← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina
01:25:03
Loading summary
Transcript354 lines
- [00:00]
A
We had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota. Customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business. The role of a CRO is fundamentally thinking about like not the revenues today, but the revenues of tomorrow. Let's do the things that no one is doing. That is what makes me passionate and that is what a good CRO I think needs to be doing. Because we're not here to do easy stuff. It's like the fastest product in terms of revenues that we've ever had. It's just insane. If you want to do something, budget is never going to be a problem.
- [00:31]
B
This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings and I'm so excited to welcome a dear friend, Carlos Rayner. Carlos is the CRO at ElevenLabs, one of the fastest growing companies on the planet. He was also one of the first investors there. He scaled the revenue org from 0 to over 350 million in ARR. This is a masterclass in scaling sales in an AI first world. On top of that, Carlos is also an incredible investor with his own solo GP fund, Baobab Ventures which has backed the likes Revolut and of course Elevenlabs
- [01:02]
C
in the early days.
- [01:03]
B
But before we dive into the show 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 for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk outreach and opportunity management. So 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@rocks.com signup. 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. Well, 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 pipe 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@monaco.com while Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your.com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise grade no code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool and is used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated a B testing. So you're not just shipping pages but you're maximizing what works and when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, enterprise grade security and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages or migrateyourfull.com framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free today@framer.com 20VC for 30 30% off 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com 20VC for 30% off framer.com 20VC rules and restrictions may apply.
- [04:20]
A
You have now arrived at your destination.
- [04:23]
B
Carlos Listen, I know a show is successful when I get friends of mine outside of tech. Be like oh love the clip with Carlos. And I'm like really? And they're like I never thought that
- [04:37]
C
quota and sales comp would be so interesting. And I'm like thank you Sarah.
- [04:42]
B
I had no idea you were interested in it. So it was such a successful show
- [04:46]
C
I thought we had to do a round two. Thank you for joining me man.
- [04:48]
A
Thank you for inviting me. This is great. I'm happy people were interested in like
- [04:52]
B
sales sales and sales comp according to
- [04:56]
C
that clip which again now it's like 5 million plus views which is insane.
- [04:59]
B
Dude. I actually wanted to start on you have now kind of led the way
- [05:05]
C
in a new CRO charge. I think 11 labs is probably one of the most exciting companies on the planet. You a CRO? There are a generation of CROs being left behind.
- [05:14]
A
Some of them, yes. But I think it's fundamentally that the market has changed. The way that we build companies today has completely evolved. We can do deals much quicker. But also for me the key item is a deal can be done. You can hire teams that have a ton of experience. But how do you think beyond a single deal and think about distribution entirely? I think that's what we're thinking, what we're actually missing in many ways like yes, it's great to do business development, it's great to think about affiliates. How do you think about much more on a strategic level, but also able to execute. Those are the key components. How do you embed AI in your entire distribution component so that you are able to actually do more with less?
- [05:52]
C
What do you mean by that? Is that simply using artisan qualified Monaco and having AI SDRs do outbound for you?
- [06:00]
A
No, that doesn't work.
- [06:01]
C
Good.
- [06:01]
B
Glad I suggested that it doesn't work.
- [06:03]
C
Lucky you're not hiring me, huh? Dodgy. Start the interview.
- [06:07]
A
No, you're fired. No, but it's like I've tried a very large number of AI go to market tools and they don't work. And they don't work because they see everything as a transaction. The point if I was building it, and hopefully some people will be able to actually use this, if I was building an AI agentic platform for sales, right, I'll be like, okay, let's actually understand each one of the core potential leads. What do they prefer? Do they prefer to actually be reached out over email? Do they prefer to actually attend events? Do they prefer to actually have a phone call? And you can try to map some of those components. But what people put on LinkedIn and social media, that is the most fundamental element. But what we're actually seeing on the AISDR front is that the majority of these tools track everyone as if they actually want to receive a message and people hate it. And you see like the response rates on outbound emails has dropped to the lowest at any point in time. It's like less than 0.01%. Like people getting message on LinkedIn is like it has skyrocketed and you can perceive that it's actually a transaction. An email must send to everyone or it was generated by AI that doesn't work.
- [07:12]
C
So outbound is dead, outbound is Dead,
- [07:14]
A
unless you do it with humans or unless you do it humanly. And that's fundamentally the key item, I can tell you. Like at 11 labs, I spent the past two years plus trying to convince the team to actually hire engineers to actually help me build AI agents for revenue, for sales. And it was only last year that actually they were like, okay, let's do it. So we ended up hiring people and we ended up building AI SDR that handles inbounds. Super good results. I have now an AI proposals manager that scans the web for RFPs and RFIs and then proposes scores and proposes things. I have an AI customer success manager that Fund elemental leaves in the back in an email and essentially proposes emails, looks at all of the data of a single customer, all of the pricing tiers and everything that we have in the contract, and then proactively proposes things. So when my customer success manager goes in the morning to check the emails, that person has a number of drafts that the AI has created and then that person can change those drafts to put it out there and to send it back. We store what we actually sent and what it was originally created and what are the responses are to actually fine tune. So each one of the customers ends up getting a slightly different message with a slightly different tone. And if they speak other languages, then it's a completely different language that works and that has closed deals for us already. We generate money from that AI customer success manager fundamentally because it is humanly right, it's perceived as human.
- [08:38]
C
So are we cutting the size of our team? If we can do so much with these different AI agents, our sales teams of the future going to be dramatically less.
- [08:46]
A
I think we will end up seeing the fact that people are becoming much more efficient. I think the goal for me at Eleven Labs is 50% improvement in productivity. That's the one that I want to do. Because then it means that I can hire less people. I prefer to manage a smaller team that gets super well compensated. Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if like a human actually closed it. And I'm very happy with that. But also that means that the people that we want to retain and have are going to be extremely top talent that are performing at a level that no one else is performing. That has a consequence. That is, instead of actually doubling my team or doing a 5x or doing whatever it is over the next two years, I end up hiring less people, but they're very concentrated.
- [09:27]
C
You mentioned the word commissions there. I'm really intrigued. We see OpenAI don't have commissions. It's like here's your salary and then here's your equity. Often people say sales people are coin operated. You said that actually last time. You have a 20x quota, which is a lot higher than anyone else. We interviewed the head of sales at Clay recently and they said there's a 6 to 8 post 20. What is the commission structure and how do you advise me as a founder on how to set the commission structure?
- [09:56]
A
I mean, I can tell you, like we had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota. I put a message in slack saying these two people have reached the Mount Olympus of Sales at ElevenLabs because in two months already did their quota.
- [10:12]
C
I mean this in the nicest way. Did you not massively miss that quota then?
- [10:16]
A
I don't think so. It's like, I think you need to put a quota that is challenging but also fair. And if people miss it fundamentally because it's too high, then you need to do the right thing and then lower it or compensate them correctly. But also good salespeople, they want to be the best ones. They want to actually, they're moved by the coin. They move by the fact like, like a big challenge ahead of them. If you don't put that challenge, they're just going to be like slacking. They're just not. You're not going to get the best out of it. And I think for me that's the key item is like we say, like, hey, you reach your quota 100% fantastic. And then you start unlocking accelerators to the point that like I'm very happy. Like if we sign a million dollar commission check, I'm the happiest person alive fundamentally because like that person did so much money for the business and for our shareholders and for the rest of the company. That is absolute no brainer. Again, like for me, it's like for every $1 million in revenues that any single person signs, and I don't care if it comes from like the sdr, the account exec, the CSM or it's an engineer that went all in and then managed to get a contract, every Single million has $33 million in extra valuation for the company. If you put it that way, it's a benefit for everything. Some people get more equity on the engineering side, great. They deserve it because they don't get commissions. Fantastic. They were popping up their entire value of their stock.
- [11:30]
C
When you get the accelerators, how do you advise me on how to Structure the accelerators, it depends.
- [11:35]
A
So the way we do it, and I think it's fair, is for every single extra year you get another 25% extra commission. On top of it, we start 5% commission on anything that you sell. And then we have the accelerators after
- [11:46]
C
your quota, that is.
- [11:47]
A
No, that is including your quota. And then after your quota. Yes. Additional like. And we have like a 1.1x, 1.2x, 1.3x, 1.5x and so on. Right. So the more you keep selling above your quota, then you hit those accelerators. But then we have like accelerators for. Or spiffs specifically for individual products. So if we are incentivizing one product because a quarter we want to incentivize that product, then we will put an accelerator or a specific spiff for that specific product. And then people even are more motivated on that front.
- [12:16]
C
Do you find that always works?
- [12:18]
A
No, no. It's easy to get hooked on spiffs or like specific incentives and lose the entire sight of what you're trying to do. If you put too many accelerators, if you put too many incentives in one place, you create the wrong behavior, which is people try to sell whatever it is to actually unlock it. For instance, like, we don't pay commissions on pilots because why? Like it's not adding to our valuation as a company. And because it's not adding to our valuation as a company. The engineers, the researchers, the ops people. The people. No one is actually getting a boost in their equity. Then why should we pay it? Let's do the right thing and let's do the complex thing, which is like, let's do the pilot if needed. Let's convince the customer that the metrics are there and we're doing it really well. And then on top of that, once we sign a yearly contract or a two year contract, then we pay you the commission.
- [13:04]
C
Do you pay on retention Expansion?
- [13:06]
A
Yes. So like first 12 months you can close a deal. It doesn't really matter, $50,000 or a million dollars or $10 million, whatever you want. And then that gets expanded over the next 12 months, you will get commissions. Great. And you can hit accelerators with that and so on. If it's a strategic account and we have designation of what is a strategic account. So for instance, like the top 20 or 30 accounts in a given market, depending how big the market is fundamentally, then you will unlock commission for two years and we can change it if needed. Right. But at a practical level, we found that that's like the first way I
- [13:36]
C
will never forget one of the great CROs saying to me on the show, you do not ever want your farmer going against someone else's hunter, meaning your kind of cushy but super nice CS enablement. Hey, like let's get champions in your company against someone else's all star hunter. Who is there to close your business. How do you feel about that? True. And then how do you think about then retaining the hunter on the account?
- [13:59]
A
The hunters are important, very important. Specifically, when you think about distribution, you think about like outbounds, inbound. You think about like a lot of different pieces. Right. But at the same time, a hunt that is not well managed will create more damage than actually opportunities. So let's say for instance, you're trying to close a company that has multiple sub companies. It's a big holding company, we can use any name you would want. And then you have a hunt that essentially tries to go to each one of them but doesn't do it in a very structured way, like trying to align what are the incentives for this big account then fundamentally you end up having discrepancies on pricing. You end up having discrepancies like what is the actual value for them and then each one of them discrepancies ends up coming back to hunt you down. Essentially when you try to renew the contract or the other forms, it is important to have them, but at the same time you need to have them in check together with the customer success. I actually am a big believer of customer success. I don't believe customer success as a satisfaction or happiness moment for customers. No, it's like customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business that works for the customer, but also works for the business to incentivize growth, expansion, cross selling.
- [15:08]
C
What do you mean by that then? Because I had Chris Degnan on the show who's one of the all time Great CROs, Snowflake 0 to 4 billion or whatever it was. And he's like, CS is complete bullshit, complete bullshit. You have professional services, pay for it and we'll make you great. To what extent do you agree or do you think customer success is in
- [15:24]
A
the world where Snowflake grew up? That made sense. In the world we are in today with AI that doesn't make any sense because fundamentally anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days. So fundamentally your customer success, you need to actually go as deep as you can as early as possible and try to close it as soon as possible. A single contract and then your customer Success is the one that actually will help you expand it quickly and retain the customer. If it becomes a services business only where you're charging for every single penny, then you become a transaction. You're not building a community, you're not retaining of the long term. You should be incent advising them to actually do both things, community trust and also incentivize the long term. So that's why I'm in favor of charging for services. But in not all the cases it makes sense. The game has changed.
- [16:10]
C
Where else has the game changed? Where else are old school CROs out
- [16:13]
A
of date in general? One single market, going one market at a time. It doesn't work Traditional bcs, the traditional method has been like oh, you open one market, you go deep, you, you win the account, you show the value, then you go to the next one and then you go to the next one and so on. And there's the bullshit advice that VCs have been giving for many years. And I know now it's changing fundamentally because hey, the reality is if you could have 100 competitors in the next month because you're starting to get some traction or because of whatever reason or everyone is thinking about the same problem and then going deep, then opening one market after the other, one after the other one, instead of actually parallelizing and trying to do multiple bets at the same time, then it's just counterintuitive is
- [16:54]
C
that only enabled by a plgmotion allows you to do multiple markets at the same time. Much easier. Because if you have enterprise motion, you need everything from SDRs to AES to CS in that place.
- [17:07]
A
Not really. So for instance, one of the, and I know this is going to be controversial, but I think all of the tech startups are afraid to actually hire someone that has had 20 years experience, 25 years experience, and the excuse that they use is like the person is not going to feed the business. And I think it's bullshit. I think it's full wrong. Fundamentally someone has 20 years experience in sales and has been selling for the past 10 years to the same like financial services firms in the city or in the us, has so much wealth, so much knowledge that it can propel the entire business. Now the question is like not all of them are going to fit your business, but a good portion of them, if they're still hungry and they still want to actually do something that is meaningful, they're going to fit really well. Those type of profiles will shorten your sales cycles because they will join and be like, okay, now I Know the product really well. I know the vision, I know how to properly pitch it. Let me call off my friends that have been interacting and all of my stakeholders that have been interacting for the past 10 years, 20 years. Now we just go directly to the C level.
- [18:06]
C
Dude. Is that not a massive misalignment of cultures? When you think about the super young hungry reps and then you're bringing in 50 year old Simon who's been selling into the city financial services for years.
- [18:16]
A
The biggest example is like Google in the early days you have like Sergey Bin and Larry Page together with Eric Schmidt. That's amazing. A guy that had ton of experience, was really successful, ended up coming in and magic happened. I think fundamentally, like both parties want to make it work. It can happen, but you need to make it work and you need to hire the right people that will have like, will be in the same brainwave as you are.
- [18:38]
C
Do you worry that people pull 11 lab so much out of your hand that anyone could sell it?
- [18:43]
A
No, I don't think it's that easy to sell, especially in this environment. Of course. I think if you have a big brand like an OpenAI or like an Anthropic or 11amps, it's easier a little bit.
- [18:52]
C
And the nice thing about this being around too is I can push back more. You can't have a 20x quota and say it's not easy to sell. You can't have that much better people than everyone else.
- [19:01]
A
I think you can.
- [19:03]
B
Your people are not, I love you dude, but your people are not forex.
- [19:05]
C
Better forex than everyone else in market.
- [19:08]
A
I do 100% believe that our people are like forex better, like without thinking twice. And I would take them to war, I would go to war with them, every single one of them. It's because like we are tough on them, but also like they're tough on us. Like they give us the feedback, the difficult feedback and I get it every single day and I'm happy that they give me the right, the tough feedback because what we're trying to do here, and I've always believed and grew up with the idea of like we're trying to find the ground truth and what the ground truth means, like today means X, tomorrow means something else and the following day will mean something else. So if you don't have people that are constantly challenging you and constantly thinking beyond what they actually is happening today, you're not going to be able to survive. And those are the people that we hire.
- [19:51]
C
Where are people challenging you? Where you don't have an answer.
- [19:54]
A
Which market should we be opening? How deep should we go into? Like, some of the structure changes, like the company is going, growing very quickly. Do we need a global accounts team? So I'm already thinking about the global accounts team. When do we implement it? How do we implement it? How do we motivate people? Should it be 20x? Should it be something else? Which products should we be selling? Should we be selling to competitors? Should we be selling to resellers? So there is all of those things, like the team challenges every single day. And I love it because it's intellectually is stimulating, but also because it forces the entire business to rethink our position every single day.
- [20:25]
C
So you would advise founders today to go to as many markets as possible
- [20:29]
A
as soon as possible, not as many markets as possible. I think you need to map out and have a reasoning and a thesis of why that market so that you can refer to that and understand whether the market conditions have changed. And then you have to actually evolve your thesis. But for me, this is like go to market is similar to investing in venture capital, right? You need to test like 100 things to actually be able to find the 3, 4, 5, 6 things that actually perform and do really well. We do the same in venture. We invest in companies knowing and believing that all of them are going to work and all of them can be like a billion or trillion dollar company. And then we realize like, shit, it not worked. But I still have like three or four or five that are going to be working really well. Go to market is exactly the same thing. Like test as many things as you can, not only in the opening markets, but also like, do you need to try like self service? Do you need to try like working with resellers, like with partners, with the cloud ecosystem, like with a grants program, with an affiliates program. There's so many things and opening markets is one of those ones.
- [21:24]
C
What did you test that didn't work and what did you learn at 11 hours?
- [21:27]
A
I've tested like endless, endless amounts of things and I absolutely love it. For instance, like media entertainment in the beginning did not work for us. It just didn't.
- [21:34]
C
What does media and entertainment mean?
- [21:35]
A
So big brands, like big entertainment studios, and the thesis was like, they're generating so much content, we should be able to actually sell to them and make a ton of money on this. And the reality was that like, yes, they do make a lot of content, but when you have an industry that essentially like is very heavily influenced by the public, the audience, the Quality, they need to produce events, all of that stuff. Then potentially the industry might not be ready for technology that you are trying to sell. That was a big learning. And we spent months and months and months trying to break into the entertainment industry to realize that we were not growing as fast as we wanted. So we ended up switching and having another ICP was like, okay, let's work with media creation platforms. That worked really well for us. And then we ended up saying like, hey, actually the wall is moving. We had a thesis around the world is moving towards agenting systems. How do we also bring a product to market that fits really well in the agentic world? And we had a vision on that. So we ended up working on that. And today AI agents, it's absolutely, fantastically huge for us fundamentally because we had the vision, we bet, we went early, we started working with, partnering with some companies and that pan out really well.
- [22:40]
C
You said the words not growing as fast as you wanted. Now you're an investor on the other side of the table. You've seen how fast a company can grow with 11 labs. You've also seen it with Revolut, to be fair, to edge cases, to be fair. But that's our business. Like that. That is the business of venture. My favorite thing with VCs is when you get other VCs. Be like, I don't know if Carlos is very good because like if you actually take out 11 labs and Revolut, he's not that good.
- [23:06]
A
And you're like, yeah, one of them for unicorns, it's fine.
- [23:10]
B
Okay, sure.
- [23:11]
C
But my point is, has it changed how you think about attractiveness in company growth?
- [23:17]
A
I don't know. I think you still need to have companies that grow from 1 to 4 or from 0 to 1 and it takes them like 18 months to get there. And I think that's actually not bad. It just means you need to incentivize the portfolio to be able to actually iterate and experiment as much as they can. Because we don't know what's going to work. And I think it is us, us still, even with new products that I'm heading and I'm trying to get to market, I truly don't know how we're going to price it. I truly don't know if it's going to work out. I'm just trying to iterate. Is it going to take us a little bit longer to get to the first million and the first 5 million and the first 10 million? Fine. We have the ability, but we need to iterate and I think it's exactly the same at 11 labs. We have a business that grows extremely quickly. We smashing it, all of that stuff. But at the same time we have brand new bets are not generating any revenue. And that's great. But it's bets that we're doing for next year. I think the idea what's the biggest
- [24:08]
C
bet you've got today? That's not generating revenue.
