Growing to billion dollar valuation multiple times with Stan Masueras

0:00At Facebook in the early days, nobody took us seriously. When I joined, Eleven App was sub 100 million. And we're going to finish the year at 300 million. We're probably the safest AI company on the planet right now. What I've done in the past does not apply to this new world. Facebook, Intercom, Eleven App, if they would have told me, Stan, we need someone at the panini machine in the canteen, would you do it? I'd be like, yes, I'll happily do it. Today on Billions, I'm sitting down with Stan Masseras, the guy who scaled companies to billion dollar valuations, not once, but multiple times. He was one of the first Facebook employees in 2008, then helped Twitter expand across the continent after that.

0:39He also spent 6 years scaling Intercom to Unicor Status and now he's doing it all over again at Eleven Labs, the voice AI company that went from zero to 6 billion plus dollar valuation in under 3 years. In this episode, we'll dig into what it actually looked like to scale sales, how selling AI is fundamentally different from selling SaaS and what Stan had to unlearn from the typical SaaS playbook to succeed at Eleven Labs. If you want to understand what it takes to repeatedly win at the billion-dollar level and what breaks inside companies growing this fast, this episode is for you. Stan, thanks a lot for being here today.

1:16Thanks for having me, Guillaume. I'm usually the one asking you to join some of our events. So I'm happy to return the favor for once. Yeah, we've known each other for quite some years now, and I've always been super impressed by your career and everything you've done so far. I was quite curious because you worked at Facebook, then Twitter, and then you were at Intercom Scaling Sales. What's kind of the real story behind scaling sales, especially all over Europe, as you did? Yeah, so scanning sales all over Europe can be very ambiguous because if you try to implement the US playbook, it will never work, especially in the EMEA region because it's very fragmented.

2:03A lot of regulations, especially in France and in Germany, also in terms of the business codes, when you deal with an Israeli company versus a German company, the way you talk about pricing proposal, You know, Israelis would love to talk about money up front. German community will actually try to, you know, do it asynchronously. So there's a lot of like nuances that you can't really understand if you're based in San Francisco in your office and thinking about deploying your go-to-market strategy in the state of California versus doing it in Germany or in the Netherlands or in France. So that's, you know, the nuances.

2:40And then, of course, you know, the things that most companies neglect is that by default, you want to be product-led, but you also want to sell to enterprises. Selling for enterprises in Europe is pretty tough, you know, in terms of regulations, so all the certification you need to own. So that's why, you know, to be on the ground, you know, to really understand, you know, the nuances, the emotion and the empathy of the buyer is what makes the difference between selling from the US versus, you know, selling, you know, SaaS or an AI product when you are in Europe. And did you see any difference between what you were doing at Facebook and Intercom, for example?

3:20Yes. So the main difference is that Facebook is very similar to 11 Labs today. We were pitching a product at the time that nobody had. So if you were an advertiser, if you were an advertising agency at the time, the choices were very limited. You could do skyscraper advertising on Yahoo and MSN or Google. That was it. So when we came and when we created this social advertising where you can leverage your social graph, this is when things really skyrocketed. But it took some time. In the early days, nobody took us seriously. I still remember this guy called Gilles from Habas in France. I'm not going to mention his surname, just in case if you still work there.

4:02But I remember cold calling him saying, hey, it's Stan from Facebook. We'd love to talk about our advertising solution, etc. And I don't know if you remember Guillaume, but this one of the original social network in France called Skyblog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a social network started by a radio for teenagers. And literally, like he told me, like, Stan, the day you have a bigger audience than Skyblog, give me a call back. And he hang up on me. I was like, yeah, visionary. Did you call him back? Oh, he called us back. He called us back. Like, you know, a few months. But yeah, it took six to eight months to really crack you up before we saw any type of traction.

4:45Yeah, that's so funny. And do you see a lot of difference between, I would say, like traditional SaaS company and AI company? Because, you know, like at Eleven Labs, I mean, we've been using the product a lot. We've been like super successful in many use cases. And what I love, you know, like, and when you're also working in sales, is that the pricing has completely changed from user base or seed base versus usage base. How exactly does that impact the sales process? And are there any other difference you see internally? Yeah, so I talk about pricing, but first in terms of the differences, and even if Intercom pivoted into becoming a full AI company, but I would say the main difference between AI companies that are really scaling super, super fast today.

