Inside the ElevenLabs GTM Playbook

Julia Nimchinski:

I’m gonna be talking to Carl Sreina, who’s the VP of Revenue and First Investor at 11 Labs. And so excited for the conversation, he took the company from 0 to 350 million ARMR in something like 3 years. So, yeah.

[email protected]:

Carlos, he’s fun, he’s fun. Eleven Lab’s a great story in that, number one, he’s driving change in his own organization, and his organization’s busy driving change out in the market. Before Carlos joins, I mean, we’ve got a couple moments, Julia. You just heard that past conversation, definitely rapid fire.

Anything that you took away from there that you disagreed with, to Tiffany’s point, or if not disagreed, loved and want to expand upon?

Julia Nimchinski:

I do love the seller’s Dilemma, and that was the prevailing theme throughout the summit. We actually had Mark Rouge yesterday, very aligned with, Tiffany’s thinking. And love the practicality of it. So yeah, freeing up the seller. It’s… I mean, it’s been the theme for, I don’t know, a decade or so.

Every sales… Salesforce report, same statistic from, you know, year to year, so really… Finally excited that AI can help with that. What about you, Russell?

[email protected]:

I like the seller’s Dilemma just because I’ve lived it, I mean, let’s face it, you know, anyone who’s looked at Salesforce or Siebel, if you want to date myself, knows that CRM historically is a manager’s tool. It’s a reporting tool.

And AI… I mean, AI is… sales is conversational, so sales was always the last field to be disrupted, because until you could drive into the conversations, you can’t… you can’t operationalize sales. And now that you have technology that can evaluate conversations, all of a sudden, there’s a lot you can do with it.

And so, the substance of selling is now grounds for disruption. Carlos, how are you?

Carles Reina:

Hey, everyone!

Julia Nimchinski:

Hey, we’re super excited to feature you, Carls. I’m leaving you with Russell, just as an introduction. Again, Carls is the VP of Revenue and First Investor at 11 Labs, and Russell, I’ll let you take… It stays here.

[email protected]:

Awesome. Carlos, so good to see you again. Would you like to introduce yourself to the audience, give some background for yourself?

Carles Reina:

Yeah, happy, happy to help, and thank you so much for having me here, an absolute pleasure. I’m Carlos, I lead the go-to-market side at 11 Labs, been with the company since day one, or day zero, depending on how you calculate it. I was the first investor of them, ended up joining to build the entire go-to-market site as employee number 4.

And then I’ve ended up building everything from the US all the way to Australia, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, all Asia, and so on, so it’s been a really wonderful experience. I’ve been doing it for a number of years, so I’ve done already, like, four unicorns, and another company that we ended up selling to Spotify.

So my background is, like, on the operating side, on building companies from the ground up, and trying Trying to make the impossible possible. And then in parallel, I do a lot of angel investing, and investing through my funds, so I, managing partner for, like, Baoba Venture, which is my own preceded and seed fund.

[email protected]:

I love that, and I cannot wait to get into, 11 Labs go-to-market. But before that, I do have to ask. Back when you invested in 11 Labs, the first investor, that’s… that’s… that’s big-time vision you saw. You saw something before the world did. Clearly you did, because the world’s seeing it now. What did you see, and what motivated you to go in?

Carles Reina:

So I think, like, so back in the day, there was a thing, there was a bunch of companies doing AI voices, right? So, text-to-speech, fundamentally. And most of them were missing a key component, which was, like, voices were not scalable, because they were using what we had in the industry, which was, like, SSML, so speech markup language.

where you’ll be able to actually add tags, ahead of a word, to be able to actually say, this is an ordinary number, or this is, like, a house, or this is an address, or whatever it is, right?

The problem with that one was, like, essentially it just wasn’t scalable, and it wasn’t done for actually, like, really, like, real-time conversational components.

And so when I met Matti, one of the founders of 11 Labs, like, he talked about, like, this concept of, like, contextual awareness, and making the voices really scalable, and so on, and it just, like, literally, like, kind of resonated really well, because that was essentially what I was trying to, like.

like, figure it out, and the company that we were selling to Spotify, and just kind of, kind of resonated, and… and just, I felt that, like, if they could deliver Even if it was, like, 10% of what they were, like, pitching.

then it was gonna be a completely, like, new technology that was gonna change the entire industry, and… And that was essentially… I ended up committing within 30 minutes of talking to Matty.

