We’re About to Lose an Entire Generation to AI — Euan Blair on the McMahon Playbook
From Downing Street to the Frontline of the AI Workforce Revolution
Episode brought to you by Aurasell AI
When the son of a prime minister walks away from politics, leaves Morgan Stanley, and bets his career on apprenticeships — people notice. But what most people don’t know is how Euan Blair built Multiverse into one of Europe’s most ambitious companies by applying the same sales operating system that produced some of the highest-performing revenue organisations in enterprise software history.
In this episode of Hunters & Unicorns, Simon Kouttis and Ollie Kuehne sit down with Euan to trace his journey from Downing Street to founding a company that has raised nearly $500 million in venture capital — and is now at the centre of the AI workforce transformation.
The Founding Story Nobody Expected
Euan’s path didn’t follow a straight line. After growing up in 10 Downing Street while his father served as Prime Minister, he started his career at Morgan Stanley — not because he wanted to stay in finance, but because he wanted to understand how capital gets allocated and how winners get determined in the financial ecosystem.
What came next surprised everyone. After leaving banking, he joined an organisation helping long-term unemployed people find jobs. It was there that he identified the fundamental friction between education and employment — two systems that should work hand in glove but often work in opposition.
The insight that became Multiverse: if you could train people on the job, in the flow of work, using an updated model of apprenticeships built around the jobs of the future, you could create both economic and social value simultaneously.
The VC Moment That Changed Everything
When Euan went to Silicon Valley to raise capital, one conversation crystallised the difference between European and American ambition. Mary Meeker at Bond Capital opened with a single question: “How do you make this a $500 billion business?”
Compare that to the typical European VC question: “How do you guarantee me three times my money back in five years?”
That difference in thinking — abundance versus protection — shaped how Multiverse would be built. US VCs brought pattern recognition from decades of backing world-changing companies. They’d seen the movie before. And their unapologetic ambition became fuel for Multiverse’s growth.
Jeremy Duggan: The Single Most Important Hire
If there’s one moment that defined Multiverse’s trajectory, it was the arrival of Jeremy Duggan.
Introduced by Knackle Mandan from Lightspeed — a board member who had been a major investor in AppDynamics — Jeremy had taken four companies from single-digit millions to billion-dollar valuations. But Euan’s pitch cut through the corporate playbook entirely: “They’re all American companies. It’s all software. Is that really what you want to be remembered for?”
Jeremy, a proud Northeasterner, wanted to be part of a British success story. And what he brought to Multiverse was transformational.
The hardest thing about founder-led sales, Euan explains, is that you have no framework. You’re scrabbling at the end of every quarter wondering if you’ll hit your number. Jeremy showed him — quickly and conclusively — that sales was not an art. It was a science. A precise science. And there are few things more electrifying than going from quarterly fear to quarterly predictability through the power of leading indicators, MEDDIC, and the full McMahon Playbook.
The Playbook in Action
What Multiverse did next was remarkable. They deployed the Playbook across their entire sales organisation — and rather than replacing their existing team, they retrained them.
Former teachers. Former solicitors. People for whom this was their first sales role. Some rebelled. Some thought the level of process control was ridiculous. But others saw it for what it was: alchemy.
The results speak for themselves: 60 to 70 percent of Multiverse’s sales leaders have been promoted internally. That’s not a statistic you hear often in enterprise software, and it’s a testament to what happens when you combine a world-class operating system with people who are hungry to learn.
Jeremy brought in Steve McCluskey as CRO and a sales enablement leader called Alier — a man who had hit his number every single quarter for 23 consecutive years.
Don D’Arcy: The Next Chapter
With Jeremy having established the culture and the Playbook, Multiverse’s next move was to bring in Don D’Arcy to scale it.
Don’s pedigree is staggering: he scaled MongoDB’s EMEA operation from Regional VP all the way to EVP, building it across multiple regions and geographies over nearly a decade. Before that, he was at BMC Software — learning from the original Playbook architects.
But what Euan values most about Don isn’t his CV. It’s that he’s deeply methodical, fiercely loyal, and — unusually for the world of go-to-market — almost completely ego-free. His people don’t just work for him; they want to work for him, because he’s obsessed with their development as individuals.
“We’re About to Lose an Entire Generation”
The conversation takes its most urgent turn when Euan addresses the AI elephant in the room.
His argument is stark: the easiest gains from AI are linked to cost reductions — removing hands from the production line. But if companies only focus on cutting costs rather than growing the pie, the AI revolution becomes a story of displacement rather than augmentation.
Multiverse is now the antidote. The majority of their revenue comes from AI training — showing organisations how to create 10x versions of every employee. From NHS nurses learning data skills to Ministry of Defence operations, the mission is the same: make AI the great human augmenter, not the great job replacer.
And the opportunity is only getting bigger. Multiverse recently expanded into Germany — the largest economy in Europe, arguably the least digitally transformed, where the government has committed to training 46 million workers in AI.
Why This Episode Matters
Whether you’re a founder trying to figure out how to scale, a sales leader looking for proof that the Playbook works outside pure SaaS, or a CEO grappling with what AI means for your workforce — this episode delivers.
Euan Blair isn’t just building a company. He’s building the case that investing in your people is the single most commercially valuable thing you can do in the age of AI.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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