We ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. That's your quota, right? So if I pay you 100k a year, your quota is $2 million. If you don't achieve your quota, then you're gonna be out, right? And we're ruthless on that end. When I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried. Because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road. When you join your level apps, you need to have signed your first contract with them first two weeks. Sales people need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told. This is 20 sales with me, how are you? My best savings now stay we have the best 20 sales episode that we have ever done. Carlos Rainer is the VP of sales at 11 labs where he has scaled the revenue walked over $330 million in just three years. He's also a phenomenal investor with investments in the lights of Revolut, Happy Robot, Nothing and more. This was probably one of the most granular, but also insightful sales episodes we've done. Carlos does not pull any punches. Get your notebooks out. This was one of my favorites to record. But before we dive into the show today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, rocks. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable. rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach and opportunity management. So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. Rocks gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try rocks at rocks.com/signup. And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years, I've watched some of the best founders in early-go-to-market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work. Well, that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, play in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, dross follow up emails for you and keeps deals moving forward. So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates and faster revenue growth. If you're an early stage startup, tired of duct taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out
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Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist. Or get started building for free stay at framer.com/20VC for 30% off, 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com/20VC for 30% off. Framer.com/20VC rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. Carlos, it is fantastic to have you on the show, dude. I've heard so many good things, mostly from Matty, but thank you so much for joining me, stay, man. Thank you so much for having me here. It's fantastic, dude. I want to start with you were VP of product back in the early days. And now in the sales world, that is a big transition. How do you think about moving from product to sales? And what have been your biggest lessons when you reflect on that? I've actually done everything. I've done like, I was VP of operations for another AI company. Like we will live from zero to like a unique horn. Then I moved to product and then ended up like moving to sales and then sales again. So like, I've done the full like all of the different kind of roles that you could do except in GA. When did you realize you loved sales? I think like when I was doing operations, I kind of like was seeing all of the guys like doing sales and I was like, shit, I can do this much better. And that's the moment I started thinking like, I want to do sales, I want to do sales. So I get, I start to get closer to like customers and then I realize like that is my area. But like when you work in a startup in the early days, nothing really matters. Like the only thing that you get about like, how do you get to the next milestone, right? So whether you've ops product like sales, everything is kind of a mesh in reality. Was there a moment when they were like, this is what I'm destined to do? Like I'm a sales leader. Yeah. So when like there was a company that came out of the F called Sonantik, they was doing AI voices back in the early days. So ended up building the entire go-to market site for them. And that's when I realized like, okay, this is what I want to be doing going forward. But then one of my friends like, Philippe from Jopin Talent called me one day saying, hey, like I want to rebuild the entire product stack. Would you join me? This is gonna be a very good challenge. I was like, okay, fine, let's do it. And then that's when I changed. But I realized like product, I love it. I did for a year and a half. It was fantastic. I built the entire product that like now, they pivoted to that product and is doing super well. But I realized like, I want to be talking to customers all the time. I want to actually sell them like the rush that you get when you close the deal is insane. It's insane and I absolutely love it. Tell me, how did you first come to meet Mati? 'Cause you invested as well. You're the like first round ambassador. Yes, at 5 million valuation preceded. So I met Mati through a common friend. Paolo, we used to work together, track the whole AI back in the day. He messaged me one day, being like, hey, I have this friend like, he, we used to work together, black dog. He's thinking about like something about like AI voices and so on. Half no idea. But you've been in that space. You want to talk to him? I was like, absolutely. And then that's when I met Mati and within 30 minutes of the first conversation, I was like, I'm all in. How much money do you want? And I wanted to do it with my friends. That was pretty much it. How much did you put in? I put it 20k. 20k? Yes. Have you kept it all? I sort of a tiny, tiny portion through one of the secondaries, but it's tiny portion. What is 20k worth now? It's probably like, it's like 800k in returns. So that's probably like what, 16 million, something like that? Not bad. Woo. Well, you've done much better. So, you might have had that multiple. I haven't had that multiple. That is fucking phenomenal. It's good. But like, it's been good. When was that moment when you're like, holy shit, I've just got to join this rocket ship. I've always been willing to actually leave everything and join one of my portfolio companies. Like one of my key things is like, I would not invest in a company if I'm not 100% convinced. Like if there is a time that I need to join, I will join them. And I think level up was one of those ones, where like, they were like the first off site that we were doing. It was in Portugal and then Mati called me one day, saying, we're doing this. Do you want to join us? We're great to have you there. And we're doing anything. One of our investors houses in Portugal. And then I went there literally, like, for 24 hours, met the team. And it was the end of the mini-offside. Mati was like, well, maybe we should talk about you joining us. And then that's when we started talking. I was like, I'm all in. Like, you tell me, I've done it before. I know the space because we sold Sonantik to Spotify. So I knew the type of customers, the page the way of doing it, like, I'm 100% in. And I kind of felt inside of me, like, there was like something that was not fully closed in the AI Boise space. And it was like, it was absolutely no brain for me to join 11. What revenue were you at when you joined? Zero. Zero? Yeah, like we had like the company launched, like literally a week before I joined. So we launched at the end of January, 2023. And then within a month or so, we had over a million users. And so if you were like, hey, you need to build out the sales team. What was Mati's job description for you that you have to do? Objective role number one. So the idea was to actually build the entire enterprise side. And that's how we time that. Like the entire auto market. But the company ended up like growing so quickly that we ended up switching it. It was like, let's do it on the enterprise side. And the way we put it, it was like, now you think it makes sense. But the compensation was based on milestones. And essentially like we ended up deciding together with Mati and Piot. It's like, okay, if we reach a certain level of revenues within 24 months, then my equity compensation goes up. So I'm in locational portion of equity. And to the point I was like, it seemed like so silly the number that we had put in there. What number did you put in there? It was a very silly number. Like very high. But it seemed so silly that like Mati even told me like, okay, so what we'll do is like we will put a check-in at 12 months mark. So like whatever you've accrued up until that point will just give you the proportional basis, right? Like it was so funny because like we hit that revenue milestone within less than 12 months of actually like starting everything. So but it actually back in the day when we were thinking about it like a way of negotiating is like, it seemed like no one had done that, right? When you are with the GTM that you have, it's a PLG motion largely. Yes. Are you not just an order?