5:36So think about the Lovable and the 11 app of this world, the Synthesia, etc. So things that they all have in common is this big disrespect of the old playbook. So the playbook invented by the likes of Salesforce, Oracle, and where you need to have an army of SDR, and you need to have multiple layers of middle management. AEs do not call call, do not call email. they work with an SDR and the SDR is a little bit like a PA almost. This does not happen, especially at 11 Ads. Intercom was slightly different. We were always very, very, I wouldn't say frugal, but we were very careful about not damaging our profitability and we're super, super efficient.

6:23And I think at 11 Ads, we even took it a step further. Number one, if you look at our SDR teams, we call them the Bionic SDRs, because thanks to AI, they can do things that they were not able or even allowed to do in the past, such as I'm going to go to Berlin and do a roadshow and meet prospects face-to-face. This seems normal in sales, but in the old playbook, if you're on SDR, no, no, no, you stay in the office five days a week, you call call or you call email. So the time that they're saving by leveraging tools like Lemlist, where we're a big user of Lemlist, but also the productivity that we have because AI literacy is super, super important to us.

7:07So when you apply for a job at 11apps, we will check how literate you are with AI tools. It doesn't matter which one because there are always new ones popping up, but it's very important to see if someone can adapt to this new world and can unlearn the previous playbook. What kind of test to you as them? Yeah. Yeah. So the first ones that I personally do, so I think after this podcast, I'll have to change it. But during the first interview, I always say, we're going to do a little game. So after we introduce ourselves, we talk about why they want to join Eleven Labs. But I always ask them, OK, so check in the chat section.

7:45I just sent you a link. And sometimes it's you, Guillaume, but sometimes it's Charles from Alain, different CEO, different founder. but I will tell them share your screen you can use every single tool that you want but craft the perfect outbound email where you're going to be pitching let's say the agent platform from 11lbs to Guillaume it worked me through the steps and the answer is that there is no perfect you know path to get there you know it's very subjective what I think is a great outbound email versus what you think is a great outbound email but I want to see which tools are you doing their thought process.

8:20And it's funny to see that in 2025, when you interview enterprise AEs that are on paper, I'm a master of outbound. When you ask them to share their screen, then everything collapse. So like, oh, I haven't logged into Sales Navigator since 2017. Or it's usually my SDR will do this for me. It's like, okay, so you don't fully outbound. You get inbound leads from from your SDRs were actually outbound. And then, you know, it's interesting to see, like, the thought process behind how thoughtful some of them might be, you know, like taking a pause, thinking about the answer. Some of them might have created custom GPTs, you know, that will take, you know, your LinkedIn profile, look into specific keywords, and then look at what the AI strategy ad-lambless in Google to look at, okay, here's my angle, and here's how I'm going to craft the email.

9:13And that's what we want to see. Nice. And unfortunately, it's 10 % to 20 % of candidates who actually still know how to outvang. So that's one of the exercises that we try to do. And sometimes I will change tools. But this is a good way to actually filter out the ones that will require hand holdings that will take super long to ramp up. So we struggle with the current tools that we're using. We just interviewed an incredible candidate. She's joining us very, very soon. She's not coming from a traditional SaaS company, and she was against some killer, killer candidate. Like six, seven years of AE experience, great companies like Canva, Figma, one of them coming from Zendesk, etc.

10:04Great, great pedigree. But they all collapsed. They all collapsed on this exercise. And she did extremely well. And quick question, because you mentioned like the old playbook where basically, you know, you had like SDR. We were doing like all the manual work, only doing like the call calls, prospecting, etc. And the IEs will pretend that they do outbound, but actually are just waiting for the hot leads to come their way. Right now, like at Eleven Labs, basically, like you only have like sales who are full sales cycle and you don't really split like both functions. Is that correct? No, we do have a small team of SDRs who take inbound, but they also outbound.

