Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine

Thank you so much for having me here. It’s fantastic.

I’ve actually done everything. I’ve done, like, I was VP of operations for another AI company. Like, we built it from zero to like, a unicorn. Then I moved to product, and then ended up like, moving to sales, and then sales again. So I’ve done the full, like, all of the different kind of roles that you could do except engineering.

I think when I was doing operations, I kind was seeing all of the guys doing sales I was like, shit, I can do this much better. And that’s the moment I started thinking, I want to do sales, want to do sales. So I started getting closer to customers and then I realized that is my area. But when you work in a startup in the early days, nothing really matters. The only thing that you care about is how do you get to the next milestone. Right? So whether you do ops, product, like sales, everything is kind of mesh in reality.

Yeah. So when, like, there was a company that came out of EF called Sonantic that was doing AI voices back in the early days. So I ended up building the entire go to market site for them. And that’s when I realized, like, okay, this is what I want to be doing going forward. But then one of my friends, like Felipe from Job and Talent, called me one day saying, hey, I want to rebuild the entire product stack. Would you join me? There’s going be a very good challenge.

I was like, Okay, fine, let’s do it. And then that’s when I changed. But I realized, like, product, I love it. I did it for a year and a half. was It fantastic. Like, I built the entire product that, like, now they’ve pivoted to that product and it’s doing super well. But I realized, like, I want be talking to customers all the time. I to actually sell them. Like, the rush that you get when you close a deal is insane. It’s insane. And and I absolutely love it.

Yes. At million valuation, pre seed. So I met Mati through a common friend, Paolo. We used to work together at Tractable AI back in the day. He messaged me one day being like, hey, have this friend. We used to work together at BlackRock. He’s thinking something about AI voices and so on. have no idea, but you’ve been in that space. Do you want to talk to him? I was like, absolutely. And then that’s when I met Mati, and within thirty minutes of the first conversation, was like, I’m all in.

How much money do you want? And I will introduce you to my friends. And that was pretty much it.

I put in 20 20k.

Yes.

I sold of a tiny, tiny, portion through one of the secondaries, but it’s that tiny portion.

worth now? It’s probably like it’s it’s like 800 800k in returns. So that’s probably like, what, 6 16,000,000, something like that? Not bad. bad, But you’ve done much better, So

It’s good. But, like, it’s it’s been good.

I’ve always been willing to actually leave everything and join one of my portfolio companies. Like, One of my key things is I would not invest in a company if I’m not 100% convinced. If there is a time that I need to join, I will join them. And I think ElevenLabs was one of those ones. They were the the first off-site that we were doing, it was in Portugal, and then Mati called me one day saying, We’re doing this. Do you want to join us? It would be great to have you there.

And we’re doing it in one of our investors’ houses in Portugal. And then I went there literally for twenty four hours, met the team, And towards the end of the mini ops side, Mati was like, well, maybe we should talk about you joining us. And then that’s when we started talking. was like, I’m all in. Like, you tell me. I’ve done it before. I know the space because we sold Solantic to Spotify. So I knew the type of customers, the pitch, the way of doing it.

Like, I’m 100% in. And I kind of felt inside of me like there was like something that was not fully closed in the AI voices space. And it was like, it was absolutely no brainer for me to join Eleven. What revenue were you at when you joined? Zero. You were zero? Yeah. Like, we had the company launched, literally a week before I joined. So we launched at the January 2023, and then within a month or so, we had over a million users.

So the idea was to actually build the entire enterprise side and that’s how we timed it, like the entire go to market. But the company ended up growing so quickly that we ended up switching it was being, let’s do it on the enterprise side. And the way we put it, it, was like, now you think it makes sense, but the compensation was based milestones. And essentially, we ended up deciding together with Mati and Piotr, it’s like, okay, if we reach a certain level of revenues within twenty four months, then my equity compensation goes up.

So I unlock additional portion of equity. And to the point that I was like, it seemed like so silly, the number that we had put in there. What number did you put in there? It was a very silly number, like very high. But it seemed so silly that like Mati even told me, like, okay, so what we’ll do is like, we will put a check-in at twelve months mark. So whatever you’ve accrued up until that point, we’ll just give you the proportional basis, right? It was so funny because we hit that revenue milestone within less than twelve months of actually starting everything.

