20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

Carles Reina is VP of Sales at ElevenLabs, where he was the first investor and fourth employee. Carles has scaled the revenue org from Day 1 to over $330M in just 3 years. Carles is also an active investor with investments in ElevenLabs, Revolut, Happy Robot and more. AGENDA: 0:00 How I Turned $20K into $16M with Revolut Angel Investment 10:45 Why I Don't Believe in Product-Market Fit 15:40 How to do Land and Expand: Turning $12K Deals into Millions 19:40 The 20X Rule: A "Ruthless" Comp Plan for Elite Reps 24:35 Public Shaming? Why Honest Pipeline Reviews Save Companies 28:50 Why Your Sales Reps Should Never Be in the Office 35:45 The Outbound King: How to Pivot from 90% Inbound 45:45 "Vibe Coding" & The Death of Technical Ceilings 55:35 Why I'd Fire Myself: The Secret Psychology of High-Performers

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We ask everyone to bring twenty times their base salary. That's your quota, right? So if I pay you a hundred K a year, your quota is two million dollars. If you don't achieve your quota, then you're going to be out, right? And we're ruthless on that end. When I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried. Because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road. When you join Eleven Labs, you need to have signed your first contract within first two weeks. Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told.

• 0:27Harry Stebbings?

  This is Twenty Sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now today, we have the best twenty sales episode that we have ever done. Carles Reina is the VP of Sales at Eleven Labs, where he has scaled the revenue org to over three hundred and thirty million dollars in just three years. He's also a phenomenal investor with investments in the likes of Revolut, Happy Robot, Nothing and more. This was probably one of the most granular, but also insightful, sales episodes we've done. Carlos does not pull any punches. Get your notebooks out. This was one of my favorites to record. But before we dive into the show today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, Rocks. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled.

• 1:12Harry Stebbings?

  It's honestly remarkable. Rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just ninety days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach and opportunity management. So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. Rocks gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try Rocks at rocks.com/signup.

• 1:56Harry Stebbings?

  And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years, I've watched some of the best founders and early go-to-market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work. Well, that changes with Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, lay in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, drafts, follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward. So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates and faster revenue growth.

• 2:40Harry Stebbings?

  If you're an early-stage startup, tired of duct-taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at monaco.com. While Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your dot com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool and is used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A/B testing.

• 3:22Harry Stebbings?

  So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click: publish, without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full dot com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off, 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan.

• 4:06Harry Stebbings?

  That's framer.com/20vc for 30% off. Framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:19Harry Stebbings?

  Carlos, it is fantastic to have you on the show, dude. I've heard so many good things, mostly from Matty, but thank you so much for joining me today, man.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me here. It's fantastic.

• 4:28Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I want to 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?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  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 in G A.

• 5:00Harry Stebbings?

  When did you realize you loved sales?

• 5:02Speaker 00

  I think like when I was doing Operations, I kind of like was seeing all of the guys like doing sales. And I was like, shit, I can do this much better. And that's the moment I started to think like, I want to do sales, I want to do sales. So I getting, I started getting closer to like customers. And then I realized like, that is my area. But like, when you work in a startup in the early days, nothing really matters. Like, the only thing that you care about is like, how do you get to the next milestone, right? So whether you'd Ops, Product, like Sales, everything is kind of a mesh in reality.

• 5:27Harry Stebbings?

  Was there a moment there where you're like, this is what I'm destined to do? Like, I'm a sales leader.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when, like, there was a company that came out of E F 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, like, I want to rebuild the entire product stack. Would you join me? There's going to be a very good challenge." I was like, "Okay, fine, let's do it." And then that's when I changed, but I realized like, Product, I love it. I did for a year and a half. It was fantastic. Like, I built the entire product that like now they pivoted to that product and it's doing super well. But I realized like, I want to be talking to customers all the time. I want to actually sell them. Like, the rush that you get when you close a deal is insane. It's insane, and I absolutely love it.

• 6:18Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, how did you first come to meet Matty? Because you invested as well. You're the like first round investor.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Yes, at five million valuation, pre-seed. So I met Matty 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, I have this friend, like, uh, he, we used to work together at Blackrock. He's thinking about like something about AI voices and so on. Have no idea, but you've been in that space. You wanna talk to him? I was like, absolutely. And then that's when I met Matty 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.

• 6:54Harry Stebbings?

  How much did you put in?

• 6:55Speaker 00

  I put in twenty K.

• 6:57Harry Stebbings?

  Twenty K?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:58Harry Stebbings?

  Have you kept it all?

• 7:00Speaker 00

  I sold a tiny, tiny portion through one of the secondaries, but that's that's tiny portion.

• 7:05Harry Stebbings?

  What is twenty K worth now?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Probably like, it's, it's like eight hundred K in returns. So that's probably like, what, six, uh, sixteen million, something like that? Not bad.

• 7:14Harry Stebbings?

  Woo!

• 7:16Speaker 00

  But you've done much better, so.

• 7:17Harry Stebbings?

  No, I haven't had that multiple. I haven't had that multiple. That is fucking phenomenal.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  It's good, but like, it's, it's, it's been good.

• 7:25Harry Stebbings?

  When was that moment where you're like, holy shit, I've just got to join this rocket ship?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  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 a hundred percent convinced. Like, if there is a time that I need to join, I will join them. And I think Eleven Labs was one of those ones where like, they were like the first offsite that we were doing. It was in Portugal and then Matty called me one day saying, we're doing this, do you wanna 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 like for twenty-four hours, met the team. And towards the end of the mini offsite, Matty was like, well, maybe we should talk about you joining us. And then that's when we started talking, I was like, I'm all in. Like, you tell me, I've done it before, I know the space because we sold Solantik to Spotify.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  So I knew the type of customers, the pitch, the way of doing it. Like, I'm a hundred percent 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.

• 8:26Harry Stebbings?

  What revenue were you at when you joined?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Uh, zero.

• 8:29Harry Stebbings?

  You were zero?

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, we had, like, the company launched like 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.

• 8:40Harry Stebbings?

  And so for you, it was like, hey, you need to build out the sales team. What was Matty's job description for you that you have to do? Objective role number one.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  So the idea was to actually like build the entire enterprise side. And that's how we timed it, like the entire go to market. But the company ended up like growing so quickly that like we ended up switching it. It was like being, let's do it on the enterprise side. And the way we put it, it was like, like now you think it makes sense. But the compensation was was based on milestones. And essentially like we ended up deciding together with Matty and Piotr, it's like, okay, if we reach a certain level of like revenues within twenty four months, then my equity compensation goes up. So I unlock additional portion of equity. And to the point that was like, it seemed like so silly, the number that we had put in there.

• 9:24Harry Stebbings?

  What number did you put in there?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  It was a very silly number, like a very high. But it seemed so silly that like Matty even told me like, okay, so what we'll do is like, we will put a check in at twelve month mark. So like whatever you've accrued up until that point will just give you the proportional, like the proportional basis, right? Like, it was so funny because like we hit that revenue milestone within less than twelve months of actually like starting everything. So, but actually back in the day when we were thinking about it, like we were negotiating, it's like, it seemed like no one had done that, right?

• 9:53Harry Stebbings?

  When you are with the GTM that you have, it's a PLG motion largely.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:58Harry Stebbings?

  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?

• 10:09Speaker 00

  So the way we did it is like the PLG motion gave us a ton of like volume of leads, which ninety plus percent of those were like extremely bad. But the interesting portion is like you started seeing like some patterns or like where people were finding interest and where you would essentially have were having meaningful conversation. So that for me was like instrumental to understand later on and building name account list and going after specific accounts from an album basis because I was seeing some level of traction. And like investors were telling us like, God, you have product market fit because you're doing all of this millions. And I was telling them like, no, no, no, like we don't have it, like I don't. Believe in product market fit until you in one single ICP you've made more than ten million dollars.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Right. So you keep experimenting and you build like a like list and then one week you tackle like specific persona. And another week you tackle like completely different vertical to actually understand one moves quicker. What is the pitch that actually resonates better and so on. That's how we essentially started doing it. And I remember the first two deals that we did within thirty days of like launching the first product. It was like a company that was doing a chatbot based in Germany. They paid us twelve thousand dollars and we thought like this is super good that like we could start doing things. Second company was a media company that was doing automated radio stations. That we sign a two year deal thirty six thousand dollars per year. Like those two companies, we still have them as customers. They've skyrocketed in value, both of them.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  But like that was only the beginning. It's like, okay, we can start doing it. We know how to actually this generate this motion. Now we need to go much deeper.

