ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota

Thank you for inviting me. This is great. I’m happy people were interested in like sales.

Some of them, yes. But I think it’s fundamentally that the market has changed. The way that we build companies today has completely evolved. We can do deals much quicker. But also for me, key item is a deal can be done. You can hire teams that have a ton of experience. But how do you think beyond a single deal and think about distribution entirely? And I think that’s what we’re thinking, what we’re actually missing in many ways. yes, it’s great to do business development. It’s great to think about affiliates.

How do you think about much more on a strategic level, but also able to execute? Those are the key components. How do you embed AI in your entire distribution component so that you are able to actually do more with less?

No, you’re fired. No, but it’s like I’ve tried a very large number of AI go to market tools and they don’t work. And they don’t work because they see everything as a transaction. transaction. If I was building it, and hopefully some people will be able to actually use this. If I was building an AI, agentic platform for sales, right? I’ll be like, okay, let’s actually understand each one of the core potential leads. What do they prefer? Do they prefer to actually be reached out over email?

Do they prefer to actually attend events? Do they prefer to actually have a phone call? And you can try to map some of those components But what people put on LinkedIn and social media. That is the most fundamental element. But what we’re actually seeing on the AI SDR front is that the majority of these tools track everyone as if they actually want to receive a message. And people hate it. And you see the response rates on outbound emails has dropped to the lowest of any point in time.

It’s less than 0.01%. people getting message on LinkedIn has skyrocketed. And you can perceive that actually a transaction email must send to everyone or it was generated by AI. That doesn’t work. So outbound is dead? Outbound is dead unless you do it with humans or unless you do it humanly. And that’s fundamentally the key item. I can tell you, like, at ElevenLabs, I spent the past two years plus trying to convince the team to actually hire engineers to actually help me build AI agents for revenue, for sales.

And it was only last year that actually they were like, okay, let’s do it. So we ended up hiring people we ended up building AI SDR that handles inbound, super good results. I have now an AI Proposals Manager that scans the web for RFPs and RFIs and then proposes scores and proposes things. I have an AI Custom Success Manager that fundamentally leaves in the back in an email and essentially proposes emails, looks at all of the data of a single customer, all of the pricing tiers and everything that we have in the contract, and then proactively proposes things.

So when my customer success manager goes in the morning to check the emails, that person has a number of drafts that the AI has created. And then that person can change those drafts to put it out there and to send it back. We store what we actually sent and what it was originally created and what are the responses are to actually fine tune. So each one of customers ends up getting a slightly different message with a slightly different tone. And if they speak other languages, then it’s a completely different language.

That works. And that has closed deals for us already. We generate money from that AI customer success manager fundamentally because it is humanly. Right? It’s human. it’s it’s specific, as human.

I think that we will end up seeing the fact that people are becoming much more efficient. I think the goal for me at ElevenLabs is 50% improvement in productivity. That’s the one that I want to do because then it means that I can hire less people. I prefer to manage a smaller team that gets super well compensated. Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if a human actually closed it. And I’m very happy with that. But also that means that the people that we want to retain and have are going to be extremely top talent that are performing at that no one else is performing.

That has a consequence. That is instead of actually doubling my team or doing a 5x or doing whatever it is over the next two years, I end up hiring less people. But they’re very concentrated.

I mean, I can tell you, like we had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota. I put a message in Slack saying these two people have reached the Olympus of sales at ElevenLabs because in two months already like did their quota.

I don’t think so. It’s like, I think you need to put a quota that is challenging but also fair. And if people miss it fundamentally because it’s too high, do need to do the right thing and then lower it or compensate them correctly. But also good salespeople, they want to be the best ones. want to actually they’re moved by the coin. They’re moved by the fact that like, a big challenge ahead of them. If you don’t put that challenge, they’re just going to be slacking. you’re not, going to get the best out of it.

And I think for me, that’s the key item. we say Hey, you reach your quota 100%. Fantastic. And then you start unlocking accelerators to the point that I’m very happy. if we sign a million dollar commission check, I’m the happiest person in life. Fundamentally because that person did so much money for the business and for our shareholders and for the rest of the company. That is an absolute no brainer. Again, for me, it’s like for every million in revenues that any single person signs, and I don’t care if it comes from like the SDR, the account exec, the CSM, or it’s an engineer that went all in and then managed to get a contract, every single million has million in extra valuation for the company.

If you put it that way, it’s a benefit for everything. Some people get more equity on the engineering side. Great. They deserve it because they don’t get commissions. Fantastic. They were popping up their entire value of their stock. When you get the

It depends. So the way we do it, and I think it’s fair, is for every single extra year, you get another 25% extra commission on top of it. We start at 5% commission on anything that you sell, and then we have the accelerators

is. No, that is including your quota. And then after your quota, yes, additional and we have a 1.1x, 1.2x, 1.3x, 1.5x, and so on, right? So the more you keep selling above your quota, then you hit those accelerators. But then we have accelerators or spiffs specifically for individual products. So if we are incentivizing one product because a quarter we want to incentivize that product, then we will put an accelerator or a specific spiffs for that specific product. And then people even are more motivated on that front.

Do you find that always works? No, no. It’s easy to get hooked on spiffs or like specific incentives and lose the entire side of what you’re trying to do. If you put too many accelerators, if you put too many incentives in one place, you create the wrong behavior, which is people try to sell whatever it is to actually unlock it. For instance, we don’t pay commissions on pilots. Because why? It’s not adding to our valuation as a company. And because it’s not adding to our valuation as a company, the engineers, the researchers, the ops people, the people, no one is actually getting a boost in their equity.

Then why should we pay it? Let’s do the right thing and let’s do the complex thing, which is like, let’s do the pilot if needed. Let’s convince the customer that the metrics are there and we’re doing it really well. And then on top of that, once we sign a yearly contract or a two year contract, then we pay the commission. Do you pay on retention and expansion? Yes. So like first twelve months, you can close It It doesn’t really matter, 50,000 or $1,000,000 or $10,000,000 whatever you want.

And then that gets expanded over the next twelve months. You will get commissions. Great. And you can hit accelerators with that and so on. If it’s a strategic account and we have designation of what is a strategic account. So for instance, like the top 20 or 30 accounts in a given market, depending on how big the market is, fundamentally, then you will unlock commission for two years. And we can change it if needed, right? But at a practical level, we found that that’s the first way.

The hunters important. Very important. Specifically when you think about distribution, you think about outbounds, inbound. You think about a lot of different pieces, right? But at the same time, a hunter that is not well managed will create more damage than actually opportunities. So let’s say, for instance, you’re trying to close a company that has multiple sub companies. It’s a big holding company. We can use any name you would want, right? And then you have a hunt that essentially tries to go to each one of them, but doesn’t do it in a very structured way, like trying to align what are the incentives for this big account.