But actually, back in the day when we were thinking about it, like when we were negotiating, it it seemed like no one had done that. Right? When

So the way we did it is like the PLG motion gave us a ton of like volume of leads, which 90 plus percent of those were extremely bad. But the interesting portion is you started seeing some patterns where people were finding interest and where you essentially were having meaningful conversation. So that for me was instrumental to understand later on building name account list and going after specific accounts from an outbound basis because I was seeing some level of traction. And investors were telling us, God, you have product market fit because you’re doing all of these millions.

And I was telling them, no, no, no, we don’t have it. I don’t believe in product market fit until in one single ICP you’ve made more than $10,000,000 like, So you keep experimenting and you build list And then one week you tackle a specific persona. and another week you tackle a completely different vertical to actually understand what moves quicker, is what the pitch that actually resonates better, and so on. That’s how we essentially started doing it. And I remember the first two deals that we did within thirty days of launching the first product.

It was a company that was doing a chatbot based in Germany. They paid us $12,000 And we thought, this is super good. We could start doing things. Second company was a media company that was doing automated radio stations that we signed a two year deal, $36,000 per year. Those two companies, we still have them as customers. They’ve skyrocketed in value, both of them. But like that was only the beginning. It’s like, okay, we can start doing it. We know how to actually generate this motion. Now we need to go

Depends on the product that you’re building, right? If you’re building something in the healthcare space, it’s an absolute no brainer, need to actually go to healthcare. But you can still take a very broad approach within the healthcare space, right? So you can actually target hospitals, can target like clinics, you can bigger ones and smaller ones, you can target like practitioners, you can target across the entire spectrum of your vertical, target as many people as possible because truly, you might have a guess or you might have an intuition of what’s going to be performing, But the best companies in reality started in one end, ended up winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting, right?

So if you can target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn’t resonate, how quickly they’re moving, and essentially then you can fine tune your pitch and your name account list in that area.

Nothing at all. It was like so random, like I had absolutely no idea. Like in the early days, we were signing enterprise contract with Gmail accounts. So we remember this is like early days of ChatGPT. People were building applications left and right and thinking like, I might need to add some voice here or there, even if it’s for some dubbing or for voicing some of the narrations and all that stuff. The reality is there will be all of these developers, like single developer shops using a Gmail account saying, well, I want to add voice but your self-service plans are not enough because they have some limitations, some caps, and essentially I would need all of these additional things.

I was like, okay, fantastic. Then enterprise is the right path. We’ll customize it for you, Blah, blah. And what I used to do is it got to a point where I was doing like minutes calls I would do maybe fifty, sixty calls in a single week back to back And I would tell them within thirty minutes, I knew if they were qualified or not. I knew they were interested, if they could move quickly. So what I would do is I would set up a trial by the end of the day.

I will commit on the call on the spot being, By the end of the day, you will have heard from me. I will set up your trial. You will have access to the contract so that you can start reviewing it. And if you need anything, just ping me at any time. And this is my WhatsApp. What you end up creating is this dynamic that you would end up building a very close relationship with those companies. They will message you on WhatsApp, and even up today if one of those very early ones have an issue, they message me on WhatsApp and essentially we try to fix it, right?

But that is the type of relationship you to be building with your first customers because essentially they will be there for you forever. They’re not going to switch away because we have such a good personal relation it’s an absolute no brainer.

For me, it’s like slightly different from what the traditional sales methods are, right? But I to know, like, what are you building and what is your vision for your company? How are you thinking about like, the entire market that you operate? Essentially, who are you? Are you? technical? Are you not technical? What are you to be doing with the product in general? Do you need to involve a lot of other people or not? right?

For me, those are the core questions in the early days, specifically on developer economy or if you’re targeting developers, that tell me if you are ready to actually buy this, you’re only playing a little bit to understand whether it makes sense or not, or how hard things are going be playing. Because if you think about it, different markets have different type of profiles, right? In like in the US you need to be very direct, and it’s a lot more aggressive sales in nature. In Europe, we’re always in the middle, right?

But if you go to LatAm or if you go to India, people don’t have an incentive to actually tell you no. So you end up getting stuck. you don’t qualify well, you end up getting stuck in endless loops of trials, chaser emails and so on of people that for a cultural perspective, they’re not going to tell you no, but they’re not going to buy. Every single market has a lot of variations. And because I’ve actually built all of them across the world for ElevenLabs, I know all of the details for all of those pieces, right?

