Inside The Pipeline: B2B Sales and GTM

throxy
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Inside The Pipeline is throxy's B2B sales and go-to-market podcast, recorded with the founders, GTM leaders, and investors building some of the fastest-growing companies in tech right now. Guests so far include people from OpenAI, Vanta, Pleo, ElevenLabs, Granola, Slack and Seedcamp. Every episode goes deep on go-to-market strategy, sales leadership, and how AI is actually changing the way B2B companies sell, hire, and scale. Real operators, real numbers, not theory. Look, I know what you're thinking: “another business podcast.” There are over 14,400 active ones in English-speaking countries alone. Fair point. We just think we're doing it differently, with the people actually building pipeline and closing deals, not just talking about it.

  1. 6d ago

    14. Max Greenbury, Startup GTM at OpenAI - Inside OpenAI's Sales Playbook

    Max Greenbury is part of OpenAI's go-to-market team, working the startup side with around 14 later-stage accounts from the UK to Israel and Lithuania. He didn't get there in a completely straight line (although it was quite straight): three years running his own subscription platform for secondhand clothing came first, three years on AWS's startup team, then Google selling into regulated enterprises. In this episode, Max opens up how OpenAI actually sells and why enterprise and startup deals are almost different jobs. Enterprise sales is a stakeholder maze, won by surfacing "unrealized pain" the buyer hasn't named yet. Startups are the opposite: founders are already pushing the models past their limits, so the job becomes optimizing for latency and cost, then routing what's missing straight back to OpenAI's research team. Max also breaks down OpenAI's AI-first culture, where tools like Codex handle data pulls and CRM updates before a human touches them, and why Generative Engine Optimization, showing up as the answer ChatGPT gives when someone asks for a recommendation, is becoming a real go-to-market priority. Five years out, Max thinks AI takes over the admin grind of selling. What it won't replace, he argues, is trust. If you sell into startups or enterprise, or you're figuring out where GEO fits your own GTM strategy, this one's for you.

  2. Jul 7

    13. Nick Taylor, Head of Customer Success at Granola - From Onfido to Synthesia, Building AI's Central Cortex for Business Context

    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.

  3. Jul 1

    12. Sacha Vauclin, GTM at Scarlet - From BeReal's US Growth to Certifying AI Medical Devices

    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.

  4. Jun 16

    11. Alex Padgette, EMEA Partnerships at Vanta - Shadow AI Is the New GDPR, Compliance Automation and Building Partnerships That Actually Deliver

    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.

  5. Jun 9

    10. Mitchell Powers, VP Commercial at Pleo - Scaling Go-to-Market Teams Across Fintech, from GoCardless to Pleo

    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.

  6. Jun 2

    9. Sophia Arora, Founding Growth at Jack & Jill - McKinsey to AI Startup, Building a Consumer Product That's Coming for LinkedIn

    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.

  7. Apr 28

    8. Will Caplan, Co-Founder of Tano - Using AI to Flip the Influencer Marketing Model

    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.

  8. Mar 11

    7. AJ Tennant, Founder at Tenacity Capital - From Building Slack's Sales Org to Scaling Glean to $100M ARR

    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.

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About

Inside The Pipeline is throxy's B2B sales and go-to-market podcast, recorded with the founders, GTM leaders, and investors building some of the fastest-growing companies in tech right now. Guests so far include people from OpenAI, Vanta, Pleo, ElevenLabs, Granola, Slack and Seedcamp. Every episode goes deep on go-to-market strategy, sales leadership, and how AI is actually changing the way B2B companies sell, hire, and scale. Real operators, real numbers, not theory. Look, I know what you're thinking: “another business podcast.” There are over 14,400 active ones in English-speaking countries alone. Fair point. We just think we're doing it differently, with the people actually building pipeline and closing deals, not just talking about it.

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