The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“Anthropic. And I've put it online, like, multiple times.”

“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.”

“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.…”

“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…”

“The average quote attainment on a per quarter basis is across the entire go-to-market team is a 167% every single quarter.”

“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…”

“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%.”

“Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if like a human actually closed it.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“I always used to tell the team all the time, I only need, you need to test a hundred things. I only need one of those 100 things to actually work to give me another hundred million dollars in ARR, right? I only need one. I don't need five. I don't need 20. I n…”

“I think, like, this common understanding among starters, you want to hire young people that are hungry, that are very driven, energetic, and all of that stuff, but it also means, like, you're starting most of the time from scratch, tackling, like, tackling com…”

“And I used to people, for the one million dollars in revenues that you bring, it's around thirty-three million dollars in extra valuation for the business.”

“Selling is a relationship problem. Like you're not going to be able to sign a big deal. With a company, if you don't go and camp in their offices, if you don't meet them, if you don't actually like understand the problems, the constraints, the concerns, all of…”

“We had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota.”

“Customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business.”

“Outbound is dead unless you do it with humans or unless you do it humanly.”

“And that has close deals for us already. We generate money from that AI customer success manager fundamentally because it is humanly, right?”

“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…”

“But at the same time, it's boring. Like the majority of companies will start with the bottom line optimization.”

“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…”

“But I also think, like, you look at, like, all of our competitors, like, you mentioned Sierra, DecGone, and all of the other ones, we power all of them.”

“And like, if you do it like early on, if you segment too early, then you fundamentally end up like screwing things up.”

“When I make an offer I tell every single person, it's like, 11 Labs is going to be extremely difficult, right? Extremely difficult. We are a hard company to work for because we have extremely high expectations. You're going to work, like, a huge amount of hour…”

“You look at what Marc Andreessen was saying the other day, and, like, companies are overstaffed by 25% and even more, right?”

“Like, I don't need to spend more than 20 minutes to know if I want to hire someone or not.”

“I think there is a very large portion that is over-exaggerated, but I think, like, there is a real fact that, like, people will end up building their own applications, and I think that's key.”

“Premium branding on the worst team. 100%. You get more exposure, and also, like, you have a lot more creative freedom, and also you're betting.”

“The worst, like, ROI for us has always been, like conferences. It just, there's no ROI in there.”

“You know, like, this is gonna be controversial, but like, I actually love CVCs, like Corporate Venture Capitalists, because they help you navigate big brands, they are your champions internally, and their incentive is to actually make it work really well for t…”

“I don't even look at the PLG numbers. I don't. I don't care about those ones. I look at, like, what are the enterprises? What are the companies in the market? How is my portfolio construction in that market? And how can I close some of those numbers, some of t…”

“The money that you're investing is not worth it. Like, I mean, it's just not worth anything for any company. Like, if you put, like, a five K check, or you put a 10 K check, or you put, like, a 50 K, it's not gonna make or break the company.”

“If in the first conversation, I want to understand, like, how are they thinking about go-to-market already? And if they tell me, like, sorry, I'm just, like, I'm only thinking about, like, building research and doing all of these things, like, fantastic, I lov…”

“I love that there's a company in, in Spain called Teke Robotics, T-H-E-K-E-R. They're doing like robotics for like the manufacturing industry and like services industry and like, sorry like warehouses and all of that stuff. Absolutely the most geniusest guys t…”