10:44However, for all the AEs, we've got a pretty aggressive target, and we expect that 50 % of what is coming from outbound. And so that's step one. Step two also, which I think is very unique to 11 Labs, and maybe companies like Basecamp, I think you might be well familiar with Jason Fried. but it's pretty similar as well where there is no middle management. So when you work at 11 Apps, it doesn't matter which team, if you're in design, customer support, marketing, or sales, if you work for the team, if you manage AEs or CSM on up, you still have an individual target, so you still need to be on the battlefield.

11:28You still need to know how to sell better than anybody else. And that's also what makes the difference between someone who understands what the current code of selling to businesses in Europe in 2025 versus most SaaS companies where the sales VP or the sales director was an AE, but like in 2014. And that's how it used to be done. And so it still must work today. So your target is linked to the amount of sales from your team or do you have also an individual target on your end? I do have an individual quota and best thing to be honest, the best thing that ever happened to me since joining 11 Apps.

12:11Because it's very easy to be detached from customer conversation. You only speak with them when there is a large deal progressing or when there is a big problem and the customer went to charm. So that's when you usually jump in, in and out. But end-to-end from sending an outbound email to closing the deals, that's personally, I think it's what will keep me relevant for the next years ahead because the playbook is completely new. So what I've done in the past does not apply to this new world. And do you still have like a steering committee or like how does the management work? Because as you said, there is no like real middle management, but you're still like managing a team even though you have like an individual target.

12:53So how exactly does that work internally? Yeah, we've got small, small squad organized per specific territories. We've got also, we started to introduce also product leads for verticals that work really well for us. And then we've got two kind of like, you know, head of sales, one in the US, Ben, one, and looking after all of international, Carles. And then underneath, we've got Hugo that will kind of oversee all of EMEA. And then we've got like, you know, all the squads underneath. But also maybe on this, it's still for me, I found it mind-blowing when I joined E-Level Apps, when I opened Salesforce for the first time.

13:34You can see Carless running outbounding campaigns in the list, two companies that just joined Y Combinator. Or you can see all the forms being sent from Matty, our CEO. When I say everybody's on the battlefield, it's everybody. It's like there is no one just do their job and spend time in spreadsheet and PowerPoint. That's so nice. And I'm quite curious because obviously right now, I think Eleven Labs is in the hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue. I think I read somewhere like it was highly profitable with around like 100 million profits. But maybe like the numbers are not like totally public.

14:16I was just curious like you have the opportunity because of the valuation the amount you raised and also like the the cash in bank to potentially like hire like a lot of people you know like that's what we've seen in in many like scale up in the past and as you mentioned it was kind of the the old playbook where you just burn cash hire as many people as possible to try to scale what's kind of the balance at 11 labs at the moment between hiring fast because i know you're still hiring a lot and uh keeping you know like the team lean and efficient and still manage like the size and the scale um so first of all we we take our time to hire people so we're done purposely that we're always you know pretty stretched and the reason why uh we're stretched is because we need to always find creative new solutions to do our job.

15:11And there is always a solution. In terms of revenues, when I joined Elevana, I was sub 100 million. I joined them a bit more than a year ago now. And we're going to finish the year at 300 million. That's the goals that we set. And I remember when I was chatting with Kales, when he was like, when will be 300 million of AR company. You'll see, I was like, it's not a way, it's an if. That's the difference. But no, so all my previous assumptions about this will not scale actually were wrong. I think there is this mindset. I don't know if it's imposed by PCs or when you bring the the parent CEOs that are brought by the board at some point, you need to scale.

16:00And actually, you don't have to. If you hire the right people with the right mindset that work hard and also that care about the mission, you cannot actually achieve the impossible. And if I look at the ARs that we usually drive from AEs at 11.0 just for first sales, it's usually 3x what we usually get at a top-performing SaaS company. Insane. Out of how many deals was that? There was a big one in it, but there was like a long tail, you know, yeah, small and medium size. And the vibe at the company, it's like fully remote or do you also have like office space and do you meet often? So we are kind of hybrid and we love hiring remotely.

16:44So right now, we're probably like 350 employees and we spread across 48 markets. I think also it's an interesting point, the reason behind, especially in go-to-market. So we hire top talent wherever they are. And we use, you know, nowadays are great tools like Deal, where you can hire people across multiple defined geos, make things a lot easier with things that was not available pre-COVID. And so that's why right now, literally, we have people almost all around the world. And the goal is to be close to our community. Carles, our head of sales, is coming from Uber. and at Uber, if you look at Uber versus Lyft in the US.

17:27So two Silicon Valley companies, Lyft decided to pilot everything from San Francisco. And they built a great business. I think it's like, you know, four or five billion dollar company nowadays. And if you look at Uber, it's actually sent squads in cities. So we're not thinking about let's activate Germany, but let's activate the city of Berlin first. And then we'll send a squad to the city of Munich. and then we'll go to Amsterdam. And so being kind of like international, you know, like global kind of mindset, but hyper local is what we're aiming to do. So that's why when we, especially in sales, when you, someone will tell us, well, I'm actually in Madrid.

18:05We're like, great. Or we're, I'm actually based in Paris, like amazing. But we do have offices. We love people to come to the office. So we've got a hub in London, got a small one in Dublin. We've got a really nice one in Warsaw because the founders are Polish, we're a European company, and most of the products and also lots of researchers are based in Poland. And New York, New York is our biggest go-to-market office in the US. Yeah, it makes sense. You mentioned earlier, you know, like the fact that there's a difference, obviously, when you want to close like SMB and potentially like more enterprise.

18:43When it comes to 11Lab strategy, do you think you could walk us through a little bit like the different persona you have and segments and how do you prioritize on one specific segment because from my understanding of the business is that you have like quite a broad range of customers and I'm curious to know like how does the self-serve works from the enterprise motion and kind of the split Yeah, so focus first on what we call the enterprise motion, which is customer signing an annual contract with us. You're right. We've got many ICPs because we had, not too long ago, but we had a series of many, many products.

19:27Now we decided to segment it in two different platforms. It's a creative platform, which is more geared to text-to-speech. If you want to do voiceover or voiceover for marketing social media posts. If you want to do speech to text, if you want to dub a video, if you want to create a podcast, you know, to take a piece of text and automatically will convert it into a dynamic podcast. Or if you want to create an audio book. So that's a different set of ICP. It's usually people working in marketing, advertising agencies, creative agencies. And so it's a completely different ICP of our agent platform, which is purely geared toward the B2B community.

20:04And so for that, we go after usually all the type of like head of AI innovation, head of support, head of customer experience. And so for that, we try to be very specific on the marketing that we create in terms of content development, in terms of the events that we create, and also customer roadshows. Last week for me was all about the creative platform, meeting with media, TV channels, movie studios, etc. etc. Next trip is going to be purely focused on the B2B umbrella. So that's why having the ability to jump back and forth is very tough. And back in the days, 18, 24 months ago, I would have told you, well, the mantra was pick your ICP, pick your segment and go deep.

20:51Own one thin slice of the total addressable market and go deep and be the de facto solution. But I can see that now with AI, it's so hard, it's so spread across multiple ICPs. And so that's why AI companies grow fast as well. It's this ability to jump between context and between ICPs and to master the two types of industry. So for everybody, Vochem, for the likes of Lovable, it works super well, Synthesia, Agen, us. Why do you think it's working so well in AI and not that much in software? I think it's because most software companies will be an expense management software, a travel management software, an account receivable software.

21:36I think the decision made seven, eight years ago when they did the first round, now they have to stick to the lane. It will be pretty hard for Navan to be like, oh, now we do AI solution for the gaming developer. But that's something we can afford to do. We can literally equip the customer support team of a telco company with our agent platform, but then at the same time work with the developer of Fortnite and to provide the voice of the Darth Vader character so we can have a conversation with Darth Vader as you're playing Fortnite. So that's kind of things that might seem to be impossible, but actually totally doable.

22:19So do you always come up with the different use cases? So right now, like you mentioned some very different, you know, like I know, I think you were working also like in the movie industry also where you can dub and do like a lot of different voiceover or like text to speech, et cetera, et cetera. Like, do you come up with the use cases or do you like, like how exactly would you open one vertical typically? That's my personal observation. So I don't know if it's the official point of view of 11 Labs. But what I've seen so far is that, yes, at the start, it was mainly user-driven. So it will tell us, here's what we're doing with your product.