Then fundamentally you end up having discrepancies on pricing, you end up having discrepancies like what is the actual value for them. And then each one of them discrepancies ends up coming back to hunt you down, essentially when you try to renew the contract or the other forms. It is important to have them, but at the same time you need to have them in check together the customer success. I actually am a big believer of customer success. I don’t believe customer success as a satisfaction or happiness moment for customers.

No, it’s like customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business that works for the customer, but also works for the business to incentivize growth, expansion, cross

In the world where Snowflake grew up, that made sense. In the world we are in today with AI, that doesn’t make any sense. Because fundamentally, anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days. So fundamentally, your customer success, you need to actually go as deep as you can as early as possible and try to close it as soon as possible a single contract. And then your customer success is the one that actually will help you expand it quickly and retain the customer.

So if it becomes a services business only, what you’re charging for every single penny, then you become a transaction. You’re not building a community. You’re not retaining of the long term. You should be incentivizing them to actually do both things: community, trust, and also incentivize the long term. So that’s why I’m in favor of charging for services, but in not all the cases it makes sense. The game has changed.

In general, like, one single market, going one market at a time, it doesn’t work. Traditional VCs, like, the traditional method has been like, oh, you open one market, you go deep, you win the account, you show the value, then you go to the next one and then you go to the next one and so on. And there’s like the bullshit advice that VCs have been giving for many years.

And I know now it’s changing fundamentally because hey, the reality is if you’re to have 100 competitors in the next month because you’re starting to get some traction or because of whatever reason or everyone is thinking about the same problem and then going deep, then opening one market after the other one, instead of actually parallelizing and trying to do multiple bets at the same time, then it’s just counterintuitive.

Not really. So for instance, one of the and I know this is going to be controversial, but I think all of the tech startups are afraid to actually hire someone that has had 20 years experience, 25 years experience. And the excuse that they use is like, the person is not going to fit the business. And I think it’s bullshit. I think it’s full wrong. Fundamentally, someone has 20 years experience in sales and has been selling for the past 10 years to the same financial services firms in the city or in the US has so much wealth, so much knowledge, that it can propel the entire business.

Now the question is like, not all of them are going to fit your business, but a good portion of them, if they’re still hungry and they still want to actually do something that is meaningful, they’re going to fit really well. Those type of profiles will shorten your sales cycles because they will join and be like, Okay, now I know the product really well. I know the vision. I know how to properly pitch it. Let me call all my friends that have been interacting and all of my stakeholders that have been interacting for the past 10 years, 20 years, Now we just go directly to the C level.

The biggest example is like Google in the early days. You have like Sergey Bin and Larry Page together with Eric Schmidt. That’s amazing. A guy that had ton of experience, was really successful, ended up coming in and magic happened. I think fundamentally like both parties want to make it work. It can happen, but you need to make it work and you need to hire the right people that will have, like, will be in the same brainwave as you are.

No, I don’t think it’s that easy to sell, especially in this environment. Of course, I think if you have a big brand like an OpenAI or like an Anthropic or ElevenLabs, it’s easier a little bit.

I think you can.

else in market. I do 100% believe that our people are like 4x better, like without thinking twice. And I would take them to war, I would go to war with them, every single one of them. It’s because we are tough on them, but also they’re tough on us. They give us the feedback, the difficult feedback, and I get it every single day. And I’m happy that they give me the tough feedback. Because what we’re trying to do here, and I’ve always believed and grew up with the idea of we’re trying to find the ground truth.

And what the ground truth means, like today means X, tomorrow means something else, and the following day will mean something else. So if you don’t have people that are constantly challenging you and constantly thinking beyond what actually is happening today, you’re not going be able to survive. And those are the people that we hire.

Which market should we be opening? How deep should we go into some of the structure changes? Like the company is growing very quickly. Do we need a global accounts team? So I’m already thinking about a global accounts team. When do we implement it? How do we implement it? How do we motivate people? Should it be 20x? Should it be something else? Which products should we be selling? Should we be selling to competitors? Should we be selling to resellers? So there is all of those things, like the team challenges every single day.

And I love it because it’s intellectually stimulating, but also because it forces the entire business to rethink our position every single

Not as many markets as possible. I think you need to map out and have a reasoning and a thesis of why that market so that you can refer to that and understand whether the market conditions have changed, then you have to actually evolve your thesis. But for me, this go to market is similar to investing in venture capital, right? You need to test 100 things to be able to find the three, four, five, six things that actually perform and do really well. We do the same in venture.

We invest in companies knowing and believing that all of them are going to work and all of them can be like a billion or trillion dollar company. And then we realize like, shit, it not worked, but I still have like three or four or five that are going to be working really well. Go to market is actually the same thing. test as many things as you can, not only in the opening markets, but also like, do you need to try self-service? Do you need to try working with resellers, like with partners? with the cloud ecosystem, with a grants program, with an affiliates program?

There’s so many things. And opening markets is one of those ones.

I’ve tested endless, endless, amounts of things. And I absolutely love it. For instance, media entertainment in the beginning did not work for us. It just didn’t. What does media entertainment mean? So big brands, like big entertainment studios. And the thesis was like, they’re generating so much content, we should be able to actually sell to them and make a ton of money on this. And the reality was that like, yes, they do make a lot of content. But when you have an industry that essentially is very heavily influenced by the public, the audience, the quality they need to produce, events, all of that stuff, then potentially the industry might not be ready for technology that you’re trying to sell.

That was a big learning. And we spent months and months and months trying to break into the entertainment industry to realize that we were not growing as fast as we wanted. So we ended up switching and having another ICP. was like, okay, let’s work with media creation platforms. That worked really well for us. And then we ended up saying like, hey, actually the wall is moving. We had a thesis around the world is moving towards agentic systems. How do we also bring a product to market that fits really well in the agentic world?

And we had a vision on that. So we ended up working on that. And today, AI agents, it’s actually fantastically huge for us. Fundamentally, because we had the vision, we bet, we went early, we started working with partnering with some companies, and that panned out really well.

One of them for unicorns. it’s fine.

I don’t know. I think you still need to have companies that grow from one to four or from zero to one, and it takes them like months to get there. I think that’s actually not bad. just means you need to incentivize the portfolio to be able to actually iterate and experiment as much as they can because we don’t know what’s going work. And I think it is us. Us, still even with new products that I’m heading and I’m trying to get to market, I truly don’t know how we’re going to price it.

I truly don’t know if it’s going to work out. I’m just trying to iterate. Is it going take us a little bit longer to get to the first million and the first million and the first million? Fine. We have the ability, but we need to iterate. And I think it’s exactly the same. At ElevenLabs, have a business that grows extremely quickly. Like, we’re smashing it, all of that stuff. But at the same time, have brand new bets that are not generating any revenue. And that’s great.

But it’s bets that we’re doing for next year. So I think, the idea What’s the biggest bet you’ve got today that’s not generating revenue? So we’re generating a good amount of revenue, but government work fundamentally, it’s a tiny portion of it. And I think that’s okay because the role of a CRO is fundamentally thinking about not the revenues today, but the revenues of tomorrow. I’m already thinking all all of this quarter, I’ve already been thinking, like, how do we put the pieces together so that the ElevenLabs next year grows even faster than this year?

Because I know this year we’ll smash the numbers. I have the right team. We’re going to continue hiring. We have the motion that we set last year. It’s going to grow really well. How am I doing it for next year being very creative so that I can start putting the right bets? That’s be my quota this year.

Who knows? I would love to hit a billion dollars in revenues by the end of the year. We have some targets internally. It would be great if we can do it. If not, it will be a little later. That’s fine. That’s absolutely fine. Any big lessons on forecasting? It’s freaking hard to do. It’s just impossible. We forecast and then we realize usually that like like just like.

But it’s impossible if you think about it from an experimentation perspective. And I always tell my team, like, I want us to test as many things as possible. I only need one of those ones to work really well give to me another million in revenues or 200 or 300.

Channels, products, ideas. Should we be pitching services? And I was like in a meeting with a CEO of an airline very recently a few days back, and we were talking about agents and all of that stuff. And then at some he was like, but Carlos, everyone keeps pitching me. I get over 100 pitches every week of companies doing customer customer support. I don’t want to have another pitch on that. And I was like, and you’re 100% right. And I hate it. Actually, don’t get me wrong.

We do it and we do it really fucking well. But at the same time, it’s boring. The majority of companies will start with the bottom line optimization. So what’s boring? Customer support? Customer support optimization for me like, yes, your mindset is like, yeah, I want to automate, increase a bunch of percentage point my profitability. So that’s what I’m focusing. And that’s great. Don’t get me wrong. It is fantastic. What I’m actually interested is like, how do we figure out a way to partner with a company and create a labs area?

So it’s company X labs so that we can figure out a way for them to generate new revenue opportunities for them. That’s what actually makes me passion. But we have to prove that that is the right thing. So that is one of the experiments. And I’m spending a lot of time these days on how do we prove that the idea of labs for companies where we essentially are their consultants and help them build those agents that will generate top line revenue with new ideas, new products, is actually something that we can scale and generate hundreds of millions.

I don’t know. I think I would rather do things that are actually much more complex than the ones that are actually less complex. I think we are here as startups and VCs to do the difficult things. I don’t believe in doing the short path, things that actually much easier. If someone is doing it and someone is super good, maybe we should be buying the company. Great. Or maybe we should just partner with them. Fantastic. Right? Let’s do the things that no one is doing. That is what makes me passionate. that is what a good CRO, I think, needs to be doing because we’re not here to do easy stuff.

I would not personally invest, but I also think that the opportunity for companies that are established and growing a lot to go into that space is good. big, right? Why doesn’t ElevenLabs do it? We do. We do. customer support. And the majority of our customers start with customer support, and we make an absolute ton of money on that. And the ROI for our customers that use us for customer support is insane. Insane. What percent of your revenue is customer support? Give it

40? We don’t share that, but I think it works really well. It’s like the fastest product in terms of revenues that we’ve ever had. just insane. But also think you look at all of our competitors, like you mentioned Sierra, Gone, and all of the other ones, we power all of them. So we actually make money off literally customer support with our agents platform, but also we make money from our API foundational model layer across the board. So that’s the good thing about ElevenLabs it’s like spreadable. so widely.

How do you think about empowering your competitors? I think fundamentally we’ve been very happy to actually support the entire infrastructure layer because we believe that the opportunity in the market was way bigger than anyone was expecting. Voice and interactions with humans and human technology interaction, it is the fundamental piece that was missing in the entire puzzle. Now you end up having situation where similar to, I don’t know, NVIDIA that was like competing with powering everyone but also competing with everyone, right? I think that’s actually fine.

It’s okay that the market is big enough for multiple companies to coexist and then try to target the same customers. I’m not going to deny it. I think also means that everyone needs to be aware that that will happen. So when we launch our agents product, I called the biggest platforms, agents platform that were operating in our platform. And I told them like, guys, FYI, in the next couple of months, we’re going to be launching our agents product. We’re to be competing with you. Just wanted to make sure that you’re okay with this.

I wanted to make sure that you understand that we are going to this space. And the funny part was all of the founders that I interacted with telling them this, they were like, yeah, welcome on board. That’s okay. And it’s good because if you’re able to actually be transparent with that and say, like, hey, I’m going be competing with you, but at the same time, I’m partnering, and in some deals you will win it, and in some deals I will win it. And in some deals we will partner together.

That’s when you end up creating a good in parallel.

agree? 100%. And our team is dedicated to that. It’s like everyone is like selling agents left and right. We’ve had the best quarter ever. It’s been fantastic. But people are incentivized to sell agents because we know we are competing with other companies. And sometimes those companies end up complaining to us, being like, why are you competing with me when you’re also selling me? But the reality is like, hey, if pay me like $1 and I could be charging end customer, or you’re charging the end customer $20 then I’m like, I mean, maybe I’m doing something wrong here

Do you

No. I think there was a lot of conversation last year. And I actually I’ve evolved my mind on all of these things. And of course, it will continue to evolve. Right? But a lot of people were talking last year about like, oh, open source models are going to take over, like even on the AI voices space, like you’re going to get commoditized and so on. And for a period of time, I kind of believed it. I was like, yeah, I mean, there is a point in time like open source models will take over.

Like, it will be fully commoditized. Great. Like, we just need to continue going deeper on the product integrations, full verticalization, distribution, all of the stuff. Great. And what I ended up realizing is even if open source models become extremely good at the same quality level that we have, it is the additional hassle, it is the additional components that make it very difficult for any organization. So if you’re a bank already, you might want to play with the idea of what if I use open source models?

The problem is that those open source models are not built for the scale that you would want. You would still need to maintain them. You would still need to actually make them operational. And ElevenLabs actually takes that away from you. And ElevenLabs agent takes that away from building the entire orchestration and managing it. Everyone can be building anything from scratch. It’s just, do you have the time and do you have the resources? And if the priority in the company changes, are you going to be able to continue adjusting and making sure that you get the right funding in there?

And I don’t think that is true. And we’re seeing it all around the world. We’re like, yeah, we could go with open source models. Excellent. Do it. You try to operationalize it and they’ve lost three months and then they come back.

I think it’s think it’s an evolving question all the time. It’s not that simple to decide. Do have verticalized sales teams? We have verticalized sales teams right now in specific markets. Markets that are much bigger or markets that are much more mature, 100%. We will have people that only do like BFSI, only teams that do like healthcare. What does it take to do vertical sales teams? And what been your big lessons on what mistakes

make? So I will give you an example. In India, I tried to implement vertical as sales team too early and essentially kind of depressed the revenues for a single quota. And it was like an absolute disaster. And then I realized like, no, What happened there then? You divided everyone and then it didn’t work? Like what happened? It didn’t work because like, A, people were not passionate enough. B, needed a long time to actually close some of the biggest sales. And C, the team was way too small.

And if you do it early on, if you segment too early, then you fundamentally end up screwing things up. So what I realized, I have this placeholder in my calendar every single week that is called pipeline construction. And that pipeline construction, it’s similar to portfolio construction that you’re familiar with. But for me, it’s like pipeline construction. How do I take a VC term and put it in my mindset? How do I design the perfect pipeline for any given market and segment? And that’s when you start thinking like, actually, you need like, the liquidity, but you also need the big whales.

So each one of my account execs needs to have the ability of like, closing big whales, specifically on the enterprise segment, but also having like, liquidity in the pipeline so that they don’t lose the confidence because people were losing the confidence.

Let’s say 20 for any given market. Doesn’t really matter. I mean, we have a lot less than those ones. Sure, let’s just say, but like, what do we do then? 20 average deal size? I look into the average size. I look into like, what are the numbers of companies in there? What’s the average deal size? 100k, Depends on the market.

So for me, the key item is like how many companies are in that market? How many very complex enterprises in that market? And how do I create enough liquidity in that market to close deals every single week so that the team stays motivated and sees the challenges of closing deals?

100%. Government vertical is one of those ones where like, we said, you know what? what? And it was one of the big bets that I made this year. was like, I don’t care Why do

Fundamentally, because one, it’s very sticky. Number two, a benefit that we make to society. If we can deploy agents for people to have better interactions with the actual government and government services, it’s an absolute no brainer. And I don’t care if I don’t make enough money to justify it or I lose money. It doesn’t really matter to me. And then the three is it’s a hard industry to get in. So the moment you actually get in, then it’s just like you never leave that industry. When you start mapping those things out, you need to make the bets.

Some of those bets will pan out really well, some the ones will not pan out that well. But it’s like literally portfolio construction. How quickly can I do some of these sales so that I can spend time also in the difficult ones and my investors don’t call me saying, what the fuck are you doing? I’m going to fire you. And I think that’s a fundamental idea of portfolio construction. And you do it at a country level, each one of the new countries that you actually want to be launching, And that is a completely different concept than what the majority of CROs are actually thinking these days.

If you tap it into AI agents for go to market and other pieces, then you have something that is quite unique for your business.

We went back to zero. We went back to horizontal. horizontal. Let’s do horizontal. Let’s allow people to do like much deeper, and then we will start segmenting again when the right timing comes. And what ended up happening is like we would then give them like a name account list and negotiate with them based on fundamentally how I was thinking about the portfolio construction. And that worked really well. literally we lost a quota. We ended up changing all of that from the Ground up. And then you could see people starting closing deals in the first month.

And it was like insane because it was day and night. We had changed the culture in the team, in the local market by getting it wrong. Let’s go back to the basics. Let’s redo it from scratch, accept that we made a mistake and then move on.

cycle? Yes, percent. And whoever tells you no, it’s like just lying. That is a fact. And I think like the idealist scenario is like no one gets fired like the idea, like remember like IBM, right? Like no one gets fired for actually buying IBM. It’s like that is the ideal scenario for any brand. like literally you become the safest asset in the block. Great. I think like the two companies that today have been able to make it is or three companies if you want, OpenAI, Anthropic, full respect for them, Cursor.

The three of them I think me are Cursor killed enterprise unbelievably well. Yeah, they’ve done super well. And it’s fantastic. Those are the three brands that are blue chip organization right now in the procurement team’s perspective and IT team’s perspective. It’s fantastic. It’s great.

just means like, brand will help you solidify your position, but also you need to like, the bigger But also the

the unwavering And it’s not that easy to get into the big enterprises anyway, right? It’s not that easy. You’ve done it with like the portfolio companies. You know how difficult it is for them. But once you start getting into the motion As a

you do it with LPs? So imagine your LPs, like it’s exactly the same concept. Like your LP is like the Multi big

sales cycle. Multi

I’m not surprised. Absolutely. But how do you create enough FOMO? How do you create enough brand to be able to actually like reduce that six years to like a lot less?

The majority of them. Do they? We’re talking about like our churn rate on the sales side is actually not that big.

It’s because when I make an offer, I tell every single person ElevenLabs is going to be extremely difficult. Extremely difficult. We are a hard company to work for because we have extremely high expectations. You’re going to work a huge amount of hours. I expect full commitment and people love it. So you end up filtering out people that actually don’t to have that type of life. And I think that’s okay.

But it is possible if you try to retain like a smaller team and you implement the latest technologies to actually like become make everyone more efficient in general. Of course, the bigger the company, then I think you get softer. But you look at what Marc Andreessen was saying the other day companies are overstaffed by 25% and even more, right? Of course, there is a trade off between overstaffing and understaffing. like if you understaff and people have like, even in sales or like revenue, you have too much pipeline, they end up not closing nothing.

We’re about adding about like another 120 people, more or less. So it will keep the entire sales team. What’s your sales team now? It’s 130 people. So will keep it under 250. But you’re doubling sales team? Doubling the sales team. Yeah. And the sales, it’s to grow much quicker than that.

A lot.

avoid? One is the dilution. Like if you’re not upfront about the expectation, I think you end up diluting because people come with different expectations. They essentially behave in a specific way that it’s not the way that you wanted.

and

For us, like all of the stats are publicly open to everyone. So everyone knows how much revenues we make. Everyone knows each one of the reps. Do you have a leaderboard internally? Yes, How do you do that to create that competition? So people like we post automatically, we have a bot that actually will post automatically into the sales channel every single week, a summary of like what percentage of quota attainment year to date for that specific quota and all of that stuff. and a On a per basis.

On a per rep basis. So anyone can see it anytime. And if you’re at the bottom, then, hey, you’re going to be able to see that you’re on the bottom. At a practical level for me, it’s like, it’s beyond that. It’s like that’s one component. But if you have someone that is like building strategic accounts, then I’m not too worried. If someone is actually building the right pipeline, I’m also not too worried. But you need to see the action. You need to see how many meetings are doing.

If I open a calendar and someone has a full calendar that is empty, I’m like, what did you do this week? Do

Sales attracts a different profile. Sales attracts the people that are much more outspoken, people that are much more extrovert, people that actually want to do something different, right? So by definition, you don’t go into sales if you’re not willing to take like the harsh feedback. If you’re not willing to Do you think

I think a very large portion of them are because they don’t have the environment to actually like just push harder or because they’ve already lost the passion in that they just want a normal job. And that’s okay. Don’t get me wrong. That’s absolutely fantastically Well, it is not what I’m hiding for. What’s your tell for the obsessed that wins? For me, you can get it very quickly, right? People that have extremely high energy, that are sharp, that are thinking quick. And also, there’s other people that will be slightly opposite, but also they’re to be very, very, deep.

And it might take them a little bit more time to actually get there, and those are less obvious. But once they do, it’s just insanely good, right? If people are sharp and they’re energetic and passionate and they come across someone that really wants to win, and you can ask them like, hey, pitch me ElevenLabs as if I was, a fish, whatever it is. it doesn’t really matter, right? Then you get a sense of how quickly they’re thinking and how passion they have, like how much passion, how much actually they’ve researched the company, who are they thinking, all of that stuff, like you end up having in a very short conversation.

Like I don’t need to spend more than 20 minutes to know if I want to hire someone or not. And I will tell you, the majority of times, I end up putting my feedback in Ashby. We use Ashby internally. I end up putting my feedback in Ashby during the conversation. By the middle of the conversation, I have my feedback. And I’m one of those crazy guys that write a lot while I’m talking to someone. I hate when it gets recorded. Then people end up behaving in a very specific way versus actually being themselves.

So I write a lot while I’m interviewing people. And then I have my summary. And in parallel, I’m writing and I’m doing my summary. And that’s it. And it. works really well for me.

My personal take is that, like, interviews, like, people behave differently if they think that they’ve been recorded versus if they think that actually they have freedom to say whatever they think is best. In sales, we are always like asking everyone to record it. And we have like, it’s mandatory for everyone. You use Gong? We use Gong and then automatically fills out our Salesforce. And so we try to automate as much as possible. And by the way, like, Lovable has the best CRM that I’ve ever seen.

Those guys have really smashed it. Like, shout out to them. Lovable CRM. Yes. Like, so Lovable ended up building their own platform like

be But We should be building our own platform as well, but we’re not.

For some areas, yes.

you not? I think for core things, yes. So a CRM, I would love to customize it. I will love to actually build it myself even. Like it doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to spend that much time. It’s just like a pool of data. you have it in your Salesforce. We haven’t done it. We use Salesforce. But for some other applications, like, I mean, why wouldn’t you do it? If it? fits better in your entire ecosystem of applications, if it’s easy enough, then maybe you should.

Would I build an entire Google Drive or a Gmail? No, I wouldn’t. Like it wouldn’t make any sense. But for a good amount of applications, for sure. If I was like a procurement guy, I would be building a procurement software for myself. So you

I think there is a very large portion that is over exaggerated, but I think like there is a real fact that like people will end up building their own applications. And I think that’s key. I think it’s why not?

Oh, we’ve never actually like put any constraints on the lack of budget. Like, you to do something, budget is never to be a problem. And that’s been since But you

you’re not allowed to, why would that be? It might well be because you haven’t proven with a test or experimentation that that is the right thing to do right now. So for me it’s like you want a budget. You want what do you want 100k? You want 50k, You want 200k to actually prove that things do it. Don’t ask me for a million dollars and ask me for like dedicate an entire team to it. Don’t ask me to actually dedicate six months of your time to for that specific thing.

I’m not gonna do it. But if you do it on the side and then you prove me that you can actually make it work and I start seeing some results, we’ll scale it and we’ll give you all of the budget that you want.

Yes. Oh, the Revolut F1.

It took us a long time to actually get comfortable with the idea. How much did it cost? We spent a good amount of money. We had a budget in mind that we wanted to spend and we went to different teams and we ended up negotiating. We’re like, this is the budget that we have. This is how much we want to be spending for year one, for year two, all of that stuff. What are the options? And then all of the teams that we spoke to, some of them were like, no, for this, no.

Or like for this, you don’t get anything. You didn’t even get the logo. Some of them are like, oh, we’ll do all of this stuff. And then we end up narrowing down to two teams and then we end up negotiating with two teams in parallel. And then there was one, like which is ODA Revolut F1. They’re like, we were very impressed. But it took us a while to actually be comfortable with the entire concept.

Premium branding on the worst team. 100%. You get more exposure and also like, you have a lot more creative freedom. And also you’re betting. So one one of the main reasons why we ended up picking like, Audi Revolut F1 is because like, if you look at the history of like, Audi, it’s like every single sports championship that’s ended, they’ve ended up winning within five years. And that’s fantastic. And like, they’re building the car from scratch. They build it on, like, engine. They build like, everything from scratch.

They’re competing with like, all of the big ones. And I’m a big Formula One fan. And I actually feel that this idea of incumbents, very technologically driven with a really clear mindset, drive, idea to win and so on. It is who we are as a company, ElevenLabs. But also is who Nick and the team are at Revolut. So it fits really well with your entire narrative as a company if you try to do it away.

The majority of them end up producing good returns. But when I look at the ones from an enterprise perspective that have a better ROI for us is dinners. When we do a dinner with execs in a given city, that has the best ROI that you could have. If I go to a trade show, the majority of them don’t have good ROI.

You could have a dinner for 15 people and cost you 3,000, 4,000, $5,000 If you want to go bigger, then essentially you need to shut the entire place and all that stuff. So you will have to spend more. Depends on the city. not the same doing it in Mexico City or doing it in Barcelona or doing it in London. But the ROI is actually quite solid. the benefit of the dinners is like you end up, imagine you’re inviting competitors. So you’re inviting competitors, different customers you’re trying to close. those guys are going to know that you are actually talking to these other guys.

So there’s a FOMO that ends up being created in place and it just pans out really well. And because they know, they know like it’s usually the same icp, so they know like who is doing procurement, who is doing like whatever, who’s doing like the sales, who’s being like the CTO, who is the chief AI officer, all of stuff. They know each other. That always works really well. The worst ROI for us has always been like conferences. just there’s no ROI in there. What’s the takeaway from that?

We should be spending less on those things and should be building our own events more. You should be building your own events more. That’s why we did like ElevenLabs You did

Why wouldn’t you?

always difficult to know. No. So so you end up having this concept of influence revenue and then direct revenue or closed close revenue. Right? So there’s a lot of different variations, all of this that you can plan it. And the event that we in London, the ElevenLabs Summit in London, was fantastic. We wanted to prove that a European company can actually be running these big events with so many people and then put up a show that actually people get passionate and talk about it. And also motivated and presented, we presented some ideas, we brought some guests to talk in front of everyone else.

Bring the right ICPs, design the content really well and think carefully about the content that you won’t want.

