Pinned Tweet
The Latest CRO Confidential with @samdblond is out! "$0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook"
Carles Reina was the fourth employee and first GTM hire at ElevenLabs. Four years later: $600M+ ARR and an $11B valuation. Today he's a Partner at Baobab Ventures, helping the next generation of startups scale.
In the latest CRO Confidential, hosted by Sam Blond (CEO and Co-Founder of Monaco), Carles breaks down exactly how they built it. The revenue ramp alone is jaw-dropping:
$0 to $100M ARR in 20 months
$100M to $200M in another 10 months
$200M to $330M in another 5 months
$330M to $600M+ in another 6 months
#1. Distribution from day one
ElevenLabs never bet on a single channel. Every market got its own thesis: why launch here, direct or reseller, what does GTM look like in the first 90 days? Core markets were sold direct; everywhere else, resellers got the technology into market fast. Distribution plus relentless experimentation was the whole game.
#2. The grants program that killed the competition
Carles came back from holiday with one question: how do I kill my competition? The answer: give startups with 25 or fewer employees free credits for 3 months. They gave out tens of thousands of grants, made a ton of noise about it, and pulled demand away from every competitor in the market. Over 10% of ElevenLabs' enterprise revenue eventually came from upselling those grant recipients as they grew.
#3. The 20X quota model
This one's controversial. At ElevenLabs, a $100k base salary meant a $2M quota — 20x — with uncapped commissions. Reps regularly hit 300-600% of target, and average attainment across the entire GTM org ran 167% every single quarter. Carles' theory: he'd rather have a lean team of killers crushing quota than a bloated team missing it and complaining. And when a market genuinely broke, they'd grant quota relief — the commitment was that comp would always stay fair.
#4. Only pay commissions on recurring revenue
Sign a giant one-off or a 2-month POC? Zero commission — because it added nothing to valuation. Roughly $1M of real recurring revenue was worth ~$33M in valuation, and reps were paid generously on that. Incentivize the outcome that matters, not the inputs.
#5. What he'd do differently: enablement and senior sellers, earlier
Two regrets. First, sales enablement came too late — it's always underinvested until the team is too big to onboard properly. Second, hire senior sellers earlier. Hungry young reps are great, but people with 20 years of relationships who know procurement compress timelines dramatically. Either regret fixed might have gotten them to a billion faster.
#6. Wire AI into GTM, but sell the team on productivity, not replacement
Carles pitched the founders on building an AI SDR, an AI AE, and an AI customer success manager. The team's first reaction: "am I going to get replaced?" They proved the opposite. The AI SDR answered inbound emails in minutes and improved conversion rates. The AI CSM worked long-tail and mid-market upsells automatically — and the human account owners still got paid the commission. Productivity story, not replacement story.
#7. Test 100 things. You only need one to work
Carles told the team he only needed one experiment to hit to add another $100M in ARR. So run everything in parallel, kill what fails fast, and treat a failed experiment as a win — you learned something. Add to that: make it insanely easy to do business with you, from pricing to onboarding to time-to-value.
👉 Distribution is everything, incentivize recurring revenue (not meetings), be famously fair to your salespeople — reps who get rich make everyone around them believe — and let AI do the work agents are best at while humans do the relationships and the creative bets no agent would ever come up with.
Watch the full episode:
youtu.be/4o_D6Ur1kko?si=-Wdw…
Every Anthropic AE starts the day in Claude.
One prompt turns Gmail, Gong, Slack and Salesforce into a 7 AM brief in Slack, says Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic's Head of Industries.
"What emails have you not answered? What Slacks have you not actioned?"
New!! 5 Interesting Learnings From Anthropic's Data on Its Own Workforce: Junior Technical Hiring Down From 27% to 9%, Agents Working 6x the Hours of Humans, and Agents Waiting on a Human 80% of the Time saastr.com/5-interesting-lea…
Ask your agent, not your developer.
"I'm not finna decide. 10K will decide," Amelia told vendors pitching her at a Salesforce event.
"If an agent isn't gonna pick you, you're gonna see degradation in your leads and your market share."
Today in AI:
1️⃣ Jim Keller's Tenstorrent raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation to scale its open-source AI chips.
2️⃣ Town raised $108M at a $1B valuation to give every team member an AI assistant.
3️⃣ Jio Platforms' anchor book opened ahead of its $3.2B IPO, set to be India's biggest.
4️⃣ BILL launched a new AI suite for finance teams, rolling out to customers today.
5️⃣ AiMOGA opened global pre-orders for Mobo, its home humanoid robot.
New!! Dear SaaStr: How Can You Land Big Customers If You're a New Startup No One Has Heard Of? saastr.com/how-can-you-land-…
Half of all executives changed jobs in 16 months.
"49.7% changed jobs in the last 16 months," says Jason Lemkin.
63% of CMOs. Your buyer is already gone.
Enrich your data or sell to nobody.
Don't rebuild your product for AI.
"What do humans do, and what do agents do? And is it any different?" says Sherif Mansour.
His aha moment at Atlassian: every problem you have to solve for agents, you already solved for humans.
Bolt AI onto the workflows you already have.
New!! Dear SaaStr: What Role Do Founders Play Once They Hire an Outside CEO? saastr.com/dear-saastr-what-…
New!! Cloudflare Cut 20%. Atlassian Cut 10%, Mostly Engineers. Bending Spoons Cuts Up to 75%. All Three Are... saastr.com/cloudflare-cut-20…
New!! Why CMO is a Really Tough Job: You Have To Deploy The Capital. And It Has To Work. saastr.com/why-cmo-is-a-real…
New!! Dear SaaStr: Once Your Equity Vests In a Startup ... Why Stick Around? saastr.com/once-your-equity-…
Selling AI globally on USD-only billing?
"Localized pricing drives 18 percent higher cross-border revenue," says Maia Josebachvili.
"Put yourself in the shoes of a customer in Brazil. Can they pay in Real with Pix?"
If the answer is no, you're leaving money on the table.
Today in AI:
1️⃣ Microsoft's MAI-Base-2: 2.8T params, 16,000 GB200s, no distillation. Own the stack, own the weights.
2️⃣ Anthropic did $16.8B in Q3, up 45%, ahead of a November IPO.
3️⃣ Apple plus Meta run an 816B-param open model on Macs. Local inference got serious.
4️⃣ Stepfun open-sourced a 600B model, #2 on OpenRouter at one-eighth of Opus 5 cost.
5️⃣ CCC goes private at $6.1B, 44% premium. Real AI workflow still gets paid.
