In this episode, we sit down with Fabian Veit, CEO of Make.com, to talk about what it really takes to scale not just one but two hyperscale SaaS companies – first in a classic enterprise sales-led motion, and now in a PLG + AI/automation world.
Fabian shares how Make has 15x’d revenue and grown from ~50 to nearly 400 people, while racing past 100k+ paying customers and aiming for €100M+ ARR, and why that requires a fundamentally different mindset than selling multi-million euro deals into the Fortune 2000. He contrasts the “one deal can make your quarter” reality of enterprise sales with the high-volume, product-first, self-serve motion of Make, where thousands of users sign up every month and the product has to carry the weight.
We also dig into what it means to build in the middle of the AI & agentic wave when your platform is literally how people wire AI into their business processes. Fabian explains why most AI projects are actually 80–90% integrations & automation, where AI is the smart layer inside the flow, not the whole show, and how Make is evolving from classic “if-this-then-that” workflows into visual AI agents that power real operations.
You’ll hear Fabian talk about:
- PLG vs Sales-Led: What changed when he went from 9–12 month, high-touch enterprise cycles at Celonis to Make’s “sign up free, upgrade yourself” engine.
- Rebuilding While Scaling: Why everything is always breaking in hypergrowth, and how he decides what to fix for 5× future scale, not just today.
- Brand & Positioning Pivots: The risky shift from Integromat to Make.com, losing SEO in the short term to win a much bigger global brand in the long term.
- Culture at Hyperspeed: How they keep their values intact with hundreds of new hires through explicit values & operating principles, and a brutal honesty policy inspired by Radical Candor.
- The AMA Channel: An internal Ask Me Anything Slack channel where anyone can ask leadership anything (even anonymously), and why Fabian believes answering every question publicly is non-negotiable for trust.
We wrap up with Fabian’s view on where we are in the AI hype cycle, why he compares this moment more to the industrial revolution than just another tech fad, and what kinds of human skills will matter even more in an AI-driven world.