- [24:10]
A
So we're generating a good amount of revenue. But government work, fundamentally, it's a tiny portion of it. And I think that's okay because the role of a CRO is fundamentally thinking about not the revenues today, but the revenues of tomorrow. I'm already thinking all of this quarter. I've already been thinking. It's like, how do we put the pieces together so that the 11 labs next year grows even faster than this year? Because I know this year we'll smash the numbers. I have the right team. We're going to continue hiring. We have the motion that we set last year. It's going to grow really well. How am I doing it for next year? Being very creative so that I can start putting the right bets. That's what be my quota this year.
- [24:47]
C
You'll hit a billion in revenue by end of year.
- [24:49]
A
Who knows? I would love to hit a billion dollars in revenues by the end of the year. We have some targets internally. If we're creative, we can do it. If not, it will be a little bit later. That's fine. That's absolutely fine.
- [24:59]
C
Any big lessons on forecasting? Fricking hard to do.
- [25:03]
A
It's just impossible. We forecast and then we realize usually that like we've, like, we would just like.
- [25:08]
C
But that's different. Traditional sales leaders on the show for the last three or four years, because I've done 20,000, have been like, oh, I can pretty much get there to 3 to 5%.
- [25:17]
A
Yes.
- [25:18]
C
I'm like, wow. Now impossible.
- [25:21]
A
But it's impossible if you think about it from an experimentation perspective. And I always tell my team, like, I want us to test as many things as possible. I only need one of those ones to work really well to give me another $100 million in revenues or 200 or 300.
- [25:34]
C
So when you say things, do you mean like channels, like affiliates, like partners, like referrals, or do you mean like products?
- [25:40]
A
Channels, products, ideas. Should we be pitching services? And I was like in a, in a meeting with a CEO of an airline very recently in a few days back and we were talking about like agents and all of that stuff. And then at Some point he was like, but Carlos, like everyone keeps pitching me, I get over 100 pitches every week of pitch, like companies doing like customer support. I don't want to have another, another pitch on that. And I was like, and you're 100% right and I hate it. Like actually, don't get me wrong, we do it and we do it really fucking well. But at the same time it's boring. The majority of companies will start with the bottom line optimization.
- [26:15]
C
So it was boring. Customer support.
- [26:17]
A
Customer support optimization for me is like, yes. Your mindset is like, yeah, I want to automate, increase a bunch of percentage point my profitability. So that's what I'm focusing and that's great. Don't get me wrong, it is fantastic. What I'm actually interested is like how do we figure out a way to partner with a company and create a lapse area so it's company X labs so that we can figure out a way for them to generate new revenue opportunities for them. That's what actually makes me a passion. But that's, we have to prove that that is the right thing. So that is one of the experiments and I'm spending a lot of time these days on like how do we prove that the idea of labs for companies where we essentially are their consultants and help them build those agents that will generate top line revenue with new ideas, new products is actually something that we can scale and generate like hundreds of millions.
- [27:02]
C
How do you think about the trade off between doing that? Well, it's maybe a little bit more low margin given the fact that it's quite hands on. I'm thinking like British Airways Labs where you have amazing voice agents who call you up and are very personalized, give you tips on how to enjoy New York with your wife. Great. Super nice idea. May get more money from it. Boom. Versus actually we can do it avatars and we can compete with all the avatar companies. Higher margin, a very adjacent product.
- [27:25]
A
I don't know. I think I would rather do things that are actually much more complex than the ones that are actually less complex. I think we are here as startups and VCs to do the difficult things. I don't believe in doing the short path. Things are actually much easier if someone is doing it and someone is super good. Maybe we should be buying the company. Great. Or maybe we should just partner with them. Fantastic. Let's do the things that no one is doing. That is what makes me passionate and that is what a good CRO I think needs to be done. Because we're not here to do easy stuff.
- [27:54]
C
I think customer support is uninvestable today and I get so much shit on Twitter for this because everyone shits on them. But unlike Sierra and Dacagon, obviously two market leaders in terms of brand and how much money they've raised. And you've got 16 providers who've raised over 75 million in the last 18 months. And then you've got all the incumbents and your Salesforce and Atlassian and then your Intercoms and Zendesk and everyone in between. OpenAI we'll do a customer support product if they continue doing new products. I'm not quite sure where that product roadmap is. Maybe it was going to happen, maybe not anymore. Do you agree it's not investable?
- [28:28]
A
I would not personally invest, but I also think that the opportunity for companies that are established and growing a lot to go into that space is good. It's big.
- [28:37]
C
Why doesn't ElevenLabs do it?
- [28:39]
A
We do. We do customer support and the majority of our customers start with customer support and we make an absolute ton of money on that. And the ROI for our customers that like use us for customer support is insane. Insane.
- [28:50]
C
What percent of your revenue is customer support? Give it 20, 30, 40.
- [28:55]
A
We don't share that, but I think it works really well. It's like the fastest product in terms of revenues that we've ever had. It's just insane. But also think you look at all of our competitors, you mentioned Sierra, Decon and all of the other ones. We power all of them. So we actually make money off literally customer support with our agents platform. But also we make money from our API foundational model layer across the board. So that's the good thing about 11 labs that it spreads so widely.
- [29:22]
C
How do you think about empowering your competitors?
- [29:25]
A
I think it gets to a point where I think fundamentally we've been very happy to actually support the entire infrastructure layer because we believe that the opportunity in the market was way bigger than anyone was expecting. Voice and interactions with humans and human technology interaction. It is the fundamental piece that was missing in the entire puzzle. Now you end up having situation where similar to, I don't know, Nvidia that was competing with powering everyone but also competing with everyone. I think that's actually fine. It's okay that the market is big enough for multiple companies to coexist and then try to target the same customers. I'm not going to deny it. I think also means that everyone needs to be aware that that will happen. So when we launch our agent's product. I called the biggest platforms agents platform that were already operating in our platform and I told them like, guys, FYI, in the next couple of months we're going to be launching our agents product. We're going to be competing with you. Just wanted to make sure that you're okay with this. I wanted to make sure that you understand that we are going to this space. And the funny part was like, all of the founders that I interacted with telling them this, they were like, yeah, welcome on board, that's okay. And it's good because if you're able to actually be transparent with that and say like, hey, I'm going to be competing with you, but at the same time I'm partnering and in some deals you will win it, and in some deals I will win it. And in some deals we will partner together. That's when you end up creating a good ecosystem in parallel.
- [30:51]
C
So I think you have to be unwaveringly aggressive now on BDN sales because I think you have an 18 to 24 month period where CIOs, CISOs are like, AI, we have to have it. We have to have a mess message for it that won't last forever. Do you agree?
- [31:05]
A
100. And our team is dedicated to that. It's like everyone is like selling agents left and right. We've had the best quarter ever. It's been fantastic. But people are incentivized to sell agents because we know, like, we are competing with other companies and sometimes those companies ends up complaining to us, being like, why are you competing with me when you're also like, selling me? But the reality is like, hey, if you pay me like $1, $1, and I could be charging the end customer like, or you're charging the end customer $20. Then I'm like, I mean, maybe I'm doing something wrong here as well.
- [31:34]
C
I totally get that. One of my dear friends is Jason Lamkin, who built a game and he used 11 labs for the voice. And he was like, it was great. Amazing. Such a beautiful product. So amazing. So amazing. Fuck. It was expensive. And then people started using it, it became even more expensive. And he's like, this will be the year of substitution where you try a great product like ElevenLabs. It's amazing. And then you go, oh fuck, it's expensive. And then you substitute for the cheaper but 80% of it. Do you think that's true?
- [32:03]
A
No, I think there was a lot of conversations last year and I've evolved my mind on all of these things. And of course it will continue to evolve. Right. But a lot of people were talking last year about, oh, open source models are going to take over, even on the AI voices space, you're going to get commoditized and so on. And for a period of time I kind of believed it. I was like, yeah, I mean there is a point in time open source models will take over. It will be fully commoditized. Great. We just need to continue going deeper on the product integrations, full verticalization, distribution, all of the stuff. Great. And what I ended up realizing is even if open source models become extremely good at the same quality level that we have, it is the additional hustle, it is the additional components that make it very difficult for any organization. If you're a bank already, you might want to play with the idea of what if I use open source models? The problem is that those open source models are not built for the scale that you would want. You would still need to maintain them, you would still need to actually make them operational. And elevenlabs actually takes that away from you. And eleven Apps Agent takes that away from building the entire orchestration and managing it. Everyone can be building anything from scratch. It's just, do you have the time and do you have the resources and if the priority in the company changes, are you going to be able to continue adjust and making sure that you get the right funding in there? And I don't think that is true. And we are seeing it all around the world where like, yeah, we could go with open source models. Excellent. Do it. You try to operationalize it and they've lost three months and then they come back.
- [33:30]
C
Interesting. ElevenLabs is almost a bit like OpenAI or anthropic in the way that it's this foundational layer and you can go in any strategic product direction you want from that foundational layer. Theirs is LLMs, yours is voice. And the question is, will I be claudified? So to speak. Then there's a question of will I be 11 labsified? You can do SDR agents with voice. How do you think about weighing that off in terms of where your product direction goes?
- [33:56]
A
I think it's an evolving, evolving question all the time. It's not that simple to decide.
- [34:02]
C
Do you have verticalized sales teams?
- [34:04]
A
We have verticalized sales team right now in specific markets, markets that are much bigger or markets that are much more mature. 100% we will have people that only do like BFSI, only teams that do healthcare.
- [34:15]
C
What does it take to do vertical sales teams? And what have been your big lessons on what mistakes people make?
- [34:21]
A
So I will give you an example. In India, I try to implement vertical sales team too early and essentially kind of the price of revenues for a single quota. And it was like an absolute disaster. And then I realized like, no, what happened there?
- [34:33]
C
Then you divided everyone and then it didn't work. Like what?
- [34:36]
A
It didn't work because like A, people were not passionate enough, B, it needed a long time to actually close some of the biggest sales and C, the team was way too small. And if you do it early on, if you segment too early, then you fundamentally end up screwing things up. So what I realized, I have this, this placeholder in my calendar every single week that is called pipeline construction. And that pipeline construction, it's similar to portfolio construction that you're familiar with. But for me it's like pipeline construction. How do I take a VC term and put it in my mindset? How do I design the perfect pipeline for any given market and segment? And that's when you start thinking, actually you need the liquidity, but you also need the big whales. So each one of my account execs needs to have the ability of closing big whales, specifically on the enterprise segment, but also having liquidity in the pipeline, pipeline, so that they don't lose the confidence because people were losing the confidence towards me.
- [35:30]
C
You have pipeline construction. What's the next subsequent step? You break out how many sellers you have in that market.
- [35:35]
A
Correct? Yes.
- [35:36]
C
How many sellers? Let's say we have 20.
- [35:38]
A
Let's say 20 for any given market. Doesn't really matter. I mean we have a lot less than those ones.
- [35:42]
C
Sure, let's just say. But like, what do we do then? 20. Average deal size.
- [35:45]
A
I look into the average deal size. I look into like, what are the number of companies in there?
- [35:49]
C
What's the average deal size? 100k.
- [35:51]
A
Depends on the market.
- [35:52]
C
Let's just say 100k because it's easy for our maths, 100k. And then we're like, okay, if I need to hit what's the maths we're trying to get to? I'm just trying to understand.
- [36:00]
A
So for me the key item is how many companies are in that market, how many very complex enterprises in that market and how do I creep enough liquidity in that market to close deals every single week so that the team stays motivated and sees the challenges of closing deals.
- [36:15]
C
Have you ever had a situation where you're like, shit, the ramp I need to get on my sellers to get to my quota is too High, I'm not equipped enough to hit that quota.
- [36:25]
A
100%. Government vertical is one of those ones where we said, you know what? And it was one of the big bets that I made this year was like, I don't care.
- [36:32]
C
Why do government in the nicest way? Hard sales cycles, tough to get in, you're crushing in other areas.
- [36:39]
A
Why do government fundamentally because one is very sticky. Number two is like it's a benefit that we make to society if we can deploy agents for people to have better interactions with the actual government and government services. It's an absolute no brainer. And I don't care if I don't make enough money to justify it or I lose money, it doesn't really matter to me. And then the three is, it's a hard industry to get in. So the moment you actually get in, then it's just like you never leave that industry. When you start mapping those things out, you need to make the bets. And some of those bets will pan out really well, some of the ones will not pan out that well. But it's like literally portfolio construction. How quickly can I do some of these sales so that I can spend time also in the difficult ones and my investors don't call me saying what the fuck are you doing? I'm going to fire you. I think that's a fundamental idea of portfolio construction and you do it at a country level, each one of the new countries that you actually want to be launching. And that is a completely different concept than what the majority of CROs are actually thinking these days. If you tap it into AI agents for like go to market and other pieces, then you have something that is quite unique for your business.
- [37:44]
C
So what did you do in India then? You verticalized too early, segmented too early, depressed the market for Google.
- [37:49]
A
We went back to zero. We went back to like horizontal, let's do horizontal. Let's allow people to do like much deeper and then we will start segmenting again when the right timing comes. And what ended up happening is we would then give them, I would then give them a name, account list and negotiate with them based on fundamentally how I was thinking about the portfolio construction. And that worked really well. Like literally we lost a quota. We ended up changing all of that from the ground up. And then you could see like people starting closing deals in the first month. And it was like insane because like it was day and night. We had changed the culture in the team, in the local market by getting it wrong. Let's go back to the basics. Let's Redo it from scratch, accept that we've made a mistake and then move on.
- [38:29]
C
Does brand dramatically reduce enterprise sales cycle when you come back? Like, no offense, 11 labs in India, I'm sure, like a year ago. Not actually a very big brand.
- [38:37]
A
No.
- [38:37]
C
Versus in the UK and the us Very big and much easier. Does brand reduce enterprise sales cycle?
- [38:43]
A
Yes, 1 million percent. And whoever tells you no, it's like just lying. That is a fact. And I think like the idealist scenario is like no one gets fired. Like the idea, like you remember like IBM, right? Like no one gets fired for actually buying IBM. It's like that is the ideal scenario for any brand. It's like literally you become the safest asset in the block. Great. I think the two companies that today have been able to make it is or three companies, if you want. OpenAI Anthropic, full respect for them. Cursor. The three of them I think for
- [39:10]
C
me are like cursor killed enterprise unbelievably well.
- [39:14]
A
Yeah, they've done super well and it's fantastic. Those are the three brands that are blue. Cheap organization right now in the procurement team's perspective and IT team's perspective, it's fantastic. It's great.
- [39:25]
C
No, but everyone on Twitter, it's one of those really funny ones where everyone on Twitter is like, no one needs them anymore. We all use claw code. You're such idiots. And it's like, sure, but going to HSBC in Hong Kong or wherever around the world, like Barclays bank in Swansea, I promise you, they're using Cursor actually in their local dev shop.
- [39:41]
A
And it is great. It just means brand will help you solidify your position. But also you need to.
- [39:47]
C
But also the stickiness of these big enterprises, that's also the unwavering.
- [39:52]
A
And it's not that easy to get into the big enterprises anyway. Right? It's not that easy. You've done it with the portfolio companies, you know how difficult it is for them. But once you start getting into the
- [39:59]
C
motion as a venture capitalist, I've done it, period. All of the companies we invest in, we basically found, you know, we do all the work. Really. That's exhausting.
- [40:10]
A
Would you do it with LPs? So imagine your LPs. Like, it's exactly the same concept. Like your LP is like multi sales cycle.
- [40:15]
C
Multi year sales cycle.
- [40:16]
A
Exactly.
- [40:16]
C
I mean seriously, multi year sales cycle. One of our biggest LPs was a six year sales cycle.
- [40:20]
A
I'm not surprised.
- [40:22]
C
Absolutely.
- [40:22]
A
But how do you create enough fomo? How do you create Enough brand to be able to actually like reduce that six years to like a lot less.
- [40:28]
C
Yeah. Brand does that.
- [40:29]
A
Exactly.
- [40:30]
C
What percentage of your new sellers work out?
- [40:34]
A
The majority of them.
- [40:35]
C
Do they?
- [40:35]
A
We're talking about like our churn rate on the sales side is actually not that big.
- [40:39]
C
Really.
- [40:39]
A
It's because like when I make an offer, I tell every single person like eleven Labs is going to be extremely difficult. Extremely difficult. We are a hard company to work for because we have extremely high expectations. You're going to work like a huge amount of hours. I expect full commitment and people love it. So you end up filtering out people that actually don't want to have that type of life and I think that's okay.
- [41:00]
C
Do you think it's possible to retain that at scale? You get these soft management people who are like, oh no, we need to filter down the messaging. Do you think that's possible at scale?
- [41:09]
A
I think it is possible, but it is possible. If you try to retain a smaller team and you implement the latest technologies to actually make everyone more efficient in general. Of course, the bigger the company then I think you get softer. But you look at what Mark Andersen was saying the other day and like companies are overstaffed by 25% and even more. Right. Of course there is a trade off between overstaffing and understaffing. So if you understaff and people have even in sales or revenue, they have too much pipeline, they end up not closing nothing.
- [41:36]
C
How many salespeople do you need to
- [41:37]
A
hire this year we're about adding about another 120 people more or less. So it will keep the entire sales team.
- [41:44]
C
What's your sales team now?
- [41:45]
A
It's 130 people, so we will keep it under 250.
- [41:50]
C
But you're doubling sales team.
- [41:51]
A
Doubling the sales team? Yeah. And the sales, it's going to grow much quicker than that.
- [41:55]
C
Do you worry about that?
- [41:56]
A
Yes.
- [41:57]
B
That's a lot to bring on board.
- [41:59]
A
A lot.
- [41:59]
C
Doubling a sales team?
- [42:01]
A
Yes.
- [42:01]
C
What are the pitfalls that you need to avoid?
- [42:04]
A
One is the dilution. Like if you're not upfront about the expectation, I think you end up diluting because people come with different expectations. They essentially behave in a specific way. They that it's not the way that you wanted.
- [42:15]
C
How can you correct it? I went to a company the other day. Essentially there was a sales leadership board of all the reps and there were like seven reps and six reps had between 5,000 and 8,000 points and just points just thinking that. And then the bottom one had 2000 and the next best one had 5000. Pretty freaking clear. This person is way off. Do you just cut it there and then or are you like give them time? It's only been a month.
- [42:41]
A
Yes and no. For us, like all of the stats are publicly open to everyone. So everyone knows how much revenues we make. Everyone knows each one of the reps.
- [42:48]
C
Do you have a leaderboard internally?
- [42:50]
A
Yes, we do.
- [42:52]
C
How do you do that to create that competition?