take as an enterprise sales team. Can you help me understand how to think through how PLG converts successfully to enterprise without it being an order takeer? So the way we did it is like the PLG motion gave us a ton of like volume of leads, which 90 plus percent of those were like extremely bad. But the interesting portion is like you started seeing like some patterns are like where people were finding interest and what you would essentially have were having meaningful conversation. So that for me was like instrumental to understand later on and building name account list and going after specific account from an hour basis because I was seeing some level of traction. And like investors were telling us like, "Gah, you have product market fit because you're doing all of this millions." And I was telling like, "No, no, no, no, we don't have it. Like I don't believe in product market fit until you in one single ICP you've made more than 10 million dollars, right?" So you keep experimenting and you build like a like list and then one week you tackle like specific persona and another week you tackle like completely different vertical to actually understand one MOOC's quicker. What is the pitch that actually resonates better and so on? That's how we essentially started doing it. And I remember the first two deals that we did within 30 days of like launching the first product was like a company that was doing a chatbot based in Germany. They paid us 12,000 dollars and we thought like, "This is super good that like we could start doing things." Second company was like media company that was doing automated radio stations that we signed a two-year deal, $36,000 per year. Like those two companies we still have them as customers, they've skyrocketed in value both of them. But like that was only the beginning. It's like, "Okay, we can start doing it. We know how to actually this generate this motion. Now we need to go much deeper." How do you advise founders then in the early days when they're in this kind of, again, we have so many founders that listen to pans and paper when they're looking at it and going, "Do I go horizontal?" And that everyone try it and really kind of let the market decide, "Well, do we go very vertically focused and go, "Okay, chatbots, we've got one customer. Let's just put all the sales team on all the chatbot partners." How do you advise founders on which ones are on? Depends on the product that you're building. If you're building something in a healthier space, it's an absolute no-brainer. You need to actually go into a healthier. But you can still take a very broad approach within the healthier space. So you can actually target hospitals, you can target clinics, you get bigger ones, smaller ones, you can target practitioners, you can target across the entire spectrum of your vertical target as many people as possible. But truly, you might have a guess or you might have an intuition of what's going to be performing. But the best companies in reality started in one end and they're like winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting. So if you tend target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn't resonate, how quickly they're moving. And essentially then you can fine tune your pitch and your name account listing that area. If we go back to the outbound element on the leads that we have, what did we look for that suggested a great lead that was a qualified lead that we would go after? Was it the fact that they had an email extension that was extension.com or whatever that was? There was a company name. Was it usage patterns? What was that? Nothing at all. It was so random, like I had absolutely no idea. In the early days we were signing enterprise contract with Gmail accounts. So we remember like this is like early days of chat GPT. People were building applications left and right and think like I might need to add some voice here or there, even if it's like for like some diving or for like boasting some of the inaugurations and all that stuff. The reality is like there will be a always like developers like single developer shops using a Gmail account saying, well, I want to add voice but your self service plans are not enough because they have like some limitations on caps and essentially I would need all of these additional things. I was like, okay, fantastic. Then enterprise is the right path. We'll customize it for you blah, blah. And what I used to do is like it got to a point where like I was doing like 30 minutes calls and I would do maybe like 50, 60 calls in a single week back to back and I would tell them like within 30 minutes, I knew if they were the qualified or not. I knew they were interested if they could move quickly. So what I would do is like I would set up a trial by the end of the day. I would commit on the call on the spot being by the end of the day, you will have heard from me. I will set up your trial. You will have access to the contracts that you can start reviewing it. And if you need anything just being me at any time. And this is my what's up. What I end up creating is like this day and I make that like you would end up building a very close relationship with those companies that will message you on what's up. And even up today, if one of those like very early ones have an issue, they message me on what's up and essentially we try to fix it, right? But like that is the type of relationship you want to be building with your first customers because essentially they will be there for you forever. They're not going to switch away because we have such a good personal relation that it's absolutely not brainer. Which is if we go through that, questions to ask which really clearly showed that they were a great high quality lead in those 30 minutes. If you would advise me on a technical found it, imagine I'm madty. Did how do I know if they're a good lead? What questions do I ask? For me, it's like slightly different from what the traditional sales method are, right? But I want to know like what are you building and what is your vision for your company? How are you thinking about like the entire market that you operate? And essentially who are you? Are you technical? Are you no technical? What are you going to be doing with like the product in general? Do you need to involve a lot of other people or not, right? For me, those are the core questions in the early day, specifically on developer economy or like if you're targeting developers that tell me if like you are ready to actually buy this, you're only playing a little bit to understand whether it makes sense or not or how things like are going to be playing because like if you think about it, like different markets have different type of profiles, right? It's like in the U.S., you need to be very direct and it's a lot more like aggressive like sales in nature. In Europe, we're always in the middle, right? So like, but if you go to Latam or if you go to India, people don't have an incentive to actually tell you no. So you end up getting a stack. If you don't qualify well, you end up getting a stack in like endless loops of like trials, chase, emails and so on of people that for a cultural perspective, they're not going to tell you no, but they're not going to buy. Every single market has a lot of variations and because I've actually built all of them across the world for 11 labs, I know all of the details for all of those pieces, right? So if you tell me like, okay, I'm building a company in Mexico City, then I can tell you like these are the core items that I would like to understand from a qualification perspective in the first few minutes. What ACV does it make sense to have wraps on? And what I mean by that is, you said they're 50 to 60 cools. Is it like 10k a year, you can start to have a wrap-led approach below that it's got to be PLG? How do you advise founders on that? I think it's like it needs to be at least $1,000 a month, right? The trick is like how much money do you feel that like you can put in your credit card without having to explain anything? Like if you are comfortable putting like $1,000 a month, absolutely fine, then your threshold should be $2,000, right? But if like the majority of people putting $1,000 on their credit cards, even if it's like for the business transaction, they still need to explain quite a lot of stuff. So then that's the morning which like they need hand holding, they need convincing, they need to show ROI, that's the one that you want to tackle them because then you treat it as like a PLG motion with a land in expand. It's like, don't worry, we'll sort everything, we'll help you like $12,000, it is a lot of money. At least there is a lot of money for them because it is a lot of money, then work with them on an expansion plan. But if you do it much higher, then I see a lot of founders telling me like no, no, it needs to be like investors have been telling me like I need to go proper enterprise, proper enterprise, like six figure deals and so on and I was like forget about it, like it's going to take you months to get that contract done. The beautiful side is like if you sign a $12,000 contract, there is probably one layer of approval, maximum two layers of approval for a bigger company. If you want to sign a six figure deal, this can be like at least three or four layers of approval. If you want to sign a million dollar contract out of the gate, it's going to take you a long time. But if you actually land in a very small deal, then you start expanding it, those approvals have disappeared completely. What are your biggest lessons on how to land an expand successfully? Because I'm in a lot of companies, period, but I'm in a lot of companies where they've landed and they've assumed that they've expanded and they have the cost base ready for the expansion in terms of CS and all that comes with the sales machine, but they stay at the land price. And that's a big problem because then the economics just don't work. What are your biggest lessons on how to expand successfully and manage that as a sales leader? So we've had that as well to 11 labs like multiple times, right? There's a lot of the portion of the customers that we oversold and then like they kept kind of flat. Part of the big effort always is like, how do you find new use cases for them and how do you show them like additional value? So there is like you need to knock on people's doors. Like even if you sign an inbound deal, that is one deal that is inbound, but you should not be thinking that like that is done. It's like then you need to transform it into like an outbound opportunity as well. And then to do it outbound opportunities like, okay, now I have an MSA sign with an order form. Let's actually go in outbound every single other team that might be relevant across the entire organization to show them what the capabilities are, right? That is the only way you actually expand a deal, but not only that, like the most important question is how do you retain them forever? Because if there is only one team that uses you, that team at some point might get pissed, someone might pitch them, you lose that deal. Who's responsible for this in term? Is it CS? Is it products? Is it sales? Depends on how you want to organize it. Some companies call it account management, right? What do you do? We do like, as account execs and customer success. So for us like once a deal is signed, we transfer it to like customer success. Customer success is responsible for like the upselling, negotiations, all of that stuff. Now the difference is in the enterprise segment. So very large customers, right? So name account lists, companies that have like over 2000 employees and things like that. Then for those ones, my request to the account execs is like your job is not finished. Even if you transfer it to a customer success manager, I still want you to go and and absolutely fine new opportunities in the account because you're inside the account.
