The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:55:42 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:55:42] S1: How do you build a community? [00:55:44] S0: Building a community is like you need to do what is right for them. You need to actually talk to them constantly. Give them your like, specifically in the early days, give them your WhatsApp, put them in Slack. It doesn't really matter. Like, those people need to interact with you constantly. And they need to know that, like, if they need to downscale the commitment, you will accept it. It's fine. You're doing what is right for them, even if that costs you money. And that's a part of the culture, right? It's like, if I'm only thinking about transactional elements and pure transactions, then no, no, no, I need to sign the highest amount for this company because whatever it is, of course, they're gonna churn at some point. But exactly the same like when you are building a company. Why would you change that approach? But you do it with your friends. The only difference is like, Hey, the customers are not your friends yet. Some of them will become your friends. And I have like a bunch of customers that end up becoming my friends. And I absolutely love it. But you need to build a relationship because no one wants to be sold. Absolutely no one.
00:56:35 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:56:35] S1: So funny, I just did a show with one of the best sales leaders ever, John McMahon. He was on the boards of MongoDB, Snowflake, real... It was a CRO of five public companies. Unbelievable. And he said, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And I just thought that was beautiful. Yes. Why should you fire yourself? And it's a really weird question, but I would fire myself because definitely we were too slow to video. No shit. That would be my number one. And then I'd say number two, I'm too distracted, not focused enough. [00:57:07] S0: For me, I would find myself because I do too many things. And I love doing too many things, but also makes me unfocused in many areas. The other one is the moment I lose passion, literally I just don't care anymore. So that's more like I would fire myself. Like, I start thinking that like I'm starting to lose a little bit of the passion, then it's like, shit, no. Like, you need to fire yourself. Like, do something else because you're gonna be like, you're gonna be burning out extremely quickly. [00:57:36] S1: Most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies. Oh, they're a zero to one person. Oh, they're very rare is that I'm thinking of Chris Degnan actually at Snowflake, he went from zero to public company. And he would say he was zero to 4,000,000,000 in an hour. Do you think you're full stack?
00:57:36 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:57:36] S1: Most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies. Oh, they're a zero to one person. Oh, they're very rare is that I'm thinking of Chris Degnan actually at Snowflake, he went from zero to public company. And he would say he was zero to 4,000,000,000 in an hour. Do you think you're full stack? [00:57:53] S0: I love the early stage of companies, but it's still like, for me, it doesn't really matter. If you're still enjoying what you're doing, just keep going, right? Like, life is too short, like, for doing something that you don't enjoy. And I think the majority of people are smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life. That's my main motivation. And I've always taken my job at ElevenLabs on a monthly basis. If next month I don't enjoy it, I would just tell Matty I'm not enjoying it. It is time for me to quit and do something else. Really? Yes. [00:58:20] S1: How do you advise people? Because I would say a month isn't long enough. A month can be a bad part of the market, it can be, I don't know, psychology, whatever. Do you advise people on when the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough, move job?
00:58:20 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:58:20] S1: How do you advise people? Because I would say a month isn't long enough. A month can be a bad part of the market, it can be, I don't know, psychology, whatever. Do you advise people on when the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough, move job? [00:58:33] S0: Of course, one month is like the trigger for you to start thinking whether it is or not the right thing. One month is not enough. So like, if it happens with like number of months, like two or three months, consecutive months, then you have a problem in there, right? Because like everyone will start seeing it. So I think like if for three months you've been going through this like very rough patch that you're not finding motivation, you should just triple check whether you're in the right place. [00:58:55] S1: What is the main reason that ElevenLabs is a efficient machine of a company that no one knows and sees? [00:59:05] S0: I think it's fundamentally the type of people. Nothing else. Like it's like very humble people that essentially don't know what they don't know, and they would just stand up and accept their mistakes. And I think we've encouraged everyone to make a ton of mistakes all the time, experiment, and no one gets fired for making mistakes. And that is the superpower that we have as an organization. It's like literally no one will know that we've iterated and tested like 25 things and all of the 25 things failed. But you just need one to actually deliver it to actually make another 100,000,000 in revenues. And I'm happy with that. I'm happy with those odds.
00:59:05 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:59:05] S0: I think it's fundamentally the type of people. Nothing else. Like it's like very humble people that essentially don't know what they don't know, and they would just stand up and accept their mistakes. And I think we've encouraged everyone to make a ton of mistakes all the time, experiment, and no one gets fired for making mistakes. And that is the superpower that we have as an organization. It's like literally no one will know that we've iterated and tested like 25 things and all of the 25 things failed. But you just need one to actually deliver it to actually make another 100,000,000 in revenues. And I'm happy with that. I'm happy with those odds. [00:59:39] S1: What makes Matti such an incredible CEO?
00:59:39 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:59:39] S1: What makes Matti such an incredible CEO? [00:59:42] S0: I think it's the fact that like he can do both like the product side and the customer side, and he's like very extrovert in nature and very empathetic with the customers and the rest of organization. It's actually difficult to find leaders and CEOs that actually can do both things with the product and can do the customer side. Sometimes they have this vision on the product side, but they're just lacking the drive to do sales, and Matti will roll up his sleeves and be like, fuck, I'm gonna be running this sale, right? It's one of his superpowers in general. You've met him, he comes across extremely personal. You're immediately drawn to him. He's a nice guy in general, right? And as such, when you add up all of these factors, then it's like, it's a fantastic leader, fantastic CEO. But we have another one, which is fundamentally like Piotr. He's the genius of the company, right? In the sense, he built the entire technology from scratch. We have a very small research team that all of them are actually, like, walking brains, like, literally, that is, like, super, super smart guys. But he's hired by Peter, like, the company would not exist if it wasn't because, like, we built a fantastic technology. [01:00:47] S1: Is it almost harder when you become a sexy brand? Because you have so many people who wanna join, it becomes a lot noisier.