It has to be not salesy. I think it needs to feel natural. You should do a presentation about your company, some insights, talk about the things that are coming next, your vision. But if you make it too salesy, people will walk away and never come back. And I think that’s the fundamental trade off. For me, these big events, like, we talk a little bit about ElevenLabs, Mati ends up doing the big keynote. But then after that, for me, all about how do we put those partners, those companies that are building in our platform or are using our technology in front of as many people as possible so that we learn about them.

And I did a fireside chat with three amazing companies like BCG and Naturgy and Connecta. For me was more about like how do we enhance their appearance? How do we talk about what are they building, what they’re using? It’s less about ElevenLabs, it’s about them. And I think that’s like you need to plan the content in a way that it feels less salesy. You talk about it, but also you bring partners to validate that what you’re doing is actually right. Totally get that. You

partnerships? There is a concept that I really like that we’ve actually done fairly well, I would say, at ElevenLabs, which is like the strategy partners. And that strategy partners, like we put in that bracket, is like companies that have a CVC. And I know this is to be controversial, but I actually love CVCs, like Corporate Venture Capitalists, because they help you navigate big brands. They are your champions internally, and their incentive is to actually make it work really well for the business.

like Salesforce Ventures, that’s Exactly. like Deutsche Telekom, T Capital, which Siemens,

have one. of them end up having one, like ventures. Like all of them have like one of them. But the good thing is they know their business And they were not sexy. Up until like a year and a half ago, two years ago, they were not sexy. Returns were not there, as we know. right? Like CBC getting returns is like really difficult. And they were just like trying to like fight to get a location in the best companies, but like it’s just not possible. Today, we’ve proven with ElevenLabs that we dedicated time to actually partner with woven and Capital from Toyota, with the Deutsche Telekom guys, with the Telefonica guys, with Liberty Global that actually joined our cap table, all of those pieces.

That is a fantastic distribution strategy.

Exactly. And essentially, we negotiate contracts with them, and essentially they end up like, depending on the situation, you have one side and another one.

Yes, they do. We are ElevenLabs, nothing is free. But I think I like it because like it incentivizes, the way I organized this concept initially, it and was so funny when I pitched it to Mati, I was like, really? People are going to give us money as a contract? And I was like, Investors? And I was like, yeah, let’s try, right? And I think the reality was that you end up aligning incentives. If the incentive is to also only invest, their incentive is only to invest, but your incentive is actually to close a deal.

So how do you figure out something that works along the way so that you end up saying, you know what? You will invest for every million dollars that you want to invest. You need to actually bring X amount of revenues in the next months or months, whatever timeframe you want. And there has to be some penalties and some consequences if that doesn’t happen. That is the way that like I’m sorry, how do actually If you don’t bring it, we strike you less. is that possible? We buy you out.

And I think it was perfectly fine. And then everyone is incentivized. And the logic, and I strongly believe that is the case, and that’s how I pitch it to everyone, is like, we want the best. So if you invest in a million dollars in ElevenLabs and you bring a contract, you help us close a contract, then your valuation goes up. So you’re making money from the VC side, but also your business is getting more efficient because it’s implementing ElevenLabs. It’s a win for everyone.

But also like the the beautiful side is like you end up building new products specifically for them because then you get the insights of industry. So we went into like the telco industry. We had no idea about the telco industry. We’ve actually learned everything about the telco industry partnering with like KPN, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, NTT DOCOMO, all of those like really amazing brands that like have been in the industry for a very long time. We work very closely with the world Capital guys at Toyota. We are learning a lot about the automotive industry because they’re in the cap table so everyone is motivated to it.

Like in the same with like financial services or even going into different markets. Like there’s a number of advantages of like having corporate VCs in your cap table just because you incentivize and you increase your opportunities of being successful.

It takes time. It takes fucking long time. And that is the reality. It’s like if you’re coming into the distribution side with partners or you’re building the entire partner ecosystem thinking that you’re going to be making another 20% of revenues in two quarters, you’re wrong. that doesn’t happen that You need people dedicated to it. You need incentives for them because people lose interest and you need your incentives for your own team. So initially start using SQLs, Sales qualified opportunities or SQLs sales qualified leads, to be able to actually track how much volume has been generated and what is the actual traction being generated.

And then once you start having a solid motion in there, then you start tracking and move it towards the revenues. So each one of the SQLs needs to be generating a certain amount of revenues.

to push you? you? can always, and Salesforce has done it extremely well. For me, they had the reference on this. It’s like they built a partner ecosystem that like where they get deals from like Salesforce, also they send deals to Salesforce. And in some cases, like in the markets where they cannot be billing the customer, they actually send the deal, be like, oh, you’re my partner, you will be billing the customer and then I will bill you independently. Right? That’s fantastic ecosystem to be building.

A thousand dollars month. When you start spending a thousand a month as a business, your brain completely switches because you don’t to put it anymore in your credit card. And at that point, start believing like, shit, I’m spending a lot of money in in there with that software. I do have high expectations. At that point, if you have emotion from a sales perspective that is fast enough, then it doesn’t really

it? I had a very clear conviction that like, at ElevenLabs launching India was going to be extremely difficult and we might fail. And what I ended up realizing is like, I didn’t know enough the market to realize like, if you do it well, you can make a ton of money and also generate ton of buzz and generate a lot of ROI.

team members to every market you open? No. But we do it centrally. We always try to like, build a market like, centrally from HQ trying to close some deals that for me it’s free to actually like, deploy a single person on the ground. Sorry, help me. It’s free to deploy a single person on the ground? Because, like, I’m already making revenues. I’m profitable. I’m making revenues in that market. I’ve proven that like it is a market that is getting. So you

No, not on the PLG. I don’t even look at the PLG numbers. I don’t care about those ones. I look at like, what are the enterprises? What are the companies in the market? How is my portfolio construction in that market? And how can I close some of those companies to get to a certain level of revenues? At the moment that I get to that certain level of revenues, for me, I’ve nailed a product idea that needs to grow and needs to prove that it can scale and it can have product market fit.

But at least I’ve proven that I actually can start selling in there. Then that’s the moment that actually I can get the team on the ground. What

We We are everywhere these days. Literally everywhere. everywhere. I have teams all around the world. Some of them have been announced, some of them have not been announced, but we we have teams all around the world. Yes. How are you weakest? I think in general, we’ve been weak in some of the languages. and that is entirely my fault on believing that you could sign contracts, everyone in the world speaking English only. And then you realize later on that that’s just not possible. And don’t get me wrong, like, I opened like Japan by myself without speaking Japanese.

