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

Summary

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): 20Sales with Carles Reina – Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine

Date: February 14, 2026
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Carles Reina, VP of Sales, ElevenLabs

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Episode Overview

In this fast-paced and deeply tactical episode, Harry Stebbings sits down with Carles Reina, the VP of Sales at explosive AI startup ElevenLabs, to dissect the DNA behind their $330M ARR sales machine. Carles is candid, unapologetic, and pulls no punches as he lays out his extreme standards for sales leaders, controversial beliefs on PLG, product market fit, sales compensation, hiring, outbound culture, and more.

This episode is a masterclass on ruthlessly efficient sales execution for founder-led sales teams and sales leaders scaling from zero to hypergrowth – brimming with concrete frameworks, quotable moments, and hard-won lessons.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. From Product to Sales: Carles’ Journey and Motivation

• Background: Carles has a cross-functional foundation, previously serving as VP of Operations and VP of Product before transitioning to Sales.
• Realization: He was drawn by observing sales teams and believing he could do better ([05:02]).
• Startup Mentality: “When you work in a startup in the early days, nothing really matters. The only thing that you care about is how do you get to the next milestone.” ([05:10])

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2. Getting Involved with ElevenLabs

• Early Investor: Carles invested $20k at a $5M valuation, now worth a reported $800k–$16M ([07:07]).
• Joining Full-time: After a brief company offsite, he joined pre-revenue as VP of Sales to design the enterprise GTM function and compensation milestones ([08:26]).
  • Notable quote: “You tell me. I’ve done it before. I know the space… I’m 100% in.” ([08:10])

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3. Compensation and Sales Culture (“20x Club”)

• Extreme Expectations:
  • “We ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. That’s your quota... If you don’t achieve your quota, then you’re going to be out. And we are ruthless on that end.” ([00:00], [20:39])
  • Over 80% of reps hit these stretch targets, unlocking generous accelerators ([20:51]).
• Comp Plans:
  • AE: 5% up to 100% quota, 7.5% from 100-150%, and 10% above 150% ([44:09]).
  • AEs and CSMs BOTH compensated for upsells in first 12 months ([21:10]).
• Organizational Design: Prefers small high-output teams over bloated headcount; over-performers are celebrated.

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4. Outbounds, Land & Expand, and Dismissing “Product-Market Fit” Dogma

• Outbound is King:
  • Goal is at least 50% of pipeline as outbound; currently at 40%.
  • “The best way to learn is by doing outbound… If at some point the pipeline dries up, you essentially end up dying.” ([37:13])
• Cultural Drive:
  • Public scoreboard of outbound activities; “I call people out...and if at some point I call you out too many times, then we’re going to have a problem.” ([37:56])
• Product-Market Fit is Overstated:
  • “I don’t believe in product-market fit until in one single ICP, you’ve made more than $10 million.” ([10:34])
  • Constant experimentation with verticals and buyer personas.

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5. PLG to Enterprise: Not Order Takers

• PLG as Lead Generation:

  • 90% inbound leads are bad fits, but patterns help hone outbound targeting ([10:09]).

  • “I was doing 50–60 calls a week...within 30 minutes I knew if they were qualified.”
• Early Days Sales:
  • Closed first contract within 2 weeks at ElevenLabs.
  • “We were signing enterprise contracts with Gmail accounts.” ([13:03])
  • Built deep relationships with first customers, leading to long-term value.

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6. Sales Team Structure, Meetings, and Remote-First Philosophy

• Remote & Ruthless:
  • “When I see my sales team in the office multiple days, I start getting worried because...if you’re a salesperson, you need to be on the road.” ([26:29])
  • “Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told.” ([00:00], [29:53])
• Meetings:
  • Intense monthly pipeline reviews done in public (not 1:1); feedback given bluntly.
  • “You need to shame them. If someone hasn’t done their job, they haven’t done their job.” ([29:41])
  • At scale, meetings are regional/sub-team but principles hold ([40:25]).

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7. Hiring & Onboarding: Speed, Culture, and Mistakes

• Hiring Playbook: “Bring someone in before playbook is perfect. Iterate fast.” ([46:56])
• Early Sales Hires:
  • Don’t over-hire; train first 2–3 intensely.
  • “When you join ElevenLabs, you need to have signed your first contract within first two weeks.” ([49:39])
• Onboarding: Shadow Carles in live calls, learn by doing, forced to make mistakes and build muscle memory ([53:12]).
• Type of Salespeople:
  • “You’re not doing sales, you’re building a community... The only thing that actually drives value [is] care about your customers.” ([54:58])

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8. Land and Expand: Upsell Accountability

• Separate AEs & CS, But Both Incentivized on Upsell:
  • “Customer Success is responsible for upselling… but [AE] still must prospect new teams in the account and gets paid if expansion happens in first 12 months.” ([19:23])
• Lessons:
  • Always go outbound after an inbound land, cross-sell internally to maximize NRR/GRR ([18:26]).
  • Early mistake: waited too long to hire CS, led to chaos at scale ([41:28]).

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9. Forecasting, Board Communication, and Pipeline Discipline

• Be Pessimistic: “Always underestimate pipeline… If you think it’s $500k, write $24k.” ([35:06])
• Pipeline Reviews:
  • Live, in front of peers—everyone expected to know details of every deal.
  • “If they improve… I know I gave you a lot of crap last month, you’ve done fantastically well now.” ([25:12])

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10. Outbound Channels, Global Variants, and Tools

• Tactics:
  • Lemlist for sequencing; LinkedIn for outreach; cold calling still works in some markets.
  • WhatsApp is king in Latam/India ([38:59]).

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11. Mindset, CEO-Investor-Sales Leader Interplay

• Carles on Pressure & Success:
  • “My insecurity? That I might not be able to get to the end of the quarter for the number that I wanted.” ([69:16])
• Management Philosophy:
  • “No one gets fired for making mistakes. Experimentation is our superpower. You just need one thing to work for another $100M in revenue.” ([59:05])
• On Being Operator & Investor:
  • “Being a good salesperson makes you a better investor, not the other way around. You can qualify better.” ([64:21])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

All timestamps in MM:SS format.

• On Ruthless Targets:
  “We ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. That’s your quota...If you don’t achieve your quota, then you’re going to be out. Right. And we are ruthless on that end.”
  (Carlos, 00:00 / 20:39)

• On What Makes Great Salespeople:
  “There’s this hunter mentality—being hungry, super driven, passionate and so on...You get it straight away or you don’t get it.”
  (Carlos, 52:16)

• On Product-Market Fit:
  “I don’t believe in product-market fit until in one single ICP, you’ve made more than $10 million.”
  (Carlos, 10:34)

• On Criticism & Public Accountability:
  “You need to shame them. If someone hasn’t done their job, they haven’t done their job. And you need to actually publicly tell them.”
  (Carlos, 29:41)

• On the CEO/Founder Role in Sales:
  “A good leader needs to be a good outbounder. For me, a VC is just a glorified SDR or BDR.”
  (Carlos, 32:38)

• On Community over Transactional Sales:
  “You’re not doing sales, you’re building a community...No one wants to be sold anything.”
  (Carlos, 54:58)

• On Culture and Fear:
  “11 Labs is not the easiest company to work for...you’re going to be working a lot. I’m going to have very high expectations...If you’re not ready, absolutely fine, don’t join us.”
  (Carlos, 54:22)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• 00:00 — Carles on the 20x sales quota and culture
• 05:00 — Journey from product/operations to sales
• 08:28 — Joining ElevenLabs at $0 revenue, building GTM from scratch
• 10:09 — PLG as lead gen, not enterprise sales; first deals with Gmail addresses
• 12:01 — Vertical vs horizontal focus in early GTM
• 16:36 — What ACV justifies rep-led sales?
• 18:26 — Land and expand mechanics, who owns expansion
• 20:39 — Comp plans and “20x” club
• 26:29 — Remote vs. in-office; reps should be on the road
• 29:41 — Pipeline reviews, public feedback, shaming vs. motivation
• 35:06 — Pessimistic forecasting and board comms
• 38:59 — Outbound tactics: Lemlist, LinkedIn, cold call, WhatsApp
• 41:28 — Right time to hire customer success
• 44:09 — AE commission/accelerator model
• 46:56 — Don't wait for sales playbook; hire leaders earlier
• 49:39 — First contract by week two for new reps
• 53:12 — Onboarding: shadowing, live pitching, making mistakes
• 59:05 — Culture of experimentation, making mistakes
• 64:21 — Operator vs. investor – why sales background trumps investing for qualification

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Memorable Final Advice

“Constantly outbound people. Spend time with the team. Spend time with your customers. Treat them as a community, not as a transactional sale...The only way to be a better sales leader and get to your sales target is fundamentally going through the pain yourself every single day.”
– Carlos Reina, 70:43

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Summary Takeaways for Listeners

This episode is a whirlwind of actionable advice, ruthless honesty, and modern sales leadership. If you’re scaling SaaS (especially in AI), let Carles’ approach challenge your assumptions: stretch your targets, experiment constantly, get on the road, hold yourself and your team brutally accountable, and never mistake pipeline for product market fit. Outbound is king, sales is about community, and speed trumps playbooks.

