Nicolas Sharp: Why Building Far From Silicon Valley is a Feature, Not a Bug

Six years ago, in a café in central London, Nicolas Sharp decided to attempt the impossible.

Alongside his co-founder, Alex Christie, Sharp had built a successful business selling targeted CRM software to venture capital, private equity, and investment teams. Customers were happy. Growth was real. On paper, things were working.

But something was off. Customers had constant feature requests and, even though they were all in the same industry, everyone wanted something different. Sharp and Christie realized that CRM – one of the biggest categories in software – was fundamentally broken.

Over coffee, the duo sketched out a far bolder vision for CRM: Instead of building pre-made solutions for customers, what if they built a platform powerful enough for any use case, where a company could mold it exactly to how their business works?

Sharp and Christie decided to go for it, even though it meant walking away from a business with product-market fit and attempting to disrupt one of the most entrenched categories in software. It was the epitome of a high-risk move.

They shut down their company and founded Attio. After three years of building from the ground up, the company launched in 2023 with a new product and the ambition to reimagine what a modern CRM could be.

The AI CRM: How Attio was built and where it goes from here

Today, Attio is the leading CRM for the AI era. More than 7,000 businesses now use Attio to run their go-to-market operations, and it’s one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe. As part of our series on European startups, we sat down with Sharp to talk about taking a leap of faith, why CRM needed to be rebuilt, and why London is a hot spot for tech entrepreneurs.

What inspired you to want to take on an 800-lb market leader like Salesforce?

Nicolas Sharp: I think we had the right amount of naïveté. If we had known more about what we were getting into, we might not have done it. But this was the biggest SaaS category in the world and we kept hearing about customers who were unhappy with all the tools out there. After that conversation in the cafe, to make our final decision, Alex went back to his desk, put on his headphones, and did all the onboarding for Salesforce. He looked at their API and assessed the overall user experience, and decided there was a lot that could be improved. CRM is a very high-value problem; it’s technically interesting; it represents a huge market; and it just didn't seem like anyone was solving it particularly well. So we went for it.

What gave you the courage to take this kind of leap?

NS: With our previous company, which was a vertical CRMn, we weren’t holding anything in reserve. We were working insanely hard all week and on weekends. Yet we weren’t scratching our fundamental itch to create something truly meaningful and impactful. It felt like training to be the world’s very best in a sport we didn't love and no one really cared about. I thought, “If I’m going to spend 100,000 hours of my life doing something, it might as well be something I enjoy.”

The fact that our hands weren’t forced made the decision to pivot much harder. But it was absolutely the right move.

What makes Attio fundamentally different from other CRMs?

NS: The first thing is that Attio is an AI CRM, meaning we’ve built it from the ground up to handle enormous volumes of unstructured data and process it all in real time. Attio automatically ingests and understands all the rich context of how a business operates – emails, calls, product data, billing, and calendar events. You connect your data and your CRM builds itself in front of you. Customers love this because CRM has historically meant manual data entry.

We also designed Attio to be highly flexible. Every company’s go-to-market is different, so we built Attio as a platform that you can build on and link to all your workflows. CRM sits at the center of a company’s ecosystem, so it has to connect easily to everything else a business uses. Our customers are building incredible tools on our platform.

Attio’s largest customer segment is in the US. Why set up headquarters in London?

NS: At the beginning, it was simple. We were in London and we wanted to start a business. As 20-somethings, we hadn’t yet figured out what we were going to do with our lives. And for me personally, a big motivator was building the kind of company I would have been inspired by, or wanted to work at, as a teenager growing up in Europe.

In hindsight, I don’t think Attio would have happened if we’d built it in the U.S. Our technical team is full of hidden gems — exceptionally brilliant, dedicated people. For three years, they were able to work almost completely undistracted, 16 hours a day, building the product, sheltered from the constant recruiting and noise of Silicon Valley. Without that environment, I don’t think we would have made it.

What are other advantages to being in the UK?

NS: There are so many. The biggest is access to talent. Within 50 miles of London, you have four of the world’s top ten universities — Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford, and UCL. And it’s not just London’s deep talent pool. We hire across Europe and it’s incredibly easy to get people to move here.

Some of the most interesting work in AI is happening in London right now. Google DeepMind is here, and so are teams that are building frontier-level AI models. That density really matters.

How optimistic are you about the European startup scene?

NS: I've been working in tech for about 12 years and it’s the best it's ever been. The focus used to be trying to build the European or the UK version of a successful American business. But now people are building companies designed to win globally. We're also now starting to see real ecosystem effects — the second, third, fourth wave of alumni coming out of incredible companies like Revolut, Wise, and Spotify. That's going to spawn a lot of new founders and a lot of ambitious new businesses.

Looking ahead five years, what does success look like for Attio?

NS: The number one thing is having a lot of very happy customers. If Attio is helping people build great businesses, that’s our validation. Second to that, I want Attio to be an exceptional place to work, where people are solving genuinely difficult and meaningful problems. Everything else is downstream from that.

Nicolas Sharp is the CEO and co-founder of Attio, a London-based company building a next-generation AI CRM. GV led Attio’s Series B investment in 2025, and GV General Partner Michael McBride is on their board.