The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:04:26 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:26] S0: Thank you so much for having me here. It's fantastic. [00:04:28] S1: Dude, I wanna 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? [00:04:43] S0: I've actually done everything. I've done like, I was VP of Operations for another AI company. Like, we built 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. [00:05:00] S1: When did you realize you loved sales? [00:05:02] S0: I think when I was doing operations, I kinda was seeing all of the guys doing sales, I was like, Shit, I can do this much better. And that's the moment I started thinking, I wanna do sales. Wanna 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. Right? So whether you do ops, product, like sales, everything is kinda enmesh in reality. [00:05:27] S1: Was there a moment there where you're like, this is what I'm destined to do. Like, I'm a sales leader. Yeah.
00:05:27 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:05:27] S1: Was there a moment there where you're like, this is what I'm destined to do. Like, I'm a sales leader. Yeah. [00:05:33] S0: So when like, there was a company that came out of EF called Sonantic that was doing AI voices back in the early days. So I 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, I want to rebuild the entire product stack. Would you join me? There's going be a very good challenge. I was like, Okay, fine, let's do it. And then that's when I changed. But I realized, product, I love it. I did it for a year and a half. Was It fantastic. Like, I built the entire product that, like, now they've pivoted to that product and it's doing super well. But I realized, like, I wanna be talking to customers all the time. I wanna actually sell them. Like, the rush that you get when you close a deal is insane. It's insane. And and I absolutely love it. [00:06:18] S1: Tell me, how did you first come to meet Matti? Because you invested as well. You're the, like, first round investor.
00:06:18 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:06:18] S1: Tell me, how did you first come to meet Matti? Because you invested as well. You're the, like, first round investor. [00:06:24] S0: Yes. At 5,000,000 valuation, pre seed. 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, have this friend. We used to work together at BlackRock. He's thinking something about AI voices and so on. I 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 thirty minutes of the first conversation, I was like, I'm all in. How much money do you want? And I will introduce you to my friends. And that was pretty much it. [00:06:54] S1: How much did you put in? [00:06:55] S0: I put in 20 k. 20 k? [00:06:58] S1: Yes. Have you kept it all? [00:06:59] S0: I sort of a tiny, tiny portion through one of the secondaries, but it's that tiny portion. [00:07:05] S1: What is 20 k worth now? [00:07:07] S0: It's probably like... It's it's like 800 k in returns. So that's probably like, what, $616,000,000, something like that? Not bad. Oh. But you've done much better. So... No. I haven't [00:07:19] S1: had that multiple. I haven't had that multiple. That is fucking phenomenal. [00:07:23] S0: It's good. But, like, it's it's it's been good. [00:07:25] S1: When was that moment when you're like, holy shit. I've just gotta join this rocket ship?
00:07:25 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:07:25] S1: When was that moment when you're like, holy shit. I've just gotta join this rocket ship? [00:07:29] S0: I've always been willing to actually leave everything and join one of my portfolio companies. Like, one of my key things is, like, I would not invest in a company if I'm not 100% convinced. Like, if there is a time that I need to join, I will join them. And I think ElevenLabs was one of those ones. They were like 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 would 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 for twenty four hours, met the team, And towards the end of the mini ops side, Matti was like, Well, maybe we should talk about you joining us. And then that's when we started talking. Was like, I'm all in. Like, you tell me. I've done it before. I know the space because we sold Sonantic 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 Eleven. [00:08:26] S1: What revenue were you at when you joined? [00:08:28] S0: Zero. You were at zero? Yeah. Like, we had, like, the company launched literally a week before I joined. So we launched at the end of January twenty twenty three, and then within a month or so, we had over a million users.
00:08:28 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:08:28] S0: Zero. You were at zero? Yeah. Like, we had, like, the company launched literally a week before I joined. So we launched at the end of January twenty twenty three, and then within a month or so, we had over a million users. [00:08:40] S1: And so for you, it was like, Hey, you need to build out the sales team. What was Matti's job description for you that you have [00:08:46] S0: to do? Objective role number one. So the idea was to actually build the entire enterprise site, and that's how we timed it, like the entire go to market. But the company ended up growing so quickly that we ended up switching it towards 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 milestones. And essentially, like, we ended up deciding, together with Matti and Pierre, it's like, Okay, if we reach a certain level of revenues within twenty four months, then my equity compensation goes up, so I unlock additional portion of equity. And to the point that I was like, it seemed like so silly, the number that we had put in there. [00:09:24] S1: What number did you put in there?
00:09:24 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:09:24] S1: What number did you put in there? [00:09:25] S0: It was a very silly number. Like, very high. But it seemed so silly that, like, Matthew even told me, like, Okay, so what we'll do is, like, we will put a check-in at twelve months mark. So whatever you've accrued up until that point, we'll just give you the proportional basis, right? It was so funny because we hit that revenue milestone within less than twelve months of actually starting everything. But actually, back in the day when we were thinking about it, like when we were negotiating it, it seemed like no one had done that. [00:09:53] S1: Right? 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?