device. And if I'm an account exec, like, let's be very honest, like everyone loves money and making money as an account exec. So you're the inside to say, like, you went through hell for the past 60 days to close an enterprise contract. Fantastic. Then that contract is signed. Getting the next team on board is relatively simple because you've actually gone through the actual, like, signing of the contract. So just outbound, open new doors. And we'll pay you a more commission because like, you keep a cream or how we understand as a founder, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps first? And then how second, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps to sell upsell efficiently? I think like in reality, it's like pretty much exactly the same in the sense that what we do at 11 lamps, like I set up like this, this threshold, which is like, we ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary. So if I pay your 100K a year, your quota is $2 million. That's it. If you don't achieve your quota, then you're going to be out, right? So everyone actually smashed their quota to 11 lamps. I would rather have smaller teams that like a smash their quotas and I paid my money to hit that quarter. Today is more than 80% hit their quota. And they unlock accelerators and all of that stuff. But the interesting piece like on the upsell side is we compensate both the account exec and the CSM. If the contract is upsold, if we upsell a company within the first 12 months, the account exec continues to accrue like quarter retirement and also like commissions. And the CSM is compensated an NRR, right? So I'm paying double, but I don't care. It makes perfect sense because then I have these two people busting the rest to make sure that they actually can make more money, which is fantastic for me as a company. Totally yeah. That again, I just want to pick on some things you said that you said that 80% is phenomenal given the ambitiousness of 20x. If you're advising me as a founder, is that 20x a good rule of thumb? Or do you think that's specific to the margin profile of 11 lamps? I think like the reality is like every business will be slightly different depending on the industry you're selling, right? So what I always tell everyone is like let's start with 20x. And then you can adjust what I told everyone in the company like the first account execs that I hired was like, guys, I have absolutely no clue if 20x is going to be the right number or not. The standard instance is that like you have like someone on like six to seven, maybe eight, maybe 10, right? That is the standard. I know that's what you are expecting. This is know how we're going to be building a company at a level of if you think about like doing the same that you've been doing a notion or like all of this place like sales from so on, then you need a wrong place. So we'll experiment if we get it wrong, absolutely fine. We'll compensate you correctly. And then essentially we will change all the entire composition structure. But if we get it right, which I think it is the right number, this is what we're going to keep. And we've kept this in say one. We've been running with this for the past two and a half years of the 20% that don't. What did they get wrong? When you look at that cohort, what do you learn when you're looking at the next times? So there is two buckets within this 20% right? One is like people that truly don't fit in the company, right? And what they get wrong is fundamentally like they're not product experts. Like they haven't actually derived deeper enough in the product that actually can understand that they have the aggressivity to actually go into the market outbound and so on, right? Those guys unfortunately, we terminate the contracts. We give them a compensation. So we usually pay anywhere between like two to three months of base salary so that like we tell them like, hey guys, it didn't work out. We do believe that like you are very strong. It didn't work out the level of because the way we do things, but you're going to go somewhere else and when I help you get somewhere else, that's why we give you this two or three months compensation severance package and you can do super well. So it's us. It is not you. It is us fundamentally, right? The other percentage of people that don't get into that 80% is people that like are building long-term pipelines. So I have a guy for instance like and there's been plenty of them like over the past like two years, but this is the this guy that we hired from AWS. Megas Mark guy like super good. And you look at the core numbers and you're like thinking, shit, I should be finding this guy. He's not hitting the quarter. He's like like less than 50% quarter, right? And then like any other person would have like look at the numbers and be like, this is not a fit. Like I cannot keep this person. Talk to any investors and we'll tell you like, fire this person like, it's just not a fit. You dive into the numbers and you realize like, oh, it's because he went to the proper enterprise cycle and then he's building the most amazing companies you can have in the day of your UK region, right? Wait a second. Why would I fire this person when he actually needs a lot more ramp fundamental because it's tackling the difficult challenging industries. We kept that person and this person like absolutely smashed it this year, 200 plus percent quarter. So like you need to actually differentiate like what is it actually someone that doesn't fit in the company for a variety of reason and who is actually building a proper pipeline over the long term and they need a little bit more help. Well, this is I completely disagree with the notion that because someone's selling to large enterprise, you can't tell whether they're good or not for a much longer period of time. I think like he did that. You look under the hood, you look at the relationships, you look at the conversations, you look at the interactions, you look where they're at, you get a good enough feel of how close it is. Yeah. And what I do is like with the team and we do like we have quite a lot of people in the go to market side like globally, we have a pipeline 90 people something like that. But what I do is like I have sessions every single month with my account execs and my CSM where we go deep into the pipeline. It's like it's pipeline review sessions and I drill them on absolutely every single detail. And we do it in front of everyone, right? So if someone hasn't been building the proper pipeline and I do see the numbers and I do see it, I will tell it in front of them like you have not done a good job. Like you're actually lacking, you're doing this, this, this or I will tell them like you're actually lucky. Like in the past like month, you hit your numbers because of pure luck. Next month, you're not going to hit them. So you not in the good spot right now. And if they improve, which the majority of them do the following month, I'm like, I know I gave you a lot of crap last month. You've done fantastically well now. But you need to have that honesty with your team because otherwise like what are we doing here? We're trying to build a generational company. You cannot like do things like the traditional way. You need to do it in a completely different way. You said there about those meetings with execs and CSMs. Can you actually just take me to them? You do them monthly, correct? With them monthly? Do the monthly. Do you do them separately with CSMs and execs altogether? CSMs have their own meeting and then CON execs have a different one. And then in CON execs, I split it by region and they're in personal room out all remote. This is an interesting thing. I know like how some people out of our like being in roughies and all of that stuff. And when I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be in the road. I trouble like 75% of my time. Like in the past three weeks, I was in San Francisco, I was in Mexico City, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Singapore, in London, and I'm heading to Dubai, right? Like that is like the standard thing. Like salespeople need to be on the road talking to their customers whether that is in the UK, there is a cross Europe or that is like in Cancun. I do not care. If you're constantly in the office doing virtual meetings only with your customers, you're doing it wrong. How do you build the sales culture remotely? By being ruthless, you need to be on top of it. It's like it requires extra time and it requires people to be forced to actually be on the road. It's like we will have multiple touchpoints, but I don't hire people that are junior. I hire people that are actually autonomous, very energetic, very passionate, will accept like a