If you only act on one thing: Get in front of more customers—relentlessly and with honesty—and hold your team to the highest bar, always.

Transcript

[Carlos Rayner]

We ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. That's your quota, Right? So if I pay you 100k a year, your quota is $2 million. If you don't achieve your quota, then you're going to be out. Right? And we are ruthless on that end. When I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road. When you join 11 labs, you need to have signed your first contract within first two weeks. Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time and they need to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Be told, this is 20 sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now stay. We have the best 20 sales episode that ever done. Carlos Rayner is the VP of Sales at 11 Labs where he has scaled the revenue or to over $330 million in just three years. He's also a phenomenal investor with investments in the likes of Revolut, Happy Robot, Nothing and more. This was probably one of the most granular but also insightful sales episodes we've done. Carlos does not pull any punches. Get your notebooks out. This was one of my favorites to record. 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 their 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 [e-mail] 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. 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 [e-mail] 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, 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 [e-mail] 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.

[Carlos Rayner]

You have now arrived at your destination.

[Harry Stebbings]

Carlos, it is fantastic to have you on the show, dude. I've heard so many good things, mostly from Matti. But thank you so much for joining me today man.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

I want to start with you were VP of Product back in the early days and now in the sales world that is a big transition. How do you think about moving from.

Product to sales and what have been.

Your biggest lessons when you reflect on that?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

When did you realize you loved sales?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Was there a moment there where you're like, this is what I'm destined to do. I'm a sales leader.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah. So when, like, there was a company that came out of EF called Synantic that was doing AI voices back in the early days, so ended up building the entire go to market site for them. And that's when I realized, like, okay, this is what I want to be doing going forward. But then one of my friends, like Felipe from Job and Talent, called me one day saying, hey, like, I want to rebuild the entire product stack. Would you join me? There's going to be a very good challenge. I was like, okay, fine, let's do it. And then that's when I changed. But I realized, like, product, I love it. I did it for a year and a half. It was fantastic. Like, I built the entire product that, like, now they pivoted to that product and it's doing super well. But I realized, like, I want to be talking to customers all the time. I want to actually sell them. Like, the rush that you get when you close a deal is insane. It's insane and I absolutely love it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Tell me, how did you first come to meet Mattie? Because you invested as well. You're like first round investor.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yes. At 5 million valuation. Precede. So I met Matti through a common friend, Paolo. We used to work together at Tractable AI back in the day. He messaged me one day being like, hey, I have this friend. We used to work together at blackrock. He's thinking about something about AI voices and so on. Have no idea. But you've been in that space. Do you want to talk to him? I was like, absolutely. And then that's when I met Matti. And within 30 minutes of the first conversation, I was like, I'm Olin. How much money do you want? And I will introduce you to my friends. And that was pretty Much it.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much did you put in?

[Carlos Rayner]

I put in 20k.

[Harry Stebbings]

20K?

[Carlos Rayner]

Yes.

[Harry Stebbings]

Have you kept it all?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

What is 20k worth now?

[Carlos Rayner]

It's probably like. It's like 800k in returns, so that's probably like, what, 16 million? Something like that. Not bad, but you've done much better, so.

[Harry Stebbings]

No, I haven't had that multiple. I haven't had that multiple. That is fucking phenomenal.

[Carlos Rayner]

It's good, but it's been good.

[Harry Stebbings]

When was that moment when you're like, holy shit, I've just got to join this rocket ship?

[Carlos Rayner]

I've always been willing to actually leave everything and join one of my portfolio companies. One of my key things is I would not invest in a company If I'm not 100% convinced. If there is a time that I need to join, I will join them. I think 11 Labs was one of those ones. They were the first off site that we were doing it was in Portugal and then Matti called me one day saying, we're doing this. Do you want to join us? It will be great to have you there. And we're doing it in one of our investors houses in Portugal. And then I went there, literally like for 24 hours, met the team and towards the end of the mini offside, Matthew was like, well, maybe we should talk about you joining us. And then that's when we started talking. I was like, I'm all in. Like, you tell me. I've done it before. I know the space because we sold Solantic to Spotify. So I knew the type of customers, the pitch, the way of doing it, like, I'm 100% in. And I kind of felt inside of me like there was like something that was not fully closed in the AI Voices space. And it was like it was absolutely no brainer for me to join 11.

[Harry Stebbings]

What revenue were you at when you joined?

[Carlos Rayner]

Zero.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're zero?

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah. Like, we had like the company launched, like, literally a week before I joined. So we launched at the end of January 2023, and then within a month or so we had over a million users.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so for you it was like, hey, you need to build out the sales team. What was Matty's job description for you? That you have to do objective role number one.

[Carlos Rayner]

So the idea was to actually build the entire enterprise side and that's how we timed it, the entire go to market. But the company ended up growing so quickly that we ended up Switching it, that was like being, let's do it on the enterprise side. And the way we put it, it was like, now you think it makes sense. But the compensation was based on milestones. And essentially we ended up deciding together with Mati and Piot, like, okay, if we reach a certain level of revenues within 24 months, then my equity compensation goes up. So I unlock additional portion of equity. And to the point I was like, it seemed like so silly, the number that we had put in there.

[Harry Stebbings]

What number did you put in there?

[Carlos Rayner]

It was a very silly number, like very high. But it seemed so silly that Matti even told me, okay, so what we'll do is we will put a check in at 12 months mark. So whatever you've accrued up until that point will just give you the proportional basis. It was so funny because we hit that revenue milestone within less than 12 months of actually, like starting everything. But actually back in the day, when we were thinking about it, like we were negotiating, it seemed like no one had done that. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you are with the GTM that you have, it's a PLG motion, Largely, yes. Are you not just an order taker? As an enterprise sales team, can you help me understand how to think through how PLG converts successfully to enterprise without it being an order taker?

[Carlos Rayner]

So the way we did it is like the PLG motion gave us a ton of like volume of leads, which 90 plus percent of those were extremely bad. But the interesting portion is you started seeing some patterns where people were finding interest and where you would essentially were having meaningful conversation. So that for me was instrumental to understand later on and building name, account list and going after specific accounts from an algorithm basis because I was seeing some level of traction and investors were telling us, God, you have product market fit because you're doing all of these millions. And I was telling them, no, no, no, no, we don't have it. I, I don't believe in product market fit until in one single ICP, you've made more than $10 million. You keep experimenting and you build a list and then one week you tackle a specific Persona and another week you tackle a completely different vertical to actually understand what moves quicker, what is the pitch that actually resonates better and so on. That's how we essentially started doing it. I remember the first two deals that we did within 30 days of launching the first product. It was like a company that was doing a chatbot based in Germany. They paid us $12,000 and we thought, like, this is super good, like we could start Doing things. Second company was a media company that was doing automated radio stations that we sign a two year deal, $36,000 per year. Like those two comers, we still have them as customers. They've skyrocketed in value, both of them. But like that was only the beginning. It's like, okay, we can start doing it. We know how to actually generate this motion. Now we need to go much deeper.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you advise founders then in the early days when they're in this kind of, again, we have so many founders at this and kind of pens and paper when they're looking at it and going, do I go horizontal and.

That everyone try it and really kind.

Of let the market decide or do we go very vertically focused and go, okay, chat bots, we've got one customer, let's just put all the sales team on all the chat bot partners. How do you advise founders on which one's the right one?

[Carlos Rayner]

Depends on the product that you're building, right? If you're building something in the healthcare space, it's an absolute no brainer. You need to actually go to health care. But you can still take a very broad approach within the health care space, right? So you can actually target hospitals, you can target like clinics, you know, bigger ones and smaller ones. You can target like practitioners, you can target like across the entire spectrum of your vertical, target as many people as possible. Because truly you might have a guess or like, you might have an intuition of like what's going to be performing. But the best companies in reality started in one end and like winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting, right? So if you can target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn't resonate, how quickly they're moving. And essentially then you can fine tune your pitch and your name, account list in that area.

[Harry Stebbings]

If we go back to the outbound element on the leads that we have, what did we look for that suggested a great lead that was a qualified lead that we would go after? Was it the fact that they had an email extension that was Accenture.com or whatever that was and it was a company name, Was it usage patterns? What was it?

[Carlos Rayner]

Nothing at all. It was so random. I had absolutely no idea. In the early days we were signing enterprise contracts with Gmail accounts. So we remember this is early days of ChatGPT. People were building applications left and right and thinking I might need to add some voice here or there, even if it's for some dubbing or for voicing. Some of the narrations and all of that stuff. The reality is there will be all of these developers, single developer shops using a Gmail account saying well, I want to add voice but your self service plans are not enough because they have like some limitations, some caps and essentially I would need all of these additional things. I was like, okay, fantastic, then enterprise is the right path, we'll customize it for you, blah blah, blah. And what I used to do is like it got to a point where like I was doing like 30 minutes calls and I would do maybe like 50, 60 calls in a single week back to back and I would tell them like within 30 minutes I knew if they were the qualified or not. I knew they were interested if they could move quickly. So what I would do is like I would set up a trial. By the end of the day I will commit on the call, on the spot being by the end of the day you will have heard from me, I will set up your trial, you will have access to the contract so you can start reviewing it. And if you need anything, just pay me at any time. And this is my WhatsApp. What you end up creating is like this dynamic that like you would end up building a very close relationship with those companies. They will message you on WhatsApp and even up today if one of those like very early ones have an issue, they message me on WhatsApp and essentially we try to fix it, right? But like that is the type of relations you want to be building with your first customers because essentially they will be there for you forever. They're not going to switch away because we have such a good personal relation that it's an absolute no brainer.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just if we go through that questions to ask, which really clearly showed that they were a great high quality lead in those 30 minutes. If you were to advise me, I'm a technical founder, imagine I'm massy dude, how do I know if they're a good lead? What questions do I ask?

[Carlos Rayner]

For me it's like slightly different from what the traditional sales methods are, right? But I want to know like what are you building and what is your vision for your company? How are you thinking about like the entire market that you operate and essentially who are you? Are you technical? Are you not technical? What are you going to be doing with like the product in general? Do you need to involve a lot of other people or not? Right. For me those are the core questions in the early days, specifically on developer economy or like if you're targeting developers that tell me if you are ready to actually buy this. You're only playing a little bit to understand whether it makes sense or not or how hard things are going to be playing. Because if you think about it, different markets have different type of profiles. In the US you need to be very direct and it's a lot more aggressive sales in nature. In Europe, we're always in the middle. But if you go to Latam or if you go to India, people don't have an incentive to actually tell you no. So you end up getting stuck. If you don't qualify, well, you end up getting stuck in endless loops of trials, chaser emails and so on of people that for a cultural perspective, they're not going to tell you no, but they're not going to buy. Every single market has a lot of variations. And because I've actually built all of them across the world for 11 labs, I know all of the details for all of those pieces. So if you tell me, okay, I'm building a company in Mexico City, then I can tell you like, these are the core items that I would like to understand from a qualification perspective in the first few minutes.

[Harry Stebbings]

What ACV does it make sense to have reps on? And what I mean by that is you said that 50 to 60 calls, is it like 10k a year. You can start to have a rep led approach below that. It's got to be PLG. How do you advise founders on that?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think it's like it needs to be at least $1,000 a month, right? The trick is like how much money do you feel that you can put in your credit card without having to explain anything? Like if you are comfortable putting like $1,000 a month, absolutely fine. Then your threshold should be $2,000. Right? But if like the majority of people putting $1,000 on their credit cards, even if it's like for a business transaction, they still need to explain quite a lot of stuff. So then that's the morning which like they need hand holding, they need convincing, they need to show roi. That's the one that you want to tackle them. Because then you treat it as like plg. Motion with a land and expand is like, don't worry, we'll sort everything, we'll help you. Like $12,000. It is a lot of money. Acknowledge that is a lot of money for them because it is a lot of money. And then work with them on an expansion plan. But if you do it much higher, then I see a lot of founders telling me like, no, no, it needs to be like investors have Been telling me like I need to go proper enterprise and proper enterprise, like six figure deals and so on. I'm always like, forget about it, like it's going to take you months to get that contract done. The beautiful side is like if you sign a $12,000 contract, there is probably one layer of approval maximum, two layers of approval for a bigger company. If you want to sign a six figure deal, this can be like at least three or four layers of approval. If you want to sign a million dollar contract out of the gate, it's going to take you a long time. But if you actually land in a very small deal, then you start expanding it, those approvals have disappeared completely.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are your biggest lessons on how to land and expand successfully? Because I'm in a lot of companies, period. But I'm in a lot of companies where they've landed and they've assumed that they've expanded and they have the cost base ready for the expansion in terms of CS and all that comes with a sales machine. But they stay at the land price and that's a big problem because then the economics just don't work. What are your biggest lessons on how to expand successfully and manage that as a sales leader?

[Carlos Rayner]

So we've had that as well at the 11 labs, like multiple times. Right. There's a portion of the customers that we oversold and then they kept kind of flat. And part of the big effort always is like, how do you find new use cases for them and how do you show them like additional value? So there is like you need to knock on people's doors. Like even if you sign an inbound deal, that is one deal that is inbound. But you should not be thinking that like that is done. It's like, then you need to transform it into like an outbound opportunity as well. And then to do it outbound opportunities, like, okay, now I have an MSA sign with an order form. Let's actually go and outbound every single other team that might be relevant across the entire organization to show them what the capabilities are. Right. That is the only way you actually expand a deal. But not only that, the most important question is how do you retain them forever? Because if there is only one team that uses you, that team at some point might get pissed, someone might pitch them, you lose the deal.

[Harry Stebbings]

Who's responsible for this internally? Is it cs, is it product, Is it sales?

[Carlos Rayner]

Depends how you want to organize it. Some companies call it account management. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you do?

[Carlos Rayner]

We do account execs and customer success. So for Us, once a deal is signed, we transfer it to customer success. Customer success is responsible for the upselling, negotiations, all of that stuff. Now the difference is in the enterprise segment, so very large customers. Right. So name account lists, companies that have over 2,000 employees and things like that. Then for those ones, my request to the account exec is like, your job is not finished. Even if you transfer it to a customer success manager, I still want you to go and upsell and find new opportunities in the account because you're incentivized. And if I'm an account exec, let's be very honest, everyone loves money and making money as an account exec. So your incentive, say you went through hell for the past 60 days to close an enterprise contract. Fantastic. Then that contract is signed. Getting the next team on board is relatively simple because you've actually gone through the actual signing of the contract. So just outbound, open new doors and we would pay you even more commissions because you keep accruing more. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

Help me understand, as a founder, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps first and then second, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps to sell upsell efficiently?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think in reality it's pretty much exactly the same in the sense that what we do at 11 labs, I set up this threshold, which is we ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. That's your quota.

[Harry Stebbings]

Right.

[Carlos Rayner]

So if I pay you 100k a year, your quota is $2 million. That's it. If you don't achieve your quota, then you're going to be out. Right. And we're ruthless on that end. So everyone actually smashes their quota to level ups. I would rather have smaller teams that like smash their quotas and I pay them. Do you hit that quota today is more than 80% hit their quota. Right. And they unlock accelerators and all of that stuff. But the interesting piece, like on the upsell side is we compensate both the account exec and the CSM if the contract is upsold. If we upsell a company within the first 12 months, the account exec continues to accrue quarter retirement and also like commissions. And the CSM is compensated on nrr. So I'm paying double, but I don't care. It makes perfect sense because then I have these two people busting their ass to make sure that they actually can make more money, which is fantastic for me as a company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Totally get that. Again, I just want to pick on some things. You said that, you said that 80% is phenomenal. Given the ambitiousness of 20x, if you're advising me as a founder, is that 20x a good rule of thumb or do you think that's specific to the margin profile of 11 labs?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think the reality is every business will be slightly different depending on the industry you're selling. Right? So what I always tell everyone is let's start with 20x and then you can adjust what I told everyone in the company. The first account execs that I hired was like, guys, I have absolutely no clue if 20x is going to be the right number or not. The standard in size is that you have somewhere on six to seven, maybe eight, maybe 10. Right? That is the standard. I know this is what you are expecting. This is not how we are going to be building a company at the level labs. If you thinking about like doing the same that you've been doing a notion or like all of these places like Salesforce and so on, then you're in the wrong place. So we'll experiment. If we get it wrong, absolutely fine. We'll compensate you correctly. And then essentially we will change the entire composition structure. But if we get it right, which I think it is the right number, this is what we're going to keep. And we've kept this in day one. We've been running with this for the past two and a half years.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of the 20% that don't, what did they get wrong? When you look at that cohort, what do you learn when you're looking at the next hires?