• 11:39Harry Stebbings?

  How do you advise founders then in the early days when they're in this kind of, again, we have so many founders that listen to pens and paper. When they're looking at it and going, do I go horizontal and let everyone try it and really kind of let the market decide? Or do we go very vertically focused and go, okay, chatbots, we've got one customer. Let's just put all the sales team on all the chatbot partners. How do you advise founders on which ones are right?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Depends on the product that you're building, right? If you're building something in the healthcare space. It's an absolute nightmare. You need to actually go to healthcare. But you can still take a very broad approach within the healthcare space, right? So you can actually target hospitals, you can target like clinics, you can have bigger ones and smaller ones. You can target like practitioners, you can target like across the entire spectrum of your vertical. Target as many people as possible because truly you might have a guess or like you might have an intuition of like what it's going to be performing. But the best companies in reality started in one end. Ended up like winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting, right? So if you can target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn't resonate, how quickly they're moving. And essentially then you can fine tune your pitch and your name account list in that area.

• 12:45Harry Stebbings?

  If we go back to the outbound element on the leads that we have. What did we look for that suggested a great lead that was a qualified lead that we would go after? Was it the fact that they had an email extension that was accenture.com or whatever that was? And it was a company name. Was it usage patterns? What was it?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Nothing at all. It was like so random, like I had absolutely no idea. Like in the early days, we were signing like enterprise contracts with Gmail accounts. So we remember like this is like early days of ChatGPT. People were building applications left and right and think like, I might need to add some voice here or there, even if it's like for like some dubbing or for like voicing some of the narrations and all of that stuff. The reality is like there will be all of these like developers, like single developer shops using a Gmail account saying, well, I want to add voice, but your self-service plans are not enough because they have like some limitations, some caps. And essentially I would need all of these additional things. I was like, okay, fantastic. Then enterprise is the right path. We'll customize it for you, blah, blah, blah.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  And what I used to do is like it got to a point where like I was doing like 30 minutes calls and I would do maybe like 50, 60 calls in a single week, back to back. And I would tell them like within 30 minutes, I knew if they were qualified or not. I knew they were interested, if they could move quickly. So what I would do is like I would set up a trial. By the end of the day, I will commit on the call on the spot being, by the end of the day, you will have heard from me. I will set up your trial. You will have access to the contracts that you can start reviewing it. And if you need anything, just ping me at any time. And this is my WhatsApp. What you end up creating is like this dynamic that like you would end up building a very close relationship with those companies. They will message you on WhatsApp and even up today, if one of those like very early ones have an issue, they message me on WhatsApp

• 14:30Speaker 00

  and essentially we try to fix it, right? But like that is the type of relationship you want to be building with your first customers because essentially they will be there for you forever. They're not going to switch away because we have such a good personal relation. It's an absolute no brainer.

• 14:43Harry Stebbings?

  Just if we go through that, questions to ask, which really clearly showed that they were a great, high-quality lead. In those 30 minutes, if you were to advise me, I'm a technical founder, imagine I'm Matty. How do I know if they're a good lead? What questions do I ask?

• 14:57Speaker 00

  For me, it's like slightly different from what the traditional sales methods are, right? But I want to know like, what are you building? And what is your vision for your company? How are you thinking about like the entire market that you operate? Essentially, who are you? Are you technical? Are you not technical? What are you going to be doing with like the product in general? Do you need to involve a lot of other people or not, right? For me, those are the core questions in the early days, specifically on developer economy. Or like if you're targeting developers, that tell me if like you are ready to actually buy this. You're only playing a little bit to understand whether it makes sense or not, or how hard things like are going to be playing. Because like if you think about it, like different markets have different type of profiles, right? Like in the US, you need to be very direct. And it's a lot more like aggressive like sales in nature. In Europe, we're always in the middle, right?

• 15:42Speaker 00

  So like, but if you go to Latam or if you go to India, people don't have an incentive to actually tell you no. So you end up getting a stack. If you don't qualify well, you end up getting a stack in like endless loops of like trials, chase at emails and so on of people that for a cultural perspective, they're not going to tell you no, but they're not going to buy. Every single market has a lot of variations. And because I've actually built all of them across the world for Eleven Labs, I know all of the details for all of those pieces, right? So if you tell me like, okay, I'm building a company in Mexico City, then I can tell you like, these are the core items that I would like to understand from a qualification perspective in the first few minutes.

• 16:21Harry Stebbings?

  What ACV does it make sense to have reps on? And what I mean by that is you said there 50 to 60 calls. Is it like 10K a year? You can start to have a rep-led approach. Below that, it's got to be PLG. How do you advise founders on that?

• 16:36Speaker 00

  I think it's like, it needs to be at least $1,000 a month, right? The trick is like, how much money do you feel that like you can put in your credit card without having to explain anything? Like if you are comfortable putting like $1,000 a month, absolutely fine. Then your threshold should be $2,000, right? But if like the majority of people putting $1,000 on their credit cards, even if it's like for the business transaction, they still need to explain quite a lot of stuff. So then that's the morning which like they need handholding, they need convincing, they need to show ROI. That's the one that you want to tackle them because then you treat it as like a PLG motion with a land and expand. It's like, don't worry, we'll sort everything, we'll help you. Like $12,000, it is a lot of money. Acknowledge that it is a lot of money for them because it is a lot of money. Then work with them on an expansion plan.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  But if you do it much higher, then I see a lot of founders telling me like, no, no, it needs to be like, investors have been telling me like, I need to go proper enterprise. Proper enterprise, like six-figure deals and so on. I'm always like, forget about it. Like, it's gonna take you months to get that contract done. The beautiful side is like, if you sign a $12,000 contract, there is probably one layer of approval. Maximum two layers of approval for a bigger company. If you wanna sign a six-figure deal, there's gonna be like at least three or four layers of approval. If you wanna sign a million-dollar contract out of the gate, it's gonna take you a long time. But if you actually land in a very like small deal, then you start expanding it, those approvals have disappeared completely.

• 17:58Harry Stebbings?

  What are your biggest lessons on how to land and expand successfully? Cause I, I'm in a lot of companies, period. But I'm in a lot of companies where they've landed and they've assumed that they've expanded and they have the cost base ready for the expansion in terms of CS and all that comes with the sales machine. But they stay at the land price. And that's a big problem because then the economics just don't work. What are your biggest lessons on how to expand successfully and manage that as a sales leader?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  So we've had that as well at Eleven Labs, like multiple times, right? There's a portion of the customers that we oversold and then like they kept going flat. Part of the big effort always is like, how do you find new use cases for them? And how do you show them like additional value? So there is like, you need to knock on people's doors. Like, even if you sign an inbound deal, that is one deal that is inbound. But you should not be thinking that like that is done. It's like, then you need to transform it into like an outbound opportunity as well. And then to do it outbound opportunity is like, okay, now I have an MSA sign with an order form. Let's actually go and outbound every single other team that might be relevant across the entire organization to show them what the capabilities are, right? That is the only way you actually expand a deal.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  But not only that, like the most important question is, how do you retain them forever? Because if there is only one team that uses you, that team at some point might get pissed. Someone might pitch them, you lose that deal.

• 19:19Harry Stebbings?

  Who's responsible for this internally? Is it CS? Is it product? Is it sales?

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Uh, depends how you wanna organize it. Some companies call it account management, right?

• 19:26Harry Stebbings?

  What do you do?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  We do like a Account execs and customer success. So for us, like, once a deal is signed, we translate to like customer success. Customer success is responsible for like the upselling, negotiations, all of that stuff. Now, the difference is in the enterprise segment. So very large customers, right? So name account lists, companies that have like over two thousand employees and things like that. Then for those ones, my request to the account exec is like, your job is not finished. Even if you translate to a customer success manager, I still want you to go and upsell and find new opportunities in the account. Because you're incentivized. And if I'm an account exec, like, let's be very honest, like, everyone loves money and making money as an account exec. So you're incentivized to say, like, you went through hell for the past sixty days to close an enterprise contract.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Then that contract is signed. Getting the next team on board is relatively simple because you've actually gone through the actual, like, signing of the contract. So just outbound, open new doors, and we'll pay you even more commissions because like you're, you keep accruing more, right?

• 20:28Harry Stebbings?

  Help me understand as a founder, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps first? And then how, second, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps to sell, upsell efficiently?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  I think like in reality is like pretty much exactly the same in the sense that what we do at Eleven Labs is like, I set up like this, this threshold, which is like, we ask everyone to bring twenty times their base salary. That's your quota, right? So if I pay you a hundred K a year, your quota is two million dollars. That's it. If you don't achieve your quota, then you're gonna be out, right? And we're ruthless on that end. So everyone actually smashes their quota at Eleven Labs. I would rather have smaller teams that like smash their quotas and I pay much more.

• 21:05Harry Stebbings?

  Do you hit that quota?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Today is more than eighty percent hit their quota. Right? And they unlock accelerators and all of that stuff. But the interesting piece, like, on the upsell side is we compensate both the account exec and the CSM. If the contract is upsold, if we upsell a company within the first twelve months, the account exec continues to accrue like quota retirement and also like commissions. And the CSM is compensated an NRR, right? So I'm paying double, but I don't care. It makes perfect sense because then I have these two people busting their ass to make sure that they actually can make more money, which is fantastic for me as a company.

• 21:43Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get that. Again, I just wanna pick on some things you said there. You said that eighty percent is phenomenal, given the ambitiousness of twenty X. If you were advising me as a founder, is that twenty X a good rule of thumb? Or do you think that's specific to the margin profile of Eleven Labs?

• 21:57Speaker 00

  I think like the reality is like every business will be slightly different depending on the industry you're selling, right? So what I always tell everyone is like, let's start with 20x and then you can adjust. What I told everyone in the company, like the first account execs that I hired was like, guys, I have absolutely no clue if 20x is going to be the right number or not. The standard in SaaS is that like you have like somewhere on like six to seven, maybe eight, maybe 10, right? That is the standard. I know this is what you're expecting. This is not how we're going to be building a company at Eleven Labs. If you're thinking about like doing the same that you've been doing at Notion or like all of these places like Salesforce and so on, then you're in the wrong place. So we'll experiment. If we get it wrong, absolutely fine. We'll compensate you correctly. And then essentially we will change the entire compensation structure.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  But if we get it right, which I think it is the right number, this is what we're going to keep. And we've kept this in C1. We've been running with this for the past two and a half years.

• 22:48Harry Stebbings?

  Of the 20% that don't, what did they get wrong? When you look at that cohort, what do you learn when you're looking at the next hires?

• 22:57Speaker 00

  So there is two buckets within this 20%, right? One is like people that truly don't fit in the company, right? And what they get wrong is fundamentally like they're not product experts. Like they haven't actually dive deeper enough in the product that actually can understand it. They have the aggressivity to actually go into the market outbound and so on, right? Those guys, unfortunately, we terminated their contracts. We give them a compensation. So we usually pay anywhere between like two to three months of base salary. So that like we tell them like, hey, guys, it didn't work out. We do believe that like you are very strong. It didn't work out at Eleven Labs because the way we do things, but you're going to go somewhere else. And when I help you get somewhere else, that's why we're giving you this two or three months compensation severance package.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  And you can do super well. So it's us. It is not you. It is us fundamentally, right? The other percentage of people that don't get into that 80% Is people that like are building long term pipelines. So I have a guy, for instance, like, and there's been plenty of them like over the past like two years. But this guy that we hired from AWS, mega smart guy, like super good. And you look at the core numbers and you're like thinking, shit, I should be firing this guy. He's not hitting the quota. He's like, like less than 50% quota, right? And then like any other person would have like, look at the numbers and be like, this is not a fit. Like, I cannot keep this person. Talk to any investors and we'll tell you like, fire this person. Like, it's just not a fit. You dive into the numbers and you realize like, oh, it's because he went to the proper enterprise cycle.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  And then he's building the most amazing commerce you can have in the entire UK region, right? Wait a second, why would I fire this person when he actually needs a lot more ramp? Fundamentally because he's tackling the difficult, challenging industries. We kept that person and this person like absolutely smashed it this year, 200 plus percent quota. So like you need to actually differentiate, like what is it actually someone that doesn't fit in the company for a variety of reasons? And who is actually building a proper pipeline over the long term? And then you, they need a little bit more help.

• 24:55Harry Stebbings?

  Well, this is, I completely disagree with the notion that because someone's selling to large enterprise, you can't tell whether they're good or not for a much longer period of time. I think like you did that, you look under the hood, you look at the relationships, you look at the conversations, you look at the interactions, you look where they're at. You get a good enough feel of how close it is.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what I do is like with the team and we do like, we have got a lot of people in the go to market side. Like globally, we have about like 90 people, something like that. But what I do is like, I have sessions every single month with my account execs and my CSMs where we go deep into the pipeline. It's like, it's pipeline review sessions and I drill them on absolutely every single detail. And we do it in front of everyone, right? So if someone hasn't been building the proper pipeline and I do see the numbers and I do sit, I will tell it in front of them like, you have not done a good job, like you're actually lacking, you're doing this, this, this. Or I will tell them like, you're actually lucky. Like in the past like month, you hit your numbers because of pure luck. Next month, you're not going to hit them. So you're not in the good spot right now.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And if they improve, which the majority of them do, the following month, I'm like, I know I gave you a lot of crap. Last month, you've done fantastically well now. But you need to have that honesty with your team because otherwise, like, what are we doing here? We're trying to build a generational company, you cannot like do things like the traditional way, you need to do it in a completely different way.

• 26:10Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about those meetings with execs and CSMs. Can you actually just take me to them? You do them monthly, correct?

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Do they monthly?

• 26:17Harry Stebbings?

  Do they monthly? Do you do them separately with CSMs and execs altogether?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  CSMs have their own meeting and then account execs have a different one. And then in account execs, I split it by region.

• 26:27Harry Stebbings?

  And they're in person or remote?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  All remote. There is an interesting thing, I know like how some people are about like being in an office and all of that stuff. And when I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried. Because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road. I travel like seventy-five percent of my time. Like in the past three weeks, I was in San Francisco, I was in Mexico City, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Singapore, in London, and I'm heading to Dubai, right? Like, that is like the standard thing, like, salespeople need to be on the road, talking to their customers, whether that is in the UK, that is across Europe, or that is like in Cancun, I do not care. If you're constantly in the office doing virtual meetings only with your customers, you're doing it wrong.

• 27:08Harry Stebbings?

  How do you build a sales culture remotely?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  By being ruthless. You need to be on top of it. It's like, it requires extra time and it requires people to be forced to actually like be on the road. It's like, we will have multiple touchpoints, but I don't hire people that are junior. I hire people that are actually like autonomous, very energetic, very passionate, will accept like a million noes fundamentally because like building sales is tough. Building sales remotely is even tougher and you just need to be on top of it.

• 27:36Harry Stebbings?

  We're gonna get to actually the people, but I just wanna stay on these meetings, okay? So we have them separate, we have them remote, we have them monthly. Let's start on the like sales team side before we move to the CSMs. What are you expecting them to bring? Should they send pipeline ahead of time with notes? What's that prep phase pre-meeting?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  So they will essentially tell me like how much they've closed, how much it's in the pipeline, how much they're expecting to close in the next thirty days. And essentially like we start going to the deals, right? We talk about like the biggest deals and all of that stuff. And then I always like look while they're talking, I look at their pipeline. And I pull up some random deals so that to understand like whether they have a full grasp of or what they're talking about because sometimes, you know, like sales teams like they can end up like cheating and then having a bigger pipeline that is inflated, but it's not moving, right? And catch them. But for me, the key item that I always tell them is like at the end, when they present, I keep interacting them and giving them feedback and asking questions. But at the end of it, I'm like, the question is always the same. What are the blockers that you have and how can I help you?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  And for me, what I do is like, I build a list of the blockers for each one of them, like summarize them later on and then post it across the entire organization being like, hey, if we solve all of these blockers in Europe, we could be making a lot more money. In India, these are the blockers. In Spanish, Latam, these are the blockers. In Middle East, these are the blockers, right? And then everyone is like, understands what are we, where are we in each one of the regions?

