Carles Reina
VP of Sales, ElevenLabs. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveinvestoroperator@Carles_Reina ↗elevenlabs.io ↗
Carles Reina joined voice AI startup ElevenLabs as its first angel investor and fourth employee, leading its go-to-market function. He is also the founder and managing partner of Baobab Ventures, investing in pre-seed and seed-stage AI, robotics, and defense startups.
2shows
2appearances
80statements
4resolved
3supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Carles Reina said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Reina: ElevenLabs set a 20x quota-to-base ratio with uncapped commissions
“The entire logic was very simple. It's like, look, if you want to have a base salary of a hundred K, you're going to need to bring two million dollars in revenues every single year, right? You have uncapped commissions. It's like OTE out of the gate is going t…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Reyna: I would choose to acquire Anthropic over OpenAI
“Anthropic. And I've put it online, like, multiple times.”
Reina: ElevenLabs would have neared $1B ARR with earlier senior sales hiring
“And I think those two items, if we had done it much sooner, then for instance, we would have already passed a billion dollars in revenue, for instance, right? Or like getting close to that billion dollars in revenues.”
Reina: ElevenLabs paid zero sales commissions on POCs, only recurring revenue
“For us, we established that like we would compensate, we pay commissions on recurrent revenue contracts, but not in one offs. So if you sign a POC and you pay for like two months or like three months or like two weeks, you would not Get any commission on that.…”
Reina: ElevenLabs account executives achieve 300% to 600% quota attainment
“To this point in time right now, like three and a half years in after I started selling the first product, I can tell you we have like account execs doing 600% quota. We have account execs and it's not uncommon. We have account execs doing like a lot of them d…”
Reina: ElevenLabs GTM team averages 167% quarterly quota attainment
“The average quote attainment on a per quarter basis is across the entire go-to-market team is a 167% every single quarter.”
Reina: LLMs struggle in sales because they only produce within-distribution results
“I do still believe that, like, AI agents are not that good today actually at doing something that is very relationship driven. But they're getting much better at it, right? So, like, the problem is when you look at LLMs, they look at the distribution site, and…”
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%.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Reina: ElevenLabs scaled from $0 to over $600M ARR in 41 months
“And when you look at the stats, for instance, we went from Zero to a hundred million dollars in ARR in 20 months. Then we went from a hundred to two hundred million dollars in another 10 months. Then we went from 200 to three hundred and thirty million in anot…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Carles's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | VP of Sales, ElevenLabs | 1 | 65 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | VP of Sales, ElevenLabs | 1 | 15 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |