00:00:00 · Carles Reina, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:00:00] S0: The only tool that actually seemed, like, really good, that was giving us results, that was easy to use, and that people in the team actually wanted to use on a day to day basis was quota is your base salary. [00:00:12] S1: You didn't know how much you were gonna raise, and eventually, you had to, like, stop it because you raised, like, too quickly. Which one do you think are bubbles versus non bubbles? Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Carles Reina, first investor and fourth employee at ElevenLabs, where he built revenue from zero to over $600,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. He's also the founder of Baobab Ventures, a $15,000,000 pre seed fund. Carles, thanks a lot for coming to the show. So to start, I really want to understand how does someone end up being an investor and also an employee at a startup like ElevenLabs? It was really odd. I think, like,
00:00:52 · Carles Reina
[00:00:52] S0: I always make the joke. It's like, I I just made the investment, and I I wanted to protect it as much as I could. So actually, so I decided to join. But like, I don't know. Like, it just... Like, Matty and I met when he was still at Palantir. Matty is one of the founders. And immediately within the first thirty minutes of talking, this is like back in March 2022, immediately within like the first thirty minutes, I was like, how much money do you want? And I will introduce you to all of my friends, and we will do a round. Do you have a deck? And of course, he didn't have a deck. He didn't have anything. So we spent a weekend putting together a deck. And one thing led to the other one, we were talking all the time. And at some point, Matthew was like, oh, we're organizing a a mini off-site in Portugal with the entire company. The entire company was like the two founders and two employees. Right? So that that was essentially the entire company. And I always considered the two founders, like, one and one, of course, 11. So, like, it's like the... Can be one and zero and zero. It has to be one and one. And I was like, yeah, let me join. So I ended up joining. And then my surprise was like, was only staying for twenty four hours because I couldn't stay for longer. And then towards the end of it, Matthew was like, hey, like, why don't you join us to build go to market? We don't have an idea. We'd love to have you here. How do we make this work? And I said, a 100%, yes. Like, count me in. And it's like, that's how everything got started. Like, literally, there was no plan actually, like, investing and joining. It was more of a, like, kinda transition towards that way. But I've always believed that, like, if you invest in a company or at least the way I see it is, like, if I invest in a company, I've always been willing to actually drop everything and work for that company for whatever number of months or years requires to make sure that like they go on. And I think like when you do it that way, then kind of the perception of like where you are investing fundamentally changes also because you want to be investing in people that, like, you would also want to be working for.
00:02:38 · Carles Reina, Guillaume Moubeche
Because the investors, you always have the idea is like, okay, you can have the board, and you give them money, and you help them a little bit if if some people want, like, oh, you help them a lot in my case, or all of the stuff. Like, literally, it's very different being an investor than actually being, like, the employee reporting to the founder. So, like, there's a little bit of a different relationship [00:02:57] S1: in there. I think it's super smart. Like, I've done a lot of early stage investment, and if I had met you earlier, I would have probably avoided many mistakes. Because the truth is, like, sometimes I've invested just because I was excited by the market, the idea, and I was like, okay. The team looks smart. But if I had asked myself, like, would I drop everything to work with some people? The answer would have been no. So it would have probably avoided me a few check, but... And going back to, like, those early days, I know you you did a lot of, sales and, you know, like, I think you did 400 demos or like many, many demos in the first months. Like, exactly did that go and how do you structure go to market company like ElevenLabs?