23:00And then because we're moving fast, but we're documenting everything, making sure that if we make a mistake, we learn from the mistake, and we don't replicate it again. But now when we go to a customer, so let's say last week I was meeting with a luxury brand, we'll do a workshop and we'll present here, you know, the seven, you know, use cases that we've been deploying with companies like yours. What else? What else can be done? And so we kind of brainstorm with them and we'll come up with different ideas. Some of them will fall into the use case that we presented and some of them will be additional.

23:36But we tried them and I think with the telco industry, this is where, this is a part where we've done pretty well recently just to speak the same language understanding the kpis that matter to them all the different use cases where our technology can be deployed so when we go to a new telco we're not reinventing the wheel we know exactly what's going to resonate well with them and uh and uh we speak the same language and i'm i'm quite interesting also because like um right now i think companies uh from an investor perspective they are always you know like um the valuation is kind of like over-indexed on net retention.

24:13And for AI companies, what's really nice is if your product is great, obviously, like the usage will keep increasing. And to take your example with a luxury company, we can think of them like using 11 Labs typically on social media for like specific ads where they're going to do like maybe voiceover in 30 different languages or whatever. but we can also think of them using Eleven Labs as a support agent that would answer all the conversation. So do you have an actual upsell strategy to kind of push bigger accounts and help them scale? Or how does that work? You're totally right, Guillaume. So usually, let's say for luxury brands, we'll start with a creative platform to clone the voice of their brand ambassador to then be able to dub this brand ambassador from English into Japanese, English into Korean, English into French, et cetera.

25:14And then they will use that for social media, sometimes TV ads, et cetera. But then also with the agent platform, not only we're now talking about customer support, especially around events. So for luxury brands, especially in France, there is no call center. actually if you are v if you're vip or vvip you've got your personal concierge okay you can order your your handbag you know the top of a button however around specific big events so think about like the milan fashion week and the paris fashion week when there is a new show organized by company x that's when those websites might be completely floated about like what's the logistic what time does it start and blah blah blah what's the sitting plan so that's what can actually will deliver a better support towards the participant of the event by having an AI agent that can do this at scale and in a personal way.

26:08So that's what we're kind of exploring. And then for customer support, this is when also like where in terms of especially for the retailer, all the distributions that they have because most of those like luxury brands, they don't have any commerce websites. They distribute across all the different distributors. And so that's also like where we can equip them and show them that they don't have to speak with you know 10 ,000 distributors they can outsource everything to an AI agent that will triage and answer deflect and answer to most of the repetitive and low value questions. Now that's nice and and within the team do you have like target on expansion also or or do you have like a specific team made for expansion or is this the whole of yeah yeah we've got a team of customer success traditionally customer success in most companies will be kind of like traditional post-sales, like hybrid of customer support.

27:01CSM at 11Apps is such a strategic role. It's all about expansion, not only making sure that the customer sees value in their initial purchase so it can prove a positive ROI, but then also start to add additional breaks, test new models when they come out, test new products, and then also if they use one platform only to expand into the other one. So not only to boost usage but also making sure that we can spread really quickly into multiple business units within the organization. You mentioned, you know, like, because from afar and also like being an 11Lab user, I also like see a lot of new features, new updates, etc., etc.

27:41How do you make sure, you know, that the existing customers see like the full benefits of what's being updated? it and i'm also curious like uh because obviously like voice i think it's been evolving extremely quickly like if we look at uh you know even the quality of uh i think it was very impressive like from the start like uh i think that the wow effect was there but from the wow effect to having something that's like almost perfect like it is now i think there's been like a lot of um evolution so how exactly like do you make sure that one every customers can really see the the updates in real time and two the customers that potentially like didn't convert back in the days to kind of like reactivate them yeah so first for existing customers that might not be using new products so for that we're we're not reinventing the wheel we've got specific call to action in the product.

28:43We're a big fan of video content. I think something that I forgot to mention is that also almost everybody at 11labs is pretty good in terms of writing, creating content, social media posts. It's not something that we check at the interview level, but it's a plus, if you can create content. So that's why, especially in our growth team, we've got some incredible content creator, video content creator. So they create literally on the fly, short form videos that will explain in 45 seconds the benefits of this new product and everything is embedded within the product. So that's how we push it to more self-service customer.