So if you tell me, like, okay, I’m building a company in Mexico City, then I can tell you like, these are the core items that I would like to understand from a qualification perspective in the first few minutes.

I think it needs to be at least $1,000 a month, right? The trick is how much money do you feel that you can put in your credit card without having to explain anything? if you are comfortable putting $1,000 a month, absolutely fine, then your threshold should be $2,000 right? But if the majority of people putting $1,000 on their credit cards, even if it’s for a business transaction, they still need to explain quite a lot of stuff. So then that’s the moment in which they need handholding, they need convincing, they need to show ROI.

That’s the one that you want to tackle them because then you treat it as like a PLG motion with a land and expand. It’s like, don’t worry, we’ll sort everything, we’ll help you. Like 12,000. It is a lot of money. Acknowledge that it is a lot of money for them because it is a lot of money. Then work with them on an expansion plan. But if you do it much higher, then I see a lot of founders telling me like, no, no, needs to be like investors have been telling me I need to go proper enterprise.

Proper enterprise, six figure deals and so on. I’m always like, forget about it. it’s going take you months to get that contract done. The beautiful side is if you sign a $12,000 contract, there is probably one layer of approval. Maximum two layers of approval for a bigger company. If you want to sign a six-figure figure deal, can this be like at least three or four layers of approval. If you want sign a million dollar contract out of the gate, it’s to take you a long time.

But if you actually land in a very small deal, then you start expanding it, those approvals have disappeared completely.

So we’ve had that as well at ElevenLabs multiple times, right? There’s a portion of the customers that we oversold and then they kept kind of flat. Part of the big effort always is like, how do you find new use cases for them and how do you show them additional value? So you need to knock on people’s doors. even if you sign an inbound deal, that is one deal that is inbound. But you should not be thinking that that is done. It’s like, then you need to transform it into an outbound opportunity as well.

And then to do it outbound opportunity, like, okay, now I have an MSA signed with an order form. Let’s actually go and outbound every single other team that might be relevant across the entire organization to show them what the capabilities are. That is the only way you actually expand a deal. But not only that, like the most important question is, how do you retain them forever? Because if there is only one team that uses you, that team at some point might get pissed, someone might pitch them, you lose the deal.

Who’s responsible for this internally? Is it CS? Is it product? Is it sales? Depends how you want organize it. Some companies call it account management, right? What do you do We do? account execs and customer success. So for us, once a deal is signed, we transfer it to customer success. Customer success is responsible for the upselling, negotiations, all of that stuff. Now, the difference is in the enterprise segment. So very large customers, right? So name account lists, companies that have over 2,000 employees and things like that.

Then for those ones, my request to the account exec is like, your job is not finished. Even if you transfer it to a customer success manager, I still want you to go and upsell and find new opportunities in the account because you’re incentivized. And if I’m an account exec, let’s be very honest, everyone loves money and making money as an account exec. So you’re incentive, say like you went through hell for the past sixty days to close an enterprise contract. Fantastic. Then that contract is signed.

Getting the next team on board is relatively simple because you’ve actually gone through the actual signing of the contract. So just outbound, open new doors, and would pay you even more commissions because like you you keep accruing more. Right?

I think in reality it’s pretty much exactly the same in the sense that what we do at ElevenLabs I set up this threshold, which is like we ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. That’s your quota, right? So if I pay you 100k a year, your quota is $2,000,000 That’s it. If you don’t achieve your quota, then you’re to be out, right? And we’re ruthless on that end. So everyone actually smashes their quota to ElevenLabs. I would rather have smaller teams that like smash their quotas and I pay them.

What

Today, more than 80% hit their quota. Right? And they unlock accelerators and all of that stuff. But the interesting piece, like on the upsell side is we compensate both the account exec and the CSM. If the contract is upsold. if we upsell a company within the first 12 months, the account exec continues to accrue quarter retirement and also like commissions, and the CSM is compensated an NRR. Right? So I’m paying double, but I don’t care. It makes perfect sense because then I have these two people busting their ass to make sure that they actually can make more money, which is fantastic for me as a company.

I think the reality is every business will be slightly different depending on the industry you’re selling, right? So what I always tell everyone is let’s start with 20x and then you can adjust. What I told everyone in the company, the first account execs that I hired was like, guys, I have absolutely no clue if 20x is going be the right number or not. The standard in SaaS is that you have somewhere like six to seven, maybe eight, maybe 10, right? That is the standard. I know this is what you are expecting.

This is not how we’re going be building a company at ElevenLabs. If you’re thinking about doing the same that you’ve been doing at Notion or all of these places like Salesforce and so on, then you’re in the wrong place. So we’ll experiment. If we get it wrong, absolutely fine. We’ll compensate you correctly. And then essentially we will change the entire composition structure. But if we get it right, which I think it is the right number, this is what we’re going to keep. And we’ve kept this in day one.

We’ve been running with this for the past two and a half years.

So there is two buckets within this 20%, right? One is like people that truly don’t fit in the company, And what they get wrong is fundamentally like they’re not product experts. Like they haven’t actually dived deeper enough in the product that actually can understand it. They have the aggressivity to actually go into the market, outbound and so on, right? Those guys, unfortunately, we terminate the contracts. We give them a compensation. So we usually pay anywhere between two to three months of base salary so that we tell them hey guys, it didn’t work out.

We do believe that you are very strong. It didn’t work out 11 ElevenLabs because the way we do things, but you’re going go somewhere else and we’re going help you get somewhere else. That’s why we’re you this two or three months compensation severance package. And you can do super well. So it’s us. It is not you. It is us fundamentally, right? The other percentage of people that don’t get into that 80% is people that are building long term pipelines. So I have a guy, for instance, and there’s been plenty of them over the past two years, but this guy that we hired from AWS, mega smart guy. super good.

And you look at the core numbers and you’re thinking, shit, I should be fighting this guy. He’s not hitting the quota. He’s less than 50% quota, right? And then any other person would have look at the numbers and be like, this is not a fit. I cannot keep this person. Talk to any investors and tell you like, fire this person. it’s just not a fit. You dive into the numbers and you realize, like, oh, it’s because he went to the proper enterprise cycle and he’s building the most amazing companies you can have in the entire UK region.

Wait a second. Why would I fire this person when he actually needs a lot more ramp, fundamentally because he’s tackling the difficult, challenging industries. We kept that person and this person absolutely smashed it this year. 200 plus percent quota. So you need to actually differentiate what is it actually someone that doesn’t fit in the company for a variety of reasons, and who is actually building a proper pipeline over the long term, and they need a little bit more help.

Yeah. And what 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 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. like you’re actually slacking, you’re doing this, this, this, Or I will tell them you’re actually lucky. Like in the past month, you hit your numbers because of pure luck. Next month, you’re not going to hit them. So you’re not in 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? If we’re trying to build a generational company, you cannot, like, do things like the traditional way. You need to do it in a completely different way.

them monthly.

have their own meeting and then account execs have a different one. And then in the account execs, I split it by region.

All remote. 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. Because if you’re a salesperson, you need to be on the road. I travel 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? 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 are 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. You 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 autonomous, very energetic, very passionate, will accept like a million no’s, fundamentally because building sales is tough. Building sales remotely is even tougher and you just need to be on top of it.

So they will essentially tell me how much they’ve closed, how much it’s in the pipeline, how much they’re expecting to close in the next 30 days. And essentially we start going to the deals, right? We talk about 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. Because 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 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 can I help you? for me, what I do is I build a list of the blockers for each one of them, 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.

In India, these are the blockers. In Spanish LatAm, these are the blockers. In Middle East, these are the blockers. Right? And then everyone understands what are we, Where are we in each one of the regions.

I mean, there’s always like deals that will end up like moving towards the next quarter. That’s inevitable, right? And like what’s And you do this, sorry, by the way, in front

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 good, to bad feedback. People learn from it, right? So the learning component is, 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. You don’t agree with the praise in public, criticize in private? No. I don’t agree. I think I need to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Of course, I’m not to tell you this is full shit, you’re to get fired. I’m not to say that. But at the same time, I’m not to hold back on saying if you haven’t done a good job.

And for instance, there was a case earlier this year of one of my account execs that I told the person, you just were lucky and you’ve closed these deals just for pure luck, but you haven’t done any good job. And then the next one, it was so funny, there was exactly two people the same case. And then the next one that came in presenting was I told him, 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 it. Salespeople 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.

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.

I think it just depends on like why the number’s not on the right place, right? I think like you need to do understand, like do the back work first to understand like what’s happening. Is 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, right? And the best way of understanding is roll up your sleeves and actually pitch customers.

I am the SDR in chief in the company, right? I absolutely love it. I actually love outbounding people. I love it. We were like, Mati and I were like in Singapore talking to Razer, like the laptops company. Absolutely love the brand. And then that came out because I outbounded the CEO and I messaged him like, Mati and I are be going to in a few days. Like, 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 VCs, right? Like for me, a VC is just a glorified SDR or BDR.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. But that’s that’s great. But like, is your point,

it. but it’s like, as a leader, like as CEO, like, say, if you’re not doing it, I think you’re doing it wrong. Of course, as the company keeps getting bigger, like, no one expects like Mati or like any CEO, like, for a very successful company to be doing outbounds. But 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 Mati as well.

We do it like, 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. the

But you need to help the team. What like, what I don’t buy is, sales leaders that are essentially the leaders. Right? You 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 question. Truly if you go to a meeting and the numbers are not in the right, maybe the problem is you, 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.

Yeah, so usually it’s like as part of like the presentation 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 days as well? And essentially, what are they going to be doing to actually close them?

Be as negative as possible. So I always like advice theme on if we are now setting a deal that is to be half dollars. fantastic. Just put me that like you’re to be signing it at $24,000 I don’t want to put an unrealistic number because if you think it’s going be half dollars, the most likelihood is going be 100k. 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 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 to look like. But we do it also for the board. When we put the board eggs 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. And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions be like, hey, by the way, you put me this account over here that it was to be a million account, but it seems you signed it at like 100k.

What? And it just raises such a number of like awkward questions that like it doesn’t make sense.

Correct. Correct. And there is another item in there. It’s like, if you always underestimate or undervalue your pipeline, it means that to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline. There is a lot of consequences 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 you just kind of it’s a forcing mechanism to have the right culture in place. We went through this cultural change earlier this year because I actually got obsessed.

We were doing the majority of deals, like 90% of the deals were mostly inbounds, right? And 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 dries up, then you essentially end up dying, right? So I put a goal saying like, we need to migrate to 50% outbound, 50% inbound by the end of the year. So kept hammering, 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 getting people make jokes about outbound, outbound, outbound, It’s like, I’m the outbound king. Yes, I love it. And people know that if you are on that list of people that are not doing their outbound, I’m to call you out. And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we’re 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.

Most of it, we use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequencing. Yeah, it’s fantastic. Those guys are doing super well. We use LinkedIn, and there’s a lot of cold calling. The traditional method works. And it depends on the market because You literally call cool. 100%, yes. I was in the office yesterday and early today, and I had, like, some of my team members actually cold calling. I was, like, so happy. I was smiling. I was actually, like, listening to the conversation because, like, I was so happy.

I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with the right mentality. But in LatAm or in India, cold calling works, but the best method is WhatsApp. It’s a different culture. in India and LatAm, they use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need be WhatsApp.

fair. But it’s also the fact that you could be sharing those best practices with the rest of the team. Over the bands, 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 like 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.

I incentivize everyone. My like my incentive to everyone is like, my messages, we need to experiment. Even at this size, like, we don’t know what’s to 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 with a wider team and then everyone can copy you.

No, at some point, you end up doing like doing multiple. Exactly. Right? And you end up like today we actually have subdivided in Europe. have UKI, the Nordics meeting, we have Southern Europe, Western Europe, all that stuff, right? But still, you need to keep actually doing it.

It’s exactly the same thing. So we will go through the pipeline and understanding like how many calls they’ve done, what are the problems with like some of their customers, what is the NRR they’re expecting to close, and how much like upselling and cross selling they’re to be doing. What NRR do you chase? 115. Yes. But we absolutely 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 like a very solid like GRR and NRR.

Any value actually works because like literally you need to actually separate it, right? It’s like I want my account execs to actually go hunting, be hungry all the time, right? So I want them to bring Lowe’s quickly because the market, like anyone can be building a competitor at any point in time extremely quickly. So I have to have those people that are incentivized to move extremely quickly. then as soon as they’ve done it, they need to be able to transfer it to someone else. So CS is something that you need from the early days as well.

We made a mistake at ElevenLabs of bringing CS way too late, way too late. It took us like fifteen months from the first contract that we signed to bring Customer Success. It was massive chaos because the account execs, and I was selling a lot back then, and I was running these deals, at the same time, people would complain like, hey, I have these problems, and then I also need to do this. And then I would look at the list of usage every single week, and then outbound, and I would put a list saying, okay, all of these accounts are ready for upselling because of usage. need to get in touch with them.

All of these other accounts, we should touch base with them. So I was sharing it with the team and at some point it starts breaking, right? And that’s when I realized, shit, we’ve done it wrong. I should have brought customer success much sooner. Let’s bring them. And there was a day and night. Initially, account execs wanted to transfer the accounts, but they just didn’t really give any level of information. So they were like, it’s signed. you deal with it. And then we’re like, on the customer success guide, We were like, what?

I don’t even know any background of this account. it’s a Gmail account, right? how the hell am I gonna

NRR. like net revenue retention. That’s essentially how we do it, right? Of course, you could have

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?

Yeah, so when you increase the NRR, then fundamentally based on the NRR, we it like the baseline is 115, right? So if you went to I don’t know, like 130, then essentially you calculate how much it takes you and then it will be fundamentally more. And it’s a direct math that you do on top of it. We don’t have accelerators for like CS. In the account exec team, we have accelerators for next year. We might change some of that.

there? For account execs, for instance, what we do is like up to 100% of your quota, we pay you 5% 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. Fairly simple, straightforward. So everyone is incentivized to actually going above 150. To the point that a lot of my account execs, now we are finalizing the performance reviews for 2025 because we always want to start January with everything fully sorted, to the point that some of my account execs will tell me or have been telling me, 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 a lot more money with like, a smaller quota hitting the accelerators sooner. Which is is smart. Really smart.

It’s a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah?

It’s fantastic.

That’s fantastic. Think Think about it. 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 the AI revolution that happened three years ago, salespeople were the highest paid, always.

No, like that too much. Otherwise, your numbers would never add up, right?

I think once you hit like a good like three, four million dollars, then I think it’s time to actually bring your fair customer success.

Yeah.

So it makes sense to have on upper CSM function an average of million 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 8 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.

Bring with zero revenue. Bring someone that is scrappy, that wants to iterate, will tell you if things work or things don’t work. I think you need that as soon as possible. Because I think there was this like moment in which Mati called me one day, like, You know what? Going forward, I report to you for sales, you report to me for everything. And And and that was his way of saying, you are supposed to be doing sales. Founder led sales are good, but you hit a rock, right? you hit a ceiling and just 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.

I think it just depends on the sales that you bring in the organization and how quickly and how willing to experiment they are, right? And I think that has a ton of value if you bring someone sooner, that has the right mentality. Of course, if you bring someone that has very like, I have my playbook and this is how we’re going to be doing it, I always hate it because playbooks don’t work, unfortunately, right? And I think that is the key is if you have someone very early that you can iterate and build trust extremely quickly, then essentially 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 keep going, right? Otherwise, you could be spending your time like building the product or doing other things that are much more important.

In the early days, like hire one or two, like don’t hire. because then if you 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 five different people iterating their own playbooks and thinking about their own stuff. What you want to do is you want to give them some guidelines 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 five different people going wild and trying to figure out because then essentially no one is going to be closing anything, right?

So better to have like you bring the safe leader, someone that 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 onboarded. wait a couple of months. You don’t have to wait too long. Two, three months. Let’s make sure they’re fully onboarded. Let’s make sure that they’re starting to sell contracts. And internally at the company, at ElevenLabs, we used to have this target that’s like, when you join ElevenLabs, you need to have signed your first contract within first two weeks.

Whoa. Like And that was a target. That was a target. We got people that had even like, signed like, within like within was, like, 72 hours hours they signed the first enterprise contract. Right? Tiny contract, but I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter. Do you put them

away? You don’t want to burn leads. the early days, we used to do it and then they would join my meetings and essentially I would tell them okay, this is how we do it on the product side. This is the overview. My expectation is you’re to be spending the next 24 hours drilling the entire product and understanding it. and I will ask you to pitch me tomorrow, right? And then I will bring into my calls and then they will see my 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. I’m like, I’m there to support you if they have any questions. And then within 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 crowded.

In the early days, the best thing is they should join calls immediately. They’re not going to be talking in those calls, but they should just join absolutely immediately so that 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?

Because you want to make sure that your reputation is on the line, you want to have them selling to the proper people. So essentially you end up having join me, then also watch some customer through Gong, and at the same time, you need to pitch me, you need to have the certifications and all of that stuff, right? Then you end up migrating towards much more of a corporation style where then people take a lot longer for two weeks. They have this run period, they they understand everything, they meet multiple people and so on.

That’s like a a lot more boring.

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 side, I thought, okay, let’s bring someone that 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 it just was not working. And the person was really good on the product side, but on the sales side, there is something that was missing in there. then that’s what teach them that sales.

This is a hunter mentality. This is like being hungry, being super driven, and and so on that you get straight away or you don’t get it. And I think that was a mistake. the person still with us like doing super well, right? And we always joke with him saying hey, you joined in the wrong role. But that was the type of profile because we were selling we had a lot of self-service companies, we had a lot of inbounds. 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 like, Shit, no, no, no, no, These people already know what ElevenLabs is, right? Specifically the inbounds. So it’s less about the product, more about like we need to convince them to sign this fucking contract, right? So like, 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.

Literally like getting them 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. And 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, 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. I would just pop up in that call and essentially make them nervous because then the worst thing that you have is like you’re both joining a call, like, unexpected. So what’s going to happen there? And I would just stay quiet And be like, 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 more mistakes. So like, you end up building that muscle memory by forcing people to make mistakes as well.

therapy.

don’t think the team is scared of me because I think when I hire people, I always tell them this line, which is like, ElevenLabs is not the easiest company to work for. And that’s always what I tell them, is like, you’re to be working a lot. I’m 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 100% respect it. majority of people end up saying like, I value that.

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. Like, it doesn’t really matter. It is like how willing are you to trade, like go deep and have this high energy situated 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 ElevenLabs or you’re doing Company X, it doesn’t really matter.

If you think about your customers are 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. How do

a

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 transactional elements and pure transactions, then no, no, no, I need to sign the highest amount for this company because whatever it is, of course, they’re 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 is like, hey, 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 a relationship because no one wants to be sold. Absolutely no one.

For me, I would fire myself because I do too many things. And I love doing too many things, but also makes me unfocused in many areas. The other one is the moment I lose passion, literally, I just don’t care anymore. So that’s the like I would fire myself. Like, I start thinking that I’m starting to lose a little bit of the passion, then it’s like, shit, no. You to fire yourself. Like, do something else because you’re gonna be burning out extremely quickly.

I love the early stage of companies, but in 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 for doing something that you don’t enjoy. And I think proportional majority of people are smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life. That’s my main motivation. And I’ve always taken my job at ElevenLabs 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.

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 through this very rough patch that you’re not finding motivation, you should just triple check whether you’re in the right place.

I think it’s fundamentally the type of people. Nothing else. Like It’s like very humble people that essentially don’t know what they don’t know, and they you 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. It’s like 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 million in revenues. And I’m happy with that. I’m happy with those odds. What makes Mati such an incredible CEO? I think it’s the fact that like he can do both like the product side and the customer side, and he’s like very extrovert in nature and very empathetic with the customers and the rest of the organization. It’s actually difficult to find leaders and CEOs that actually can do both things with the product and can do the customer side.

Sometimes they have this vision on the product side, but they’re just lacking the drive to do sales, and Mati will roll up his sleeves and be like, fuck, I’m gonna be running this sale, right? It’s one of his superpowers in general. You’ve met him, he comes across extremely personal. You’re immediately drawn to him. He’s a nice guy in general, right? And as such, when you add up all of these factors, then it’s like, it’s a fantastic leader, fantastic CEO. But we have another one, which is fundamentally like Piotr.

He’s the genius of the company, right? In the sense, he built the entire technology from scratch. We have a very small research team that all of them are actually, like walking brains. like, literally, they’re like like super, super, smart guys. But he’s headed by Peter. like, the company would not exist if it wasn’t because, like, we built a fantastic technology.

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. There is a lot of inbound. There is a lot of things that you get, but that doesn’t mean that is equivalent to quality, that is equivalent to the type of bill that you’ll 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 see as like a step in their career to actually do something else much bigger later on. We try to filter those ones out.

And like in

Like if have this AI. No. In 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. Then, like,

And by the way, like, screen them all and talk to them. And then, like, it’s it’s tough. It’s really tough.

Hiring faster. I think I made a mistake crap like not hiring 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 a lot more people.

That’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 wrong in terms of timing or have been the wrong focus essentially, right? Or even I can tell you, even on the cross sell side that I had not spent enough time in that specific area, and that meant we end up leaving money at the table, right? So sometimes you actually need to rethink a little bit twice. But I think also, like when you’re growing so quickly, it’s difficult to actually not miss stuff.

So some things that I take, like that is like we’ve done well, sometimes forcing like we’ve not done well in general.

funny. Baobab trees, they grow up in very warm climate, like in Australia, in Africa and so on. I actually grow baobab trees in London, in my flat in London, but also in my flat in Barcelona. And I’ve been doing for many years, right? And it’s like really fragile trees that when the winter comes or like when the cooler weather comes, they lose all of the leaves, you need to stop watering them. it’s like really cool plant in general. So it’s my favorite one. And I have like, what, I don’t know, like 10 or 12 at home these days.

thing cross-sell

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 inbounds reviewing all of the leads that we get, right? a good SDR, a good good account execs does exactly the same thing. The only thing they’re missing is there is a sixth sense that we get specifically on the pre seed stage.

It’s like, is it a good match 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 good SDR also has and knows whether running with that opportunity is going to transform into something or an account executive is going to transform into something or they get the gut feeling 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. From B.C. VC, we do exactly the same

I don’t know. I kept asking multiple times, and I think he knows I have a passion for it. have done, like as an Angel, 74 tickets. So I think at some point, when I was annoying enough that he ended up saying, yes, do it. Top three tickets? Without looking into the order. But Revolut, ElevenLabs, and I don’t know, like a company called Visim, they’re doing super well. They’re doing training for robots, physics.

So I do founders that are very technical. And what I realized, is many of the technical founders over the years, they just realized that they don’t care about sales. So 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, stumbling into a wall where you tell them, the product is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but we need to start making some money. Right? And sometimes a 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 so much more difficult to convince them that they also need to start thinking about commercialization of the product, that at some point you end up filtering them out. And I think one of the key areas, 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 if you look at OpenAI or Anthropic or Sakana AI, they raise money saying, we’re to be doing pure research, right?

Nonprofit. Exactly, exactly, right? So there is a flip side of it. But of course, when you look at venture, which is like power law, at the same time, you need to be looking at a lot of different companies, then maybe research have are outliers in many ways, right?

So far, what I want to do is I want to build a generational fund, something that actually will outlive us all, ideally. Smaller funds keep raising relatively often, but being there for founders, I want to be there for founders. has to be the operator led fund that actually is there for them. It’s like doing the right thing.

I think it is possible. I think it’s like a ruthless prioritization of your time and where you put the effort. I talk constantly to my founders on WhatsApp all the time. I will dedicate weekends, late nights, early mornings. Do have kids? No. That helps for sure, right?

Helps a lot. I go Do want want kids? I 100% want. But And maybe at some point, you end up having to decide on which one you go further, right? Do take you one? Do you take the other one? And so on.

Specifically on investing, you need to also be investing in founders that actually care about sales, not only the technical aspect of it.

That they don’t spend enough time talking to customers directly and signing contracts themselves.

That they would just force a number to their sales leaders and expect that they deliver without understanding what are the implications of all

Outdated, I think is like emails. Like sending an email, no one replies. There is so much like outbounds that are like fundamentally AI generated, no one replies. Like the the conversion rate on emails these days has dropped to like like zero point zero something, whatever.

What’s my insecurity? That like I might not be able to get to the end of the quarter for the number that I wanted.

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 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 be get there, you’re get there, you’re to relax. I don’t want that.

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.

Constantly up on people. I think it’s important. Outbound, But like 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 like, be a better sales leader and the only way to actually get to your sales target is fundamentally like, going through the pain yourself every single day.

Thank you so much for inviting me. This was this was really, really good.