that elusive edge that competitors haven't copied yet. After the election loss forced a pivot into tech, Varun became the only attendee at a Clay webinar with no customers or revenue. That moment led to co-founding what's now used by Salesforce, OpenAI, and Nvidia, inventing an entirely new profession in the process. Varun reveals why go-to-market AI is fundamentally different from support or coding AI and how Clay's "un-opinionated primitives" approach lets teams build unique competitive advantages. He shares examples ranging from Waste Management analyzing trash can colours via Google Street View to Clay's own social listening engine that automatically routes sentiment to CSMs: all happening without human intervention. The conversation explores the Go-to-Market Engineer role, why curiosity-driven teams win, and Varun's prediction that the next 18-24 months will be about autonomous agents working accounts while humans focus on high-value interventions. Whether you're building GTM systems or rethinking sales ops, this episode challenges every assumption about how modern revenue teams should operate.

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Episoder(65)

Lovable from zero to $400m in 15 months with CRO, Ryan Meadows

Published in a week when Lovable's valuation doubled to $13.3 billion, up from $6.6 billion in December, this episode presents Ryan Meadows story of joining Lovable as a customer before becoming its C...

13 Aug 28min

Predicting AI: Rob Toews' scorecard from the frontier

Every December, Rob Toews publishes ten AI predictions in Forbes, then comes back a year later and grades himself in public. That habit of putting a stake in the ground, and owning the misses, makes h...

9 Jul 33min

The rogue agent problem: A conversation with Gil Elbaz at the Hg Digital Summit

In this episode, John Cranmer is joined by Gil Elbaz, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Onyx Security, the company building the secure AI control plane for the agentic era. Gil, formerly in the CTO o...

10 Jun 34min

Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit

The inventor of DevOps explains why AI needs engineering rigour and human collaboration. The engineer who coined "DevOps" in 2009 thinks he is watching the same pattern play out again, only faster. I...

28 Mai 30min

Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light: fear is not a strategy

When Jonathan Sanders pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: rebuilding ERP would take a decade and a hundred million dollars. He did it in two years, with AI at the core. Today Light...

15 Mai 54min

Evan Goldberg of NetSuite: 3 decades and 2 platform shifts

Evan Goldberg co-founded NetSuite in 1998 with a five-minute phone call to Larry Ellison when his "graphics stuff" wasn't going great. He pioneered cloud computing before SaaS existed, sold to Oracle ...

23 Apr 31min

Marjorie Janiewicz of Mistral AI: flipping the adoption curve - why SaaS with data can win in an AI world

Marjorie Janiewicz has sold enterprise software through every platform shift for three decades: Oracle, MySQL, SAP, MongoDB, HackerOne. Now as Chief Revenue Officer at Mistral AI, she's taking a Frenc...

17 Mar 51min