• 28:58Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. And so we have that. And when they come to you and they say something, because I'm on a lot of boards and very often it's like, that one, that slipped to next quarter. What do you say when you get reps who say that? And what's the right way to deal with that?

• 29:12Speaker 00

  I mean, there is always like deals that will end up like moving towards the next quarter. And that's inevitable, right? It was like.

• 29:17Harry Stebbings?

  And you do this sort of, by the way, in front of everyone?

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:21Harry Stebbings?

  You don't do it one by one?

• 29:22Speaker 00

  No. No one has enough time to do it one by one. And I think like everyone can benefit from like, like doing it in front of other people. It's the pressure, it's the fact like you, you can give them good feedback, people learn from it, right? So the learning component is, I think it's important, specifically from a sales perspective.

• 29:38Harry Stebbings?

  How do you do that without shaming people?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I don't know. You need to shame them. Like if someone hasn't done their job, they haven't done their job. And you need to actually publicly tell them so that like they understand they haven't done their job. And everyone else knows that like they're getting shit for it.

• 29:50Harry Stebbings?

  So you don't agree with the praise in public criticized in private?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  No, I don't agree. I think like I need to tell you like what is right and what is wrong. Of course, I'm not going to tell you like, this is like full shit, like you're going to get fired. I'm not going to say that. But at the same time, I'm not going to hold back on saying if you haven't done a good job. And for instance, there was like a case earlier this year of one of my account execs that I told the person like, you just were lucky and you've closed these deals just for pure luck, but you haven't done any good job. And then like the next one, there was like, it was so funny, like there was exactly two people, the same case. And then the next one that came in presenting. Was I told him like you have done exactly the same thing, but you have not been lucky as the previous person. And that's why you haven't actually closed anything. Both of them, the following month, absolutely smashed it.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told. And if they're good at their job, they're going to accept the criticism, learn from it and then improve.

• 30:48Harry Stebbings?

  How long are those meetings?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  We end up putting usually an hour and a half. And then people have like about like seven, eight minutes to present and then like it's very, very quick in general.

• 30:57Harry Stebbings?

  What happens, and this is a hard one, because Eleven Labs seemingly just such rocket ship revenue growth. What would you advise if you were put on a hypothetical hat for it not working so well? What would you advise a sales leader or a CEO who's taking this, who's going to run with this? But the numbers are not up and to the right. How do I have a meeting like this without feeling like dejected, demoralized when numbers aren't up and to the right?

• 31:19Speaker 00

  I think it just depends on like why the numbers not on the on the right place, right? I think like you need to do, understand, like do the back work first to understand like what's happening. Is it because the sales team is not good enough? Is it because the product is not good enough? Is it because we're not being aggressive enough? What is essentially happening here? Because like if you don't have a full understanding, then like you might be like shaming people for the wrong reasons, right? And the best way of understanding is like roll up your sleeves and actually pitch customers. I am the SDR in chief in the company, right? Like, I absolutely love it. I actually love outbounding people. I love it. Like we were like, Matty and I were like in Singapore, like talking to, talking like to Razor, like the laptops company. Absolutely love the brand.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  And then that came out because like I outbounded the the CEO and I messaged him like, Matty and I are gonna be in Singapore in a few days. Like we'd love to actually meet and figure out how we can talk, how we can figure out like a partnership. And he replied saying like, yes. Let's do it. So we end up spending like a good hour in their offices, which is fantastic. I do it all the time and then I pass it to the team because I do believe like a good leader needs to be a good outbounder. It's interesting that I have this narrative also with B C's, right? Like for me, a B C is just a glorified S D R or B D R.

• 32:38Harry Stebbings?

  One hundred percent and respectfully, why do I bother doing venture when I, sorry, being blunt when I can make millions from media? Because of the media, you have the ability to be the best B D R in the world because people will always respond to you when you have a big brand.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:53Harry Stebbings?

  That's why, this is why people like founders, they're like, yeah, I love working with them. I have quite a few who come in and sit in our office and they just go on LinkedIn with me and we just send cold in-mails from mine. And I'm literally a B D R.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:05Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  But that's, that's great.

• 33:07Harry Stebbings?

  But like to your point though, I feel this rush when I get a response. It's like, yeah, we'd love a call. That'd be so great. I'm like, yes.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  I love it. Look, but it's like. As a leader, like as a C E O, like a sales leader, if you're not doing it, I think you're doing it wrong. Of course, as the company keeps getting bigger, like no one expects like Matty or like any C E O, like for a very successful company to be doing like outbound. But nevertheless, what you could do is like you can prep. So I have team members that like will message me saying like, could you send an outbound message to this person? I've just drafted it for you, right? And we do it with Matty as well, with like with my LinkedIn account and all that stuff. And the response rate that you get is like, as you were saying, like through the roof.

• 33:47Harry Stebbings?

  We do, we do on founders, also in my LinkedIn where like Paul or Kieran or Alex will do it, a hundred percent. And they join the call and that's totally fine.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  It's good.

• 33:55Harry Stebbings?

  A hundred percent. If you trust in your team to be amazing, it'll be a great experience for everyone.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  But you need to help the team, right? It's like what I don't buy is like sales leaders that are essentially the leaders, right? Like you don't know the pain, you don't know essentially what it is actually your team is suffering. And it goes back to your questions, like truly, if you go to a meeting and like the numbers are not in the right, maybe the problem is you. That like you don't understand how the sales process happens, the product that your team is selling and the pain points are actually they're going through. So maybe like you need to fix that first.

• 34:25Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get that. If we just go back to this meeting, because I so want to kind of extract everything I can from this. Is it just retroactive review or is there any element of forward planning? Do we at the end spend fifteen minutes, go, okay, for the next four weeks, we're going to do this? How do we think about that?

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so usually it's like as part of like the presentation for the account execs, every single one, even in the CSM side, it's like, what are they forecasting to actually be closing over the next thirty days as well? And essentially, what are they going to be doing to actually close them?

• 34:53Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, fantastic. What is your advice to me as sales leader or CEO who's not as experienced and brilliant as you on the right way to forecast? Is it like be optimistic, be realistic, be negative? How do you advise on that?

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Be as negative as possible. So I always like advise team on if we are negotiating a deal that is going to be half a million dollars, fantastic, just put me that like you're going to be signing it at twenty four thousand dollars. I don't want to put like a unrealistic number because like if you think it's going to be half a million dollars, the most likelihood is going to be a hundred K, right? So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs are intent to inflate as much as possible so that it looks like better. I don't like that. So let's put the lowest possible number. That's fine, we'll fix it later, but at least we under underestimate what it's going to look like. But we do it also like for the board, like when we put like the board eggs and like we tell them like, we tell them like, hey, this is the pipelines, like this is the contracts, all of that stuff, like we put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions, be like, hey, by the way, you put me like this account over here that it was going to be a two million dollar account, but it seems you sign it at like a hundred K, what? And it just raises such a like a number of like awkward questions that like it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense.

• 36:07Harry Stebbings?

  One of the fastest ways, I think, to create distrust. Obviously, when you have investors like at your company, obviously, you share pipe often of what you expect it to be.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:15Harry Stebbings?

  When we do reference calls, as all investors do with friends who are CEOs of those companies and like, dude, we'd never spend more than twenty five K on this, and they've got it in for two fifty, fastest way to lose credit.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. And there is another item in there is like if you always underestimate or under value your pipeline, it means that like to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline. Like there is a lot of consequence of all of this, there's like you'll end up working at twice as hard because your pipeline is not big enough for the year end number or the quarter end number that you needed. So you just kind, it's a forcing mechanism to have the right culture in place. We went through this like a cultural change early this year because I actually got obsessed. We were doing the majority of deals, like ninety percent of the deals were mostly inbounds, right? And as the team keeps growing, I was like getting extremely worried that like we were not building the right mentality in the team. It's like if at some point.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  The pipeline dries up, then you essentially end up dying, right? So I put a goal saying like, we need to migrate to fifty percent outbound, fifty percent inbound by the end of the year. So kept hammering absolutely everyone. I still put together a report every single week with every single account exec and SDR in the in the team. Telling them like, you've achieved your target on a weekly basis. You haven't achieved it. And if people don't achieve it, then I call them out. I did it so often that I ended up like getting like people make jokes about outbound, outbound, outbound. It's like, I'm the outbound king. Yes, I love it. Like people and people like know that like if you are on that list of people that are not doing the outbound, I'm gonna call you out.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we're gonna have a problem, right? It's a cultural thing and we end up like migrating from like this ten percent outbound sales that we're doing to forty percent that we do today.

• 38:03Harry Stebbings?

  You're forty percent outbound. Wow. And when you say outbound, just to clarify specifically, this is not picking names from a PLG list. This is direct outbound.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Direct outbound, yes.

• 38:12Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. What's the primary channel for that direct outbound?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  And most of it, we use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequencing.

• 38:19Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, Guillaume was.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Those guys are doing super well. We use LinkedIn and there is a lot of cold calling. The traditional method works. And it depends on the market because.

• 38:29Harry Stebbings?

  You literally cold call?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  One hundred percent, yes. I was in the office yesterday and early today and I had like some of my team members actually cold calling. I was like so happy. I was smiling like I was actually like listening to the conversation because like I was so happy. I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with the right mentality. But in Latam or in India, cold calling works, but the best method is WhatsApp. It's a different culture. Like in India and Latam, like they use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need to win WhatsApp.

• 38:59Harry Stebbings?

  See, this is why I disagree with you on the remote preference. I get you in terms of needing to be with customers and I understand that. But I think you learn so much from hearing your friend who's also in sales have that message work really well. And you're like, God, I could use that. And he his messaging is much better than mine. And then you see support over in the other corner and everyone is talking about the same. Challenges that are having and you're like, God, okay, I could actually talk about that as one of the core problems that we solve. And actually, you get so many of the multifunctional benefits from being in the office. But I agree with you, you need to be with customers. It's a nuanced thing, to be fair.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  But it's also the fact that you could be sharing those best practices with the rest of the team. And over the other bands, like as we kept expanding the team, specifically in Europe, for instance, the team has become extremely good at sharing their best practices. You will have like one of the account execs saying, I've done this like fifty times. This is working super well and we'll share it in the Slack message being like, guys, you should try it.

• 39:53Harry Stebbings?

  Is that how you do it? How do you create a structure to share best practices?

• 39:56Speaker 00

  I incentivize everyone or like my incentive to everyone is like in my messages, we need to experiment. Even at this size, like we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We need to be ahead of the trends. We need to constantly experiment. So if you experiment with like messaging, like ways of like talking to customers and so on, just put it with a wider team. And then everyone can copy you.

• 40:15Harry Stebbings?

  When does the sales team become too large for this forum and communication?

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Never.

• 40:20Harry Stebbings?

  But dude, if you have a hundred sales reps.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter.

• 40:23Harry Stebbings?

  What, you're gonna have seven hundred minute meeting?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Fine.

• 40:25Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, you can't.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  No, at some point, you end up like doing like.

• 40:29Harry Stebbings?

  Multiple separate ones.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Exactly, right? And you end up like today, we actually have like subdivided in Europe, but like we have like UKI, the Nordics like meeting, we have Southern Europe.

• 40:40Harry Stebbings?

  Gosh.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Western Europe and all of that stuff, right? But still, you need to keep actually doing it.

• 40:44Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, when we move to the CSM side, is there anything different about these meetings? Like what are they expected to bring and what, how did these meetings go?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  It's exactly the same thing. So we will go through the pipeline and understanding like how many calls they've done. What are the problems with like some of their customers? What is the NRR they are expecting to close? And how much like up-selling and cross-selling they're gonna be doing?

• 41:05Harry Stebbings?

  What NRR do you chase?

• 41:07Speaker 00

  A hundred and fifteen.

• 41:08Harry Stebbings?

  Hundred and fifteen?

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yes, but we just like we absolutely smash the number every single quarter.

• 41:13Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  It's absolutely crazy because we have this line and expand. Line and expand works really well if you work closely with your customers. And then you end up having like a very solid like GRR and NRR.

• 41:23Harry Stebbings?

  What ACV justifies having a CSM and how many accounts are they responsible for?

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Any value actually works. Because like li- literally, you need to actually separate it, right? It's like, I want my account execs to actually go hunting, be hungry all the time, right? So I want them to bring logos quickly because the market, like, anyone can be building a competitor at any point in time extremely quickly. So I have to have like those people that are incentivized to move extremely quickly. And then as soon as they've done it, they need to be able to transfer it to someone else. So like CS is like something that you need from the early days as well. We made a mistake at Eleven Labs for bringing CS way too late, way too late. It took us like fifteen months from the first contract that we signed to bring customer success. It was massive chaos because the account execs, and I was like selling a lot back then,

• 42:11Speaker 00

  and I was like running these deals and at the same time, like, people would complain like, hey, like, I have these problems and then like I also need to do this. And then I would look at the list of usage every single week and then outbound and I would put like a list saying, okay, all of these accounts are ready for like upselling because of usage. We need to get in touch with them, all of these other accounts, like, we should touch base with them. So I was sharing it with the team and at some point it starts breaking, right? And that's when I realized like, shit, we've done it wrong. I should have brought like customer success much sooner, let's bring them. And there was like a day and night, initially like account execs wanted to transfer the accounts, but they just didn't really give any level of information. So they were like, it's signed, you deal with it. And then we're like, they get on the customer success guys, we were like, what? Like, I don't even know any background of this account.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Like, it's a Gmail account, right? Like, how the hell am I gonna know who is behind it?

• 43:01Harry Stebbings?

  John Doe. It could be a few people, I've looked on LinkedIn and it leaves me with seven hundred and eighty-four profiles in London. I love that. Okay, and so we have that. How do we financially incentivize customer success? Just so I understand that.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  N R, like net revenue retention. That's essentially how we do it, right? Of course, you could have like-

• 43:21Harry Stebbings?

  So once it's over one fifteen?

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 43:23Harry Stebbings?

  You get compensated how?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  So we have like bonuses or commission structure that like depends how big it gets. Then essentially you get two X, three X, four X, whatever that is, right? So.

• 43:34Harry Stebbings?

  Just so I understand, just because there's going to be so many founders who are like, I love this, but what do I actually do? It's like two, three X, what salary, like the upsell, what are they getting?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like when you increase the N R R, then fundamentally like based on the N R R, like we calculate it's like the baseline is one fifteen, right? So if you went to like, I don't know, like a hundred and thirty, then essentially you calculate how much it takes you. And then like it will be like fundamentally more. And that's like, it's a direct like math that you do on top of it. We don't have accelerators for like N R R or like C S. In the account exec team, we have accelerators for next year, we might change some of that stuff.

• 44:06Harry Stebbings?

  How do you use accelerators to get the most out of sales teams and any advice there?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  For account execs, for instance, what we do is like up to a hundred percent of your quota, we pay you five percent commission, right? So fairly simple. From a hundred to a hundred and fifty percent quota, we pay you seven point five percent commission. And then anything above a hundred and fifty percent, we pay you ten percent commission. Like fairly simple, straightforward. So everyone is incentivized, so actually going above a hundred and fifty percent. To the point that like a lot of my account execs, now we are finalizing the, the performance reviews for two thousand and five, because we always like want to start January with everything fully sorted. To the point that like some of my account execs will tell me or have been telling me like, I don't want an increase in salary. If you're going to increase my salary, then calculate that and put it in equity. Because if you increase my salary, my quota goes up.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  And then it takes me longer to hit accelerators. So I can make a lot more money with like a smaller quota, hitting the accelerators mature. Which is, is smart, really smart.

• 45:04Harry Stebbings?

  It is totally smart, also tells me that no one's buying fucking houses in Gomorrah, which is, fuck you, Rachel Reeves. That is what I say there. Interesting, it's not very much. I didn't mean that rudely, but like over a hundred and fifty, I get ten percent. Shit me, is it what?

• 45:21Speaker 00

  It's a lot.