I was like, okay, like, I haven’t seen any product, I haven’t seen any demo, I haven’t seen anything, I just like the idea, like, the energy, like, the passion, the drive, the technical components of all of these things. Let’s do it. How much money do you want? And that’s one thing led to the other one.

[email protected]:

Well, I love that, Carlos. I know we have to talk about 11 Labs Go-to-market. What I really heard you say is you saw a large market, and you saw, in scalable voices, a differentiated way to go attack that growing market, which… These are all the settings.

Carles Reina:

You know, like, sometimes it’s difficult to actually tell, like… I mean, BCs… I’m also a BC, so I can say these things, like, we’re pretty dumb in many ways, right?

Like, so, we get to see what actually founders tell us, so if founders tell us, like, it’s a really big market, then I, as a BC, I go and try to calculate how big the market is, and so on and so forth. And then, back in the day, with 11 Labs trying to fundraise for the priesthood round.

it was really difficult, because, like, all of them were like, well, the market is not big, no one is actually buying this technology, like, there’s plenty of competition with smaller companies, you’re also going to be with Google, and Amazon Poly, and all of that stuff, like, literally, this is not interesting, right?

But I think, like, there is a deeper layer of all of these things. The majority of BCs end up missing, which is, like, what is the actual market going? What is actually going to be the demand? What is going to be the transformational technology that is going to be needed, not today, but in a year’s time, right?

And if you’re able to time it well, and think a little bit ahead of time, and… try to think, like, what are the visions, what are the theses that you have for how the world is going to be evolving? I think you end up, like, spotting the right trends. And we’ve seen it over the years across VCs.

The best VCs are the ones that actually get ahead of the market. Place their bets, ahead of time, and then they help the companies execute.

[email protected]:

Yeah, and you hit on something, an information asymmetry that you had an advantage of, which… I’m gonna explicitly say what I read in between the lines there, which is, number one, you’re selling a company to Spotify, so you saw you saw a market around voices, or what platforms that got voices out into the mass market meant, and I’ve never heard the concept of scalable voices before, I’m guessing most listeners haven’t either, and that probably indicates that you saw a challenge in the current state of technology that a better future state could eviscerate.

Carles Reina:

100%. And when we talk… when we think about go-to-market, go-to-market teams are really well-positioned to understand what’s actually, like, missing in the market, because we get the feedback. from customers and talking to them.

Now, the question, like, how do you synthesize that information to make sure that, like, the actual teams building product get it and trust that that information is correct.

And we could spend hours talking about all of these things, because, like, I strongly believe, and I would love to get your take on this, but I strongly believe that, like, the entire, like, it’s broken, the entire chain is fully broken, like, go-to-market people can go and get a lot of feedback.

From customers, and we’re like, okay, we need all of these features. yet product people and engineers actually don’t believe that it’s actually true, because, like, the moment that they do it, they go back to the go-to-market people, like, okay, now I build this, go and sell it, and it takes time to actually generate some revenue, right?

So, like, that kind of link is usually broken, but there’s a really good information, like, flow that you could be having to, like, infer the product roadmap in there, right? What has been your experience on that?

[email protected]:

I’ll answer that question, then I’ll get us back on. So, I have a direct, actually a direct answer. There’s a couple companies I partner with who do exactly that, like companies like Attention and Accord.

So the ability to synthesize a whole bunch of call transcripts, we’ve all seen the use case where we want the ability to listen in on every call a rep has so we can coach the reps. Or listen on every call a rep has, so… We can aggregate the information and score a deal, or identify the deal riskers.

But when we can listen to all calls in the aggregate and understand, well, what product-level objections are we hearing? What requirements are we being asked for that we can’t fulfill? What is the economic impact of not having particular capabilities?

what industry segments would be better served by having these capabilities that the market’s listening to?

That sort of feedback has always been a horrible game of telephone between typically sales engineers to managers to product managers back to engineering, and it’s usually a game of people’s opinion… people using what they want to hear and their opinions to go force the roadmap.

So, there’s a lot of new technologies that are allowing primary research based on what customers are explicitly stating around where that can go. That’s… so my perspective is… and actually, Udi Legger of Gong, he… I have never… we were sitting… having dinner a couple weeks ago. And he was so passionate about that underused, use case of gun.

So, my perspective is.

Carles Reina:

Yes.

[email protected]:

I don’t think people are buying Gong, buying Accord for that use case, but what we’re gonna see is that use case trickling insights, which are going to drive value? How we amortize that? Different story.

But let me go into, I know we had, something we’re supposed to be talking about today, but I’d kind of rather chat about this, because it’s too much fun. About 11 Labs’ go-to-market, something you’ve built over the past couple years. When we had a chance to speak earlier, you mentioned experimentation.

On that note, I’m gonna ask you to react to, something one of my favorite CEOs once told me, which is, Hey Russell, you’re doing a shitty job. I need you to be wasting at least 50% of your marketing budget. Thank you, Richard Hearn.

When you hear a statement like that, and knowing the philosophy you have behind your go-to-market, how to react, and where do you go with that?

Carles Reina:

I think it’s 100% right. I think, like, the reality is, like, the entire organization, not only from a go-to-market Pacific, like, but everything needs to be, like, tailored towards, like, experimenting as much as possible. Like, today, you don’t know what you don’t know, right? Like, the market evolves extremely fast.

You want to be launching new markets, you want to be testing ICPs, you want to be testing new products, you want to be testing, like, new ideas, new concepts. If you don’t experiment, you’re going to be dead.

And the way to actually enhance that experimentation is, like, by essentially wasting some marketing budget on, like, things that might or might not work. we have these, like, ideas, like, everything needs to be perfect at some point, right? And as companies evolve and grow, like, the dollar, like, number in the ROI is actually very, very key.

But I would also, like, put it usually in a different perspective, like. If we experiment and we test a hundred things. I just need one of them to give me another $100 million in revenues. I only need one! It’s like… and, like, really, statistically, this is like investing, right?

Like, you place your bets, you invest, thinking that, like, one will be the fun returner, right? One would be the one that actually, like. like, walk, like, takes it out of the park, which is, like, fundamentally the same concept I’m trying to think, like, for Eleven Labs always about, like, go to market.

And it’s like, because if we don’t get… if we don’t test 100 things to get one. Then we need to get everything else perfect. Statistically, it’s also very difficult to get everything perfect, because, like, some customers might churn. That’s impossible to avoid, even though, like, we always want to avoid it, it’s impossible to avoid.

Some of the customers might not behave the way you wanted, you might not be able to upsell them, you might be having more challenges, or the market might perform slightly different, whether it is because the war in eggs, or because, like, the market dynamics change, or there’s a new regulation, or all of that stuff. So, if you don’t experiment.

Hence that experiment with, like, marketing budget. then I think you’re gonna be… end up in a situation where, like, your competitors are gonna be overtaking you, and you’re not gonna be growing as quickly as you should be growing.

[email protected]:

What I love is you’re making this conversation full circle. We started with venture capital, which is all about placing a bet, hoping for that one home run, and now we’re talking about placing bets inside of them. So you’re looking at your experiments, just like your own personal portfolio, a series of bets, hoping for a couple home runs.

Carles Reina:

You know, the way I was actually… I have this thing in my calendar every week. Which is portfolio contract… Pipeline construction, right? So in venture, you would do, like, portfolio construction, so it’s more about, like, how do you think about your portfolio of companies that you’re backing?

For go-to-market, I always think about, like, pipeline construction. And pipeline construction is, like, a really interesting concept for me, because I do spend a lot trying to analyze the entire pipeline that we have on a per segment, per rep, and all of that stuff. And I do believe that you need to have, like, multiple things.

You need to have, like, liquidity in your entire pipeline, which a lot of companies don’t really realize, like, liquidity is what kills your pipeline. And also you need to have, like, the big bets that you’re placing.

But, like, that portfolio construction around, like, the liquidity, the type of markets, like, the type of, like, segments, the type of reps that you have. will likely be different in each one of the segments, right? In each one of the markets.

So, like, it would be different in the US versus in Japan versus in Mexico, versus, like, in Colombia, versus, like, in the UAE or in the UK, right? So I do have that bucket in my calendar every week, but it’s all about pipeline construction. It’s essentially the same concept.

[email protected]:

It’s absolutely the same concept. Oh my gosh, we could… this… this… the fact that we only have 17 minutes left is quite disturbing, because we could go for hours on this. Like, you’re speaking my language. I used to look at my pipeline as a portfolio risk to manage, and forecasting being nothing more than portfolio management.

And it’s the same financial concepts that govern that. And at the same token, you have another portfolio of go-to-market risks or marketing campaign risks. Question for you. So, you, as Julie said earlier, you were the first investor, the first go-to-market leader, and now the company has hundreds of people out there, you know, marching that march.

how have you scaled… you speak about scalable voices, let’s talk about scalable hypothesis, or scalable experiments. How have you gone from You being the alpha and the omega of the experiments to scaling out the concept of experimentation across different regions, across different functions within that organization.

Carles Reina:

I think it’s more of a cultural component in the org, where, like, everyone knows that, like, and I’ve repeated, like, a million times, and I will continue repeating it a million times, like, no one will get fired for actually, like, wasting company money in an experiment. No one, right?

Like, you will get fired for many other pieces, like, at 11 Labs, because 11 Labs is really hard as a company to work for. But you will never get fired for wasting, like, money. Like, you could spend a million dollars because we gave you the budget, and it produces zero. I do not care about those things, right?

And that’s, like, when you repeat it, and you embed it in the culture of the go-to-market organization, it ends up, like, becoming, like, it flows directly in the entire veins of… of the team, right? But I do believe that you need to keep reminding everyone, like, like, every 6 months or so, there’s like.

we are expected to continue, like, iterating, we’re expected to make mistakes, we’re expected to actually, like, waste resources. That is okay. And then people keep doing. Because otherwise, like, the new joiners might not have, like, gotten that matches in the early days, they might have forgotten because they have quotas to reach.

all of that stuff, and then you can, like, kind of diluting, so you need to actually consistently, consistently do it.

And then on top of that, like, I have GMs all around the world, that essentially manage different markets, or regions, or bigger regions, and then one of the core components that I, like, keep pushing them and force them is like, like, it’s like, how much are you experimenting? Like. What do we not know?

Like, let’s figure out the new bets that we need to be doing for that specific market. I think, like, then you end up, like, doing, like, the top-down and the bottom-up approach.

[email protected]:

Love that. And what you told me loud and clear just now is that you’re a leader who’s extremely conscious Of how the carrots and sticks that you put in place around behaviors are ultimately what’s going to form the foundation of a culture. And, the specific line, he says, no one gets fired for an experiment.

That’s actually that boss Richard of mine, what he said is. I will never fire you for making a mistake, comma, once. And that was always the ethos. We iterate, we hone, and we move on. And that’s how species evolve, and that’s how organizations evolve and dominate.

Carles Reina:

And that’s how kids actually evolve as well. Like, if you’re a kid, and you’re, like, learning something, you’re learning how to actually, like, I don’t know, like, ride a bike. and then you crash your bike, and then you’re told that, like, why did you do it?

Like, you shouldn’t have done that, and you just, like, get into this massive, massive mess with your parents, like, you’re gonna be scared of actually riding a bike, and also, like, making another mess, but not only on bikes, but, like, many other things, right? I think go-to-market is essentially a muscle in many ways.

Like, the more deals you close, the better you get actually closing deals. And if you actually get told, like, don’t pursue risk, because you might mess it up, and essentially I’m gonna fire you for messing it up, then essentially you end up getting worse at your job. It’s kind of like there’s a very strong correlation in all those things.

[email protected]:

Absolutely, and I love that you bring parenting into the mix. Like, that same kind of call… I just talked about a conversation I had with my son about 2 hours ago. My son, he’s a weirdo. He, a lot of us, when we watch sports. we rewind and we watch the injuries. We watch the highlights. My son rewinds and watches the injuries.

He got this thing for orthopedic surgery at 15 years of age. He watches surgery videos, he’s a nut, and so at 15 years of age. We have a summer project where he’s reaching out to doctors with the goal of interviewing 20. And so, cold out.

Carles Reina:

a gene.

[email protected]:

And he had a flip-out this morning because he sent the note and he realized there were some grammatical mistakes. But he was too scared to tell us because, in his mind, perfection is everything.

And the big message to him was, son, the only mistake you made was focusing your energy on the mistake you made, as opposed to learning and moving on, being proud of yourself for evolving. And so, I just had to share that because it was literally 2 hours fresh, but it’s the same way of raising employees.

And it’s exactly what I love about the culture you put in place, which If you make mistakes, I’m gonna reward you.

Even back when I had my first BDR team, we created, you know, people were so enamored with email that we forgot that the phone is where we reach out and touch someone, and so what we did is we put in place a rule or an award every week that was gonna be the most embarrassing call of the week award. Why?

Because we want to reward the failures that are part of human behavior. All that said, I want to shift gears a little bit, because you hit earlier on, when talking about culture and talking about scaling experiments, that things are different in each country. Right? So, when I look at what Eleven Labs is doing, it’s fascinating, right?

Humans, we’re defined by our ears and our eyes, not necessarily what we see on a screen. And our ears pick up voice. And so many businesses out there, insurance businesses, manufacturing businesses, are dependent upon outbound, which is a key part of what Eleven Labs do.

What you’re ultimately doing is you’re driving transformation to the way manufacturers, telecommunication organizations, insurance companies, financial services organizations reach out and touch someone.

However, you’re selling into geopolitical areas that have different cultures, which means the way your customers are buying, the way they’re adopting change is going to be different, and the way you have to enable your teams to operate and behave have to be different to succeed within these areas.

How are you managing those complex layers Around go-to-market inside, and more specifically, here’s the specific question. How are you organizing in a manner that drives and balances scale? As well as empathy for the audience you’re looking to transform.

Carles Reina:

So we… I… every year, I come up with a revenue vision for that year, so we have revenue vision for, like, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, and so on. And that revenue vision, like, sets up what we’re going to be doing. What are markets that we’re entering? How are we going to be approaching this?

What are the dynamics in industries, and, like, the philosophy behind all of this, right? And last year, the main headline was, like, we are a global hyper-local company. And what that fundamentally means is, like, we build products at a global scale, but we deliver them at the local level, where our customers are.

Hence, trying to account for the fact, like, we are a growing organization, we need to hire a lot more, but we’re literally not going to be successful if we sell the same way in Japan than we sell in the US, or than we sell in Mexico. And I will give you some examples, like.

in the US, you know it better than me, but, like, if you’re not talking about pricing by the end of meeting 2, people get a little bit, like. like, sellers get disappointed. If by the end of meeting three you’re not talking about pricing and looking at, like, contracts and all of that stuff, people, like, just lose interest, right?

So you know that, like, you’re just not gonna move at the pace that you wanted, or what you wanted, right? In India, or in Mexico, or across Latin America, like, companies are not… people are not incentivized to tell you no. In the US, they will tell you, like, yes or no, and you will know straight away, right?

But in those markets, like, they will not tell you no. So, like, you might spend… Infinite amount of time wasted. Because they just don’t have an incentive to tell you no. It’s more about the relationship side, right? So, how do you figure out why to navigate that?

I can tell you, like, also, like, selling in China, like, Chinese, like, buyers are extremely technical, whereas the US buyers are mostly business tech… business people in the majority of cases.

So, like, the technical bias in China, like, will not trust you unless they’ve, like, completely destroyed your product, and they know that you can answer really tough questions. They don’t want to know about the ROI, they don’t want to know about the technical side of the product.

So if you’re not able to answer, like, those technical, really tough questions, they don’t want to talk to you. Right? So there is all of these variations, and in the Middle East, it’s all about the relationship, so you need to build a proper relationship before you can actually, like. talk about a contract. If you don’t have that.

then it feels transactional, and it just feels very, very different, right? And it’s very difficult to actually navigate it. And across Europe, we have, like, plenty of different cultures and ways of doing it.

So, for us, the way we do it is, like, we hire teams that are on the ground, at the local level, that actually speak the language, like, understand the culture, have been doing it for a number of years, but I do trouble most of my time, because I want to go into those markets.

The worst possible outcome is I get told something by one of my account execs, or by one of GMs. And it just doesn’t ring a bell.

It’s like, I can spot bullshit straight away, but if I don’t go into the market, then I will believe it, and I will be like, okay, like, so we have not been able to do XYZ or reach the target that we wanted in market X, and then I get a bullshit answer, and it’s like, I will have to accept it.

But if I’ve already been in the market, and I understand the dynamics, and I’ve spent some time in the markets, we’re talking about, like, weeks or months in there, and I go regularly, then I’m able to spot and say, like, I know, we didn’t reach it because of all of these other problems, not because of what you’re telling me, right?

So I think, like, you end up having a hybrid. So that has a toll… that takes a toll in your personal lives, right? For instance, when, like, if you’re traveling, I’m traveling, like, 80% of the time these days, so every 4 weeks, like, for every 4 weeks of… in a month, I’m traveling 3 weeks. That’s tough. That’s tough, fundamentally.

But that’s the only way to build a global organization that actually, like, takes the nuances of each one of the countries.

[email protected]:

100%, you need… and I like the… I like that you bring out bullshit in there, because at the end of the day, if you’re managing a portfolio of risk in the game of sales, you gotta be able to spot the bullshit fast. So, on that note. Right?

I’ve always found that you need to build governance and expectations into process to proactively root out the bullshit so you can effectively manage that portfolio risk. I mean, clearly, you know, you’re in 9 figures already, so clearly, you got your scaling out process.

How have you gone about Building out a global process that also maintains locality, for the example you gave, you know, in some parts of the world, if you’re not talking about pricing on… by meeting 2, you’re probably in your qualify out, where in other places, you’re probably not talking about pricing until far later, so you need the ability to have a… perhaps there’s a global process, but you’re… you have to delegate control to the local level.

How are you managing that balance of global governance, localized, and delegation of authority?

Carles Reina:

Pipeline reviews. We do pipeline reviews every quarter, sorry, every month, and I get involved in all of the pipeline reviews, at the regional level. So that’s one. The second was, like, with the GMs. They’re owners of their pipelines and the results, and I go very deep on that element. And number 3 is, like, trying to automate as much as you can.

So, like, we have, like, Claude embedded in the entire organization, and I can actually, like, I check very regularly pretty much what everything is happening in the pipelines, the deals, and all of that stuff. So that’s usually the way that I handle it, here at 11 Labs.

There’s probably much better ways, but it’s usually the best way for me at this scale.

[email protected]:

With a couple minutes left, I’m gonna throw one question out, which really tweaked me in our first conversation. And that was, we both agreed that It’s critical that when companies are growing, that we maintain the hunger, the rabid competitiveness. On our teams, and not allow complacency to steep in. How are you handling that at 11 Labs?

Is 11 Labs grows, you’re a global name, you’re well known. Even someone who lives in a cave like me knows who you are. How do you go about instilling that competitive fire and that challenger mentality in your team as the company grows?

Carles Reina:

Two ways. Number one is, like, we have very high quotas across the board, so it’s famous that we did, like, this 20X quota. So, like, 20x base salary is what you need to be bringing to the company. So it means, like, people need to be very eager to actually, like, get there.

I can also tell you, like, last year, like, 90% of my account execs passed their quota target. And then this year, like, I… the average quote attainment in Q1 was 167%, right? So, it just gives you an idea, like, people are really good at those things. So that’s number one.

The second one is fundamentally, like, putting very ambitious targets and asking people to actually be creative on how we get there. It’s like… like, look, I mean, I’m just gonna put a very, like, high target as a company, and… how do we make it work?

Like, you come up with ideas, it’s not gonna be, like, bottom-ups, like, let’s see, okay, we have, like, one… if we have, like, 10 more reps, can we do this amount? Yeah, yeah, we do those things, but, like, in reality, it’s like, it’s top-down. It’s like, I give you a number. What do you need to execute on that number?

And that essentially usually creates a lot of really good conversation, or, like, being creative, and what are the bets that we need to be placing, right?

And I hope that we continue doing all of these things, because at the end of the day, that means, like, people are owners of their own success, owners of the actual solutions to get to those numbers, and everyone feels that, like, we are doing something quite unique in general.

[email protected]:

Love that. How does being an early investor and someone I’m gonna imagine is heavily… let’s say equity, I imagine, is a key component of your motivations, how does that play in to how you manage, knowing that you’re saying, we’re going to set very lofty expectations?

Carles Reina:

So, I don’t have a bonus, for instance, I don’t have a commission. on my end, right? So, I’ve never had it, and I think that’s good. I mean, my compensation is based on Was initially based on equity.

And we put initially, like, a specific revenue threshold within… that we wanted to reach, and it seemed, like, impossible to reach because, like, only two or… like, two or three companies in the world in the past had actually reached that threshold. in a very specific time frame, and we smashed that threshold within, like, less than a year.

And I think that, for me, that is the extra motivation. Like, for anyone working in go-to-market. you have three components. You have the base, you have, like, the commission, and you have the equity.

Like, people over the index, I think, on the commission side, when in fact, what actually will give you really good, like, wealth at a personal level is going to be the equity. So, I would propose always to actually be like, hey, like, do you want to swap some of it?

Because, like, you might be better off, actually, like, over-indexing on the equity side than actually on the OTE side. But of course, like, everyone has, like, different, like, requirements.

Some people might have, like, some things to pay, some bills to pay, some people might have a bigger family, a smaller family, all of the stuff, so, like, there is a fine balance to be having there. But I do think, like, we live in this age where, like.

Companies are doing these days secondaries every few months, and… you don’t have to wait 10 years to see if you would be able to get something out of it. So, if you can afford it, just over-index on the equity side, because you’re going to be extra motivated when the company valuation keeps going up.

[email protected]:

Carlos, that is a great way to end, and I don’t explicitly say what I think you implied just now, and I’m going to say this because I learned this mistake the hard way, and that is for most aspiring CROs, of which I was once one.

The biggest mistake we’re gonna make as we’re working our way up the ranks is we go from fixed to variable, taking on a higher percentage of repaid commissions. But what boards care most about is they want CROs, or CMOs for that matter, who have an investor’s mindset.

Think with your equity as opposed to your commission check, your salary, and… That’s, to me, one of the biggest mistakes I see aspiring seros make, and I think, Carlos, you said that far better than Anyone given advice could have said it.

Carles Reina:

Now, like, let me finish with one thing, which is, like, I always tell the teams, like, for every $1 million that you bring to 11 Labs in sales, it’s another $33 million in valuation increase. Right? So, like, if you think about it, like, as a CMO or a CRO, how much more revenue did you can bring, because that has a direct impact on your equity.

And everyone else’s equity, not yours, equity only. The entire company equity, your investor’s equity, right?

That is the real value of, like, amazing leaders, like, they can, like, they can bring, like, the equity value up by essentially doing the right things, or doing a set of things, whether sometimes it’s, like, short-term, long-term, or mid-term, right? That is the actual real value.

[email protected]:

I love that, because someone thinking like that is going to recognize the difference between low multiple versus high multiple income. Yes. I’m seeing a little bit after the hour, it looks like we have a panel ahead of us. Carlos, I had a blast chatting with you, and, Julie, I will turn this back to you.

Julia Nimchinski:

What a fantastic discussion. Thank you so much, Carlos. Thank you, Russell. What’s the best way to support you for our community?

Carles Reina:

Thank you so much, and it was great, to actually, like, chatting with you all.

Julia Nimchinski:

Where should we follow you, Carlos? LinkedIn? Twitter? X?

Carles Reina:

LinkedIn, Twitter, email me, I mean, I try to reply as much as I can.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much, Russell. How about yourself?

[email protected]:

I’m always on LinkedIn, love to chat. Have a wonderful day and a great panel.