- [42:54]
A
So people like we post automatically. We have a bot that actually will post automatically into the sales channel every single week. A summary of like what percentage of quota payment year to date for that specific quarter and all of that stuff and the power up basis on a per basis. So anyone can see it anytime. And if you're at the bottom, then hey, you're going to be able to see that you're on the bottom. At a practical level for me it's like it's beyond that. It's like that's one component. But if you have someone that is like building strategic accounts, then I'm not sure if someone is actually building like the right pipeline. I'm also not too worried. Right. But you need to see the action. You need to see like how many meetings are doing. If I open a calendar and someone has a full calendar that is empty, I'm like, what did you do this week?
- [43:36]
C
Do you worry about demoralization or losing? Exactly. I mean, dude, if I'm like, if I'm looking at the report and it's like harry bottom next week. Harry bottom. I'm like, oh, you're out. It's so mean. It's like public. You know, I was the fat kid at school and it was horrible because you had running races and you're losing in public was so public because everyone could see how far behind you were.
- [44:02]
A
Sales attracts a different profile. Sales attracts the people that are much more outspoken, people that are much more extrovert, people that actually want to do something different. Right. So by definition you don't go into sales if you're not willing to take like the harsh feedback. If you're not willing to say most
- [44:18]
C
sales reps are softer today, I think
- [44:21]
A
a very large portion of them are because they don't have the environment to actually like just push harder or because they've already lost the passion in that they just want a normal job and that's okay. Don't get me wrong, that's absolutely fantastically. Well, it is not what I'm hiding
- [44:33]
C
for what's your tell for the obsessed that Wins.
- [44:36]
A
For me, you can get it very quickly, right? People that have extremely high energy, that are sharp, that are thinking quick. And also there's other people that will be slightly opposite, but also they're going to be very, very deep and it might take them a little bit more time to actually get there. And those are less obvious. But once they do, it's just insanely good. If people are sharp and they're energetic and passionate and they come across someone that really wants to win and you can ask them like, hey, pitch me 11 laps. As if I was, I don't know, like a fish. Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter, right? Then you get a sense of how quickly they're thinking and how passion they have. Like how much passion, how much actually they reaches the company. Who are they thinking? All of that stuff you end up having in a very short conversation. I don't need to spend more than 20 minutes to know if I want to hire someone or not. And I will tell you, the majority of times, I end up putting my feedback in Ashby. We use Ashby internally. I end up putting my feedback in Ashby during the conversation. By the middle of the conversation, I have my feedback and I'm one of those crazy guys that write a lot while I'm talking to someone I hate when it gets recorded, then people end up behaving in a very specific way versus actually being themselves. So I write a lot while I'm interviewing people and then I have my summary and in parallel, I'm writing and I'm doing my summary and that's it. And it works really well for me.
- [45:57]
C
Why do you hate the recorded element? So for me, all our calls in the venture fund are recorded because it's important for us that we can share them. And I can ramp up without being in the room.
- [46:09]
A
My personal take is that interviews people behave differently if they think that they've been recorded versus if they think that actually they have freedom to say whatever they think is best. In sales, we are always ask everyone to record it. And we have like, it's mandatory for everyone years gone. We use gong and then automatically fills out our salesforce. And so we try to automate as much as possible. And by the way, Lovable has the best CRM that I've ever seen. Those guys have really smashed it. Shout out to them.
- [46:36]
C
Lovable CRM.
- [46:37]
A
Yes. So Lovable ended up building their own platform.
- [46:40]
C
Can you imagine if they didn't?
- [46:43]
A
We should be building our own platform as well. But we're not.
- [46:46]
C
Do you buy that? Do you buy the SaaS apocalypse of you will customize your own software entirely in the future?
- [46:52]
A
For some areas, yes.
- [46:53]
C
Where will you. Where will you not?
- [46:54]
A
I think for core things, yes. So a CRM. I would love to customize it. I would love to actually build it myself even. It doesn't really matter. You don't have to spend that much time. It's just like a pool of.
- [47:06]
C
Do you have an esl?
- [47:08]
A
We haven't done it. We use Salesforce. But for some other applications. I mean, why wouldn't you do it? If it fits better in your entire ecosystem of applications? If it's easy enough, then maybe you should. But would I build an entire Google Drive or a Gmail? No, I wouldn't. It wouldn't make any sense. But for a good amount of applications, for sure. If I was like a procurement guy, I would be building a procurement software for myself.
- [47:30]
C
So you think the SaaS apocalypse is over exaggerated?
- [47:33]
A
I think there is a very large portion that is over exaggerated. But I think there is a real fact that people will end up building their own applications. And I think that's key. I think it's. Why not.
- [47:44]
C
What would you like to do with 11 labs today that you're not able to do because of lack of budget?
- [47:49]
A
Oh, we've never actually put any constraints on the lack of budget. If you want to do something, budget is never going to be a problem. And that's been since what is the
- [47:58]
C
problem if you want to do something and you're not allowed to? Why would that be?
- [48:02]
A
It might well be because you haven't proven with a test or experimentation that that is the right thing to do right now. So for me it's like you want a budget. What do you want 100k? You want 50k? You want 200k to actually prove that things do it. Don't ask me for a million dollars and ask me for like dedicate an entire team to it. Don't ask me to actually dedicate six months of your time to for that specific thing. I'm not going to do it. But if you do it on the side and then you prove me that like you, you can actually make it work and I start seeing some results, we'll scale it and we'll give you all of the budget that you want.
- [48:32]
C
You're on the CRO and you said that it's so interesting about kind of I want to see the data before I scale it. You now do paid and you do paid, you know, on an F1 car.
- [48:41]
A
Yes. Audi Revolut. F1.
- [48:43]
C
How did you weigh up the decision to do that when it's a big investment and you had no data honestly to suggest it would work?
- [48:50]
A
It took us a long time to actually get comfortable with the idea.
- [48:53]
C
How much did it cost?
- [48:54]
A
We spent a good amount of money. We had a budget in mind that we wanted to spend, and we went to different teams and we ended up negotiating. We're like, this is the budget that we have. This is how much we want to be spending for year one, for year two, all of that stuff. What are the options? And then all of the teams that we spoke to, some of them were like, no, for this, no. Or for this, you don't get it. Anything. You didn't even get the logo. Some of them are like, oh, we'll do all of this stuff. And then we end up narrowing down to two teams and then we end up negotiating with two teams in parallel. And then there was one, which is Oda Revolut F1. We were very impressed, but it took us a while to actually be comfortable with the entire concept.
- [49:31]
C
Would you rather premium branding on a worst team or secondary branding on a number one team?
- [49:36]
A
Premium branding on the worst team? 100%. You get more exposure and also you have a lot more creative freedom. And also you're betting. So one of the main reasons why we ended up picking Audi, Revolut F1, is because if you look at the history of Audi, it's like every single sports championship they've entered, they've ended up winning within five years, and that's fantastic. And they're building the car from scratch. They build their own engine, they build everything from scratch. They're competing with all of the big ones. And I'm a big Formula one fan, and I actually feel that this idea of incumbents, very technologically driven with a really clear mindset, drive, idea to win and so on. It is who we are as a company, Elevenlabs, but also is who Nick and the team are at Revolut. It fits really well with your entire narrative as a company. If you try to do it away.
- [50:28]
C
What was the biggest paid marketing event that you did? Event, channel or activity that you did? That was a mistake. And what did you learn from that?
- [50:36]
A
The majority of them end up producing good returns, but when I look at the ones from an enterprise perspective that have a better ROI for us is dinners. When we do a dinner with execs in a given city, that has the best ROI that you could have. If I go to a trade show, the majority of Them don't have good roi.
- [50:53]
C
How much does a dinner cost?
- [50:54]
A
You could have a dinner with for 15 people and cost you 3,000, 4,000, $5,000. If you want to go bigger, then essentially you need to shut the entire place and all of that stuff. So you will have to spend more. Depends on the city. Not the same doing it in Mexico City or doing it in Barcelona or doing it in London. But the ROI is actually quite solid. But the benefit of the dinners is you end up imagine you're inviting competitors. So you're inviting competitors, different customers you're trying to close. So those guys are going to know that you are actually talking to these other guys. So there is a FOMO that ends up being created in place and it just pans out really well. And because they know, they know it's usually the same icp. So they know who is doing procurement, who is doing whatever, who's doing the sales, who's being the cto, who's the chief AI officer, all of that stuff. They know each other. That always works really well. The worst ROI for us has always been conferences. It just. There is no ROI in there.
- [51:46]
C
What's the takeaway from that?
- [51:48]
A
We should be spending less on those things and should be building our own events more.
- [51:52]
C
You should be building your own events more.
- [51:54]
A
That's why we did like 11 Labs.
- [51:55]
C
We did this insane 11 Labs event which kind of reminded me of some kind of rock concert, meet Steve Jobs kind of event. Do you, do you need to see ironically a return on that or is it like 100%?
- [52:07]
A
Why wouldn't you?
- [52:09]
C
It's always difficult to know.
- [52:10]
A
No. So you end up having this concept of influence revenue and then direct revenue or close revenue. Right. So there's a lot of different variations. All of this that you can plan it. And the event that we run In London, the 11 Labs summit in London was fantastic. We wanted to prove that a European company can actually be running these big events with like so many people and then put up a show that actually people get passionate and talk about it. And also motivated and presented. We presented some ideas, we brought some guests to talk in front of everyone else.
- [52:42]
C
What is your biggest tip? For me I'm thinking about one company in particular of ours, Solve Intelligence. Amazing business in London. AI for patent lawyers. They should do an incredible event for patent lawyers specifically. Be an amazing close knit community. If you were to advise, say then on, you should know this, if you're going to do an event for your customers, having done it so well, what would you say?