It’s really fucking hard. Japan’s

It’s really hard. And I started doing it like two years ago, going myself to Japan like constantly and meeting companies and we started generating motion. It was great. And then I hired my first rep and then I hired the GM, Jim and the rest of the team. That was a really hard market. And you could not sell in English everywhere else in the world, but you could also not sign contracts that are always in English. So if you end up having a team that mostly has mostly had experience in the US, their belief is that you can repeat that anywhere in the world.

The reality is like you look at Latin America, less than 5% of the population speak English. If you want to open France and launch in France, good luck if you’re only going to be speaking English. Good luck if you don’t offer like French law in your contracts. No one’s going to be signing it. So is some of these learnings that we’ve had that are really, really, tough. There’s like, we wanted to actually sell in France and well, I was not speaking French. Then let’s get someone that speaks French, right?

So there is some of those things that we’ve learned by doing that is my entire fault, but it’s also like part of experimentation, I think.

We are there. We have an office. Yes. It’s really, really, really, tough. But also like the benefit of Korea, that’s why I was saying earlier, like you need to have a thesis on why you’re launching in a specific market. But the thesis on Korea was they produce a ton of content, they’re very innovative when they want, and they’re producing products and services not for the local market, but for the international market. So in reality, yes, you need to be selling in Korean, but the majority of your usage will not be in Korean, will likely be for the international market.

So how do you support and map those languages that they care about so that you can target those companies, at least for us?

I don’t think that’s how I would put it. I think like Hollywood is declining in this model that they have today, where like very big budget productions that require a ton of people, that require a lot of different things, right? And I think they’re going through a crisis. But I actually think Hollywood will come out like even stronger than this. And I think at the end of the day, like, it’s like, imagine that you get a startup and the startup tells you like, you know what?

I need a million, I need million pre seed just for this idea. And then it’s to take me five years to get it out. I don’t know who’s going to buy it. What are you going to say? Like, why don’t you raise a million dollars? That’s going be like, raise a million dollars, prove like some points and then start going there. And I think that’s the problem with Hollywood right now. I don’t think it’s like AI voices. I don’t think it’s AI video. I think those are like additional solutions to make sure that you’re democratizing it and you’re reducing your cost of launching new ideas to the market.

And that is going to be part of the solution.

know what I mean? And that’s what needs to change fundamentally. Like how do we create content that takes less money, dollars to actually be created? You start very slowly, but also then you ramp up once you realize that actually there is product market fit in that content. And I’ve spoken with a lot of studios over the past like three years. I’ve spent a lot of time in LA, in the industry. and my pitch always to them is like, hey, let’s try to create content that will capture people’s attention across the channels that they operate today.

And if it works well, let’s scale it. Then you have the million budget. And I think like what’s where AI can benefit a lot. But you have. and because like you can iterate a lot, you can create content that is personalized, you can create them that is like is engaged by people. And then we were talking yesterday about like this idea of like cost per engagement. Why don’t we use exactly the same framework? How much is the cost for every single person that gets engaged in your content?

And that content can essentially expand to be extremely high quality as you’re proving that like fundamentally dynamic changes. Right?

Yes, Yes. yes, yes, It should always. But it should, cycle my thinking here is like, it is because founders want to be backed by other founders. They want to be backed by the best operators. They also want to be backed by the best investors. If you are an operator and you are willing to deploy time, not money, time to help a company navigate and try to be successful, at some point you will end up realizing that like, why not to actually do it from with institutional

I don’t think so. I think that you can do both things in parallel and one contributes to the other one. Like, I don’t think there is any conflicts in there fundamentally.

I was 100%. And I I would understand it. Like,

But you know what? But the interesting thing is like, I think you put it really well in the other podcast, which is like, you are the hardest working person in the office. I am the same. And if you want to do both things at the same you need to prove every single day that you are the hardest working person in the office. And I think that’s when it works. Fundamentally, you will work really hard for the company, but also you will work really hard for your investors and your LPs.

And when I was negotiating my LPA with my LPs, we got stuck in one clause. You know, like always you get stuck in clauses and things like that. What was the clause? I can’t even remember. But like, and I remember like that clause, which was like, for me, was absolutely silly. And I was like pushing back. And like for them, was like core to them. I was like, I called my main LP, which is absolutely fantastic. Sindana Capital, they’re really amazing guys. But I remember calling them like, Guys, we need to get over this.

If we are fucked, if I don’t return the money and I don’t do all of these things, we’re all fucked. It doesn’t really matter how we see it, right? It just doesn’t really matter. So let’s move on. Let’s close this thing. Let’s make sure that I start deploying the capital and then we will celebrate. And if it doesn’t work out, I’m fucked. I’m accountable for all of this. I lost all of this money. We’ll figure it out. But I don’t think I will lose your money.

I think I will do like a 10x, and I’m happy with it. And we ended up like moving on.

I think like, for me, is like the way I I thought when I was raising a fund is like I will be very happy the moment that I actually have seven unicorns in my fund. Seven. It has to be seven. I’m not gonna be happy. Why seven? I don’t know. It’s a number that I have

don’t watch football. But it’s like Soccer. Sorry. Okay, Okay, well, he was number seven, which is why. No, but I think that’s the key. Like, people that, like, want to achieve something that is different have a very clear idea of, like, what is the actual like, vision that they have. Like, who

I don’t care.

I don’t care.

I did the pre seed.

No, but I think at some point, unit economics also matters, but also I think it’s important to stay within your lane as well, right? Like, I get a lot of like, A’s and amazing companies. just not my area of expertise as a fund investor. And that’s not what I’m going to have a lot of fun as an investor. Is it?

Not for me. I love like the scrappiness. I love the crazy ideas. I love the companies. The founders like, no one wants to back them. I like those ones. I love things that are not obvious. We just did a deal together. And it wasn’t I mean, for me, it was very obvious. For your team, it was like Kira. and for you, it was like pretty obvious. But I also like talked to a lot of other VCs and they were like, no. And they’re like, how is this a no for you?

I don’t understand it. Those are the things that I really like.

That happens a lot.

Oh, wait, So you were not interested in a week ago, and now that you know that Tony VC and blah are doing it, then you’re interested? No, thank you.

I don’t think it matters in the early days. I think it’s more about like how do you get speed. But if you’re building an entire brand new market from scratch, I think you have like a power of deciding the pricing and that pricing will help you a lot in terms of unit economics. So the key item is like, are you building something from scratch? And if so, then you have like pricing power. If you’re not and you’re only looking at like building something that other people already have, then you’re to get screwed and then you will have to figure out how to actually go deeper to be able to charge more.

Be helpful. Like the money that you’re investing is not worth it. Like, I mean, it’s just not worth anything for any company. Like if you put like a 5k check or you put a 10k check or you put like a 50k, it’s not to make or break the company. And you need to be very clear that like in your mind that that’s not the case.