[Carlos Rayner]

So there is two buckets within this 20%, right? One is people that truly don't fit in the company. And what they get wrong is fundamentally they're not product experts. They haven't actually dived deeper enough in the product that actually can understand it. They have the aggressivity to actually go into the market outbound and so on. Those guys, unfortunately, we terminate the contracts, we give them a compensation. So we usually pay anywhere between like two to three months of base salary so that like we tell them like, hey guys, it didn't work out. We do believe that, like you are very strong. It didn't work out. 11 labs. Because the way we do things, but you're going to go somewhere else and when I help you get somewhere else, that's why we're giving you this two or three months compensation severance package and you can do super well. So it's us. It is not you, it is us fundamentally, right? The other percentage of people that don't get into that 80% is people that are building long term pipelines. So I have a guy, for instance, and there's been plenty of them over the past two years. But there's this guy that we hired from aws, mega smart guy, super good. And you look at the core numbers and you're thinking, shit, I should be firing this guy. He's not hitting the quota, he's less than 50% quota. And then any other person would have look at the numbers and be like, this is not a fit. I cannot keep this person, talk to any investors and will tell you fire this person, it's just not a fit. You dive into the numbers and you realize, oh, it's because he went to the proper enterprise cycle and then he's building the most amazing companies you can have in the entire UK region. Wait a second, why would I fire this person when he actually needs a lot more ramp fundamental because it's tackling the difficult, challenging industries. We kept that person and this person absolutely smashed it this year. 200 plus percent quota. So you need to actually differentiate what is it actually? Someone that doesn't fit in the company for a variety of reason and who is actually building a proper pipeline over the long term and they need a little bit more help.

[Harry Stebbings]

I completely disagree with the notion that because someone's selling to large enterprise, you can't tell whether they're good or not for a much longer period of time. I think like you did that, you look under the hood, you look at the relationships, you look at the conversations, you look at the interactions, you look where they're at, you get a good enough feel of how close it is. Yeah.

[Carlos Rayner]

And what I do is like with the team and we do it like we have quite a lot of people in the go to market side, like globally we have about 90 people or something like that. But what I do is I have sessions every single month with my account Execs and my CSMs where we go deep into the pipeline. It's like it's pipeline review sessions and I drill them on absolutely every single detail and we do it in front of everyone. Right. So if someone hasn't been building the proper pipeline and I do see the numbers and I do say it, I will tell it in front of them like you have not done a good job, like you're actually slacking, you're doing this, this, this, or I will tell them like you're actually lucky. Like in the past like month you hit your numbers because of pure luck, next month you're not going to hit them. So you're not in the good spot right now. And if they improve, which the majority of them do the following month, I'm like, I know I gave you a lot of crap last month, you've done fantastically well now. But you need to have that honesty with your team because otherwise, like, what are we doing here? We're trying to build a generational company. You cannot, like do things like the traditional way. You need to do it completely different way.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said there about those meetings with execs and CSMs. Can you actually just take me to them? You do them monthly. Correct.

[Carlos Rayner]

With them monthly.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do them monthly. Do you do them separately with CSMs and execs altogether, CSMs have their own.

[Carlos Rayner]

Meeting and then account execs have a different one. And then in account execs, I split.

[Harry Stebbings]

It by region and they're in person or remote.

[Carlos Rayner]

All remote. There's an interesting thing. I know how some people are about being in an office and all of that stuff. And when I see my sales team in the office multiple days, I start getting worried because if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road. I travel 75% of my time in the past three weeks. I was in San Francisco, I was in Mexico City, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Singapore, in London and I'm heading to Dubai. That is the standard thing. Salespeople need to be on the road talking to their customers. Whether that is in the uk, that is across Europe or that is in Cancun. I do not care. If you are constantly in the office doing virtual meetings only with your customers, you're doing it wrong.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you build a sales culture remotely?

[Carlos Rayner]

By being ruthless. You need to be on top of it. It's like it requires extra time and it requires people to be forced to actually be on the road. It's like we will have multiple touch points. But I don't hire people that are junior, I hire people that are actually autonomous, very energetic, very passionate, will accept a million no's, fundamentally because building sales is tough, Building sales remotely is even tougher and you just need to be on top of it.

[Harry Stebbings]

We're going to get to actually the people, but I do just want to stay on these meetings. We have them separate, we have them remote, we have them monthly. Let's start on the sales team side before we move to the CSMs. What are you expecting them to bring? Should they send pipeline ahead of time with notes? What's that? Prep phase, pre meeting.

[Carlos Rayner]

So they will essentially tell me how much they've closed, how Much it's in the pipeline, how much they're expecting to close in the next 30 days. And essentially we start going to the deals, we talk about the biggest deals and all of that stuff. And then I always look while they're talking, I look at their pipeline and I pull up some random deals so that to understand whether they have a full grasp of what they're talking about. Because sometimes sales teams, they can end up cheating and then having a bigger pipeline that is inflated, but it's not moving and catch them. But for me, the key item that I always tell them is at the end, when they present, I keep interacting with them and giving them feedback and asking questions. But at the end of it, the question is always the same. What are the blockers that you have and how can I help you? And for me, what I do is I build a list of the blockers for each one of them, summarize them later on, and then post it across the entire organization being like, hey, if we solve all of these blockers in Europe, we could be making a lot more money in India. These are the blockers in Spanish Latam. These are the blockers in Middle East. These are the blockers. And then everyone understands, what are we? Where are we? In each one of the regions.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay. And so we have that. And when they come to you and they say something, because I'm on a lot of boards, and very often it's like that one that slipped to next quarter. What do you say when you get reps who say that? And what's the right way to deal with that?

[Carlos Rayner]

I mean, there's always, like, deals that will end up, like, moving towards the next quarter. That's inevitable. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

And you do this, Sorry, by the way, in front of everyone. You don't do it one by one.

[Carlos Rayner]

No, no one has enough time to do it one by one. And I think, like, everyone can benefit from, like, like doing it in front of other people. It's the pressure. It's the fact, like, you. You can give them good, bad feedback. People learn from it. Right. So the learning component is. I think it's important specifically from a sales perspective.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you do that without shaming people? I don't know.

[Carlos Rayner]

You need to shame them. Like, if someone hasn't done their job, they haven't done their job. And you need to actually publicly tell them so that, like, they understand they haven't done their job. And everyone else knows that, like, they're getting shit for it.

[Harry Stebbings]

You don't agree with the praise in public? Criticized in private.

[Carlos Rayner]

No, I don't agree. I think, like, I need to tell you, like, what is right and what is wrong. Of course I'm not going to tell you, like, this is like, fool shit, like, you're going to get fired. I'm not going to say that. But at the same time, I'm not going to hold back on saying if you haven't done a good job. And for instance, there was like a case earlier this year, one of my account execs that I told the person, like, you just were lucky and you've closed these deals just for pure luck, but you haven't done any good job. And then like the next one there was like, it was so funny. Like, there was exactly two people the same case. And then the next one that came in presenting was, I told him, like, you have done exactly the same thing, but you have not been lucky as the previous person and that's why you haven't actually closed anything. Both of them, the following month, absolutely smashed it. Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told. And if they're good at their job, they're going to accept the criticism, learn from it, and then improve.

[Harry Stebbings]

How long are those meetings we end.

[Carlos Rayner]

Up putting usually an hour and a half. And then people have about seven, eight minutes to present. And then it's very, very quick in general, what happens.