- [53:08]
A
That advice would be bring the right ICPs, design the content really well, and think carefully about the content that you won't want.
- [53:15]
C
What would be your advice on the content design? What does that mean?
- [53:18]
A
It has to be, like, not salesy. I think it needs to feel natural. Like, you should do, like, a presentation about your company, like some insights, talk about the things that are coming next, your vision. But if you make it too, sales people will walk away and never come back. And I think that's the fundamental trade off. Like, for me, like these big events, like, we talk a little bit about 11 up. So Matti ends up doing like the big keynote, but then after that, for me is all about how do we put those partners, those companies that are building in our platform or are using our technology in front of as many people as possible so that we learn about them. And I did a fireside chat with three amazing companies like BCG and. And Atulji and Connecta. For me, it was more about, like, how do we enhance their appearance? How do we talk about what are they building, what they're using? It's less about 11 labs. It's about them. And I think that's like, you need to plan the content in a way that it feels less salesy. You talk about it, but also you bring partners to validate that what you're doing is actually right.
- [54:13]
C
Totally get that. You said they're partners. How do you think about partnerships as a channel at elevenlabs?
- [54:19]
A
Yes.
- [54:20]
C
What are the big misnomers that people have around partnerships?
- [54:23]
A
There is a concept that I really like that we've actually done fairly well, I would say, at 11 labs, which is like the strategy partners, and that is strategy partners we put in that bracket is like companies that have a cvc. And I know this is going to be controversial, but I actually love CVCs, like corporate venture capitalists, because they help you navigate big brands. They are your champions internally, and their incentive is to actually make it work really well for the business, just for
- [54:48]
C
people to kind of understand. That's like Salesforce Ventures.
- [54:50]
A
That's exactly like Deutsche Telekom, like T Capital, which is Siemens, I think have one. All of them end up having one, like, entity, Docomo Ventures. Like, all of them have, like, one of them. But the good thing is they know their business and they were not sexy up until like a year and a half ago. Two years ago, they were not sexy. Returns were not there, as we know. Right. Like cbc getting returns is, like, really difficult. And they were just, like, trying to, like, fight to get a location in the best companies. But, like, it's just not possible. Well, today we've proven with 11 labs that we dedicated time to actually partner with woven capital from Toyota, with the Deutsche Telekom guys, with the Telefonica guys, with Liberty Global, that actually joined our cap table, all of those pieces. That is a fantastic distribution strategy.
- [55:34]
C
And so you get them to invest a small amount and then you distribute through them.
- [55:38]
A
Exactly. And essentially we negotiate contracts with them. And essentially they end up depending on the situation, you have one side and another one.
- [55:46]
C
Do they have to bring a certain amount of pipes or promises to get a certain amount of allocation?
- [55:53]
A
Yes, they do. We are 11 labs. Nothing is free. But I think I like it because it incentivizes the way I organized this concept initially. And it was so funny when I pitched it to Matti, I was like, really? People are going to give us money as a contract? And I was like, investors? And I was like, yeah, let's try, right? And I think the reality was that you end up aligning incentives. If the incentive is to only invest, their incentive is only to invest, but your incentive is actually to close a deal. So how do you figure out something that works along the way so that like you put and end up saying, you know what you will invest for every million dollars that you want to invest, you need to actually like bring X amount of revenues in the next 12 months or 24 months, whatever time frame you want. And there has to be some penalties and some consequences if that doesn't happen. That is the way that, like, I'm
- [56:37]
C
sorry, how do you actually. That if you don't bring it, like, we strike you last, like, is that possible?
- [56:41]
A
We buy you out. And I think it was perfectly fine. And then everyone is incentivized. And the logic, and I strongly believe that is the case, and that's how I pitched it to everyone, was like, we want the best. So if you invest in a million dollars in 11 labs and you bring a contract, you help us close a contract, then your valuation goes up. So you're making money from the VC side, but also your business is getting more efficient because it's implementing 11 labs. It's a win win for everyone.
- [57:05]
C
I totally get that. I think the other thing that you also get is like a public market messaging story, which is like, we're closely partnered with 11 Labs, a pioneer in the industry, and four large telecoms providers. Wherever you are, around the world or whatever enterprise you are, that helps a lot, 100%.
- [57:20]
A
But also the Beautiful side is you end up building new products specifically for them because then you get the insights of the industry. So we went into the telco industry, we had no idea about the telco industry. We've actually learned everything about the telco industry. Partnering with kpn, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, ntt, docomo, all of those like really amazing brands that like have been in the industry for a very long time. We work very closely with the open capital guys at Toyota. We are learning a lot about the automotive industry because they're in the cap table. So everyone is motivated to it like in the same with like, like in financial services or even going into different markets. Like there's a number of advantages of like having corporate VCs in your cap table just because you incentivize you and you increase your like opportunities of being successful.
- [58:05]
C
What are the biggest mistakes that you think people Partner ecosystems. I think people think of them as like a silver bullet. Oh, we'll have a partner and then it's done. I think you need to have people who nurture those partners incredibly well to teach them, train them, onboard them. What would be some others from your perspective?
- [58:21]
A
It takes time. It takes fucking long time. And that is the reality is like if you're coming into the distribution side with partners or you building the entire partner ecosystem thinking that you're going to be making another 20% of revenues like like in two quarters, you're wrong. Like that doesn't happen that way. You need people dedicated to it. You need incentives for them because people lose interest and you need your incentives for your own team. So initially start using like SQLs sales qualified opportunities or SQLs as sales qualified leads to be able to actually track how much volume is being generated and what is the actual traction being generated. And then once you start having a solid motion in there, then you start tracking and move it towards the revenues. So each One of the SQLs needs to be generating a certain amount of
- [59:02]
C
revenues other than letting them invest. How do you incentivize your partners to push you?
- [59:07]
A
You can always and Salesforce has done it extremely well. For me they had the reference on this is like they built a partner ecosystem where they get deals from like Salesforce plus they send deals to Salesforce and in some cases like in the markets where they cannot be billing the customer, they actually do send the deal be like, oh you're my partner, you will be billing the customer and then I will bill you video independently. That's a fantastic ecosystem to be building.
- [59:31]
C
How do you Think about the justification of rep time across account and what I mean by that specifically is any company that's very large could spend a large amount of money. And with PLG everyone tends to start small and then the hope is they expand much bigger and bigger and bigger. How do you think about what ACV is large enough for reps to spend significant time on?
- [59:51]
A
Trying to get it $1,000 more month. When you start spending $1,000 a month as a business, your brain completely switches because you don't want to put it anymore in your credit card. And at that point you start believing like shit, I'm spending a lot of money in there with that software. I do have high expectations at that point. If you have emotion from a sales perspective that is fast enough, then it doesn't really matter.
- [60:13]
C
Are you ready for a weird one? One of my favorite sayings I've heard recently is fear is a mile wide and an inch deep and you need to take the step to realise it's not as scary as you think. Where have you thought the thing was very scary and difficult, where it actually wasn't once you did it?
- [60:30]
A
I had a very clear conviction that at 11 labs, launching India was going to be extremely difficult and we might fail. And what I end up realizing is I didn't know enough the market to realize if you do it well, you can make a ton of money and also generate a ton of buzz and generate a lot of roi.
- [60:47]
C
Do you have to send OG team members to every market you open?
- [60:50]
A
No, but we do it centrally. We always try to build a market centrally from hq, trying to close some deals. So that for me it's free to actually deploy a single person on the ground.
- [61:00]
C
Sorry, help me. It's free to deploy a single person
- [61:02]
A
on the ground because I'm already making revenues, I'm profitable, I'm making revenues in that market. I've proven that it is a market that is getting.
- [61:08]
C
So you only go into new markets when you've already got a lot of customers and you can see the plg.
- [61:12]
A
No, not on the plg. I don't know even look at the PLG numbers. I don't care about those ones. I look at like, what are the enterprises, what are the companies in the market? How is my portfolio construction in the market and how can I close some of those companies to get to a certain level of revenues at the moment that I get to that certain level of revenues? For me, I've nailed a product idea that needs to grow and needs to prove that, like it can scale and it can have like product market fit. But at least I've proven that actually can start selling in there, then that's the moment that actually I can get the team on the ground.
- [61:41]
C
What market are you not in today? Geography or sector that you would most like to be in?
- [61:46]
A
We are everywhere these days.
- [61:48]
C
Literally everywhere.
- [61:49]
A
Everywhere. I have teams all around the world. Some of them have been announced, some of them have not been announced. But we have teams all around the world. Yes.
- [61:54]
C
Where are you weakest?
- [61:56]
A
I think in general we've been weak in some of the languages and that is entirely my fault. On believing that you could sign contracts. Everyone is in the world. Everyone in the world speaking English only. And then you realize later on that that's just not possible. And don't get me wrong, like I said, I opened like Japan by myself without speaking Japanese.
- [62:17]
C
Japan's hard.
- [62:18]
A
It's really fucking hard.
- [62:19]
C
Japan's hard. My friend is Daniel Dines from UiPath. He told me before how hard Japan, it's a major market for them now and it's phenomenally successful. But it's hard to spin up.
- [62:27]
A
It's really hard. And I started doing it like two years ago, going myself to Japan, like constantly and meeting companies and we started generating motion. It was great. And then I hired my first rep and then I hired the gm, Jim and the rest of the team. That was a really hard market. And you could not sell in English everywhere else in the world, but you could also not sign contracts that are always in English. So if you end up having a team that has mostly had experience in the us, their belief is that you can repeat that anywhere in the world. The reality is, you look at Latin America, less than 5% of the population speak English. If you want to open France and launch in France, good luck. If you're only going to be speaking English, good luck. If you don't offer like French law in your contracts, no one's going to be signing it. So there's some of these learnings that we've had that are really, really tough. There's like we wanted to actually sell in France and well, I was not speaking French then. Let's get someone that speaks French. Right? So there is some of those things that we've learned by doing that is my entire fault. But it's also like part of the experimentation.
- [63:26]
C
I think if you think that stuff careers fucking hard.
- [63:29]
A
We are there. We have an office. Yes, yes. It's really, really, really tough. But also like the benefit of Korea and that's why I was saying earlier, like, you need to have a thesis on why you're launching in a specific market. But the thesis on Korea was they produce a ton of content, they're very innovative when they want, and they're producing products and services not for the local market, but for the international market. So in reality, yes, you need to be selling in Korean, but the majority of your usage will not be in Korean, will likely be for the international market. So how do you support and map those languages that they care about, want that you can target those companies at least for us.
- [64:03]
C
Are you happy to be powering the decline of Hollywood? And I don't mean that horribly, but there was a brilliant article the other day on the permanent decline of Hollywood and I think it was a Wall Street Journal article, but it essentially said about the democratization of content creation and what that's done to consumer attention and hence the decline of Hollywood is producing less and less content. You are in large part powering that. I can paint a very positive case for democratization, income equality, equalizing content, and also declining Hollywood. Is that a good thing?
- [64:33]
A
I don't think that's how I would put it. I think Hollywood is declining in this model that they have today with very big budget productions that require a ton of people, that require a lot of different things. And I think they're going through a crisis. But I actually think Hollywood will come out even stronger than this. And I think at the end of the day it's like imagine that you get a startup and the startup tells you what I need $100 million, I need $50 million pre seed just for this idea. And then it's going to take me five years to get it out. I don't know who's going to buy it. What are you going to say, like, why don't you raise a million dollars? That's going to be like, raise a million dollars proof, like some points and then start going deep. And I think that's the problem with Hollywood right now. I don't think it's like AI voices, I don't think it's AI video. I think those are like additional solutions to make sure that you're democratizing it and you're reducing your cost of launching new ideas to the market. And that is going to be part of the solution.
- [65:25]
C
It's actually why I find defense so hard to invest in, which is like it takes five years and 200 to 250 million dollars before you can make your first dollar of revenue on a defense product. Quoting from Matt Stagman who's the president, cbo, vandurill. I think he knows his shit. That's just tough for me as like a seed venture investor to get on board with that cost curve to dollar gain. Do you know what I mean?
- [65:46]
A
And that's the, that's what needs to change fundamentally. Like, like how do we create content that takes less money dollars to actually be created? You start very slowly, but also then you ramp up once you realize that actually there is product market fit in that content. And I've spoken with a lot of studios over the past three years. I've spent a lot of time in LA in the industry and my pitch always to them is like, hey, let's try to create content that will capture people's attention across the channels that they operate today. And if it works well, let's scale it. Then you have the $50 million budget and I think that's where AI can benefit a lot. But you have. And because you can iterate a lot, you can create content that is personalized, you can create that is engaged by people. And then we were talking yesterday about this idea of cost per engagement. Why don't we use exactly the same framework? How much is the cost for every single person that gets engaged in your content? And that content can essentially expand to be extremely high quality. As you're proving that fundamentally dynamic changes. Right?
- [66:45]
C
You mentioned a couple of times about also investing as well. Fantastic investor. Obviously we've invested a lot together. Should more operators be investors at the same time?
- [66:55]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yes. It should always, but it should. My thinking here is it is because founders want to be backed by other founders. They want to be backed by the best operators and they also want to be backed by the best investors. If you are an operator and you, you are willing to deploy time, not money time to help a company navigate and try to be successful, at some point you will end up realizing that why not to actually do it with institutional money?
- [67:24]
C
Okay, because flip side, when you take institutional money, it's a great responsibility taking on someone else's money. And you have already made a promise to your employer that you will devote your best efforts and all of your energy to making them successful and the company successful. If you're suddenly looking at defence companies at seed, you are not doing that job to the best of your ability.
- [67:47]
A
I don't think so. I think that you can do both things in parallel and one contributes to the other one. I don't think there is any conflicts in there fundamentally.
- [67:55]
C
I don't think so. I Think you can, because you have reached. I'm your friend, you've reached an echelon that you can. But I don't think otherwise. Honestly, if I was one of your sellers and I was going home and in the bath time reading about next generation drone companies and the cost curve to launch drone companies, you'll be like, dude, your motherfucking turf is France and it's media. You could ramp that instead. I would be saying that If I
- [68:18]
A
was 100 and I would understand it,
- [68:19]
C
like, no, but I'm getting the best out of myself by doing that.
- [68:23]
A
But you know what? But the interesting thing is, like, I think you put it really well in the other. In the other podcast, which is like, you are the hardest working person in the office. I am the same. And if you want to do both things at the same time, you need to prove every single day that you are the hardest working person in the office. And I think that's when it works. Fundamentally, you will work really hard for the company, but also you will work really hard for your investors and your LPs. And when I was negotiating my LPA with my LPs, we got stuck in one clause. Always you get stuck in clauses and things like that.
- [68:54]
C
What was the clause?
- [68:55]
A
I can't even remember. And I remember that clause, which was for me was absolutely silly and I was pushing back and for them, it was core to them. I was like, I called my nlp, which is absolutely fantastic, Cindana Capital. They're really amazing guys. But I remember calling them guys. We need to get over this. If we are fucked, if I don't return the money and I don't do all of these things, we're all fucked. It doesn't really matter how we see it. It just doesn't really matter. So let's move on. Let's close this thing. Let's make sure that I start deploying the capital and then we will celebrate. And if it doesn't work out, I'm fucked. I'm accountable for all of this. I lost all of this money. We'll figure out, but I don't think I will lose your money. I think I will do like a 10x and I'm happy with it. And we ended up moving on.
- [69:41]
C
What fund would you be happy with? What do you say to investor? I would be very happy with the 10X. I'd be very happy with the 6X. I'd be very happy with the.
- [69:50]
A
I think for me, the way I thought when I was raising a fund is I will be Very happy. The moment that I actually have seven unicorns in my fund.
- [69:58]
C
Seven.
- [69:59]
A
It has to be seven. I'm not gonna be seven.
- [70:02]
C
I don't know.
- [70:02]
A
It's a number that I have like David Beckham. I don't watch football, but it's like soccer. Sorry.
- [70:10]
C
Okay, well, he was number seven, which is why.
- [70:13]
A
No, but I think that's the key. Like, people that like, want to achieve something that is different have a very clear idea of like, what is the actual like, like vision that they have.
- [70:22]
C
Like, do you care if you're seed only?
- [70:24]
A
I don't care.
- [70:25]
C
You don't care?
- [70:25]
A
I don't care.
- [70:26]
C
Because you do the A of 11 labs for 350k, you'll make a fuck ton of money.
- [70:30]
A
Sure, I did the precede.
- [70:31]
C
No, again, no need to brag me. It's okay, I got you pre. Pre seed.
- [70:39]
A
No, but I think like at some point, like unit economics, like, also matters, but also like, I think it's important to stay within your lane as well. Right. Like, I get a lot of like A's and amazing companies is. I just, it just know my area of expertise as a fund investor. And that's not what. I'm going to have a lot of fun as a, as an investor, is it not? Not. Not for me. I love like the scrappiness. I love the crazy ideas. I love the companies. Like the founders are like, no one to. No one wants to back them. I like those ones. I love things that are like, not obvious. We just did a deal together and it wasn't. I mean, for me it was very obvious. For your team it was like Kira. And for you it was like pretty obvious. But I also talked to a lot of other VCs and they were like, no. They're like, how is this a no for you? I don't understand it. Those are the things that I really like.
- [71:25]
C
My favorite though is that when we did it, then they had 10 people call and be like, by the way, super interested to speak about the round.
- [71:30]
A
Did you know that happens a lot?
- [71:32]
C
No shit, that happens a lot.
- [71:33]
A
Oh, wait, so you were not interesting a week ago and now that you know that Tony VC and Baobab are doing it, then you're interested? No, thank you.
- [71:40]
C
I totally agree with you. Unit econ. Does it matter? Early, you said there it does A lot of the time with AI companies, it's like inverted. And actually if you're unit econ's good, it almost means that no one's using your product.
- [71:52]
A
I don't think it matters. In the early days, I think it's more about how do you get speed. But if you're building an entire brand new market from scratch, I think you have a power of deciding the pricing and that pricing will help you a lot. In terms of unit economics. The key item is are you building something from scratch? And if so, then you have pricing power. If you're not and you're only looking at building something that other people already have, then you're going to get screwed. And then you will have to figure out how to actually go deeper to be able to charge more.
- [72:18]
C
What's your single biggest advice for me? Pretend I'm an operator at a company. I'm head of sales, I'm a head of product. I had a growth. Any of the coveted people that you're born on a cap table. And I'm like, I'm thinking about doing more investing. What would your advice to me be? Having done all that you've done, be helpful.
- [72:35]
A
Like the money that you're investing is not worth it. Like, I mean it's just not worth anything for any company. Like if you put like a 5k check or you put a 10k check or you put like a 50k, it's not going to make or break the company. And you need to be very clear that like in your mind that that's not the case.
- [72:48]
C
One of the most common ways companies need your help, what's the number one
- [72:51]
A
way go to market? Hiring people.
- [72:53]
C
Getting hiring. Sales. Hiring sales.
- [72:55]
A
Hiring. For me, like I go into customer calls with my portfolio companies and absolutely love it. I do intros for them. I asked them to send me their decks, their pitch record themselves pitching and I give them feedback. And I love it because then I can figure out essentially how potentially we can change it. Are we in the right market? Are we not? Are we getting the right traction or not? I absolutely love it. And I think that you can be helpful with your portfolio companies in your own way. Just forget about the money. Do small checks. It doesn't really matter.
- [73:22]
C
I always say do the same size check every time. Do not do the whole, oh, I think this one's great. I'll put 50. This one, I'm not sure I'll do 10. It's like, no, no, just do 25 every time.
- [73:32]
A
Whatever it is, I think there's like different variations and methods. I've not done it in my life. Essentially, as my wealth kept increasing, then fundamentally I started doing bigger checks. And that's okay, but. And you know, like sometimes of Course we fool ourselves saying this is the company. And you know how the majority of times that we do it, like, you end up getting disappointed. We get disappointed, but also like, we would do it again.
- [73:55]
C
What's your biggest investing mistake?
- [73:57]
A
Like, I've done a few investments where I was convinced on the market, I was convinced on the founders, but I did not check how hungry they were to actually do go to market. I ended up finding out that, yes, they were very hungry to build product to execute, but they were not hungry and actually iterate on the go to market.
- [74:15]
C
How do you test hunger on go to market specifically?
- [74:18]
A
I think it's very difficult. I think for me it's like if in the first conversation I want to understand how are they thinking about go to market already? And if they tell me like, sorry, I'm just like, I'm only thinking about like building research and doing all of these things, like, fantastic. I love your product. This is great. It's fantastic. Your mindset, your ideas, it's just not for me because then you're going to be fighting with them for like go to market. And I have a bunch of my portfolio companies that actually are like that and it's great. Don't get me wrong, they're doing super well and I love them and I'm as helpful as I can. But at some point the party ends and if the music ends and you're stuck without having a product product, when you're monetizing it and you're stuck with the idea that we can always make more money later on, then you're going to get fucked.
- [74:58]
C
You can invest all of your money into one company that you've bat. Which company can't be Elevenlabs?
- [75:03]
A
Elevenlabs for sure.
- [75:04]
C
Obviously it can't be.
- [75:06]
A
Okay, it cannot be 11. It cannot be the rebels. Yeah, I love that. There's a company in Spain called Teke Robotics. T H E K E R They're doing robotics for the manufacturing industry and warehouses and all of that stuff.
- [75:19]
C
Stuff.
- [75:19]
A
Absolutely the most geniuses guys that I've seen in robotics space ever. Like, amazing. I would just dump all of my money in there.
- [75:27]
C
How quickly do you think, you know, a company is good? Was it obvious? Very quickly that 11.
- [75:32]
A
Yeah, yes, yes, 11. I mean, like I talked to Matti for 30 minutes and I committed, right?
- [75:36]
C
Because like, for me, like, you know, one of my best from Farm one, I think was linear. Well, like, yes, I know Sequoia and very early and it all looked great, but it wasn't what it is. Today, for a couple of years, actually. It was a bit of a slow burner. Do you believe in slow burners anymore?
- [75:53]
A
Yes, that's absolutely fine. Not everyone learns at the same pace. Not everyone's market grows at the same pace, and I think that's okay. Life is not perfect. Why do we want to have perfect companies in our portfolio? No, let's do the tough things. Always. I think the reality is, for my LPs, I always told them, guys, we're going to get it right and we're getting it wrong. Like, and that's okay. Like, if I. If I invest in a founder that, like, it doesn't work out and the founder wants to do another company, I believe the first time, why not to do it the second time? Literally, like, you are, like, trying to fall in the same place multiple times. Yes, and I will, because I believe in people and I believe in, like, that they can do something that they can do. Like, learn from those mistakes and execute and move quicker and quicker and quicker. I think that's okay.
- [76:36]
C
I'd love to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
- [76:40]
A
Okay.
- [76:41]
C
The reason I look kind of dazed and confused there is. I was trying to remember this brilliant quote, and it's like, what would you need to achieve to be happy in 2026?
- [76:49]
A
Oh. I mean, for me, like, if I get three unicorns and 11 labs crosses a billion dollars in revenues, I will be very happy.
- [76:56]
C
Wow.
- [76:56]
A
Three unicorns for the fund. I would be very happy.
- [76:58]
C
What's the single hardest thing for you today?
- [77:01]
A
Time. It's like, it's.
- [77:03]
C
That's not an answer.
- [77:04]
A
It is like, I love you, dear.
- [77:05]
C
It's not.
- [77:06]
A
It is like. It is. I don't have the time and I. This is like, a job.
- [77:10]
C
I work too hard.
- [77:11]
A
No, no, no, no, no, no, it is not. And the problem is, like, if you don't have enough time for certain things, then you're sacrificing, like, your partner, your friends, all of that stuff. And that's the hardest thing for me. Like, it's. I choose to actually work, like, the amount of hours that I work and work for 11 labs and work for my fund and for my LPs. But there is a choice. And then you're choosing to do things. Putting aside all the things that are also equally important.
- [77:34]
C
What's your escape?
- [77:36]
A
Plants. Like, like, gardening. I absolutely love it. I talk to my plants. I have so many plants at the time, I water them. I like, I take, like, Small scissors and I chop them like, it's so nice. I really like it. And that's when I'm really stressed and I don't understand like how to fix a thing. Then I start essentially, like spend an hour or two hours like looking after my plants. I can like spend time like looking at them and not doing anything, just talking to them. That gives me back energy. Very, very strange.
- [78:06]
C
No, no, there's no such thing as strange. I think we all need to be a bit more strange. What is the thing that makes Matti so good?
- [78:13]
A
What makes him so good is I think his ability of listening to people and then making a decision regardless of whether he gets it right or wrong. And he will acknowledge if he got something wrong and then change it immediately. And I think that's what I really value because you get CEOs that will tell you most of the times I need to get it right and then make some mistakes in there. And for me it's actually the opposite. You should be always getting it right or 99% right in 5% of the things that are really mega important. In the 95% remaining things, you should be getting it mostly wrong. I think that's what Matt is trying to do and he's very successful at that. Allowing people to experiment and get it wrong and then push back, but also run with their ideas. And if there is a thing that he believes it is fundamentally it needs to happen in a specific way, he will say it and he will live it and everyone needs to be aligned. And he has that ability of like combining both things in different moments in time. And it works really well. We've seen it at the level apps.
- [79:11]
C
Final one for you. What are you most excited about when you look forward to the next 24 months?
- [79:16]
A
I am actually looking forward to the next wave of foundational model companies. I believe that there is a brand new wall of opportunities that we are unlocking or that is going to be unlocked with a new wave.
- [79:26]
C
Whoa, wait.
- [79:26]
B
When you look at the next generation
- [79:28]
A
of OpenAI, next generation of OpenAI, but I actually think OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and 11 Labs will end up buying all of the new foundational model companies that will will be popping up and creating research and paying just like a few billion here, a few billion there and just swapping them in. But I think like it's actually, would
- [79:43]
C
you rather buy OpenAI at 830 or Anthropic at 500?
- [79:47]
A
Anthropic. And I've put it online like multiple times. I Think like, I love OpenAI. Don't get me wrong, they're amazing. Pushing the boundaries, but I really like,
- [79:55]
C
how do you think they are still?
- [79:57]
A
I think they're still, like, pushing it and I think that they're trying to do things, like good things for the world, but they were spread too thin. And I think it's the problem. Like, even us at 11 labs, we're facing. And anthropic is facing, everyone is facing. Like, then when you start being very successful, you want to do too many things and then you end up, like, getting too stretched and then not doing anything correctly. Right. It's like, how do you do it less and then doing it really well.
- [80:20]
C
But do you not think that it's been stretched too thin for too long and the anthropic acceleration has been too great? Yes.
- [80:26]
A
They need to start from scratch. And for me, the key item is the, like, how do they start building the experimentation? Thinking, like, yes, we're still number one, we make all of this money, but at the same time, like, let's go back to the basics.
- [80:37]
C
What do you use?
- [80:38]
A
Anthropic? I use Claude and I'm very happy. Like, Claude is my best friend. Like, it's actually true. I use it all.
- [80:45]
B
What do you.
- [80:46]
C
Personal and everything.
- [80:47]
A
Personal, like, fund 11 labs, everything.
- [80:50]
C
Biggest advice to someone who hasn't got it set up, who needs to.
- [80:54]
A
Oh, probably I'm the worst one of all of them. But, like, I mean, I like the cloth skills, for instance, and all of that. Like, like, it's really amazing. But I see some of my, like, team members and they're like, they've just nailed it. I'm just like an amateur. They're professionals at all of this and I would love to actually be like, you know what? Fuck all of this. I'm going away for an entire month and I'm going to be a pro at all of this stuff. I would love to do it and hopefully one day happens.
- [81:17]
C
Dude, I've so enjoyed this. Thank you so much for putting up with me. You've been fantastic. And I actually preferred the second time, if I can say that.
- [81:25]
A
Really?
- [81:25]
B
Yeah.
- [81:26]
A
Nice. Good.
- [81:28]
B
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. So 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. ROX 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 rox@rox.com signup 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. Well that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented CM 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 foster 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@monaco.com while Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your.com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise grade no code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel. To move faster, designers and marketers can fully own the site with real time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A B testing. So you're not just shipping pages but you're maximizing what works and when you're ready to ship changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, hosting, enterprise grade security and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages or migrateyourfull.com framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free today@framer.com 20VC for 30% off 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com 20VC for 30 percent off framer.com 20VC rules and restrictions may apply.