Opinion
Reyna: AI go-to-market tools fail because they treat sales transactionally
“No, but it's like, I've tried a very large number of like AI go to market tools, and they don't work because they see everything as a transaction.”
Insight
Reyna: Professional services models fail in AI due to two-day copycats
“In the world where, like, Snowflake grew up like, that made sense. In the world we are in today with AI, that doesn't make any sense. Because fundamentally, like, anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days. Anyone.”
Opinion
Reyna: Open-source AI models won't commoditize ElevenLabs due to enterprise complexity
“A lot of people were talking last year about, like, oh, open source models are gonna take over, like, even on the AI voices space, like, you're gonna get commoditized and so on. And for a period of time, I kind of believed it. I was like, yeah, I mean, There i…”
Opinion
Reyna: Operating full-time while investing presents no fundamental conflicts
“I think that you can do, like, both things in parallel, and one contributes to the other one. Like, I don't think there is any conflicts in there, fundamentally.”
Opinion
Reyna: I would choose to acquire Anthropic over OpenAI
“Anthropic. And I've put it online, like, multiple times.”
Assertion Contradicted
Reyna: Outbound cold email response rates have dropped below 0.01%
“And you see, like, the response rates on outbound emails Has dropped to the lowest of any point in time. It's like less than 0.01%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
ElevenLabs pays human sales reps full commissions for AI-closed deals
“Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if like a human actually closed it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reyna: Every $1M in sales adds $33M to ElevenLabs' valuation
“For every one million dollars in revenues that any single person signs. And I don't care if it comes from like the SDR, the account exec, the CSM, or it's an engineer that went all in and then managed to get a contract. It's like every single million has thirt…”
Opinion
Reyna: VC advice on sequential market expansion is bullshit
“In general, like one single market going one market at a time, it doesn't work. Traditional BCs, like, they've, like, the traditional method has been like, oh, you open one market, you go deep, you win the account, you show, like, the value, then you go to the…”
Opinion
Reyna: Tech startups are wrong to avoid hiring veteran sales reps
“I think like all of the tech startups are afraid to actually hire someone that has had 20 years experience, 25 years experience. And the excuse that they use is like, that person is not going to feed the business. And I think it's bullshit. I think it's full w…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reyna warned top platform partners before ElevenLabs launched competing AI agents
“So when we launch our agents product, I called the biggest platforms, agents platform that were operating in our platform, and I told them, like, guys, FYI, like in the next couple of months, we're going to be launching our agents product. We're going to be co…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reyna: Enterprises waste three months trying open-source before returning to ElevenLabs
“We're like, yeah, we could go with open source models. Excellent. Do it. You try to operationalize it and they've lost three months and then they come back.”
Disclosure
Reyna: ElevenLabs is willing to lose money entering the government vertical
“And I don't care if I don't make enough money to justify it or like I lose money. It doesn't really matter to me.”
Opinion
Reyna: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor are enterprise AI's only blue-chip brands
“I think, like, the two companies that today have been able to make it is, or three companies, if you want, OpenAI, Anthropic, full respect for them, Cursor. The three of them, I think, for me, are, like, Cursor has killed enterprise unbelievably well. Yeah, th…”
Opinion
Reyna: A large portion of modern sales reps have grown soft
“I think a very large portion of them are because they don't have the environment to actually like just push harder or because they've already lost the passion in that.”
Disclosure
ElevenLabs forces CVC investors to deliver revenue or face contractual penalties
“So how do you figure out something that works along the way so that, like, you put and end up saying, you know what, you will invest for every million dollars that you want to invest, you need to actually, like, bring X amount of revenues in the next 12 months…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Apr 2028
Reyna: OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs will buy new foundational model startups
“OpenAI and Anthropic will end up, and Google will end up buying, and 11 Labs will end up buying, like, all of the new foundational model companies that will be popping up and creating research and paying just, like, a few billion here, a few billion there, and…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Two ElevenLabs salespeople hit full-year quota by February
“We had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota.”
Insight
Reyna: Customer success must generate money for the business
“Customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business.”
Insight
Carles Reyna: Outbound sales is dead unless executed humanly
“Outbound is dead unless you do it with humans or unless you do it humanly.”
Assertion Supported
ElevenLabs generates revenue using an internal AI customer success manager
“And that has close deals for us already. We generate money from that AI customer success manager fundamentally because it is humanly, right?”
Insight
Reyna: Traditional sales forecasting is impossible in experimentation-driven startups
“Impossible. But it's impossible if you think about it from an experimentation perspective, and I always tell my team, like, I want us to test as many things as possible. I only need one of those ones to work really well to give me another hundred million dolla…”
Opinion
Reyna: Enterprise AI customer support automation is boring bottom-line optimization
“But at the same time, it's boring. Like the majority of companies will start with the bottom line optimization.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
ElevenLabs is testing consultative AI labs to drive enterprise revenue growth
“I'm spending a lot of time these days on like, how do we prove that the idea of labs for companies where we essentially are their consultants and help them build those agents that will generate top line revenue with new ideas, new products is actually somethin…”