[Harry Stebbings]

And this is a hard one because Elevenlabs seemingly just such rocket shit revenue growth. What would you advise? If you would put on a hypothetical hat for it not working so well? What would you advise a sales leader or a CEO who's taking this, who's going to run with this, but the numbers are not up and right. How do I have a meeting like this without feeling like, dejected, demoralized, when numbers aren't up and to the right?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think it just depends on, like, why the numbers not on the, on the right place, right? I think, like, you need to do, understand, like, do the back work first to understand, like, what's happening. Is it because the sales team is not good enough? Is it because the product is not good enough? Is it because we're not being aggressive enough? What is essentially happening here? Because, like, if you don't have a full understanding, then you might be shaming people for the wrong reasons. Right? And the best way of understanding is like, roll up your sleeves and actually pitch customers. I am the SDR in chief in the company, right? Like, I absolutely love it. I actually love outbounding people. I love it. We were like, Matt and I were like in Singapore talking to Razer, like, the laptops company. Absolutely love the brand. And then that came out because, like, I up on the CEO and I messaged him, like, matt and I are going to be in Singapore in a few days. We'd love to actually meet and figure out how we can talk, how we can figure out our partnership. And he replies saying, yes, let's do it. So we end up spending a good hour in their offices, which is fantastic. I do it all the time and then I pass it to the team because I do believe a good leader needs to be a good outbounder. It's interesting that I have this narrative also with BCS. For me, a VC is just a glorified SDR or BDR.

[Harry Stebbings]

100%. And respectfully, why do I bother doing venture when I. Sorry, being blunt, when I can make millions from media? Because of the media, you have the ability to be the best BDR in the world because people will always respond to you when you have a big brand.

[Carlos Rayner]

Exactly.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's why. This is why people like founders. Like, yeah, I love working with. I have quite a few who come in and sit in our office and they just go on LinkedIn with me and we just send cold inmails from mine and I'm literally a BDR. Yeah, yeah, but that's.

[Carlos Rayner]

That's great. But like, to your point, though, I.

[Harry Stebbings]

Feel this rush when I get a response. Yeah, we'd love a call.

That'd be so great. I'm like, yes, I love it.

[Carlos Rayner]

Like, but it's like, as a leader, like, as CEO, like a say, Lila, if you're not doing it, I think you're doing it wrong. Of course, as the company keeps getting bigger, like, no one expects, like, Mati or like any CEO, like, for a very successful company to be doing, like, outbounds. But nevertheless, what you could do is you can prep. So I have team members that will message me saying, could you send an outbound message to this person? I've just drafted it for you. And we do it with Matti as well. We do it with my LinkedIn account and all that stuff. And the response rate that you get is, as you were saying, through the roof.

[Harry Stebbings]

We do on founders, all through my LinkedIn where Paul or Kieran or Alex will do it 100% and they join the call. And that's totally fine. It's good 100%. If you trust in your team to be amazing, it'll be a great experience for everyone.

[Carlos Rayner]

But you need to help a team. What I don't buy is sales leaders that are essentially the leaders. You don't know the pain. You don't know essentially what it is actually your team is suffering. And it goes back to your question. Truly if you go to a meeting and the numbers are not in the right, maybe the problem is you, you don't understand how the sales process happens, the product that your team is selling and the pain points that actually they're going through. So maybe like you need to fix that first.

[Harry Stebbings]

Totally get that. If we just go back to this meeting because so want to kind of extract everything I can from this. Is it just retroactive review or is there any element of forward planning? Do we at the end spend 15 minutes, go. Okay, for the next four weeks we're going to do this. How do we think about that?

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah, so usually is like as part of like the presentation for the account execs, every single one, even in the CSM side, it's like what are they forecasting to actually be closing over the next 30 days as well and what are they going to be doing to actually close them?

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, fantastic. What is your advice to me, a sales leader or CEO who's not as experienced and brilliant as you on the right way to forecast? Is it like be optimistic, be realistic, be negative. How do you advise on that?

[Carlos Rayner]

Be as negative as possible. So I always like advice theme on if we are now setting a deal that is going to be half a million dollars. Fantastic. Just put me that like you're going to be signing it at $24,000. I don't want to put an unrealistic number because if you think it's going to be half a million dollars, the most likelihood is going to be 100k. So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs are incentivized to inflate as much as possible so that it looks better. I don't like that. So let's put the lowest possible number. That's fine, we'll fix it later. But at least we underestimating what it's going to look like. But we do it also for the board. When we put the board X and we tell them, hey, this is the pipelines, this is the contracts, all of that stuff. Like we put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates. And if it inflates the numbers also investors will ask more questions. Be like, hey, by the way, you put me like this account over here that it was going to be a $2 million account, but it seems you sign it at like 100k. What? And it just raises such a, like, a number of like, awkward questions that, like, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense.

[Harry Stebbings]

One of the fastest ways, I think, to create distrust, obviously, when you have investors looking at your company, obviously you share pipe often of what you expect it to be. When we do reference calls, as all investors do with friends who are CEOs of those companies, and like, dude, we'd never spend more than 25k on this. And they've got it in for 250. Fastest way to lose credit.

[Carlos Rayner]

Correct? Correct. And there is another item in there is like, if you always underestimate or undervalue your pipeline, it means that, like, to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline. Like, there is a lot of consequences of all of this. Like, you'll end up working twice as hard because your pipeline is not big enough for the year end number or the quarter end number that you needed. So you just kind of. It's a foreseeing mechanism to have the right culture in place. We went through this, like a cultural change early this year because I actually got obsessed. We were doing the majority of deals, like 90% of the deals were mostly inbounds, right. And as the team keeps growing, I was like getting extremely worried that, like, we were not building the right mentality in the team. It's like if at some point the pipeline dries up, then you essentially end up dying, right? So I put a goal of saying, like, we need to migrate to 50% outbound, 50% inbound by the end of the year. So kept hammering, absolutely everyone. I still put together a report every single week with every single account exec and SDR in the, in the team, telling them, like, you've achieved your target on a weekly basis, you haven't achieved it. And if people don't achieve it, then I call them out. I did it so often that I ended up like, getting like, people make jokes about outbound, outbound, outbounds. Like, I'm the outbound king. Yes. I love it. Like, people and people know that if you are on that list of people that are not doing that outbound, I'm going to call you out. And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we're going to have a problem. Right. It's a cultural thing. And we end up like, migrating from like these 10% outbound sales that we're doing to 40% that we do. Today.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're 40% outbound. Wow. When you say outbound, just to clarify, specifically, this is not picking names from a PLG list. This is direct outbound.

[Carlos Rayner]

Direct outbound, yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wow. What's the primary channel for that? Direct outbound?

[Carlos Rayner]

Most of it. We use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequencing games. Yeah, it's fantastic. Those guys are doing super well. We use LinkedIn and there's a lot of cold calling. The traditional method works, and it depends on the market because she called cool. 100%. Yes. I was in the office yesterday and earlier today, and I had, like, some of my team members actually call calling. I was, like, so happy. I wasn't smiling. Like, I was actually, like, listening to the conversation because, like, I was so happy. I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with the right mentality. But in Latam or in India, cold calling works. But the best method is WhatsApp. It's a different culture in India and latam. They use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need to be in WhatsApp.

[Harry Stebbings]

See, this is why I disagree with you on the remote preference. I get you in terms of needing to be with customers, and I understand that. But I think you learn so much from hearing your friend, who's also in sales, have that message work really well. And you're like, God, I could use that. And his message is much better than mine. And then you see support over in the other corner, and everyone is talking about the same challenges that they're having. And you're like, God, okay, I could actually talk about that as one of the core problems that we solve. And actually, you get so many of the multifunctional benefits from being in the office. But I agree with you. You need to be with customers. It's a nuanced thing, but it's also.

[Carlos Rayner]

The fact that you could be sharing those best practices with the rest of the team and of the bands. As we kept expanding the team, specifically in Europe, for instance, the team has become extremely good at sharing their best practices. You will have one of the account execs saying, I've done this 50 times. This is working super well. And we'll share it in the Slack message being like, guys, you should try it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is that how you do it? How do you create a structure to share best practices?

[Carlos Rayner]

I incentivize everyone. My incentive to everyone is my message is, we need to experiment. Even at this size, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We need to be ahead of the trends. We need to constantly experiment. So if you experiment with messaging, like ways of like talking to customers and so on, just put it with a, with a wider team and then everyone can copy you.

[Harry Stebbings]

When does the sales team become too large for this forum and communication?

[Carlos Rayner]

Never.

[Harry Stebbings]

But I did. If you have 100 sales reps, what you're going to have 700 minute meeting.