million knows fundamental because like building sales is stuff. Building sales remotely is a metaphor and you just need to be on top of it. We're going to get to that sheet of people, but I just want to stay on these meetings. We have them separate, we have them remote, we have them monthly. Let's start on the like sales team type before we move to the CSM. What are you expecting them to bring? Should they send pipeline ahead of time with notes? What's that prep phase pre-meeting? So they will essentially tell me like how much they've closed, how much it's in the pipeline, how much they're expecting to close in the next 30 days, and essentially like we start going into the deals, right? We talk about like the biggest deals and all of that stuff. And then I always like look while they're talking, I look at their pipeline and I pull up some random deals. So the two understand like whether they have a full grasp of what they're talking about because sometimes you know like sales teams like they can end up like cheating and then having a bigger pipeline that is inflated, but it's not moving, right? And catch them. But for me the key item that I always tell them is like at the end when they present I keep it right in them and give them feedback and ask you questions, but at the end of it I am like the question is always the same. What are the blockers that you have and how can I help you? And for me what I do is like I build the list of the blockers for each one of them like summarize them later on and then post it across the entire organization being like hey if we solve all of these blockers in Europe we could be making a lot more money. In India these are the blockers. In Spanish Latam these are the blockers. In Middle East these are the blockers, right? Then everyone is like understands what are we, what are we in each one of the regions? Okay and so we have that and when they come to you and they say something because I'm on a lot of reports and very often they say that one that slipped to next quarter. What do you say when you get wraps who say that and what's the right way to deal with that? I mean there's always like deals that will end up like moving towards the next quarter that's inevitable, right? It was like the question like you do this right by the way in front of everyone. Yes you don't do it one by one. No, no one has enough time to do it one by one and I think like everyone can benefit from like like doing it in front of other people. It's the pressure, it's the fact like you you can give them what to do. By feedback people learn from it, right? So the learning component is I think it's important specifically from a sales perspective. How do you do that without shaming people? I don't know, you need to shan them like if someone hasn't done their job they haven't done their job and you need to actually publicly tell them so they're like they understand they haven't done their job and everyone else knows that like they're getting shit for it. Do you don't agree with the praise in public criticize in private? No, I don't agree. I think like I need to tell you like what is right and what is wrong? Of course I'm not going to tell you like this is like
like full shit, like you're gonna get fired. I'm not gonna say that, but at the same time, I'm not gonna hold back on saying if you haven't done a good job. And for instance, there was like a case earlier this year or one of my account execs that I told the person like you just were lucky. And you've closed these deals just for pure luck, but you haven't done any good job. And then like the next one, there was like, it was so funny, like there was exactly two people the same case. And then the next one that came in presenting was I told him like you have done exactly the same thing, but you have not been lucky as the previous person. And that's why you haven't actually closed anything. Both of them, the following one absolutely smashed it. And if they're good at their job, they're gonna accept the criticism, learn from it and then improve. How long are there is meetings? We end up putting usually an hour and a half and then people have like about like seven, eight minutes to present and then like, it's very quick in general. And what happens and this is a half on 'cause 11 apps seemingly just such rocket shit revenue growth. What would you advise if you would put on a hypothetical hat for it not working so well? What would you advise a sales leader or CEO who's taking this, who's gonna run with this? But the numbers are not up and so right. How do I have a meeting like this without feeling like dejected, demoralized when numbers aren't up and so right? - I think it just depends on like why is the numbers not on the right place, right? I think like you need to do understand like, do the work work first to understand like, what's happening? Is it because the sales team is not good enough? Is it because the product is not good enough? Is it because we're not being aggressive enough? What is essentially happening here? Because like if you don't have a full understanding, then like you might be like shaming people for the wrong reasons, right? And the best way of understanding is like, roll up your sleeves and actually pitch customers. I am the SDR in chief in the company, right? Like, I absolutely love it. I actually love how bounding people, I love it. Like we were like Matinite with like in Singapore, like talking to you, talking like to to to razor, like the laptops company, absolutely love the brand. And then that came out because like I abounded the CEO and I messaged him like, Matinite gonna be in Singapore in a few days, like we would love to actually meet and figure out how we can talk, how we can figure out like a partnership. And he replied saying like, yes, let's do it. So we end up spending like a good hour in their offices, which is like fantastic. I do it all the time and then I pass it to the team because I do believe like a good leader needs to be a good outbounder. It's interesting that you have this narrative also with BCs, right? Like for me, a BC is just a glorified SDR or BDR. 100% and respectfully, why do I bother doing venture when I, sorry, being blunt when I can make millions from media? Because of the media, you have the ability to be the best BDR in the world 'cause people will always respond to you when you have a big brand. Exactly. It's what, this is what people like founders, they're like, yeah, I love working with them. I have quite a few who come in and sit in an office and they just go on LinkedIn with me and we just send cold in-mails for mine. (laughs) And I'm literally a video. Yeah. But that's great. But like, at your point though, I feel this rush when I get a response. Like, yeah, we'd love a cool, that'd be so great. I'm like, yes. I love it. But it's great. As a leader, like a CEO, like a sailie, if you're not doing it, I think you're doing it wrong. Of course, as the company keeps getting bigger, like no one expects like Matthew or like any CEO, like for a very successful company to be doing like our bounce. But nevertheless, what you could do is like, you can prep. So I have team members that like will message me saying like, could you send an outbound message to this person, I've just drafted it for you, right? And we do it with Matthew's world, we do it with like with my LinkedIn account and all of that stuff. And the response rate that you get is like, as you were saying, like, through the roof. To be doing what we do on founders, all through my LinkedIn, like Paul or Karen or Alice will do it 100% and they join the cool and that's certainly fine. It's good 100%. If you trust in your team to be amazing, it will be a great experience to have around. But you need to help a team, right? It's like what I don't buy is like sales leaders that are essentially the leaders, right? Like you don't know the pain, you don't know essentially what it is actually your team is suffering. And it goes back to your questions. Like truly, if you go to a meeting and like the numbers are not in the right, maybe the problem is geo, that like you don't understand how the sales process happens, the product that the team is selling and the pain points are actually going through. So maybe like you need to fix that first. Totally get that. If we just go back to this meeting because I'm so wanna extract everything I can from this, is it just retroactive review? Or is there any element of forward planning? Do we get the ends, then 15 minutes ago? Okay, for the next four weeks we're gonna do this. How do we think about that? Yeah, so usually it's like as part of like the president for the account execs, every single one. And even in the CSM side, it's like what are they forecasting to actually be closing over the next 30 days as well. And essentially what are they gonna be doing to actually close them? Okay, fantastic. What is your advice to me at Salesforce CEO who's not experiencing brilliant as you on the right way to forecast? Is it like be optimistic, be realistic, be negative? How do you advise on that? Be as negative as possible. So I always like advice team on, if we are now stating in the year that it's gonna be half a million dollars, fantastic. Just put me that like you're gonna be signing it at $24,000. I don't wanna put like an unrealistic number because like if you think it's gonna be half a million dollars, the most likely who this is gonna be 100K, right? So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs and incentivize to inflate as much as possible so that it looks like better. I don't like that. So let's put the lowest possible number, that's fine, we'll fix it later, but at least we underestimate what it's gonna look like. But we do it also like for the board. Like when we put like the board eggs and we told them like we tell them like, hey, did the pipelines, did the contracts, all of that stuff. Like we put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates. And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions. And be like, hey, by the way, you put me like this account over here that it was gonna be a $2 million account, but it seems you sign it at like 100K. What? And it just raises such a number of like awkward questions that like it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense. - One of the fastest ways I think to create distrust, obviously when you have investors, you share pipe often of what you expect it to be. - Yes. - When we do reference schools, as all investors do with friends, who are CEOs of those companies, and like do, we're never spent more than 25K on this. And they've got it in for 250 fastest way to do this credit. - Correct, correct. And there is another item in there is like, if you always underestimate or underbody your pipeline, it means they like to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline. So like there is a lot of consequent level of this. So it's like you'll end up working twice as hard because your pipeline is not big enough for the year and number, or the quota and number that you need it. So you just kind of, it's a forcing mechanism to have the right culture in place. We went through this like a cultural change earlier this year because I actually got obsessed. We were doing the majority of deals, like 90% of the deals were mostly about, right? And as the team keeps growing, I was like getting extremely worried that like we were not building the right mentality in the team. It's like if at some point the pipeline drives up, then you essentially end up dying, right? So I put a goal saying like we need to migrate to 50% or about 50% inbound by the end of the year. So keep hammering absolutely everyone. I still put together a report every single week with every single account, an exact and SDR in the team telling them like, you've achieved the otarget on a weekly basis, you haven't achieved it. And if people don't achieve it, then I called them out. I did it so often that I ended up like getting, like people make jokes about outbound outbound outbound. Like I'm the outbound king, yeah, I love it. And people like know that like if you are on that list of people that are not doing the outbound, I'm gonna call you out. And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we're gonna have a problem, right? It's a cultural thing. And we end up like migrating from like this 10% outbound sales that we're doing to 40% that we do today. - You're 40% outbound. Wow. When you say outbound, just to clarify specifically, this is not picking names from a PLG list. This is direct outbound. - Direct outbound. - Yes. - Wow. - What's the primary channel for that direct outbound? - A must of it. We use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequins. - Yeah, key, almost. - Yeah, it's fantastic though. - I like that. - We're doing super well. We use LinkedIn and there's a lot of call calling. The traditional method works. And it depends on the market because-- - You like chic-hole-coo. - 100%. Yes. I was in the office yesterday and early today. And I had some of my team members actually call calling. I was so happy. I was smiling. I was actually listening to the conversation because I was so happy. I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with a right mentality. But in Latam or in India, call calling works, but the best method is what's up. It's a different culture. Like in India and Latam, they use what's up all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need to be in what's up? - See, this is why I disagree with you on the remote preference. I get even terms of needing to be with customers and I understand that. But I think you learn so much from hearing your friend who's also in sales, have that message work really well. And you're like, "God, I could use that." And he has a message much better than mine. And then you see support over in the other corner. And everyone is talking about the same challenges that are having. And you're like, "God, okay, I could actually talk about that as one of the core problems that we solve." And actually you get so many of the multifunctional benefits from being in the office. But I agree with you, you need to be with customers. It's a nuanced thing to be found. - But to be fair, which be sharing those best practices and with the rest of the team. And over the other ones, as we kept expanding the team specifically, in Europe, for instance, the team has become extremely good at sharing their best practices. You will have one of the account execs saying, "I've done this 50 times. This is working super well." And we'll share it in this like message. Being like, "Guys, you should try it." - Is that how you create a structure to share best practices? - I incentivize everyone. Like my intent is to everyone is on my messages.
We need to experiment. Even at this size, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We need to be ahead of the trends. We need to constantly experiment. So if you experiment with messaging, ways of talking to customers and so on, just put it with a word and with a wider team, and then everyone can copy you. When does the sales team become too large for this forum and communication? Never. But I do. If you have 100 sales reps, then I'm not going to have 700 minute meetings. Fine. You can't. No, at some point, you end up doing like, you end up doing multiple. Multiple. Some multiples. Exactly. And you end up like today, we actually have subdivided in Europe. We have like UKI, the Nordics meeting, we have South and Europe, West and Europe and all of that stuff. But still, you need to keep actually doing it. Okay. When we moved to the CSM side, is there anything different about these meetings? What are they expected to bring and what had these meetings go? It's exactly the same thing. So we go through the pipeline and understanding how many calls they've done, what are the problems with some of their customers, what is the NRR they're expecting to close, and how much upselling and cross selling they're going to be doing. What NRGJs? 115. 115. Yes. But we absolutely smash the number. Everything look good. Yeah. It's absolutely crazy. Because we have this line and next one. Line and next one works really well if you work closely with your customers. And then you end up having a very solid G-RR and NRR. What ACV justifies having a CSM and how many accounts they're responsible for? Any value actually works. Because literally, you need to actually separate it. I want my account execs to actually go hunting, be hungry all the time. I want them to bring laws quickly. Because the market, anyone can be building a competitor at any point in time extremely quickly. So I have to have those people that are incentivized to move extremely quickly. And then as soon as they've done it, they need to be able to try to do someone else. So like CS is something that you need from the early days as well. We made a mistake at 11 laps of bringing CS way too late. Way too late. It took us 15 months from the first contract that we signed to bring customer success. It was massive chaos. Because the account execs, and I was selling a lot back then. And I was running these deals. And at the same time, people would complain. Like, "Hey, I have these problems." And then I also need to do this. And then I would look at the list of usage every single week. And then I'll buy one and I'll put a list saying, "Okay, all of these accounts are ready for upselling because of usage. We need to get in touch