/
.webp)
London, 2019.
Nicolas Sharp and Alex Christie sit in a cafe, staring at a single question scribbled on a napkin: "What if we could build the CRM that actually should exist?"
They have a problem. Their current company, Fundstack—a vertical CRM for venture capitalists—is working. Really working. Revenue is growing. Customers are happy. By every startup metric, they're succeeding.
And they hate it.
Not the work. Not the customers. They hate that they're building something that isn't ambitious enough. They've proven they can build a CRM. But a CRM just for VCs? That feels like a warm-up, not a destination.
Sharp looks at Christie. "If we're going to pour everything into something—knowing it's not the best version of what it could be—what's the point?"
They start drawing on more napkins. Not a vertical CRM for one industry. A horizontal CRM for everyone. Built from scratch. With a completely new data model. Flexible enough to work for any company, any workflow, any use case.
The kind of CRM that Salesforce would have built if they started today.
The kind of ambition that would require them to disappear for years. No marketing. No noise. Just building.
Most founders would have stayed on the safe path. Fundstack was working. Growth was predictable. Investors were interested.
Sharp and Christie walked away from all of it.
Passion Capital, 2014-2016
Nicolas Sharp wasn't a typical startup founder. He was a VC.
At Passion Capital, one of London's prominent venture firms, Sharp ran business development. His job was relationships—tracking founders, managing deal flow, nurturing the network that makes venture capital work.
And his tools were garbage.
The CRM options were either ancient enterprise systems designed for massive sales teams (Salesforce) or lightweight tools that couldn't handle the complexity of VC deal flow. Spreadsheets. Fragmented notes. Lost emails.
Sharp kept thinking: this is absurd. VCs spend their lives evaluating software companies, and they can't find decent software for themselves?
Meeting Alex Christie
In 2017, Sharp met Alex Christie, a software engineer with the technical chops to build what Sharp could envision. They started Fundstack—a CRM specifically for venture capital firms.
The hypothesis: VCs needed specialized tools. Build exactly what they need. Go vertical.
The product worked. Customers came. Revenue grew.
But something nagged at both founders.
The Ambition Problem
"We basically had this moment of realization," Sharp later explained. "If we're gonna put all of this work into something knowing that this isn't the best version of what it could be, what's the point?"
The vertical approach was safe but limiting. Every feature they built was for one industry. Every customer acquisition conversation was constrained.
What if they built something bigger?
November 2019: The Pivot
In November 2019, Sharp and Christie made a decision that went against every piece of startup wisdom: they would rebuild their entire product from scratch, for a broader market, and they wouldn't tell anyone.
The plan:
- Abandon Fundstack's narrow focus
- Build a completely new CRM architecture from the ground up
- Design a data model flexible enough for any company
- Take as long as necessary to get it right
They called it Attio.
The Anti-Y Combinator Approach
Y Combinator's religion is ship fast. Talk to users. Iterate publicly. Build in the open.
Sharp and Christie did the opposite.
For three years—from 2019 to 2022—they went silent. No marketing. No press. No Twitter threads. No Product Hunt launches.
Just building.
"We weren't 'in stealth,'" Sharp clarified, "but we also weren't doing marketing."
This was strategic silence. They were building something that required years of development. A half-finished CRM competing with Salesforce would have been embarrassing. They needed to emerge with something complete, something that justified the wait.
The Data Model Obsession
What took three years?
The data model.
Most CRMs are rigid. They assume you have Contacts, Companies, and Deals. They assume your sales process works a certain way. They bake in assumptions about how businesses operate.
Attio's insight: every company is different. The data model should flex to the user, not the other way around.
They built a system where:
- Any object could be created
- Any relationship could be defined
- Any workflow could be automated
- Data synced automatically from email and calendar
The goal: a CRM that felt like Notion—endlessly flexible—but with the power of Salesforce under the hood.
This wasn't a weekend project. This was years of architecture work, database design, and interface iteration.
December 2022: $1 Million ARR in Beta
While still in beta—with no marketing—Attio passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
Word of mouth alone. Engineers telling engineers. Operators telling operators.
The three years of silence had built something worth talking about.
March 2023: Series A
On March 2, 2023, Attio announced a $23.5 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures.
The company that hadn't marketed for three years suddenly had the funding to scale.
The Positioning
Attio positioned itself as the CRM for the modern era—built for companies that needed flexibility, not the rigid structures of legacy tools.
The target: companies that had outgrown spreadsheets but found Salesforce overwhelming. Startups, scale-ups, and modern teams who wanted power without complexity.
The Strategy Shift
After three years of silence, Attio flipped the script.
They became famous for building in public—sharing roadmaps, engaging on Twitter, releasing features in public view. The company that had hidden for years became one of the most visible CRM startups.
The paradox made sense: they hid while the product was incomplete, then opened up once they had something worth showing.
The Traction
By 2024:
- Thousands of companies using Attio
- Multiple funding rounds
- A product that drew comparisons to Notion and Airtable
- Growing reputation as the CRM for startups and modern teams
Nicolas Sharp Today
Sharp remains CEO, steering Attio through the crowded CRM market. His bet—that three years of patient building would beat three years of noisy iteration—appears to be paying off.
The Lesson
Attio's founding story challenges the conventional startup playbook.
Ship fast? They took three years.
Build in public? They built in silence.
Start narrow? They pivoted to go broad.
Every rule was broken. And it worked—because they were building something that required that approach.
Sometimes the best way to compete with giants is to disappear until you're ready to fight.
