Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast

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 French startup from zero to $400 million in 18 months, closing deals with ASML and HSBC in under a year - timelines that used to take half a decade. Recorded in New York as Mistral announced its Finance offering, this conversation addresses what's working versus what's theatre in enterprise AI.

Marjorie supports the MIT hypothesis: 95% of AI projects never reach production. Chatbots drive adoption but don't change businesses. The 5% that work? They start with one high-impact use case, they customise models with proprietary data, and they deploy on-prem where regulated data lives. She explains why the adoption curve flipped, why SaaS companies sitting on data can win if they treat AI as transformation not automation, and why Mistral bet on 400 forward deployment engineers instead of just shipping models. From prototypes done in 48 hours to why "sovereignty is just marketing, independence is what matters," this is pattern recognition from someone who's been in the room when the shift happens repeatedly. Whether you're a SaaS company worried about agents or trying to sell AI to enterprises struggling with ROI, Marjorie's earned her perspective.

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.

In this rare internal conversation, Matthew Brockman, Hg's Chief Investment Officer, offers an insider's view on what's actually working versus what's still hype. Far beyond speculation, this is private equity deploying real capital into real companies with real customers, watching what happens when agentic software meets regulatory compliance and established workflows.

Brockman reveals why vibe coding is being used in sales processes but not production, why venture money is subsidising inference costs that must eventually turn into labour market economics, and his "virtual Matthew" Turing test for when we've truly reached AGI. From Hg's Catalyst program - parachuting developers into portfolio companies at Hg's expense to accelerate AI product builds - to standing up in Silicon Valley urging CEOs to invest and move quickly, this conversation cuts through the noise with data, deployment examples, and the hard economics of building enterprise AI that actually ships. Essential listening for anyone trying to separate signal from hype in February 2026

Franz Faerber, co-founder and CEO of Everest Systems and former architect of SAP HANA, challenges Sam Altman's vision of throwaway software, arguing humans crave stability, while making the case for why Germany - not Silicon Valley - is the right place to build next-generation enterprise software in the AI age. Despite being a German-US company, Everest invests 80% in Germany, leveraging equal talent quality at a fraction of US costs. This episode explores the rare dual perspective of someone who led innovation inside SAP and now challenges the narrative that all meaningful software innovation must come from the Valley.

Faerber discusses Everest's breakthrough "live sandboxing" technology that eliminates complex multi-system landscapes,, why deep domain knowledge is the new differentiator in an AI age, and shares his counterintuitive leadership philosophy: "I'm a big believer in a certain level of chaos is healthy." From building Germany's first AI-generated warehouse module to his advice for SaaS leaders ("assume AI costs zero—what fundamentally changes?"), this conversation offers a masterclass in conviction, timing, and reimagining enterprise software. Whether you're building against incumbents or navigating AI transformation, Faerber's insights on bureaucracy, talent strategy, and the courage to "do it earlier" provide essential guidance for software builders.

Franz Faerber spent 26 years at SAP building Hana before doing something unusual - walking away to build a competitor. Four years in stealth gave Everest Systems the rare luxury of rethinking ERP from first principles, and what emerged is a philosophy that challenges the entire business software model. Faerber's core thesis: application features are no longer defensible because AI can replicate them too easily. It is deep domain knowledge embedded in platforms that enable radical personalization. His "live sandboxing" technology allows users to experiment with production data in isolated environments - something he was never able to do in 26 years at SAP - and represents a fundamental shift from selling configured software to enabling customers to generate their own. The vision is provocative: 80% of software becomes commoditised infrastructure, while 20% becomes bespoke customization, and markets grow as companies build differentiated software instead of accepting generic solutions.

The conversation reveals hard-won wisdom about fighting bureaucracy, the viscosity of enterprise software markets, and why Germany remains his deliberate choice despite Silicon Valley's pull. His analysis of why technology companies struggle to become business software providers offers a refreshing counter to theories around OpenAI or Microsoft absorbing vertical markets. Most personally, his career reflections capture the tension experienced leaders feel between corporate safety and the life-enriching risk of building something new. At an age when contemporaries were settling into senior roles, Faerber chose to start over, arguing AI makes this the first time in ERP history when newcomers can genuinely out-innovate giants in years, not decades.