with them. All of these other accounts. Like, we should touch page with them." So I was sharing it with the team. And at some point, it starts breaking. And that's when I realized, "Shit, we've done it wrong. I should have brought customers success much sooner. Let's bring them." And there was a day and night. Initially, the account execs wanted to transfer the accounts. But they just didn't really give any level of information. So they were like, "It's signed. You deal with it." And then they get on the customer success. Guys, we were like, "What? I don't even know any background of this account." Like, "It's a German account." And they're like, "How the hell am I going to know who is behind it?" John Doe. "Oh, fine. It could be a few people I've looked on LinkedIn. And it leaves me with 784 profiles in London." I love that. Okay. And so we have that. How do we financially incentivize customers success? Just so I understand that. And then there are. Like net revenue retention. That's essentially how we do it. Of course, you could have like-- So once it's over 115. Exactly. You get compensated how. So we have like bonuses or commission structure that like, depending how big it gets, then essentially you get 2x, 3x, 4x, whatever that is. Right. So-- Just so I understand this, because there's going to be so many founders. But like, I love this. But what do I actually do? It's like, 2, 3x. What salary? Like, what the upside? What are they getting? Yeah. So like, when you increase the NRA, then fundamentally, it's like based on the NRA, like, the baseline is 115. So if you want to like, I don't know, like, 130, then essentially you calculate how much it takes you. And then like, it would be like fundamentally more. And that's like, it's a direct math that you do on top of it. We don't have accelerators for like NRA or like CS. In the account exact team, we have accelerators for next year. We might change some of that. How these accelerators get the most out of sales teams and any advice that? For account exacts, for instance, what we do is like, up to 100% of your quota, we pay you 5% commission. Right. So fairly simple. From 100 to 150% quota, we pay you 7.5% commission. And then anything above 150%, we pay you 10% commission. Like fairly simple straightforward. So everyone is incentivized. So actually going above 150%. To the point that like, a lot of my account exacts, now we are finalizing the performance reviews for 25, because we always like want to start January with everything fully sorted. To the point that like, some of my account exacts will tell me or have been telling me like, I don't want an increase in salary. If you're going to increase my salary, then calculate that and put it in equity. Because if you increase my salary, my quota goes up. And then it takes me longer to hit accelerators. So I can make a lot more money with like a smaller quota hitting the accelerators much. Which is smart. Really smart. It's totally smart. Also tells me that no one's buying fucking houses. There are more watches, which isn't fucking rituals. That's what I say there. Interesting. It's not very much. I didn't mean that rudely. But like over 150, I get 10%. Shit, mate. It's a lot. It's a lot. Dude, it's not much. It's a lot of money. Compared. If we think about you set me a account, I'm 100K, and I get 20, 20x, I'm one, two millions. If I get three million, then I get 10%. Yeah. And I get 300K. Yeah. As a bonus. It's fantastic. Is that good for industry? That's fantastic. Like, think about it. Sales people used to be the highest pay in any organization. Now it's changed with the researchers and NAI, which 100% they deserve it. But up until the AF revolution, the happen three years ago, sales people were the highest payed always. No, I'm aware of that. But I'm just like, God, I thought if you hit like 100% of your quota, getting 15-20% would be good. No, like, that's too much. Otherwise, your numbers would never add up, right? When do you advise founders on when to have a customer's success team? You said they wait a way, you know, wait a little. Yeah, when's our time? I think once you hit like a good like three, four million dollars, then I think it's time to actually bring your free customer's success. Three, four, an era. Yeah. Okay, got you. So like, it makes sense like to have like a, like a CSM function, like an average of like four million dollars in book value. I think that makes sense. With a super bad on that, so I think like our average book value per CSM is about like eight points on thing million, right? So it means I would massively understand stuff, so we're trying to fix it for next year. But ideally, four is a good number. On the flip side for sales teams, do you think that you need to wait until you have a sales play but before you hire a fantastic sales leader like you? What do you do? What Mattie did and bring you in with zero revenue? Bring with zero revenue. Bring someone that is like scrappy, they're like one, two, three, eight, will tell you like if things work or things don't work. Like, I think you need that as soon as possible. Because I think like there was this like, moment in which like Mattie like, I'll call me one day like, you know what, going forward, I report to you for sales. You report to me for everything. And that was like, he was his way of saying like, you are supposed to be doing sales. Founder let's sales are good, but like you hit a rock, right? Like you hit like a ceiling and just like at some point you need to transition. So better do the transition now than actually wait another six months. Because we know what we're selling. We know how we're selling it. You've been doing it all of these months and you get a lot more deals than me. How common is that? That you know what messaging works. You know what channel works. You have a playbook. I think it just depends on like the sales that you bring in the organization and how quickly and how willing to experiment they are. And I think like that has a ton of value to bring someone sooner. That has the right mentality. Of course, if you bring like someone that has like, very like, I have my playbook and this is how we're going to be doing it. I always hate it because that playbooks don't work. Unfortunately, right? And I think like that is the key. Like if you have someone very early that you can iterate and build trash extremely quickly, then essentially like founder let sales stop making any sense fundamental because you could be spending a lot more time doing other things. Unless you're a founder that is like really on the sales side. Fantastic. Then just just keep going, right? Otherwise, you could be spending your time like building the product or doing other things that are much more important. So you come in and then what's biggest advice post that in terms of do we just highlight five reps at once and just go half a level? How do we think about the right way to sequence hiring in the really early sales days? In the early days, like higher one or two. Like don't like don't don't over hire because then if you over hire fundamentally, you're going to be building their own culture. People are going to be asking you a lot of questions. You will have like five different people like iterating their own playbooks and thinking about their own stuff. What you want to do is like you want to give them some guidelines. Like this is what works. This is what is not working. You can still iterate a lot of what works and what doesn't work. And you can make a ton of mistakes but I don't want like five different people like going wild and trying to figure out because then essentially no one is going to be closing anything. So better to have like you bring the state leader. Someone that is like is able to actually get the hands dirty and understand what's happening in the business and pitch and go deep and then you bring two more people. Then wait until they're onboarded. Like wait a couple of months. You don't have to wait too long, two, three months. Let's make sure they're fully onboarded. Let's make sure that they're starting to sell contracts. And internally at the company, the LEM Labs, we used to have like this. This target is like when you join LEM Labs, you have to have signed your first contract with them first two weeks. Whoa. It's like and that was a target. That was a target. We got people that even like signed like within like was like 72 hours they signed the first enterprise contract, right? Tiny contract but I don't care. It doesn't really matter. Do you put them on cool straight away? Like you don't want to burn leads. In the early days we used to do it and then they would join my my meetings and essentially I would tell them like, okay, this is what I'm going to do.