• 45:22Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, it's not much.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  It's a lot of money.

• 45:25Harry Stebbings?

  Compared, if we think about, you set me, okay, I'm on a hundred K and I get twenty, twenty X, I'm on two million. So if I get three million, then I get ten percent.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:35Harry Stebbings?

  And I get three hundred K.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:37Harry Stebbings?

  As a bonus.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  It's fantastic.

• 45:39Harry Stebbings?

  Is that good for industry?

• 45:41Speaker 00

  That's fantastic. Like, like, think about it, like, like, salespeople used to be the highest paid in any organization. Now it's changed with the researchers and NAI, which a hundred percent they deserve it. But up until like the AI revolution that happened three years ago, like, salespeople were like the highest paid, always.

• 45:58Harry Stebbings?

  No, I'm aware of that, but I'm just like, God, I thought if you hit like a hundred percent of your quota, getting fifteen to twenty percent would be good.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  No, like, that is too much, otherwise your numbers would never add up, right?

• 46:09Harry Stebbings?

  When do you advise founders on when to have a customer success team? You said that you waited way too long, way too long.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:15Harry Stebbings?

  When's the right time?

• 46:15Speaker 00

  I think like, once you hit like a good like three, four million dollars, then I think it's time to actually bring your first customer success.

• 46:21Harry Stebbings?

  Three, four, an error?

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:23Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, got you.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  So like, it makes sense like to have like on upper like a CSM function, like, an average of like four million dollars in book value. I think that makes sense. We're super bad on that, so I think like our average book value per CSM is about like eight point something million, right? So it means that we're massively under stuff, so we're trying to fix it for next year, but ideally like four is a good number.

• 46:44Harry Stebbings?

  On the flip side for sales teams, do you think that you need to wait until you have a sales playbook before you hire a fantastic sales leader like you? Or do you do what Matty did and bring you in with zero revenue?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Bring with zero revenue. Bring someone that is like a scrappy, that like wants to iterate, will tell you like if things work or things don't work, like, I think you need that as soon as possible. Because I think like, there was this like moment in which like Matty like, like called me one day, like, you know what, going forward, I report to you for sales, you report to me for everything. And I was like, and that was, he was, his way of saying like, you are supposed to be doing sales, founder-led sales are good, but like you hit a rock, right? Like you hit like a ceiling and just like at some point you need to do the transition. So better do the transition now than actually wait another six months because we know what we're selling. We know how we're selling it. You've been doing it all of these months and you get a lot more deals than me.

• 47:38Harry Stebbings?

  How common is that, though, that you know what messaging works, you know what channel works, you have a playbook?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  I think it just depends on like the sales leader you bring in the organization and how quickly and how willing to experiment they are, right? And I think like that has a ton of value if you bring someone sooner that has the right mentality. Of course, if you bring like someone that has like very like, I have my playbook and this is how we're gonna be doing it. I always hate it because that playbooks don't work, unfortunately, right? And I think like that that is the key is like if you have someone very early that you can iterate and build trust extremely quickly. Then essentially like founder led sales stop making any sense fundamentally because you could be spending a lot more time doing other things. Unless you're a founder that is like really on the sales side, fantastic, then just just keep going, right? Otherwise, you could be spending your time like building the product or doing other things that are much more important.

• 48:27Harry Stebbings?

  So you come in and then what's the biggest advice post that in terms of? Do we just hire like five reps at once and just go hell for leather? How do we think about the right way to sequence hiring in the really early sales days?

• 48:39Speaker 00

  In the early days, like hire one or two, like don't like, don't over hire because then if you over hire fundamentally, you're gonna be building the wrong culture. People are gonna be asking you a lot of questions. You will have like five different people like iterating in their own playbooks and thinking about their own stuff. What you wanna do is like you wanna give them some guidelines, like this is what works, this is what is not working. You can still iterate a lot of what works and what doesn't work and you can make a ton of mistakes. But I don't want like five different people like going wild and trying to figure out because then essentially no one is gonna be closing anything, right? So better to have like you bring the sales leader, someone that is like is able to actually get the hands dirty and understand what's happening in the business and pitch and and go deep.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  And then you bring two more people, then wait until they're on board. Like wait a couple of months. You don't have to wait too long, two, three months. Let's make sure they're fully on board. Let's make sure that they're starting to sell sell contracts. And internally at the company, at Eleven Labs, we used to have like this this standard that's like when you join Eleven Labs, you need to have signed your first contract within first two weeks.

• 49:38Harry Stebbings?

  Whoa.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  It's like, and that was a target, that was a target. We got people that had even like signed, like within like, uh, what is it, like seventy two hours, they signed the first enterprise contract, right? Tiny contract, but I don't care, it doesn't really matter.

• 49:50Harry Stebbings?

  Do you put them on calls straight away? Like, you don't wanna burn leads.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  In the early days, we used to do it, and then they would join my, my meetings, and essentially I would tell them like, okay, this is like, how we do it on the product side, this is like the overview. My expectation is like, you're gonna be spending the next like twenty four hours, like drilling the entire product and understanding it, and I will ask you to pitch me tomorrow, right? And then I would bring into my calls, and then they would see my page, they would see me talk to customers. The following day, they would essentially just give me the pitch. If I liked it, then essentially we would ju- just join calls the same day or the following day together. And then they would pitch, I'll be taking a backseat, be like, I'm there to support you if they have any questions. And then within like a week, they were already fully up and running. And then, of course, it was a lot more risky, but hey, we had nothing to lose back there, right? We had to move quickly because the market was like crowded.

• 50:38Harry Stebbings?

  Advised me, how can I train my reps most effectively? Is this like, listen to all my Gong calls? Go spend time with product, go spend time with customer support? What should I do to train reps most effectively?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  In the early days, the best thing is like, they should join calls, like immediately. Like, they're not gonna be talking in those calls, but like, they should just join absolutely immediately, so that like, they see how other people are doing it. They need to be answering tickets, like of support questions. They need to essentially be talking to the engineers and then going deep into the product side. Once all of that has passed, and you're already making a good amount of money, and you claim that you have product market fit, claim, because you never know, then essentially it's a completely different game, right? Because you wanna make sure that like, your reputation is like on the line, you wanna have them like selling to the proper people, so essentially you end up like having, join me, then also watch some customer calls through Gong, and at the same time, you need to pitch me, you need to have like the certifications and all of that stuff, right?

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Then you end up migrating towards like much more of a Corporation style where like then people take a lot longer for two weeks, they have like this run period, but like they understand everything, they meet multiple people and so on. That's like a little more boring.

• 51:46Harry Stebbings?

  When was your hiring process broken and what did you learn from that time?

• 51:52Speaker 00

  So we made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes because like the first one that I hired on the go to market side, I thought, okay, let's bring someone that like understands a lot more on the product side. I can train them how to excel and then it will be fine. And then it turned out like it just was not working. And like the person was really good on the product side, but like on the sales side, there is something that like was missing in there.

• 52:14Harry Stebbings?

  And you couldn't teach them that, sales?

• 52:16Speaker 00

  This is a hunter mentality. This is like, like being hungry, like being like super driven, passionate and so on that you get like straight away or you don't get it. And I think that that was, I'm saying like the person is still with us like doing super well, right? And we would joke with him saying like, hey, like you joined the wrong, in the wrong role. But that was the type of profile because like we were selling, like we, we had a lot of like self-service companies. We had a lot of inbounds, like you were thinking much more like it needs to be product led sales. It needs to be like fundamentally like thinking about like the product and trying to like help them navigate it and so on. And you're like, shit, no, no, no, no. These people already know what eleven labs is, right? Specifically the inbounds. So like it's less about the product, it's more about

• 52:57Speaker 00

  like, we need to convince them to sign this fucking contract, right? So like, that's a completely different profile of people. And then that's when I brought my first two proper account execs that started on the same day and I trained them in parallel and they did super well.

• 53:09Harry Stebbings?

  What did you do well that you would recommend to everyone else having seen it?