[Carlos Rayner]

Fine.

[Harry Stebbings]

You can't.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay. When we move to the CSM side, is there anything different about these meetings? Like what are they expected to bring and what, how did these meetings go?

[Carlos Rayner]

Is exactly the same thing. So we will go through the pipeline and understanding like how many calls they've done. What are the problems with like some of their customers, what is the NRR they're expecting to close and how much upselling and cross selling they're going to be doing.

[Harry Stebbings]

What NRR do you chase?

[Carlos Rayner]

115.

[Harry Stebbings]

115, yes.

[Carlos Rayner]

But which we absolutely smashed the number every single quarter. It's absolutely crazy because we have this line and expand. Line expand works really well if you work closely with your customers and then you end up having a very solid GRR and nrr.

[Harry Stebbings]

What ACV justifies having a CSM and how many accounts are they responsible for?

[Carlos Rayner]

Any value actually works because like literally you need to actually separate it. Right. It's like I want my account execs to actually go hunting, be hungry all the time. Right. So I want them to bring lowers quickly because the market, like anyone can be building a competitor at any point in time extremely quickly. So I have to have like those people that are incentivized to move extremely quickly and then as soon as they've done it, they need to be able to transfer it to someone else. So like CS is like something that you need from the early days as well. We made a mistake at ElevenLabs of bringing CS way too late, way too late. It took us like 15 months from the first contract that we signed to bring customer success. It was massive chaos because the account execs and I was selling a lot back then and I was running these deals and at the same time people would complain like, hey, I have these problems and then I also need to do this. And then I would look at the list of usage every single week. And then outbound and output put a list saying, okay, all of these accounts are ready for upselling because of usage. We need to get in touch with them. All of these other accounts, we should touch base with them. So I was sharing it with the team and at some point it starts breaking. And that's when I realized, shit, we've done it wrong. I should have brought customer success much sooner. Let's bring them. And there was a day and night. Initially account execs wanted to transfer the accounts, but they just didn't really give any level of information. So they were like, it's sign, you deal with it. And then we're like, they get on the customer success guide. We were like, what? Like, I don't even know any background of this account. Like it's a Gmail account, right? Like, how the hell am I going to know who is behind it?

[Harry Stebbings]

John Doe. It could be a few people. I've looked on LinkedIn and it leaves me with 784 profiles in London. I love that. Okay. And so we have that. How do we financially incentivize customer success? Just so I understand that NRR like.

[Carlos Rayner]

Net revenue retention, that's essentially how we do it, right? Of course you could have like once.

[Harry Stebbings]

It'S over 115 exactly, you get compensate.

[Carlos Rayner]

How so we have like bonuses or commission structure that like depend how big it gets. Then essentially you get 2x, 3x, 4x, whatever that is. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

So just so I understand, just because there's going to be so many founders who are like, I love this, but what do I actually do? It's like 2, 3x. What salary, like what the upsell? What are they getting?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you use accelerators to get the most out of sales teams and.

[Carlos Rayner]

Any advice there for account execs? For instance, what we do is like up to 100% of your quota. We pay you 5% commission. So fairly simple. From 100 to 150% quota, we pay you 7.5% commission. And then anything above 150%, we pay you 10% commission. Fairly simple, straightforward. So everyone is incentivized to actually going above 150% to the point that a lot of my account execs. Now we are finalizing the performance reviews for 2025 because we always want to start January with everything fully sorted to the point that some of my account execs will tell me or have been telling me, I don't want an increase in salary. If you're going to increase my salary, then calculate that and put it in equity. Because if you increase my salary, my quota goes up. And then it takes me longer to hit accelerators so I can make a lot more money with a smaller quota hitting the accelerators much sooner. Which is smart. Really smart.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's totally smart. Also tells me that no one's buying fucking houses and mortgages, which isn't fuck you, Rachel Roos, is what I say there. Interesting. It's not very much. I didn't mean that rudely, but like over 150 I get 10%. Shit, mate. So what?

[Carlos Rayner]

It's a lot, dude.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's not much. It's a lot of money compared. If we think about you set me, okay, I'm on 100k and I get 20, 20x, I'm on 2 million. So if I get 3 million, then I get 10%.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

And I get 300k. Yeah. As a bonus.

[Carlos Rayner]

It's fantastic.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is that good for industry?

[Carlos Rayner]

That's fantastic. Think about it. Salespeople used to be the highest paid in any organization. Now it's changed with the researchers and AI, which 100%, they deserve it. But up until the AI revolution that happened three years ago, salespeople were the highest paid.

[Harry Stebbings]

Always. No, I'm aware of that, but I'm just like, God. I thought if you hit 100% of your quota, getting 15 to 20% would be good.

[Carlos Rayner]

No, like that is too much. Otherwise your numbers would never add up. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

When do you advise founders on when to have a customer success team? You said that you waited way too long. Way too long.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

When's our time?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think once you hit like a good like $3, $4 million, then I think it's time to actually bring your fair customer success.

[Harry Stebbings]

Three, four an hour.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay. Got you.

[Carlos Rayner]

So like it makes sense like to have like on upper like csm function like an average of like $4 million in book value. I Think that makes sense? We're super bad on that. So I think like our average book value per csm is about like 8 point something million. Right? So it means that we're massively understaffed. So we're trying to fix it for next year. But ideally four is a good number.

[Harry Stebbings]

On the flip side for sales teams, do you think that you need to wait until you have a sales playbook before you hire a fantastic sales leader like you? Or do you do what Matti did and bring you in with zero revenue?

[Carlos Rayner]

Bring. With zero revenue, Bring someone that is crappy, that wants to iterate, will tell you if things work or things don't work. I think you need that as soon as possible because I think there was this moment in which Matti called me one day, you know what? Going forward, I report to you for sales, you report to me for everything. And that was his way of saying you are supposed to be doing sales. Founder led sales are good, but you hit a rock, you hit a ceiling and just at some point you need to do the transition. So better do the transition now than actually wait another six months because we know what we're selling, we know how we're selling it. You've been doing it all of these months and you get a lot more deals than me.

[Harry Stebbings]

How common is that though that you know what messaging works, you know what channel works, you have a playbook.

[Carlos Rayner]

I think it just depends on like the sales lead that you bring in the organization and how quickly and how willing to experiment they are. Right. And I think like that has a ton of value. If you bring someone sooner, that has the right mentality. Of course, if you bring like someone that has like very like I have my playbook and this is how we're going to be doing it. I always hate it because that playbooks don't work unfortunately. Right. And I think like that that is the key is like if you have someone very early that you can iterate and build trust extremely quickly, then essentially like founder led sales stop making any sense fundamentally because you could be spending a lot more time doing other things. Unless you're a founder that is like really on the sales side. Fantastic. Then just, just keep going. Right. Otherwise you could be spending your time like building the product or doing all the things that are much more important.

[Harry Stebbings]

So you come in and then what's the biggest advice post that in terms of do we just highlight five reps at once and just go hell for leather. How do we think about the right way to sequence hiring in the really early sales days.

[Carlos Rayner]

In the early days, like hire one or two, like don't. Like, don't, don't over hire. Because then if you over hire, fundamentally you're going to be building the wrong culture. People are going to be asking you a lot of questions. You will have like five different people iterating their own playbooks and thinking about their own stuff. What you want to do is you want to give them some guidelines like this is what works, this is what is not working. You can still iterate a lot of what works and what doesn't work and you can make a ton of mistakes. But I don't want five different people going wild and trying to figure out because then essentially no one is going to be closing anything. So better to have you bring the sage leader, someone that is able to actually get their hands dirty and understand what's happening in the business and pitch and go deep and then you bring two more people. Then wait until they're on board it. Like wait a couple of months. You don't have to wait too long, two, three months. Let's make sure they're fully onboarded. Let's make sure that they're starting to sell sell contracts. And internally at the company at 11 Labs, we used to have like this target is like when you join 11 labs, you need to have signed your first contract within first two weeks. Whoa.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's like.

[Carlos Rayner]

And that was a target. That was a target. We got people that even like signed like within like was like 72 hours. They signed the first and enterprise contract. Right. Tiny contract, but I don't care. It doesn't really matter.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you put them on calls straight away? Like you don't want to burn leads.

[Carlos Rayner]

In the early days we used to do it and then they would join my, my meetings and essentially I would tell them like, okay, this is like how we do it on the product side is like the overview. My expectation is like you're going to be spending the next like 24 hours like drilling the entire product and understanding it. And I will ask you to pitch me tomorrow, right? And then I will bring into my calls and then they will see my page, they will see me talk to customers the following day. They would essentially just give me the pitch if I liked it. Then essentially we would just join calls the same day or the following day together. And then they would pitch. I'll be taking a backseat. I'm there to support you if they have any questions. And then within a week they were already fully up and running. And then of course it Was a lot more risky. But hey, we had nothing to lose back there, right? We had to move quickly because the market was crowded.

[Harry Stebbings]

Advise me how can I train my reps most effectively? Is this like, listen to all my gong calls. Go spend time with product, go spend time with customer support. What should I do to train reps most effectively?

[Carlos Rayner]

In the early days? The best thing is they should join calls immediately. They're not going to be talking in those calls, but they should just join absolutely immediately so that they see how other people are doing it. They need to be answering tickets of support questions. They need to essentially be talking to the engineers and then going deep into the product side. Once all of that has passed and you're already making a good amount of money and you claim that you have product market fit claim because you never know, then essentially it's a completely different game, right? Because you want to make sure that your reputation is on the line. You want to have them selling to the proper people. So essentially you end up having join me, then also watch some customer calls through gong and at the same time you need to pitch me, you need to have the certifications and all of that stuff. Then you end up migrating towards much more of a corporation style where then people take a lot longer for two weeks. They have this run period, they understand everything, they meet multiple people and so on. That's like a lot more boring.

[Harry Stebbings]

When was your hiring process broken and what did you learn from that time?

[Carlos Rayner]

So we made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes because like the first ones that I hired on the go to market site, I thought, okay, let's bring someone that like understands a lot more on the product side. I can train them how to excel and then it will be fine. And then it turned out like it just was not working. And like the person was really good on the product side. But like on the sales side there is something that like what's missing in there?

[Harry Stebbings]

And then you teach them that sales.

[Carlos Rayner]

This is a hunter mentality. There's like, like being hungry, like being like super driven, passionate and and so on that you get like straight away or you don't get it. And I think that that was a mistake. Like the person is still with us like doing super well, right? And we always joke with him saying like, hey, like you joined the wrong in the wrong role. But that was the type of profile because like we were selling like we had a lot of like self service companies, we had a lot of inbounds. You were thinking much more like it needs to be product led sales, it needs to be fundamentally thinking about the product and trying to help them navigate and so on. And you realize like, shit. No, no, no, no. These people Already know what 11 labs is, right? Specifically the inbounds. So it's less about the product, more about we need to convince them to sign this fucking contract, right? So that's a completely different profile of people. And then that's when I brought my first two proper account execs that started on the same day and I trained them in parallel and they did super well.

[Harry Stebbings]

What did you do well that you would recommend to everyone else, Having seen.

[Carlos Rayner]

It literally like getting them in calls with me, see me pitch, right? Like, I had done a lot already, like hundreds and hundreds of times. See me page, see me how I was answering calls, see me that, like, I would tell them, customers, like, by the end of day you have all of these things. And then by the end of the day I would send those things. Because the best thing that you have is trust with your customers. It set up the right culture and the right way of operating in the team. That was for me, the most important thing. And then on top of that, then I, then I was keeping like in the loop and like joining their calls randomly. So I would open their calendar and be like, okay, I have a call in 10 minutes, fine. I would join that call. I would just pop up in that call and essentially make them nervous. Because then the worst thing that you have is like your boss joining a call, like, unexpected. So what's going to happen there? And I would just stay quiet and be like, no, no, I'm just here to support. Don't worry. But of course, you could see that they were very nervous, right? And they make a ton of mistakes. So, like, you end up building that muscle memory by forcing people to make mistakes as well.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you worry about having a culture of fear? You said the word ruthless. You are very direct. I love it. I thrive off it. I'm a narcissist and need therapy. Do you worry about having a culture of fear?

[Carlos Rayner]

I don't think the team is scared of me because I think when I hire people, I always tell them this line, which is like, 11 labs is not the easiest company to work for. And that's always what I tell them, is like, you're going to be working a lot. I'm going to have very high expectations. We can have a lot of fun. If you're not ready, absolutely, fine, don't join us. But I want you to know before you accept the role and then it sets the right tone. Some people have told me like, this is not for me and 100% respect it. The majority of people end up saying, I value that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of the successful sales reps that you have, what is the most common background and what backgrounds tend to not work?

[Carlos Rayner]

We've tried all of different backgrounds and it doesn't really matter whether you come from a very pure, massive sales organization like Salesforce or you come from ABC background, it doesn't really matter. It is like, how willing are you to constantly trade, go deep and have this high energy situated with your customers and care about your customers? The only thing that actually drives value. Think about it. You're not doing sales, you're building a community. Whether you're doing levelabs or you're doing Company X, it doesn't really matter. If you think about your customers are pure sales, then you're falling into being a transactional element. Right? No one wants to be sold anything. But if you're building a community that loves your product, that loves your brand, that loves you, like everything that you represent, then sale is much easier.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you build a community?

[Carlos Rayner]

Building a community is like you need to do what is right for them. You need to actually talk to them constantly. Give them your, specifically in the early days, give them your WhatsApp, put them in Slack, it doesn't really matter. Those people need to interact with you constantly. And they need to know that if they need to downscale the commitment, you will accept it. It's fine. You're doing what is right for them, even if that costs you money. And that's a part of the culture. Right? It's like, if I'm only thinking about transactional elements and pure transactions, then no, no, no. I need to sign the highest amount for this company because whatever it is, of course they're going to churn at some point. But exactly the same, like when you are building a company, why would you change that approach? But you do it with your friends. The only difference is like, hey, like the customers are not your friends yet. Some of them will become your friends. And I have like a bunch of customers that end up becoming my friends and I absolutely love it. But you need to build a relationship because no one wants to be sold. Absolutely no one.

[Harry Stebbings]

So funny. I just did a show with one of the best sales leaders ever, John McMahon. He was on the boards of MongoDB, Snowflake Real. It was a CRO of five public companies. Unbelievable. And he said no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And I just thought that was beautiful.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yes.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why should you fire yourself? And it's a really weird question. I would fire myself because definitely we were too slow to video. No shit. That would be my number one. And then I'd say number two, I'm too distracted, not focused enough for me.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies. Are there zero to one person? Oh, there are. Very rare. Is that I'm thinking of Chris Degnan actually at Snowflake. He went from zero to public company. And so he was zero to 4 billion in ARR. Do you think you're full stack?

[Carlos Rayner]

I love the early stage of companies, but still, like, for me it doesn't really matter if you're still enjoying what you're doing. Just keep going. Right. Like life is too short for doing something that you don't enjoy. And I think majority of people are smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life. That's my main motivation. And I've always taken like my job at 11 labs on a monthly basis. Like, if next month I don't enjoy it, I will just like tell Mati I'm not enjoying it. It is time for me to quit and do something else.

[Harry Stebbings]

Really?

[Carlos Rayner]

Yes.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you advise people? Because I would say a month isn't long enough. A month can be a bad part of the market. Can be psychology, whatever. How do you advise people on when the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough job?

[Carlos Rayner]

Of course one month is like the trigger for you to start thinking whether it is or not the right thing. One month is not enough. So if it happens with number of months, two or three months, consecutive months, then you have a problem in there because everyone will start seeing it. So I think if for three months you've been going through this very rough patch that you're not finding motivation, you should just triple check whether you're in the Right place.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is the main reason that ElevenLabs is an efficient machine of a company that no one knows and sees?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

What makes Matti such an incredible CEO?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think it's the fact that he can do both the product side and the customer side. And he's very extrovert in nature and very empathetic with the customers and the rest of the organization. It's actually difficult to find leaders and CEOs that actually can do both things with products and can do the customer side. Sometimes they have this vision on the product side, but they're just lacking the drive to do sales. And Matti will roll up his lips and be like, fuck, I'm gonna be running this sale. Right. It's one of his superpowers in general. You've met him, he comes across extremely personal. You immediately drawn to him. He's a nice guy in general. Right. And as such, when you add up all of these factors, then it's like, it's fantastic leader, fantastic CEO. But like, we have another one which is fundamentally like piot. He's the genius of the company. Right? In the sense, like, he built the entire technology from scratch. We have a very small research team that all of them are actually like walking brains. Like, literally, they're like super, super smart guys. But he's headed by Peter. Like, the company would not exist if it wasn't. Because we built a fantastic technology.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is it almost harder when you become a sexy brand because you have so many people want to join? It becomes a lot noisier.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah, but also the expectation is higher. Right. We hired about 0.18% of people that apply, or 0.018. We had about 180,000 applications in the first six months of the year. There is a lot of imbalance. There is a lot of things that you get, but that doesn't mean that is equivalent to Quality that is equivalent to the type of build that you'll be hiring. Of course, as you become a hot commodity in there, people want to actually work for you, but they want to work for the wrong reasons. Most of it. People will see that, like a step in their career to actually do something else much bigger later on. We try to filter those ones out.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's fucking insane. 180,000. 1, 8.

[Carlos Rayner]

It's insane. And, like, in goes through that. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm being serious.

[Carlos Rayner]

And, like, if I have this, I know in the first half of the year we had, like, what, like, five, six recruiters across the entire organization. Right. They've been doing a fantastic job on that end.

[Harry Stebbings]

And then, like, they're doing996, aren't they? Fucking hell.

Here's a dart room.

Here's 180,000 applications. Go have fun.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

What have you not done? When you reflect back on your time in elevenlabs, that with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had done hiring faster?

[Carlos Rayner]

I think I made a mistake, like, not hiring fast enough when the company did a lot more people in the organization, and I think we've suffered over the years of, like, we. I think I strongly believe we could have grown much quicker if we had hired, like, a lot more people.

[Harry Stebbings]

What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

[Carlos Rayner]

That's a tough one, huh? That's a really tough one. Sometimes. Some of the iterations that we've done on the ICPs have probably been, like, wrong in terms of timing or have been, like, the wrong focus essentially. Right. Or even. I can tell you, like, even on the cross sell side that I had not spent enough time in that specific area. And that meant, like, we end up, like, leaving money at the table. Right. So sometimes you actually need to rethink a little bit. Twice. But I think, like, also, like, when you're growing so quickly, it's difficult to actually not miss stuff. So something that, like, I take, like, that is, like, we've done well sometimes, like, we've not done well in general.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, you've just raised a $15 million fund. Amazing achievement. I also love the name Baobab. And it's because of your love of these trees, right? Yes. Yeah, I read about this. Super sweet. I think Sequoia got that first.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

I'd actually be an LP. If someone wants to start this in a fund called Cactus Capital that only invests in really fucking prickly founders, it's.

Not a bad idea from a brand new perspective.

I bet we prickly founders, I bet.

You would like they obnoxiously prickly.

Like they thrive on the friction.

[Carlos Rayner]

Yes. Yeah, I love it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Does being an investor make you a better sales leader?

[Carlos Rayner]

No, I think like being a good salesperson makes you a better investor.

[Harry Stebbings]

How?

[Carlos Rayner]

Because you are able to qualify better. I think like what we do like from an investor perspective, like these days, of course, like we do outbounds to actually get into the deals that we want and we also do like inbounds reviewing like all of the leads that we get. Right. Like a good sdr, a good account execs does exactly the same thing. The only thing they're missing is there is a sixth sense that we get specifically on the pre seed stage. It's like, is there a good match with the founders? Are they really smart? Can they trade with the product and the company? Are they willing to pivot? Are they willing to actually listen to other people, all of those items? But there is a gut feeling attached to all of that, that a good SDR also has and knows whether running with that opportunity is going to transform into something or an account executive is going to transform into something or they get the gut feeling like this is going to be like, it's not the right person just going to stop at some point. I just don't want to run it from B.C. we do exactly the same thing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude. If being an investor doesn't make you a better sales leader, why does Matty let you do it?

What the fuck? I was expecting to be like, yes, I teed that one up for you to like slam dunk.

And you were like, no. I'm like, okay, well why would he let you do it?

[Carlos Rayner]

I don't know. I kept asking multiple times and I think like, he knows, like I have a passion for it. I have done like as an angel 74 tickets. So I think at some point, when I was annoying enough that he ended up saying, yes, do it. Top three tickets without looking into the order. But Revolut 11 Labs and, I don't know, a company called VSIM, they're doing super well. They're doing training for robots, physics.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you look back at that 74 that you've done, angel, what's your biggest lesson?

[Carlos Rayner]

So I do founders that are very technical. And what I realized, like, is many of the technical founders over the years, they just realized that they don't care about sales. So what I've ended up screening over the past years a lot more is like, are they really good technical founders? And do they also care about sales? Because otherwise you end up, like, stumbling into a wall where you tell them, like, the product is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but we need to start making some money, right? And so they're like, no, no, we don't want to make money. We only want to do research. We only want to build the best product and so on. And you're like, you're going to die as a company. Right? It's so much more difficult to convince them that they also need to start thinking about commercialization of the product. At some point, you end up filtering them out. And I think one of the key areas, you need to actually test for appetite for sales at some point early on, because there might not be a fit. But there's the flip side of all of this where it's like if you look at OpenAI or Anthropic or Sakana AI, they raise money saying, we're going to be doing pure research.

[Harry Stebbings]

Nonprofit.

[Carlos Rayner]

Exactly. So there is a flip side of it. But of course, when you look at venture, which is power law, but at the same time, you need to be looking at a lot of different companies, then maybe Research Hub are outliers in many ways.

[Harry Stebbings]

Final one and then a quick fire. What do you want to do with Baobab? Do you want this to be a venture fund? That's a $500 million fund in its.

[Carlos Rayner]

Own right so far. What I want to do is I want to build a generational fund, something that actually will outlive us all, ideally, like smaller funds, keep raising relatively often. But being there for founders, I want to be there for founders. It has to be the operator led fund that actually is there for them is like doing the right thing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can you be there for founders, dude, if you've got 40 and you're a sales leader, honestly, and Then you do another fund.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Helps a lot.

[Carlos Rayner]

Helps a lot. But like, I go, do you want kids? I 100 want.

[Harry Stebbings]

And.

[Carlos Rayner]

But. And maybe at some point, like, you end up like having to decide on which one you go further. Right. Do you take one? Do you take the other one? And so on.

[Harry Stebbings]

I want to do a quick fire and I've loved this. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the single biggest mistake you see sales leaders make today?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the biggest mistake CEOs make in how their relationship is with their sales leaders?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

What channel or method is super outdated in sales? Often people say that, like cold calling. Who do that? What is outdated?

[Carlos Rayner]

Outdated, I think is like emails, like sending an email. No one replies. There is so much like outbounds that are like fundamentally AI generated. Like, no one replies. Like, the conversion rate on emails these days has dropped to like 0.00 something, whatever.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's your biggest insecurity?

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Has that ever happened?

[Carlos Rayner]

Yeah, 100%. But like, you live with it, right? Like, we all make mistakes all the time and you live with it. But I think it's important because, like, as a sales leader, you always need to be worrying, like, am I going to get to the end of the quarter? Because it means that like, you are pushing really fucking hard. That if you know that you're going to be get there, you're going to get there, you're going to relax. I don't want that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Let's be honest, you don't need the money anymore. Whatever. 11 Labs Revolut is angels. It's not about the money. Are you a better sales leader because you're richer?

[Carlos Rayner]

Yes. I don't get compensated on how much sales we make. It means that I'm fully independent because that is not like I Don't believe in that. I don't believe if the company makes X amount of money, then it's fantastic if they make X Z fantastic. My goal is to make sure we make as much money as possible based on the plan that we've committed. And the plans are absolutely bananas. Right? Like we always like shoot for the stars, but my role is to make sure that I get compensated on equity side, not on how much money we make. I think it's wrong.

[Harry Stebbings]

If I were to say the person is listening to the next 60 seconds and this is all that they're going to take from our conversation and from all of your writing, from everything they've seen in the news about you, what would you most want that person to take from this and from everything in the next 60 seconds?

[Carlos Rayner]

Constantly up on people. I think it's important up when up on. But essentially spend time with the team. Spend time with your customers. Treat them as a community, not as a proper transactional sale. Be with them, be on the road all the time. Because if you're not, you're missing the reality of what your team, what your company is going through. And the only way to actually be a better sales leader and the only way to actually get to your sales target is fundamentally going through the pain yourself every single day.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, this has been such a joy. I've loved this. It also feels like I've known you for a long time, but thank you for being so brilliant.

[Carlos Rayner]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

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 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. 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 [e-mail] 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 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 [e-mail] 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 market 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 99.9 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 [e-mail] 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.