is like how we do it on the product side. It's like the overview. My expectation is like you can be spending the next 24 hours, like drilling the entire product and understanding it. And I will ask you to pitch me tomorrow, right? And then I will bring into my calls and then there will be a page that will send me talk to customers. The following day, they will essentially just give me the pitch. If I liked it, then essentially we'll just join calls the same day or the following day together. And then they will pitch, I'll be taking a backseat. They're like, I'm there to support you. If they have any questions. And then within like a week, they would already fully up and running. And then of course, it was a lot more risky, but hey, we had nothing to lose back there, right? We had to move quickly because the market was like crowded. - Advise me, how can I train my reps most effectively? If this like listen to all my gong calls, go spend time with product, go spend time with customer support, what should I do to train reps most effectively? - In the early days, the best things like they should join calls, like immediately. Like they're not gonna be talking in those calls, but like they should just join absolutely immediately. So they're like, they see how all the people are doing it. They need to be answering tickets, like of support questions. They need to essentially be talking to the engineers and then going deep into the product side. Once all of that has passed and you're already making a good amount of money and you claim that you have product market fit claim because you never know. Then essentially it's a completely different game, right? Because you wanna make sure that like your reputation is like on the line, you wanna have them like selling to the proper people. So essentially you end up like having joined me then also watch some customer calls through GONG. And at the same time, you need to pitch me, you need to have like these certifications and all of that stuff, right? Then you're not migrating towards like much more of a corporation style where like then people take a lot longer, for two weeks, they have like this run period, but like then they understand everything, they mean multiple people and so on. That's like a lot more boring. When was your hiring process broken? And what did you learn from that time? - So we made a lot of mistakes because like the first ones that I hired and they go to market side, I thought, okay, let's bring someone that like understands a lot more on the product side. Why can't you train them how to excel? And then it will find. And then you turn out like it just was not working. And like the person was really gone on the product side, but like on the sales side, there is something that like was missing in there. And then that's when I'm like, - And you can't teach them that sales. - This is a hundred mentality. There's like like being hungry, like being like super driven, passionate and so on that you get like straight away or you don't get it. And I think that that was when we say like the person is still with us, like doing super well, right? And we were with Jog with him saying like, "Hey, like you joined the wrong role." But that was the type of profile because like we were selling, like we had a lot of like self-service companies. We had a lot of inbounds. Like you were thinking much more like it needs to be product-led, sales. It needs to be like fundamentally like thinking about like the product and trying to like help them navigate and so on. And you're like like shit, no, no, no, no. These people already know what the level lapse is, right? Specifically the inbounds. So like it's less about the product more like we need to convince them to sign this fucking contract, right? So like that's a completely different profile of people. And then that's when I brought my first two proper account execs that started on the same day and I trained them in parallel and they did super well. - What did you do? Well, you would recommend to everyone else having seen it. - Literally like getting them in cult with me. - See me pitch, right? Like I had done already like a hundred and a hundred of times. See me pitch, see me how I was entering goals. See me that like I would tell them customers like by the end of the day you have all of these things. And then by the end of the day I would send those things because the best thing that you have is trash with your customers. It set up the right culture and the right way of operating in the team. That was for me the most important thing. And then on top of that then I then I was keeping like in the loop and it's like joining their calls randomly. So I would open their calendar and be like, okay, they have a call in ten minutes. Fine, I will join that call. So I would just pop up in that call and essentially make them nervous because then they get the worst thing that you have. It's like you're both joining a call like unexpected. So what's gonna happen that you know, just stay quiet and be like, no, no, I'm just here to support them. We're worried, but of course you could see that they were very nervous, right? And they make a total of mistakes. So like you end up building that muscle memory by forcing people to make mistakes. - You worry about having a culture of fear. You said the word ruthless. You are very direct. I love it. I thrive of it. I'm a narcissist and a therapy. Do you worry about having a culture of fear? - I don't think the team is the skater of me because I think when I hire people, I always tell them this line, which is like 11 laps is not the easiest company to work for. And like that's always what I tell them. It's like you're gonna be working a lot. I'm gonna have very high expectations. We can have a lot of fun. If you're not ready, absolutely fine. Don't join us. But I want you to know before you accept the role. And then it sets the right on. Like some people have told me like, this is not for me. And 100% respected. The majority of people end up saying like, I value that. - Of the successful sales reps that you have, what is the most common background and what backgrounds tend to not work? - We've tried all of different backgrounds and it doesn't really matter whether you come from a very pure massive sales organization like Salesforce or you come from like ABC background. Like it doesn't really matter. It is like how willing are you to constantly trade? Like go deep and have this high energy between your customers and care about your customers, the only thing that actually drives value. Think about it like you're not doing sales. You're building a community. Whether you're doing a level of you doing like company X, it doesn't really matter. Like if you think about like your customers are like pure sales, then you're falling into the being a transactional element, right? No one wants to be sold anything. But if you're building a community that loves your product, that loves your brand, that loves you like everything that you represent, then sale is much easier. - How do you build a community? - The thing about a community is like you need to do what is right for them. You need to actually talk to them constantly. Give them your, like specifically in the early days, give them your what's up, put them in slag. Like those people need to interact with you constantly. And they need to know that like if they need to downscale the commitment, you will accept it. It's fine. You're doing what is right for them, even if that costs you money. And then that's a part of the culture, right? It's like if I'm only thinking about like transactional elements and pure transactions, then no, no, no, no, I need to sign the highest amount for this company because whatever it is, of course they're gonna turn at some point. But exactly the same like when you are building a company. Why would you change that approach? But you do it with your friends. The only difference is like, hey, like the customers are not your friends yet. Some of them will become your friends and have like a bunch of customers that are becoming my friends. And I absolutely love it. But you need to build a relationship because no one wants to be sold, absolutely no one. - So funny, I just did a show with one on the best sales lead as Avagon Mon. He was on the board of MongoDB, Snowflake, Real. He was a CRR of five public companies, unbelievable. And he said, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And I just thought that was beautiful. - Yes. - Why should you fire yourself? And it's a really weird question. But I would fire myself because definitely we were too slow to video, no shit. That would be my number one. And then I'd say number two, I'm too distracted, not focused enough. - For me, I would fire myself because I do too many things. And I love doing too many things, but also makes me like, unfocusing in many areas. The other one is the moment I lose passion, like literally like I just don't care anymore. So that's the moment like I would lose, I would fire myself. Like if I start thinking like I'm starting to lose a little bit of the passion, then it's like shit, no, like it's you need to do you need to fire yourself. Like do something else because you're gonna be like, you're gonna be burning out extremely quickly. - Most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies. Oh, there, zero to one person. Oh, there are very rare. Is that I'm thinking of Chris Dagnan, actually, it's kind of like he went from zero to public company. And he would say he was zero to four within an hour. Do you think yours full sack? - I love the early stage of companies, but it's still like for me, that doesn't really matter. If you're still enjoying what you're doing, just keep going, right? Like life is too short, like for doing something that like you don't enjoy. And I think like, what's your difficulty for people that's smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life? That's my main motivation. And I've always taken like my job at the level labs on a monthly basis, like if next month I even enjoy it, I would just like tell my, my, my, my, my, I'm not enjoying it. It is time for me to create and do something else. - Really? - Yes. - How do you advise people? 