00:03:41 · Carles Reina
[00:03:41] S0: I think like the reality is like, there's no major secret, right? Like for us, and the same I recommend to all of my founders and every single person that I talk out there is like, literally, when you're pre product market fit, you just need to get a lot of nos. And you know it better than than everyone else as well. It's like, literally, talk to as many people as you can, get as many nos as you can so that you build all of the resilience and get them as quickly as possible so that you know, like, okay, these are the things that are not working. These are the things that are actually working. And then you triple down on those things that are actually working. And that's what we did at ElevenLabs. So fundamentally, like, initially we launched, it was all about self-service, product led growth, like in... Like, self-service where people would sign up. And then fundamentally, like, we started getting a bunch of inbound. But the majority of those inbox that we're getting actually were kinda trash fundamentally because, like, it was people, like, just wanted to explore. It's like... Or they had a lot of questions on the support side that we were not answering on the support side. Or like, there was a lot of the things. So like, I started testing and experimenting a number of things. One, what was the actual pitch that was gonna be working? What was the value proposition that we had to actually pitch and that we had to put to the market? How quickly should we be sending follow ons, like information around like the contract, the pricings? So everything was an actually testing environment for us during the first like six months to fully understand what was actually gonna be working to the point that, like, even the ICP is like, should I be outbounding and talking to, like, people that are on the tech side? Should I be doing it to CEOs? Should I be doing it to, like, strategy teams? Should I be doing it to, like, marketing teams? We had absolutely no clue. One thing was very clear for us, like, it was working with content creators. But content creators, unfortunately, don't end up spending, like, tens of thousands every month or hundreds of thousands. That is the problem. So you had to actually find a brand new niche market to be able to actually do that. And it was all about like Google Sheets, simply a very basic CRM that we had in a Google Sheet.
00:05:42 · Carles Reina, Guillaume Moubeche
That was like in the early days. And essentially me outbounding and blocking as many invites and calendar invites then and meetings as possible to the point that I was doing 80 to a 100 meetings every single week. Like, simple as that. And I would do like nonstop back to back meetings where I would do like thirty minutes reserved for every every single one of the customer. And it was a prospect in the majority of cases. The first twenty minutes was all about, like, ElevenLabs and their problems and all of that stuff. The last five minutes was a little bit of, a recap and all of that stuff. In the last five minutes, I would always finish, like, at minute twenty five or so so that I could spend the next five minutes drafting the follow on email and then scheduling it so that it would be sending it like in the next thirty, forty minutes and then testing variations. Should we be sending like pricing? Should we not be sending price? Should we do this? Should we do that? Right? That was fundamentally how we got started. And I was doing it myself for the first nine months of ElevenLabs. And it was really a lot of fun, but also like super, super training. But that's actually like the tough things of building a company. [00:06:45] S1: And how do you go like from... You've done it, you've tested like many different ways to sell ElevenLabs to, okay, I need to hire a team and now start structuring, like, how SDRs are working, what are their processes, and how do we reach, like, a quota?
00:07:00 · Carles Reina
[00:07:00] S0: Yeah. So I think, like... So when I started hiring the first people, so, like, I hired two... The first two account execs in September 2023. So we had already been selling for nine months. I had a pretty good idea of, like, what was actually working, what wasn't actually working. My view has always been that, like, you need to have in a go to market organization icebreakers, and you need to have, like, people that actually scale the go to market side. The icebreakers are those guys that actually will go and find what is next. Like, where should we be going? What are the markets? What are the products? How do we pitch it? Like, finding truly the PMF on that side. And then once you figure that out, then you hire people and you bring people that actually will scale it much deeply. And we were in that phase where we're like scaling it. And for us, like, we were throwing like 6,000,000 more or less on the enterprise side and all that stuff. I still felt that we didn't have product market fit because there was a lot of things that we had to figure out. But it was a good way that we had a little bit of some parameters of like what was working, what wasn't actually working. So I brought the first two. We started growing even faster, which was a good sign because it meant that, like, the market was ready to actually go quicker and essentially cover more more geographies, more type of companies, and so on. And then we continually started scaling and scaling. While I stayed, I was still closing a lot of deals. So in the three and a half years that I was at ElevenLabs up until recently, I've been closing deals myself pretty much every month. And so, like, I didn't wanna lose this sense of touch of reality and customers because then essentially you don't understand what's happening in the business. But I was much more focused on this being an icebreaker. What are the markets that we need to actually open? What are the new products that we need to be pitching? Hence, you end up doing this, like, kind of hybrid model. And then once we saw the first two that were working really well, I remember, like, the first two people that we... I hired, they were selling contracts within the first two weeks. And then the third person that I hired in The