Blond: Startups should not blindly copy ElevenLabs' 20x sales quota
Sam Blond · CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina · Sep 9, 2026 · at 26:53
Sam Blond and former ElevenLabs VP of Revenue Carles Reina discuss whether ElevenLabs' aggressive 20x sales quota model can be generalized to other startups.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What works for 11 Labs at 20 X quota, meaning if you are paying a rep a 100,000 dollars a year, they need to generate two million dollars a year. That works for 11 Labs. It does not mean that we pattern match that to all other startups the way that we might, that five X revenue contribution in this sort of like SaaS world.”
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 Sam Blond
Blond: AI Will Make Software Development 5x Faster Within Three Years
“We can build software today. Let's call it five X faster than we could three years ago before all of the coding assistance. Well, if that's true faster, yeah, maybe more than probably more, it's reasonable to believe that in three years from now we can build f…”
Sam Blond Predicts AI Will Fully Automate Transactional Sales
“Transactional sort of commodity like sales will be disrupted in ways that support has been disrupted, where more and more revenue will be generated from just pure models, converting website visitors to revenue without the sales touch. And I think that will con…”
Outbound sales drives the majority of Rippling's revenue attribution
“We're going to focus more specifically on outbound, which makes up the majority of Rippling's revenue from an attribution standpoint.”
Blond: Founders Fund avoided AI, health tech, and ed tech deals
“You mentioned AI founders fund didn't really do AI. So even if you were dot AI the last 18 months, it was like a no-go regardless of the success of the business. We didn't love the categories of like health tech and ed tech.”
Blond: A $1B exit no longer moves the needle for large VC funds
“What you're describing is as Peter described the power law venture, where there can be a series, a, an exceptional company that is raising money at 30 to forty million dollars, which I think is probably the Middle of the road series a right now and a billion d…”
Sam Blond: Spreadsheet-based sales hiring caused productivity to regress dramatically
“We made decisions based on a spreadsheet. We had a historical data on rep effectiveness in 20, 20 and 20, 21 in finance plugged the number going from 10 reps to 14 reps into the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet said this was what was going to happen when we go…”