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Literally like getting them in calls with me, seeing me pitch, right? Like I had done it already like hundreds and hundreds of times, seeing me page, seeing me how, how I was answering calls, seeing me that like I would tell them customers like by the end of the day, you have all of these things. And then by the end of the day, I would send those things because the best thing that you have is trust with your customers. It set up the right culture and the right way of operating in the team. That was for me the most important thing. And then on top of that, then I, then I was keeping like in the loop and it's like joining their calls randomly. So I would open their calendar and be like, okay, I had, they have a call in 10 minutes. Fine. I will join that call. I would just pop up in that call. And essentially make them nervous because then like the worst thing that you have is like you're both joining a call like unexpected. So what's gonna happen there?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  And I would just stay quiet and be like, no, no, I'm just here to support. Don't worry. But of course, you could see that they were very nervous, right? And they make a ton of mistakes. So like, you end up building that muscle memory by forcing people to make mistakes as well.

• 54:10Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry about having a culture of fear? You said the word ruthless. You are very direct. I love it. I thrive off it. I'm a narcissist and need therapy. Do you worry about having a culture of fear?

• 54:22Speaker 00

  I don't think the team is scared of me because I think when I hire people, I always tell them this line, which is like, Eleven Labs is not the easiest company to work for. And like, that's always what I tell them is like, you're gonna be working a lot. I'm gonna have very high expectations, but we can have a lot of fun. If you're not ready, absolutely fine. Don't join us, but I want you to know before you accept the role. And then it sets the right tone. Like, some people have told me like, this is not for me. And a hundred percent respect it. The majority of people end up saying like, I value that.

• 54:52Harry Stebbings?

  Of the successful sales reps that you have, what is the most common background and what backgrounds tend to not work?

• 54:58Speaker 00

  We've tried all of different backgrounds and it doesn't really matter whether you come from a very pure massive sales organization like Salesforce or you come from like a B C background. Like, it doesn't really matter. It is like, how willing are you to constantly trade, like go deep and have this high energy to your customers and care about your customers, the only thing that actually drives value. Think about it, like, you're not doing sales, you're building a community. Whether you're doing Eleven Labs or you're doing like company X, it doesn't really matter. Like, if you think about like your customers are like pure sales, then you're falling into being a transactional element, right? No one wants to be sold anything. But if you're building a community that loves your product, that loves your brand, that loves your like everything that you represent, then sale is much easier.

• 55:42Harry Stebbings?

  How do you build a community?

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Building a company 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 like 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? Like, but you do it with your friends. The only difference is like, hey, like the customers are not your friends yet.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Some of them will become your friends and I have like a bunch of customers that ended 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.

• 56:35Harry Stebbings?

  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.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:53Harry Stebbings?

  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.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  For me, I would fire myself because I, I do too many things. And I love doing too many things, but also makes me like unfocused in many, in many areas. The other one is the moment I lose passion, like literally like I just don't care anymore. So that's the moment like I would lose, I would fire myself. It's like if I start thinking like I'm starting to lose a little bit of the passion, then it's like shit, no. Like it's you need to, you need to fire yourself, like do something else because you're gonna be like, you're gonna be burning out extremely quickly.

• 57:36Harry Stebbings?

  Most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies. Ah, there is zero to one person. Ah, there are very rare. Is that I'm thinking of Chris Dagnan, actually at Snowflake, who went from zero to public company. And he would say he was zero to four billion in AR. Do you think you're a full stack?

• 57:53Speaker 00

  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, like, you don't enjoy. And I think, like, in fact, sure, if people are smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life. That's my main motivation. And I've always taken, like, my job at Eleven Labs on a monthly basis. Like, if next month I don't enjoy it, I would just, like, tell Matty, Matty, I'm not enjoying it. It is time for me to quit and do something else.

• 58:19Harry Stebbings?

  Really?

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:20Harry Stebbings?

  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, can be, I don't know, psychology, whatever. How do you advise people on when the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough, move job?

• 58:33Speaker 00

  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, like, through this, like, very rough patch, that you're not finding motivation, you should just triple check whether you're in the right place.

• 58:55Harry Stebbings?

  What is the main reason that Eleven Labs is a efficient machine of a company that no one knows and sees?

• 59:05Speaker 00

  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 will 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 this superpower that we have as an organization. It's like, literally, no one will know that we've iterated and tested, like, twenty-five things, and all of the twenty-five things failed, but you just need one to actually deliver, to actually make another hundred million in revenues. And I'm happy with that. I'm happy with those odds.

• 59:39Harry Stebbings?

  What makes Matty such an incredible CEO?

• 59:42Speaker 00

  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 the organization, right? It's actually difficult to find leaders and, like, CEOs that actually can do both things, the product and can do the customer side. Like, sometimes, like, they just, like, have this vision on the product side, but they're just lacking, like... The drive to do sales and Matty 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 you've met him, like, he comes across like extremely personal, like, you immediately like, uh, like drawn to him. He's a nice guy in general, right? And and as such, like, when you add up all of these factors, then it's like, it's fantastic, like fantastic leader, fantastic CEO.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  But like, we have another one, which is fundamentally like Piotr. He's the genius of the company, right? In the sense like he built the entire technology from scratch. We have a very small research team that all of them are absolutely like walking brains, like literally, they're like super, super smart guys. But it's headed by Peter, like the company would not exist if it wasn't because like we built a fantastic technology.

• 1:00:47Harry Stebbings?

  Is it almost harder when you become a sexy brand? Because you have so many people wanna join, it becomes a lot noisier.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, but also like the expectation is higher, right? We hired about like zero point one eight percent of people that uh apply or zero point zero one eight. Um, we had about a hundred and eighty thousand applications in the first six months of the year. There is a lot of imbalance, there is a lot of things that you get. But that doesn't mean that like that there is equivalent to like quality, that is equivalent to like the type of people that you be hiding. Of course, as you become a hot commodity in there, people want to actually work for you, but they want to work for the wrong reasons. Most of it, people will see that like a step in their career to actually do something else much bigger later on. We try to filter those ones out.

• 1:01:29Harry Stebbings?

  That's fucking insane. A hundred and eighty thousand, zero point zero one eight.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  It's insane, eh? And like in the second half.

• 1:01:36Harry Stebbings?

  Who goes through that?

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Harry Stebbings?

  I'm being serious.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  And like in first half.

• 1:01:41Harry Stebbings?

  I hope it's A I.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  No, in the first half of the year, we had like, what, like five, six recruiters across the entire organization, right? They've been doing a fantastic job on that end and then like second.

• 1:01:51Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, they're doing nine nine six, aren't they? Fucking hell. Like, here's a dot room, here's a hundred and eighty thousand applications, go, go, go have fun.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  And by the way, like screen them all and talk to them and then like it's it's tough, it's really tough.

• 1:02:05Harry Stebbings?

  What have you not done when you reflect back on your time in eleven labs? That with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had done.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Hiding faster. I think I made a mistake like not hiding fast enough when the company did a lot more people in the organization. And I think we've suffered over the years of like we, I think, I strongly believe we could have grown much quicker if we had hired like a lot more people.

• 1:02:27Harry Stebbings?

  What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  That's a tough one, huh? That's a really tough one. Sometimes some of the iterations that we've done on the ICPs have probably been like wrong in terms of timing or have been like the wrong focus essentially, right? Or even I can tell you like even on the cross sell side that I had not spent enough time in that specific area and that meant like we end up like leaving money at the table, right? So sometimes you actually need to rethink a little bit twice. But I think like also like when you're growing so quickly, it's difficult to actually not miss stuff. So something that like I take like that is like we've done well, sometimes like we've not done well in general.

• 1:03:08Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, you've just raised a fifteen million dollar fund. Amazing achievement. I also love the name Baobab and it's because of your like love of like these trees, right?

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:17Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I read about this. Super sweet. I think Sequoia got that first, dude.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  It's funny, like Baobab trees, like they grow up in like a, like in very warm climates, like in Australia, in Africa and so on. I actually grow Baobab trees in London, in my flat in London, but also like in my flat in Barcelona. And I've been doing for many years, right? And it's like really fragile trees that like when the winter comes or like when the cooler weather comes, they lose all of the leaves, you need to stop watering them. So it's like really cool plant in general. So it's my favorite one. And I have like, what, I don't know, like ten or twelve at home these days.

• 1:03:52Harry Stebbings?

  I'd actually be an LP if someone wants to start this in a fund called Cactus Capital.

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:03:57Harry Stebbings?

  They only invest in really fucking prickly founders. You'd be the fucking funniest thing ever. It's not a bad idea, is it? From a branding perspective.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  I bet with money.

• 1:04:08Harry Stebbings?

  Really prickly founders. I bet you would like they obnoxiously prickly. Like they'd thrive on the friction.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Yes, I love it.

• 1:04:14Harry Stebbings?

  Does being an investor make you a better sales leader?

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Nah. I think like being a good salesperson makes you a better investor.

• 1:04:21Harry Stebbings?

  How?

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Because you're able to qualify better. And I think like what we do like from an investor perspective like these days, of course, like we do outbound to actually get into the deals that we want. And we also do like inbound reviewing like all of the leads that we get, right? Like a good SDR, a good account execs does exactly the same thing. The only thing they're missing is like there is a sixth sense that we get specifically on the pre-seed stage. It's like, is it a good match like with the founders? Are they really smart? Can they trade with the product and the company? Are they willing to pivot? Are they willing to actually listen to other people? All of those items, but there is a gut feeling attached to all of this that an SDR, a good SDR also has. And knows if whether running with that opportunity is gonna transform into something or account exec is gonna transform into something.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  Or they get the gut feeling like this is gonna be like, it's not the right person, just gonna stop at some point. I just don't wanna run it. From a VC, we do exactly the same thing.

• 1:05:11Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, if being an investor doesn't make you a better sales leader, why does Matty let you do it? What the, I would be, I was expecting you to be like, yes, I teed that one up for you to like slam dunk. And you're like, no, I'm like, okay, well, what, why would he, why would he let you do it?

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  I don't know, I kept asking multiple times and I think like he knows like I have a passion for it. I have done like as an angel, 74 tickets. So I think like at some point, like when I was like annoying enough that he ended up saying, yes, do it.

• 1:05:40Harry Stebbings?

  Top three tickets?

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Without like looking into the order, but Revolut, Eleven Labs and I don't know, like a company called Vsim. They're doing super well. They're doing like training for robots, physics.

• 1:05:51Harry Stebbings?

  When you look back at that 74 that you've done angel, what's your biggest lesson?

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  So I do founders that are like very technical. And what I realized like is many of the technical founders over the years, like they just realized that like they don't care about sales. So like what I've ended up like screening over the past, over the past years a lot more is like, are they really good technical founders? And do they also care about sales? Because otherwise you end up like stumbling into a wall. What do you tell them like, you like the product is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but we need to start making some money, right? And sometimes like, no, no, no, we don't wanna make money. We only wanna do research. We only wanna build the best product and so on. And you're like, You're gonna die as a company, right? It's like, it's so much more difficult to convince them that like, they also need to start thinking about like commercialization of the product, that like, at some point you end up filtering them out.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  And I think like, one of the carriers, like, you need to actually test for appetite for sales at some point early on, because they might not be a fit. But there's the flip side of all of this, where it's like, if you look at like OpenAI or Anthropic or Sakana AI, like, they raise money saying like, we're gonna be doing pure research, right?

• 1:06:56Harry Stebbings?

  Nonprofit.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  No, exactly, exactly, right? So like, there is like a flip side of it, but of course, like, when you look at like venture, which is like power law, but at the same time, it's like, you need to be like, looking at a lot of different companies, then maybe research have, are like outliers in many ways, right?

• 1:07:12Harry Stebbings?

  Final one and then a quick fire. What do you wanna do with BAP? Do you want this to be a venture fund that's like a $500 million fund in its own right?

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  So far, like, what I wanna do is like, it's, I wanna build a generational fund, something that like, actually will like, outlive us all ideally, like smaller funds, like keep raising relatively often, but being there for founders. Like, I wanna be there for founders. It has to be the operator-led fund that actually is there for them, is like, doing the right thing.

• 1:07:38Harry Stebbings?

  Can you be there for founders, dude? If you've got 40 and you're a sales leader, honestly, and then you do another fund?

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  I think it is possible. I think it's like a ruthless prioritization of your time and where you put the, you put the effort. I talk constantly to my founders, like on WhatsApp, all the time. I will dedicate like weekends, late nights, early mornings.

• 1:07:57Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have kids?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  No, that helps for sure, right?

• 1:08:01Harry Stebbings?

  Helps a lot.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Helps a lot, but like, I go into like-

• 1:08:03Harry Stebbings?

  Do you want kids?

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  I hundred percent want, and but, and maybe at some point, like, you end up like, having to decide on which one you go further, right? Do you take one, do you take the other one as one?

• 1:08:13Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I wanna do a quick fire, and I've loved this. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Like, that, like, specifically on investing, it's like, you need to also be investing in like, in founders that actually care about like, sales, not only like, like the technical aspect of it.

• 1:08:28Harry Stebbings?

  What's the single biggest mistake you see sales leaders make today?

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  That they don't spend enough time talking to customers directly and signing contracts themselves.

• 1:08:37Harry Stebbings?

  What's the biggest mistake CEOs make in how their relationship is with their sales leaders?

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  That they would just force a number to their sales leaders and expect that they deliver, without understanding what are the implications of all of it.

• 1:08:49Harry Stebbings?

  What channel or method is like super outdated in sales? Often people say that like cold calling, who do that? What is outdated?

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Updated, I think is like emails, like sending an email, no one replies. There is so much like outbound that is like fundamentally AI generated, like no one replies. Like the, the conversion rate on emails these days has dropped to like, like zero point zero zero something.

• 1:09:14Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest insecurity?

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  What's my biggest insecurity that like I might not be able to get to the end of the quarter for the number that I wanted?

• 1:09:22Harry Stebbings?

  Has that ever happened?

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. But like you live with it, right? Like we all make mistakes all the time and you live with it. But I think it's important because like as a sales leader, you always need to be worrying like, am I gonna get to the end of the quarter? Because it means that like you are pushing really fucking hard. If you know that like you're gonna be get there, you're gonna get there, you're gonna relax. I don't want that.

• 1:09:42Harry Stebbings?

  Let's be honest, you don't need the money anymore. Like eleven labs, Revolut is angels. It's not about the money. Are you a better sales leader because you're richer?

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  Yes, I don't get compensated on how much sales we make. So it means that I'm fully independent because that is not like, I don't believe in that. I don't believe like if the company makes X amount of money, then it's fantastic. If they make Z, fantastic. My goal is to make sure we make as much money as possible based on the plan that we've committed. And the plans are absolutely bananas, right? Like we always like shoot for the stars. But my role is to make sure that I get compensated on equity side, not on how much money we make. I think it's wrong.

• 1:10:23Harry Stebbings?

  If I were to say the person is listening to the next sixty seconds and this is all that they're gonna take from our conversation? And from all of your writing, from everything they've seen in the news about you? What would you most want that person to take from this and from everything in the next sixty seconds?

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Constantly outbound people, I think it's important.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  But essentially spend time with the team, spend time with your customers, treat them as a community, not as a proper transactional sale. Be with them, be on the road all the time, because if you're not, you're missing the reality of what your team, what your company is going through. And the only way to actually be a better said leader and the only way to actually get to your sales target is fundamentally going through the pain yourself every single day.

• 1:11:14Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, this has been such a joy. I've loved this. It also feels like I've known you for a long time, but thank you for being so brilliant.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for inviting me. This was really, really good.

• 1:11:27Harry Stebbings?

  But before we leave you today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, Rocks. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable. Rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end to end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach and opportunity management. So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. Rocks gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge

• 1:12:12Harry Stebbings?

  graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try Rocks at rocks.com/signup. And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years, I've watched some of the best founders and early go to market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work. Well, that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, lay in real time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline

• 1:12:56Harry Stebbings?

  Then practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, drafts follow-up emails for you and keeps deals moving forward. So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates and faster revenue growth. If you're an early-stage startup, tired of duct-taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at monaco.com. While Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your dot com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favourite design tool and is used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster.

• 1:13:40Harry Stebbings?

  Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A/B testing. So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximising what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages or migrate your full dot com, Framer has programmes for startups, scale-ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast.

• 1:14:22Harry Stebbings?

  Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off, 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/20vc for 30% off. Framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply.