Reina: Over 10% of ElevenLabs' enterprise revenue came from startup grants
Carles Reina · CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina · Sep 9, 2026 · at 7:56
Carles Reina, former VP of Revenue at ElevenLabs, explains the long-term enterprise revenue attribution of their early startup grants initiative.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So for a very, very long time, like, over 10% of the enterprise revenues that we're generating Were essentially coming from the Grants program.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Carles Reina
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…”
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…”