20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

25:11Yeah. And what I do is like with the team and we do like we have quite a lot of people in the go-to-market side, like globally we have about like 90 people or something like that. But what I do is like, I have sessions every single month with my account execs and my CSMs where we go deep into the pipeline. It's like it's pipeline review sessions and I drill them on absolutely every single detail. And we do it in front of everyone, right? So if someone hasn't been building the proper pipeline and I do see the numbers and I do see it, I will tell it in front of them, like you have not done a good job.

25:41Like you're actually slacking, you're doing this, this, this. Or I will tell them like, you're actually lucky. Like in the past month, you hit your numbers because of pure lack. Next month, you're not going to hit them. So you're not in the good spot right now. And if they improve, which the majority of them do, the following month, I'm like, I know I gave you a lot of crap last month. You've done fantastically well now. But you need to have that honesty with your team because otherwise, like, what are we doing here? We're trying to build a generational company. You cannot do things like the traditional way.

26:08You need to do it in a completely different way. You said there about those meetings with execs and CSMs. Can you actually just take me to them? You do them monthly, correct? With them monthly. Do them monthly. Do you do them separately with CSMs and execs all together? CSMs have their own meeting, and then account execs have a different one. And then in account execs, I split it by region. And they're in person or remote? All remote. This is an interesting thing. I know how some people are about being in an office and all of that stuff. And when I see my sales team in the office multiple days, I start getting worried.

26:41Because if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road. I travel like 75 % of my time. Like in the past three weeks, I was in San Francisco, I was in Mexico City, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Singapore, in London, and I'm heading to Dubai, right? It's like, that is like the standard thing. Like salespeople need to be on the road talking to their customers, whether that is in the UK, that is across Europe, or that is like in Cancun. I do not care. If you're constantly in the office doing virtual meetings only with your customers, you're doing it wrong. How do you build a sales culture remotely? By being ruthless.

27:11You need to be on top of it. It's like it requires extra time and it requires people to be forced to actually like be on the road. It's like we will have multiple touch points, but I don't hire people that are junior. I hire people that are actually like autonomous, very energetic, very passionate, will accept like a million no's fundamentally because like building sales is tough. Building sales remotely is even tougher and you just need to be on top of it. We're going to get to actually the people, but I just want to stay on these meetings. case we have them separate we have them remote we have them monthly let's start on the like sales team side before we move to the csms what are you expecting them to bring should they send pipeline ahead of time with notes what's that prep phase pre-meeting so they will essentially tell me like how much they've closed how much it's in the pipeline how much they're expecting to close in in the next 30 days and essentially like we start going to the deals right we talk about like the biggest deals and all of that stuff and then i always like look while they're talking i look at their pipeline and I pull up some random deals so that to understand like whether they have a full grasp of what they're talking about.

28:14Because sometimes, you know, like sales teams, like they can end up like cheating and then having a bigger pipeline that is inflated, but it's not moving, right? And catch them. But for me, the key item that I always tell them is like at the end when they present, I keep interacting them and giving them feedback and asking questions. But at the end of it, I'm like, the question is always the same. What are the blockers that you have and how How can I help you? And for me, what I do is like I build a list of the blockers for each one of them, like summarize them later on and then post it across the entire organization being like, hey, if we solve all of these blockers in Europe, we could be making a lot more money.

28:48In India, these are the blockers. In Spanish, LATAM, these are the blockers. In Middle East, these are the blockers, right? Then everyone is like understands what are we, what are we in each one of the regions? Okay. And so we have that. And when they come to you and they say something, because I'm on a lot of boards and very often And it's like, that one, that slipped to next quarter. What do you say when you get reps who say that? And what's the right way to deal with that? I mean, there is always like deals that will end up like moving towards the next quarter. That's inevitable, right? It was like the question.

29:18And you do this, by the way, in front of everyone. Yes. You don't do it one by one. No. No one has enough time to do it one by one. And I think like everyone can benefit from like doing it in front of other people. It's the pressure. It's the fact like you can give them bad feedback. People learn from it, right? So the learning components, I think it's important, specifically from a sales perspective. How do you do that without shaming people? I don't know. You need to shame them. Like if someone hasn't done their job, they haven't done their job. And you need to actually publicly tell them so that like they understand they haven't done their job and everyone else knows that like they're getting shit for it.

29:50You don't agree with the praise in public, criticized in private? No, I don't agree. I think like I need to tell you like what is right and what is wrong. Of course, I'm not going to tell you like this is like full shit, like you're going to get fired. I'm not going to say that. but at the same time, I'm not going to hold back on saying if you haven't done a good job. And for instance, there was like a case earlier this year of one of my account execs that I told the person like, you just were lucky and you've closed these deals just for pure luck, but you haven't done any good job. And then like the next one, there was like, it was so funny.

30:23Like there was exactly two people, the same case. And then the next one that came in presenting was I told him like you have done exactly the same thing but you have not been lucky as the previous person and that's why you haven't actually closed anything both of them the following month absolutely smashed sales people need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told and if they're good at their job they're going to accept the criticism learn from it and then improve how long are those meetings we end up putting usually an hour and a half and then people have like about like seven eight minutes to present and then like it's very quick in general what happens and this is a hard one because 11 laps seemingly just such rocket ship revenue growth what would you advise if you would put on a hypothetical hat for it not working so well what would you advise a sales leader or a ceo who's taking this who's going to run with this but the numbers are not up into the right how do i have a meeting like this without feeling like dejected demoralized when numbers aren't up into the right i think it just depends on like why the numbers not on the on the right place right I think you need to do the back work first to understand what's happening.

31:28Is it because the sales team is not good enough? Is it because the product is not good enough? Is it because we're not being aggressive enough? What is essentially happening here? Because if you don't have a full understanding, then you might be shaming people for the wrong reasons. And the best way of understanding is roll up your sleeves and actually pitch customers. I am the SDR in chief in the company. I absolutely love it. I actually love outbounding people. I love it. We were like, Matti and I were like in Singapore, like talking to Razer, the laptops company. Absolutely love the brand. And then that came out because I outbounded the CEO and I messaged him like, Matti and I are going to be in Singapore in a few days.

32:12Like we'd love to actually meet and figure out how we can talk, how we can figure out like a partnership. And he replied saying like, yes, let's do it. So we end up spending like a good hour in their offices, which is fantastic. I do it all the time and then I pass it to the team because I do believe like a good leader needs to be a good outbounder. It's interesting that I have this narrative also with BCs, right? Like for me, a BC is just a glorified SDR or BDR. 100%. And respectfully, why do I bother doing venture when I, sorry, being blunt, when I can make millions from media? because of the media you have the ability to be the best BDR in the world because people will always respond to you when you have a big brand.

32:52Exactly. This is why people like founders they're like yeah I love working with Harry. I have quite a few who come in and sit in our office and they just go on LinkedIn with me and we just send cold emails from mine. And I'm literally a BDR. Yeah. Yeah. But that's great. But to your point though I feel this rush when I get a response that's like yeah we'd love a call that'd be so great. I'm like yes. I love it. But as a leader, as a CEO, like a say leader, if you're not doing it, I think you're doing it wrong. Of course, as the company keeps getting bigger, no one expects Matty or any CEO for a very successful company to be doing outbounds.

33:28But nevertheless, what you could do is you can prep. So I have team members that will message me saying, could you send an outbound message to this person? I've just drafted it for you, right? And we do it with Matty as well, we do it with my LinkedIn account and all that stuff. and the response rate that you get is like, as you were saying, like through the roof. Dude, we do what we do on Founders all through my LinkedIn where like Paul or Kieran or Alex will do it. A hundred percent. And they join the call and that's totally fine. It's good. A hundred percent. If you trust in your team to be amazing, it'll be a great experience for everyone.

33:59But you need to help the team, right? It's like what I don't buy is like sales leaders that are essentially the leaders, right? Like you don't know the pain. You don't know essentially what it is actually your team is suffering. And it goes back to your questions. Like truly, if you go to a meeting and like the numbers are not in the right. Maybe the problem is you, that like you don't understand how the sales process happens, the product that your team is selling and the pain points that actually they're going through. So maybe like you need to fix that first. Totally get that. If we just go back to this meeting, because I'm so want to kind of extract everything I can from this.

34:31Is it just retroactive review or is there any element of forward planning? Do we get the end spend 15 minutes ago? Okay, for the next four weeks, we're going to do this. How do we think about that? Yeah, so usually it's like, as part of like the presenter for the account execs every single one even in the csm side it's like what are they forecasting to actually be closing over the next 30 days as well and essentially what are they going to be doing to actually close them okay fantastic what is your advice to me as sales leader or ceo who's not as experienced and brilliant as you on the right way to forecast is it like be optimistic be realistic be negative how do you advise on that be as negative as possible So I always like advice team on if we are now setting a deal that is going to be half a million dollars, fantastic.

35:13Just put me that like you're going to be signing it at$24 ,000. I don't want to put like an unrealistic number because like if you think it's going to be half a million dollars, the most likelihood is going to be a hundred K, right? So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs are incentivized to inflate as much as possible so that it looks like better. I don't like that. So let's put the lowest possible number. That's fine. we'll fix it later, but at least we're underestimating what it's going to look like. But we do it also for the board. When we put the board X and we tell them, hey, this is the pipelines, this is the contracts, all of that stuff, we put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates.

35:50And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions and be like, hey, by the way, you put me this account over here that it was going to be a$2 million account, but it seems you sign it at like 100K? hey, what? And it just raises such a number of awkward questions that it doesn't make sense. One of the fastest ways, I think, to create distrust, obviously, when you have investors look at your company, obviously, you share a pipe often of what you expect it to be. When we do reference calls, as all investors do with friends who are CEOs of those companies, like, dude, we'd never spend more than 25K on this, and they've got it in for 250, fastest way to lose credit.

36:25Correct. Correct. And there is another item in there. It's like, if you always underestimate made or undervalue your pipeline, it means that to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline. So there is a lot of consequence of all of this. You'll end up working twice as hard because your pipeline is not big enough for the year end number or the quarter end number that you needed. So it's a forcing mechanism to have the right culture in place. We went through this cultural change early this year because I actually got obsessed. We were doing the majority of deals, like 90 % of the deals were mostly inbounds.

36:59And as the team keeps growing, I was getting extremely worried that we were not building the right mentality in the team. It's like if at some point the pipeline drives up, then you essentially end up dying. So I put a goal saying we need to migrate to 50 % outbound, 50 % inbound by the end of the year. So it kept happening. Absolutely everyone. I still put together a report every single week with every single account exec and SDR in the team telling them, like, you've achieved your target on a weekly basis. You haven't achieved it. And if people don't achieve it, then I call them out. I did it so often that I ended up, like, getting, like, people make jokes about outbound, outbound, outbound.

37:40It's like, I'm the outbound king. Yes, I love it. And people, like, know that, like, if you are on that list of people that are not doing the outbound, I'm going to call you out. And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we're going to have a problem, right? it's a cultural thing and we end up like migrating from like this 10 % outbound sales that we're doing to 40 % that we do today. You're 40 % outbound. Wow. And when you say outbound, just to clarify specifically, this is not picking names from a PLG list. This is direct outbound. Direct outbound, yes. Wow. What's the primary channel for that direct outbound?

38:15Most of it we use a company called Lemlist which is fantastic for sequencing. Yeah, Guillaume is the fan. Yeah, it's fantastic. Those guys are doing super well. We use LinkedIn and there is a lot of cold calling. The traditional method works. And it depends on the market. You literally code who? 100%, yes. I was in the office yesterday and early today, and I had some of my team members actually cold calling. I was so happy. I was smiling. I was actually listening to the conversation because I was so happy. I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with the right mentality.

38:47But in LATAM or in India, cold calling works, but the best method is WhatsApp. It's a different culture. Like in India and LATAM, like they use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need to be in WhatsApp. See, this is why I disagree with you on the remote preference. I get you in terms of needing to be with customers and I understand that, but I think you learn so much from hearing your friend who's also in sales have that message work really well. And you're like, God, I could use that. And his messaging is much better than mine. And then you see support over in the other corner and everyone is talking about the same challenges that they're having.

39:19And you're like, God, okay, I could actually talk about that as one of the core problems that we solve. And actually, you get so many of the multifunctional benefits from being in the office. But I agree with you, you need to be with customers. It's a nuanced thing, to be fair. But it's also the fact that you could be sharing those best practices with the rest of the team. And over the months, as we kept expanding the team, specifically in Europe, for instance, the team has become extremely good at sharing their best practices. You will have one of the account execs saying, I've done this like 50 times this is working super well and we'll share it in the slack message being like guys You should try it.

39:53Is that how you do it? How do you create a structure to share best practices? I incentivize everyone like my incentive to everyone is like in my messages We need to experiment even at this size like we don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow We need to be ahead of the trends. We need to constantly experiment So if you experiment with like messaging like ways of like talking to customers and so on Just put it with a word with a wider team and then everyone can copy you When does the sales team become too large for this forum and communication? Never. But like, dude, if you have 100 sales reps. Doesn't matter.

40:23What, you're going to have 700-minute meeting? Fine. You can't. No, at some point, you end up doing like... Multiple. Multiple. Exactly, right? And you end up like... Today, we actually have like subdivided in Europe. We have like UKI, the Nordics like meeting. We have Southern Europe, Western Europe and all of that stuff, right? But still, you need to keep actually doing it. Okay. When we move to the CSM side, is there anything different about these meetings? What are they expected to bring and how do these meetings go? It's exactly the same thing. So we will go through the pipeline and understanding how many calls they've done, what are the problems with some of their customers, what is the NRR they're expecting to close, and how much upselling and cross-selling they're going to be doing.

41:05What NRR do you chase? 115. 115. Yes, but we absolutely smashed the number every single quarter. Yeah. It's absolutely crazy because we have this land and expand. Land and expand works really well if you work closely with your customers and then you end up having a very solid GRR and NRR. What ACV justifies having a CSM and how many accounts are they responsible for? Any value actually works because literally you need to actually separate it. I want my account execs to actually go hunting, be hungry all the time. So I want them to bring logos quickly because the market, Like anyone can be building a competitor at any point in time, extremely quickly.

41:45So I have to have like those people that are incentivized to move extremely quickly. And then as soon as they've done it, they need to be able to transfer it to someone else. So like CS is like something that you need from the early days as well. We made a mistake at 11 labs of bringing CS way too late, way too late. It took us like 15 months from the first contract that we signed to bring customer success. It was massive chaos because the account execs, and I was like selling a lot back then. And I was like running these deals. And at the same time, like people would complain, like, Hey, like I have these problems and then like, I also need to do this.

42:18And then I would look at the list of usage every single week and then outbound and I would put like a list saying, okay, all of these accounts are ready for like upselling because of usage. We need to get in touch with them. All of these other accounts, like we should touch base with them. So I was sharing it with the team and it's like at some point it starts breaking. Right. And that's when I realized like, shit, we've done it wrong. I should have brought like customer success much sooner. Let's bring them. and there was like a day and night initially like account execs wanted to transfer the accounts but they just didn't really give any level of information so they were like it's sign you deal with it and then we're like they get on the customer success guys we were like what like i don't even know any background of this account like it's a gmail account right like how the hell am i gonna know who is behind it john doe oh it could be a few people i've looked on linkedin That leaves me with 784 profiles in London.

43:09I love that. Okay. And so we have that. How do we financially incentivize customer success? Just so I understand that. NRR. Like net revenue retention. That's essentially how we do it, right? Of course, you could have like... So once it's over 115. Exactly. You get compensated how? So we have like bonuses or commission structure that like depends how big it gets. Then essentially you get 2X, 3X, 4X, whatever that is, right? So... Just so I understand, just because there's going to be so many founders who are like, I love this, but what do I actually do? It's like two, three X. What salary? Like, the upsell?

43:42What are they getting? Yeah. So like when you increase the NRR, then fundamentally, like based on the NRR, like we call it, it's like the baseline is 115, right? So if you went to like, I don't know, like 130, then essentially you calculate how much it takes you and then like, it would be like fundamentally more. And that's like, it's a direct like math that you do on top of it. We don't have accelerators for like NRR or like CS in the account exec team we have accelerators for next year we might change some of that how do you use accelerators to get the most out of sales teams and any advice there for account execs for instance what we do is like up to 100 of your quota we pay you five percent commission right so fairly simple from 100 to 150 quota we pay you 7.5 commission and then anything above 150 we pay you 10 commission like fairly simple straightforward so everyone is incentivized so actually going over 150 to the point that like a lot of my account execs now we are finalizing the the performance reviews for 2005 because we always like want to start january with everything fully sorted to the point that like some of my account execs will tell me or have been telling me like i don't want an increase in salary if you're going to increase my salary then calculate that and put it in equity because if you increase my salary my quota goes up and then it takes me longer to hit accelerators so i can make lot more money with like a smaller quota hitting the accelerators mature which is is smart really hard it's totally smart also tells me that no one's buying houses and mortgages uh which isn't you rachel roose uh is what i say there um interesting it's not very much i didn't mean that rudely but like over 150 i get 10 percent shit me so what it's a lot dude it's not much It's a lot of money.

45:25Compared, if we think about it, you set me, okay, I'm on 100K and I get 20X. I'm on 2 million. So if I get 3 million, then I get 10%. Yeah. And I get 300K. Yeah. As a bonus. It's fantastic. Is that good for industry? That's fantastic. Like, think about it, like, salespeople used to be the highest paid in any organization. Now it's changed with the researchers and AI, which 100 % they deserve it. but up until like the AF revolution that happened three years ago, like salespeople were like the highest paid, always. No, I'm aware of that. But I'm just like, God, I thought if you hit like 100 % of your quota, getting 15 to 20 % would be good.

46:05No, like that's too much. Otherwise your numbers would never add up, right? When do you advise founders on when to have a customer success team? You said that you waited way too long, way too long. Yeah. When's the right time? I think like once you hit like a good, like three,$4 million, dollars then i think it's time to actually bring your fair customer six three for an hour yeah okay got you so like it makes sense like to have like on upper like a csm function like an average of like four million dollars in book value i think that makes sense we're super bad on that so i think like our average book value per csm is about like eight point something million right so it means that we're massively understaffed so we're trying to fix it for next year but ideally four is a good number on the flip side for sales teams do you think that you need to wait until you have a sales playbook before you hire a fantastic sales leader like you or do you do what mattie did and bring you in with zero revenue bring with zero revenue bring someone that is like scrappy that like wants to iterate will tell you like if things work or things don't work like i think you need that as soon as possible because i think like there was this like moment in which like mattie like And they called me one day, like, you know what, going forward, I report to you for sales.

47:13You report to me for everything. And I was like, and that was his way of saying, like, you are supposed to be doing sales. Founder-led sales are good, but, like, you hit a rock, right? Like, you hit, like, a ceiling, and just, like, at some point, you need to do the transition. So better do the transition now than actually wait another six months, because we know what we're selling. We know how we're selling it. you've been doing it all of these months and you get a lot more deals than me how common is that though that you know what messaging works you know what channel works you have a playbook i think it just depends on like the sales day that you bring in the organization and how quickly and how willing to experiment they are right and i think like that has a ton of value if you bring someone sooner that has the right mentality of course if you bring like someone that has like very like i have my playbook and this is how we're going to be doing it i always hate it because that playbooks don't work unfortunately right and i think like that that is the key is like if you have someone very early that you can iterate and build trust extremely quickly then essentially like founder-led sales stop making any sense fundamentally because you could be spending a lot more time doing other things unless you're a founder that is like really on the sales side fantastic then just just keep going right otherwise you could be spending your time like building the product or doing all the things that are much more important so you come in And then what's the biggest advice post that in terms of, do we just hire like five reps at once and just go hell for leather?

48:35How do we think about the right way to sequence hiring in the really early sales days? In the early days, like hire one or two. Like don't over hire because then if you over hire, fundamentally, you're going to be building the wrong culture. People are going to be asking you a lot of questions. You will have like five different people like iterating their own playbooks and thinking about their own stuff. What you want to do is like you want to give them some guidelines. Like this is what works. This is what is not working. you can still iterate a lot of what works and what doesn't work. And you can make a ton of mistakes, but I don't want like five different people like going wild and trying to figure out because then essentially no one is going to be closing anything, right?

49:10So better to have like, you bring the safe leader, someone that's like is able to actually get their hands dirty and understand what's happening in the business and pitch and go deep. And then you bring two more people. Then wait until they're on boarded. Like wait a couple of months. You don't have to wait too long, two, three months. Let's make sure they're fully on boarded. Let's make sure that they're starting to sell contracts. And internally at the company, 11 Labs, we used to have this target that's like, when you join 11 Labs, you need to have signed your first contract within the first two weeks.

49:38Whoa. And that was a target. That was a target. We got people that had even signed within 72 hours, they signed the first enterprise contract, right? Tiny contract, but I don't care. It doesn't really matter. Do you put them on calls straight away? You don't want to burn leads. In the early days, we used to do it. and then they would join my meetings and essentially I would tell them like, okay, this is like how we do it on the product side is like the overview. My expectation is like, you're going to be spending the next like 24 hours, like drilling the entire product and understanding it. And I will ask you to pitch me tomorrow.

50:11Right. And then I will bring into my calls and then they will see me page. They will see me talk to customers. The following day, they would essentially just give me the pitch. If I liked it, then essentially we would just join calls the same day or the following day together. And then they would pitch, I'll be taking a backseat. They're like, I'm there to support you if they have any questions. And then within like a week, they were already fully up and running. And then of course it was a lot more risky, but hey, we had nothing to lose back there, right? We had to move quickly because the market was like crowded.

50:39Advise me, how can I train my reps most effectively? If this is like, listen to all my gone calls, go spend time with product, go spend time with customer support. What should I do to train reps most effectively? In the early days, the best thing is like they should join calls, like immediately. Like they're not gonna be talking in those calls, but they should just join absolutely immediately so they see how other people are doing it. They need to be answering tickets of support questions. They need to essentially be talking to the engineers and then going deep into the product side. Once all of that has passed and you're already making a good amount of money and you claim that you have product market fit claim because you never know, then essentially it's a completely different game, right?

51:16Because you want to make sure that your reputation is on the line. You You want to have them like selling to the proper people. So essentially you end up like having join me then also watch some customer calls through Gong and at the same time you need to pitch me, you need to have like the certifications and all of that stuff. Right. Then you end up migrating toward like much more of a corporation style where like then people take a lot longer for two weeks. They have like this round period where like they understand everything, they meet multiple people and so on. That's like a lot more boring.

51:46When was your hiring process broken? And what did you learn from that time? So we made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes because like the first ones that I hired on the go to market side, I thought, OK, let's bring someone that like understands a lot more on the product side. I can train them how to excel and then it will be fine. And then it turned out like it just was not working. And like the person was really good on the product side, but like on the sales side, there is something that like was missing in there. And you couldn't teach them that sales. This is a hunter mentality. This is like being hungry, like being like super driven, passionate and so on that you get like straight away or you don't get it.

52:25And I think that that was a mistake. Like the person is still with us, like doing super well, right? And we always joke with him saying like, hey, like you joined in the wrong role. But that was the type of profile because like we were selling, like we had a lot of like self-service companies. We had a lot of inbounds. Like you were thinking much more like It needs to be product-led sales. It needs to be fundamentally thinking about the product and trying to help them navigate it and so on. And you realize, shit, no, no, no, no, no. These people already know what 11laps is, right? Specifically the inbounds.

52:55So it's less about the product, more about we need to convince them to sign this fucking contract, right? So that's a completely different profile of people. And then that's when I brought my first two proper account execs that started on the same day and I trained them in parallel and they did super well. What did you do well that you would recommend to everyone else having seen it? Literally, like, getting them in calls with me, seeing me pitch, right? Like, I had done it already, like, hundreds and hundreds of times, seeing me pitch, seeing me how I was answering calls, seeing me that, like, I would tell them customers, like, by the end of the day, you have all of these things.

53:28And then by the end of the day, I would send those things because the best thing that you have is trust with your customers. It set up the right culture and the right way of operating in the team. That was, for me, the most important thing. And then on top of that, then I was keeping in the loop and joining their calls randomly. So I would open their calendar and be like, okay, they have a call in 10 minutes. Fine. I will join that call. So I would just pop up in that call and essentially make them nervous because then the worst thing that you have is like your boss joining a call, like unexpected.

53:57So what's going to happen there? And I would just stay quiet and be like, no, no, I'm just here to support. Don't worry. But of course you could see that they were very nervous, right? And they make a ton of more mistakes. So, like, you end up building that muscle memory by forcing people to make mistakes as well. Do you worry about having a culture of fear? You said the word ruthless. You are very direct. I love it. I thrive off it. I'm a narcissist and need therapy. Do you worry about having a culture of fear? I don't think the team is as scared of me because I think when I hire people, I always tell them this line, which is, like, Eleven Labs is not the easiest company to work for.

54:32And like, that's always what I tell them is like, you're going to be working a lot. I'm going to have very high expectations. We can have a lot of fun. If you're not ready, absolutely fine. Don't join us. But I want you to know before you accept the role. And then it sets the right tone. Like some people have told me like, this is not for me. And I 100 % respect it. The majority of people end up saying like, I value that. Of the successful sales reps that you have, what is the most common background and what backgrounds tend to not work? Like we've tried all of different backgrounds and it doesn't really matter whether you come from a very pure massive sales organization like Salesforce or you come from like ABC background.

55:08Like it doesn't really matter. It is like how willing are you to constantly trade, like go deep and have this high energy situation with your customers and care about your customers. The only thing that actually drives value. Think about it like you're not doing sales, you're building a community. Whether you're doing a Level Up or you're doing like company X, it doesn't really matter. Like, if you think about, like, your customers are, like, pure sales, then you're falling into being a transactional element, right? No one wants to be sold anything. But if you're building a community that loves your product, that loves your brand, that loves everything that you represent, then sale is much easier.

55:42How do you build a community? Building a community is, like, you need to do what is right for them. You need to actually talk to them constantly. Give them your, like, specifically in the early days, give them your WhatsApp, put them in Slack. It doesn't really matter. Like, those people need to interact with you constantly. and they need to know that like if they need to downscale the commitment, you will accept it. It's fine. You're doing what is right for them, even if that costs you money. And that's a part of the culture, right? It's like if I'm only thinking about like transactional elements and pure transactions, then no, no, no.

56:11I need to sign the highest amount for this company because whatever it is, of course, they're going to churn at some point. But exactly the same, like when you are building a company, why would you change that approach? But you do it with your friends the only difference like hey like the customers are not your friends yet some of them will become your friends and i have like a bunch of customers that end up becoming my friends and i absolutely love it but you need to build the relationship because no one wants to be sold absolutely no one so funny i just did a show with one of the best sales leaders ever john mcmahon he was on the boards of mongodb snowflake real it was a cro of five public companies unbelievable and he said no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care and i just thought that was beautiful yes why should you fire yourself and it's a really weird question but i would fire myself because definitely we were too slow to video no shit that would be my number one and then i'd say number two i'm too distracted not focused enough for me i would fire myself because i i do too many things and i love doing too many things but also makes me like unfocused in many in many areas the other one is the moment i lose passion like literally like i just don't care anymore so that's more like i will lose i would fire myself like if i start thinking that like i'm starting to lose a little bit of the passion then it's like shit no like it's you need to look you need to fire yourself like do something else because you're gonna be like you're gonna be burning out extremely quickly most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies are there a zero to one person, are there a very rare is that I'm thinking of Chris Degnan actually at Snowflake who went from zero to public company and he would say he was zero to four within an hour.

57:50Do you think you're full stack? I love the early stage of companies but it's still like for me it doesn't really matter if you're still enjoying what you're doing just keep going right like life is too short like for doing something that like you don't enjoy and I think like majority of people are smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life. That's That's my main motivation. And I've always taken my job at 11 Labs on a monthly basis. If next month I don't enjoy it, I would just tell Mati I'm not enjoying it. It is time for me to quit and do something else. Really? Yes. How do you advise people?

58:21Because I would say a month isn't long enough. A month can be a bad part of the market, it can be psychology, whatever. How do you advise people on when the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough, move job? Of course, one month is like the trigger for you to start thinking whether it is or not the right thing. one month is not enough so like if it happens with like number of months like two or three months consecutive months then you have a problem in there right because like everyone will start seeing it so I think like if for three months you've been going like through this like very rough patch that you're not finding motivation you should just triple check whether you're in the right place what is the main reason that 11 labs is a efficient machine of a company that no one knows and sees?

59:05I think it's fundamentally the type of people. Nothing else. It's like very humble people that essentially don't know what they don't know and they'll just stand up and accept their mistakes. And I think we've encouraged everyone to make a ton of mistakes all the time, experiment, and no one gets fired for making mistakes. And that is the superpower that we have as an organization. Literally no one will know that we've iterated and tested like 25 things and all of the 25 things failed, but you just need one to actually deliver to actually make another 100 million in revenues. And I'm happy with that.

59:38I'm happy with those odds. What makes Matty such an incredible CEO? I think it's the fact that he can do both the product side and the customer side. And he's very extrovert in nature and very empathetic with the customers and the rest of the organization, right? It's actually difficult to find leaders and CEOs that actually can do both things, that product and can do the customer side. sometimes like this like have this vision on the product side but they're just lacking like the drive to do sales and mattie will roll up his leave and be like i'm gonna be running this sale right it's one of his superpowers in general you've you met him like he comes across like extremely personal like you immediately like uh like drawn to him he's a nice guy in general right and and as such like when you add up all of these factors then it's like it's fantastic like fantastic leader fantastic ceo but like we have another one which is fundamentally like piot he's the genius of the company, right?

1:00:32In the sense, like, he built the entire technology from scratch. We have a very small research team that all of them are absolutely, like, walking brains, like, literally. They're, like, super, super smart guys. But it's headed by Peter. Like, the company would not exist if it wasn't because, like, we built a fantastic technology. Is it almost harder when you become a sexy brand? Because you have so many people want to join. It becomes a lot noisier. Yeah, but also, like, the expectation is higher, right? We hired about, like, 0.18 % of people that apply, or 0.018. We had about 180 ,000 applications in the first six months of the year.

1:01:06There is a lot of imbalance. There is a lot of things that you get, but that doesn't mean that there is equivalent to quality, that is equivalent to the type of bill that you be hiring. Of course, as you become a hot commodity in there, people want to actually work for you, but they want to work for the wrong reasons. Most of it, people will say there's a step in their career to actually do something else much bigger later on we try to filter those ones out that's fucking insane 180 000 0.018 it's insane and like who goes through that yeah i'm being serious i hope there's ai no i mean the first half of the year we had like what like five six recruiters across the entire organization right they've been doing a fantastic job on that end and then like Well, they're doing 996, aren't they?

1:01:53Fucking hell. Here's a Dart room. Here's 180 ,000 applications. Go have fun. And by the way, like screen them all and talk to them. And then like, it's tough. It's really tough. What have you not done when you reflect back on your time in 11 labs that with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had done? Hiding faster. I think I made a mistake of like not hiding fast enough when the company did a lot more people in the organization. And I think we've suffered over the years of like we, I think I strongly believe we could have grown much quicker if we had hired like a lot more people. What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

1:02:30That's a tough one. That's a really tough one. Sometimes some of the iterations that we've done on the ICPs have probably been like wrong in terms of timing or have been like the wrong focus essentially. right or even i can tell you like even on the cross sell side that i had not spent enough time in that specific area and that meant like we end up like leaving money at the table right so sometimes you actually need to rethink a little bit twice but i think like also like when you're growing so quickly it's difficult to actually not miss stuff so some things that like i take like that is like we've done well sometimes it's like we've not done well in general dude you've just raised a 15 million dollar fund amazing achievement i also love the name baobab and it's because of your like love of like these trees right yes yeah i read about this super sweet i think sequoia got that first they do uh it's funny like baobab trees like they they grow up in like a like in in very warm climate like in australia in in africa and so on i actually grow baobab trees in london in my flat in london but also like in my flat in barcelona and i've been doing for many years right and it's like really fragile trees that like when the winter comes or like when the cooler weather comes listen they lose all of all of the leaves you need to stop watering them so it's like really cool plant in general so it's my my favorite one and i have like what i don't know like 10 or 12 at home these days i'd actually be an lp if someone wants to start this in a fund called cactus capital okay only invest in really prickly families i think you mean the funniest It's not a bad idea, is it, from a branding perspective?

1:04:06I bet we would make money. Really prickly founders. I bet you would. Obnoxiously prickly. They thrive on the friction. Yes. I love it. Does being an investor make you a better sales leader? No. I think being a good salesperson makes you a better investor. How? Because you are able to qualify better. I think what we do from an investor perspective these days, of course, we do outbounds to actually get into the deals that we want. and we also do like inbounds reviewing like all of the leads that we get, right? Like a good SDR, a good account execs does exactly the same thing. The only thing that I'm missing is like there is a sixth sense that we get specifically on the precede stage.

1:04:42It's like, is it a good match like with the founders? Are they really smart? Can they trade with the product and the company? Are they willing to pivot? Are they willing to actually listen to other people? All of those items. But there is a gut feeling attached to all of that that an SDR, a good SDR also has and knows if whether running with that opportunity is going to transform into something, when an account exec is going to transform into something, or they get the catchphrase, like, this is going to be, like, it's not the right person, just going to stop at some point. I just don't want to run it.

1:05:09From VC, we do exactly the same thing. Dude, if being an investor doesn't make you a better sales leader, why does Matty let you do it? I was expecting you to be like, yes, I teed that one up for you to, like, slam dunk. And you're like, no. I'm like, okay, well, why would he let you do it? I don't know. I kept asking multiple times. And I think like he knows, like I have a passion for it. I have done like as an angel 74 tickets. So I think like at some point, like when I was like annoying enough that he ended up saying, yes, do it. Top three tickets. Without like looking into the order. But like Revolut, 11 Labs and I don't know, like a company called VSEAM.