What’s the number one way? Go to market, Hiring people, getting Sales hiring. Sales hiring. For me, like I go into customer calls with my portfolio companies and absolutely love it. I do interest for them. I ask them to send me their decks, their pitch, like record themselves pitching, I give them feedback. And I love it because then I can figure out essentially how potentially we can change it. how are we in the right market? Are we not, are we getting the right traction or not? I absolutely love it.

And I think that you can be helpful with your portfolio companies in your own way. Just forget about the money. Do small checks. It doesn’t really matter.

I think there’s like different variations and methods. I’ve not done it in my life. I’ve essentially, as my wealth kept increasing, then fundamentally I started doing bigger checks. And that’s okay. But And you know, sometimes, of course, we fool ourselves saying this is the company. And you know how the majority of times that we do it, you end up getting disappointed. We get disappointed, but also we would do it again. What’s your biggest investing mistake? Like, I’ve done a a few investments where I was committed on the market, I was convinced on the founders, but I did not check how hungry they were to actually do go to market.

I ended up finding out that, yes, they were very hungry to build product, to execute, but they were not hungry and actually iterate on the go to market, How do you test hunger on go to market specifically? I think it’s very difficult. I think it’s like, for me, it’s like if in the first conversation, I want to understand how are they thinking about go to market already? And if they tell me like, sorry, I’m just like, I’m only thinking about building research and doing all of these things, like, fantastic.

I love your product. This is great. It’s fantastic. Your mindset, your ideas, it’s just not for me. Because then you’re going be fighting with them for go to market. And I have a bunch of my portfolio companies that actually are like that. And it’s great. Don’t get me wrong. They’re doing super well and I love them and I’m as helpful as I can. But at some point, the party ends. And if the music ends and you’re stuck without having a product where you’re monetizing it and you’re stuck with the idea that like, we can always make more money later on, then you’re gonna get fucked.

ElevenLabs for sure. Obviously can’t be. Okay. it cannot be ElevenLabs. It cannot be the Revolut. Yeah, yeah. I love that there’s a company in Spain called Teker Robotics, t h e k e r. They’re doing like robotics for like the manufacturing industry and like warehouses and all of that stuff. Absolutely the most geniuses guys that I’ve seen in robotics space ever. Like, amazing. I would just dump all of my money there.

obvious very quickly that Eleven and Ashby, use Yes, Eleven I mean, like, I talked to during for the minutes and I committed.

Yes. that’s absolutely fine. Like not everyone learns at the same pace. Not everyone like not everyone’s market grows at the same pace. And I think that’s okay. Like life is not perfect. Why would we want to have like perfect companies in our portfolio? No, let’s do the tough things always. I think like the reality is like for my LPs, I always told them like, guys, we’re to get it right and we’re going to it wrong. Like, and that’s okay. Like if I invest in a founder that like it doesn’t work out and the founder wants to do another company, I believe the first time, why not to do the second time?

Literally, like you are like trying to fall in the same place multiple times. Yes, and I will because I believe in people. And I believe in like that they can do something that they can do, like learn from those mistakes and execute and move quicker and quicker and quicker I think that’s okay.

I mean, for me, like if I get three unicorns and ElevenLabs crosses a billion dollars in revenues, I will be very happy. Wow. Three unicorns for the fans, I will be very happy. What’s the single hardest thing for you today? Time. It’s like it’s

not an answer. It is. I love you, It’s not It is. I don’t have the time I this love is like

No, No, no, no, no, it is not. And the problem is like, if you don’t have enough time for certain things, then you’re sacrificing like your partner, your friends, all of that stuff. And that’s the hardest thing for me. Like it’s I choose to actually work, like the amount of hours that I work and work for ElevenLabs and work for my fund and for my LPs, but there is a choice. And then you’re choosing to do things, putting aside all the things that are also equally important.

Plants. Like gardening. I absolutely love it. I talk to my plants. I have so many plants at home. I talk to them all the time. I water them. I take small scissors and I chop them. It’s so nice. I really like it. And that’s when I’m really stressed and I don’t understand how to fix a thing, then I start essentially spending an hour or two hours like looking after my plants. I can like spend time like looking at them and not doing anything, just talking to them.

That gives me back energy.

It’s very, very strange.

What makes him so good is like, I think his ability of listening to people and then making a decision regardless of whether he gets it right or wrong. And he will acknowledge if he got something wrong and then change it immediately. And I think that’s what I really value because you get CEOs that will tell you most of the times I need to get it right and then make some mistakes in there. And for me, it’s actually the opposite. It’s like you should be always getting it right or like 99% right in 5% of the things that are really mega important. like in the 95% remaining things, should be getting it mostly wrong.

I think that’s what Mati is trying to do, and he’s very successful at that. like allowing people to experiment and get it wrong and then push back, but also run with their ideas. And if there’s a thing that he believes it is fundamentally, it needs to happen in a specific way, he will say it and he will do it. And everyone needs to be aligned. And he has that ability of combining both things in different moments in time. And it works really well. We’ve seen it at ElevenLabs.

I am actually looking forward to the next wave of foundational model companies. I believe that there is a brand new world of opportunities that we are unlocking or that is to be unlocked with a new wave. Wait, You’re looking

Next generation of OpenAI. But I actually think like OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and ElevenLabs will end up buying like all of the new foundational model companies that will be popping up and creating research and paying just like a few billion here, few billion there and like just swapping them in. But I think it’s actually

Anthropic. And I’ve put it online like multiple times. I think like I love OpenAI, don’t get me wrong, they’re amazing, pushing the boundaries, But I really like how Do you

I think they’re still like pushing it. And I think that they’re trying to do things, like good things for the world, but they were spread too thin. And I think it’s the problem, like even us at ElevenLabs we’re facing and Anthropic is facing, everyone is facing. then when you start being very successful, you want to do too many things and then you end up, like, getting too stretched and then not doing anything correctly, right? It’s like, how do you do it less and then doing it really well?

Yes. They need to start from scratch. And for me, the key item is that it’s like, how do they start building the experimentation? Thinking like, yes, we’re still number one, we make all of this money, but at the same time, like, let’s go back to the basics.

Anthropic. I use cloth and I’m I’m very happy. Like, Cloth is my best friend. Like, It’s It’s It’s actually true. I use it all

Personal, like, fund ElevenLabs, everything.

Oh, probably I’m the worst one of all of them. But like, I mean, I like the Claude skills, for instance, and all of that, like, it’s it’s really amazing. But I see some of my, like, team members and they’re like, they’ve just nailed it. I’m just like an amateur. They’re professionals at all of this. And I would love to actually be like, you know what? Fuck all of this. I’m going away for an entire month and I’m going be a pro at all of this stuff.

I would love to do it. And hopefully one day happens.

Nice. Good.