Carles Reina, ElevenLabs' first investor and fourth employee, ran outbound sales himself, holding 80 to 100 meetings a week on a basic Google Sheets CRM.
ElevenLabs set quotas at 20 times base salary, the so-called 20x rule, and averages about 167% quota attainment each quarter.
Reina says roughly 99% of companies are overvalued and predicts that firms which raised at inflated valuations will struggle and some will disappear within six to nine months.
How ElevenLabs' first investor built a quota-crushing sales machine
Carles Reina went from ElevenLabs' first investor to its fourth employee and built the sales engine by hand. He argues early go-to-market rewards sheer volume of conversations and experiments, followed by steep incentives once reps arrive. He now applies that operator discipline to a pre-seed fund, wary that most AI startups are overvalued.
Takeaways
Early sales means collecting many fast nos. Reina ran outbound himself at 80 to 100 meetings a week, tracked in Google Sheets. Calls gave 20 minutes to the prospect's problems, then a recap, ending at minute 25 to draft the follow-up. Experiments are never punished, since one idea in 100 suffices.
The 20x rule ties quota to salary. Quotas equal 20 times base salary, so a 100,000 base with 100,000 uncapped commission requires 2m in annual sales. Commission rates climb from 5% to 10%, upsells pay for twelve months, and average attainment runs about 167% per quarter, with relief in harder markets.
Developers came first, enterprises followed later. The first nine months went to convincing companies of a future through generative AI consulting. Fit arrived with developer-ecosystem companies building their own tools, before banks and telcos. Reina calls not splitting incentives by vertical a mistake, and enterprise deals take longer than six months.
Models are saturated, so ElevenLabs owns audio. Reina sees too many models across text, video, image, audio and music. ElevenLabs aims for the best audio research and products built on its foundational models. Competitors have used its API and claimed the technology as their own.
Europe is unserious about AI infrastructure. Reina calls Spain's 720m euro commitment to a one gigabyte data center laughable and blames countries competing for the same funding. Europe excels at applications like ElevenLabs and Mistral but lacks core models, so founders sometimes must move to the US to win globally.
Reina's fund bets on writing the first check. After about 60 angel investments starting with Revolut, he closed at a 16m hard cap on 23m of commitments in August 2025. Twelve months in, it holds about 23 investments including two unicorns, at a 2.6 MOIC.
About 99% of AI startups are overvalued. Reina points to 2m pre-seed rounds at 50m valuations, even as one portfolio company reached 20m ARR in two and a half months. He expects inflated-valuation companies to struggle within six to nine months and urges managers to sell some holdings for LPs.
Fixing Europe's capital cycle
Guillaume says US founders are more confident but not smarter, and France lacks a VC mindset.
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On this episode 2
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No French investors took part when NVIDIA acquired Hugging Face at roughly 13bn, he notes.
France's three billionaire founders could break the cycle by investing again, Guillaume argues.
Reina says secondary sales let employees cash out and reinvest, which Europe needs to fund the industries behind its welfare state.