1:05:47They're doing super well. They're doing like training for robots, physics. When you look back at that 74 that you've done, Angel, what's your biggest lesson? So I do founders that are like very technical. And what I realized like is many of the technical founders over the years, like they just realized that like they don't care about sales. So like what I've ended up screening over the past years a lot more is like, are they really good technical founders? And do they also care about sales? Because otherwise you end up like coming into a wall where you tell them like, the product is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but we need to start making some money, right?

1:06:23And sometimes like, no, no, no, we don't want to make money. We only want to do research. We only want to build the best product and so on. And you're like, you're going to die as a company, right? It's like, it's so much more difficult to convince them that like they also need to start thinking about like commercialization of the product that like at some point you end up filtering them out. And I think like one of the key areas, like you need to actually test for appetite for sales at some point early on because there might not be a fit. But there's the flip side of all of this, which is like, if you look at like open AI or Anthropic or Sakana AI, like they raise money saying like, we're going to be doing pure research, right?

1:06:56Or like... Non-profit. No, exactly. Exactly, right? So like there is like a flip side of it. But of course, like when you look at like venture, which is like power law, but at the same time, like you need to be like looking at a lot of different companies, then maybe Research Hub are like outliers in many ways, right? Final one and then a quick fly. What do you want to do with BapBap? Do you want this to be a venture fund that's like a$500 million fund in its own right? So far, like what I want to do is like I want to build a generational fund, something that like actually will like outlive us all ideally like smaller funds like keep raising relatively often but being there for founders like i want to be there for founders it has to be the operator like fund that actually is there for them it's like doing the right thing and can you be there for founders dude if you've got 40 and you're a sales leader honestly and then you do another fund i think it is possible i think it's like a ruthless prioritization of your time and where you put the effort.

1:07:51I talk constantly to my founders like on WhatsApp all the time. I will dedicate like weekends, late nights, early mornings. Do you have kids? No, that helps for sure, right? Helps a lot. It helps a lot. Do you want kids? I 100 % want. And maybe at some point you end up having to decide on which one you go further, right? Do you take one? Do you take the other one? I want to do a quick fire round. I've loved this. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Like specifically on investing, it's like you need to also be investing in founders that actually care about sales, not only the technical aspect of it.

1:08:28What's the single biggest mistake you see sales leaders make today? That they don't spend enough time talking to customers directly and signing contracts themselves. What's the biggest mistake CEOs make in how their relationship is with their sales leaders? That they would just force a number to their sales leaders and expect that they deliver without understanding what are the implications of it. What channel or method is super outdated in sales? Often people say that cold calling. What is outdated? Outdated, I think, is emails. Sending an email, no one replies. There is so much outbounds that are fundamentally AI generated.

1:09:06No one replies. The conversion rate on emails these days has dropped to 0.00 something. What's your biggest insecurity? what's my biggest insecurity that like i might not be able to get to the end of the quarter for the number that i wanted has that ever happened yeah 100 but like you live with it right like we all make mistakes all the time and you live with it but i think it's important because like as a sales leader you always need to be worrying like am i going to get to the end of the quarter because it means that like you are pushing really fucking hard if you know that like you're going to be get there you're going to get there you're going to relax i don't want that let's be honest you don't need the money anymore 11 labs revolute as angels it's not about the money are you a better sales leader because you're richer yes I don't get compensated on how much sales we make it means that I'm fully independent because that is not like I don't believe in that I don't believe like if the company makes X amount of money then it's fantastic if they make Z fantastic my goal is to make sure we make as much money as possible based on the plan that we've committed and the plans are absolutely bananas right like we always like shoot for the stars but my role is to make sure that i get compensated on equity side not on how much money we make i think it's wrong if i were to say the person is listening to the next 60 seconds and this is all that they're going to take from our conversation and from all of your writing from everything they've seen in the news about you what would you most want that person to take from this and from everything in the next 60 seconds?

1:10:43Constantly up on people. I think it's important. Up on, up on, up on. But essentially spend time with the team, spend time with your customers, treat them as a community, not as a proper transactional sale. Be with them, be on the road all the time, because if you're not, you're missing the reality of what your team, what your company is going through. And the only way to actually be a better site leader and the only way to actually get to your sales target is fundamentally like going through the pain yourself every single day. Dude, this has been such a joy. I've loved this. It also feels like I've known you for a long time.

1:11:20But thank you for being so brilliant. Thank you so much for inviting me. This was really, really good. But before we leave you today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, ROX. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable. ROX is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board-level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach and opportunity management.

1:12:00So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. Rocks gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep, and consolidate your stack, try Rocks at rocks.com slash sign up. And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years, I've watched some of the best founders and early go-to-market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work.

1:12:36Well, that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, layer in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls, and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, drafts, follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward. So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates, and faster revenue growth. If you're an early-stage startup, tired of duct-taping sales tools together, and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at monaco.com.

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