'Cause I would say a month isn't long enough. A month can be a bad part of the market, can be, I don't know, psychology, whatever. How do your boys, people on the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough. - Move job. - Of course, one month is like the trigger to follow you to start thinking whether it is or not the right thing. One month is not enough. So like if it happens with like number of months, like two or three months consecutive months, then you'll have a problem in there, right? Because like everyone will start seeing it. So I think like if for three months, you've been going like through this like very rough patch that you're not finding motivation, you should just triple check whether you're in the right place. - What is the main reason that 11 labs is a efficient machine of a company that no one knows and sees? - I think it's fundamentally the type of people. Nothing else, like it's like very humble people that essentially don't know what they don't know and they'll just stand up and accept their mistakes. And I think we've encouraged everyone to make a ton of mistakes all the time, experiment, and no one gets fire for making mistakes. And that is this superpower that we have as our organization. It's like literally no one will know that we've iterated and tested like 25 things. And all of the 25 things failed, but you just need one to actually deliver to actually make another 100 million revenues. And I'm happy with that. I'm happy with those odds. - What makes Mattie such an incredible CEO? - I think it's the fact that like he can do both like the product side and the customer side. And he's like very extrovert in nature and very empathetic with the customers and the rest of the organization, right? It's actually difficult to find leaders and like CEOs that actually can do both things that the product
can do the customer side. Sometimes they have this vision on the product side, but they're just lacking the drive to do sales and Matti will roll up. He's leaving me like, "Fuck, I'm going to be running this sale." It's one of his superpowers in general. You met him. He comes across an extremely personal, immediately drawn to him. He's a nice guy in general. As such, when you add up all of these factors, it's fantastic leader, fantastic CEO. But we have another one, which is fundamentally like Piat. He's the genius of the company, right? In the sense that he built the entire technology from scratch. We have a very small research team that all of them are like walking brains, literally that it's super, super smart guys. But it's headed by Peter. The company would not exist if it wasn't because we built a fantastic technology. Is it almost harder when you become a sexy brand? Because you have so many people who want to join. It becomes a lot no easier. Yeah, but also the expectation is higher, right? We are higher about 0.18% of people that apply or 0.018. We had about 180,000 applications in the first six months of the year. There is a lot of imbalance. There is a lot of things that you get. But that doesn't mean that there is equivalent to quality, that is equivalent to the type of build that you be hiding. Of course, as you become a hot commodity in there, people want to actually work for you, but they want to work for the wrong reasons. Most of it, people will see that like a step in their career to actually do something else much bigger later on, which try to filter those ones out. That's fucking insane. 180,000 0.018. It's insane. And like, into the second half. You go through that. Yeah. I'm being serious. I'm like, I have this AI. No. In the first half of the year, we had like what like five, six recruiters across the entire organization, right? They've been doing a fantastic job on that end. And then like, they're doing 996 on that fucking hell. Here's a daughter room. Here's 180,000 applications. Go have fun. And by the way, like, screen them all and talk to them. And then like, well, it's stuff. It's really tough. What have you not done when you reflect back on your time in 11 labs, but with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had done hiding faster. I think I made a mistake, like, no hiding fast enough when the company in the teller more people in the organization. And I think we've suffered over the years of like, we, I think I strongly, we could have grown much quicker if we had hired like a lot more people. What did you do? You wish you had been done. That's a tough one. That's really tough one. Sometimes some of the iterations that we've done on the ICPs have probably been like wrong in terms of timing or have been like the wrong focus essentially, right? Or even I can tell you like, even on the cross cell side that I could not spend enough time in that specific area. And I meant like, we end up like living money at the table, right? So sometimes you actually need to rethink a little bit twice. But I think like also like, when you're growing so quickly, it's difficult to actually not miss stuff. So something that like I take like that is like, we don't well sometimes things like we've not done well in general. Dude, you've just raised a 15 million dollar fund. Amazing achievement. I also love the name power Bab. And it's because of your love of like these treats, right? Yeah. I read about this. Super sweet. I think Sequoia got that first. It's tough. It's tough. And like Babab too. They grow up in like a like in very warm climate like in Australia and in Africa and so on. I actually grow Babab in London in my flat in London. But also like in my flat in Barcelona. And I've been doing for many years, right? And it's like really fragile trees that like when the winter comes or like when the cooler weather comes, they lose all of the leaves. You need to stop watering them. So it's like a really cool plant in general. So it's my favorite one. And I have like what they're like 10 or 12 at home this days. I'd actually been LP if someone wants to start this in a fun, cool cactus capital. Okay. Only invest in really fucking prickly families. The fucking funny thing. It's not a bad idea. It's from a brand new perspective. I bet we're many prickly founders. I bet you would like they obnoxiously prickly. Like they thrive on the friction. Yes. Yeah. I love it. Does being an investor make you a better sales leader? No. I think like being a good salesperson makes you a better investor. How? Because you're able to qualify better. I think like what we do like from an investor perspective, like these days, of course, like we do our bounce to actually get into the deals that we want. And we also do like imbounds to reviewing like all of the leads that we get, right? Like a good SDR, a good account execs, does exactly the same thing. The only thing that I'm missing is like there is a six cents that we get specifically on the pre-seed stage. It's like is it a good match like with founders that are really smart. Can they iterate with the product and the company? Are they willing to pivot? Are they willing to actually listen to other people? All of those items. But there is a gut feeling attached to all of this that has an SDR, a good SDR also has. And notice whether running with that opportunity is going to transform into something when our account execs going to transform into something or they get the cut finish like this is going to be like it's not the right person. Just going to stop at some point. I just don't want to run it. From a BC, we do exactly the same thing. Did if being an investor doesn't make you a better sales leader, why does Matty let you do it? What the fuck? I would be like I was expecting you to be like yes, I teed that one up for you to like slam dunk and you're like no, I'm like okay well what the fuck why would you why would you let you do it? I don't know I kept asking multiple times and I think like he knows like I have a passion for it. I have done like as an angel 74 tickets. So I think like at some point like when I was like annoying enough that he ended up saying yes do it. Top three tickets without like looking into the other but yeah. Rebel loot 11 labs and I don't know like a company called VCIM that doing super well that doing like training for robots physics. When you look back at that 74 that you've done angel, what's your biggest last? So I do founders that are like very technical and what I realized like is many of the technical founders over the years like they just realized that like they don't kind of what sales. So like what I've ended up like streaming over the past year or the past year, so a lot more is like are they really good technical founders and do they also kind of what sales because otherwise you end up like slamming into a wall what do you tell them like you're like the product is fantastic don't get me wrong but we need to start making so money right and suddenly like no no we don't want to make money we only want to do research we only want to build the best products and so on and you're like you can a guy as a company right there's like it's so much more difficult to convince them that like they also need to start thinking about like commercialization of the product that like at some point you end up filtering them out and I think like one of the carriers like you need to actually test for appetite for sales at some point early on because they might not be a fit but there's the flip side of all of this which is like if you look at like opening a eye or on tropic or a sakana a yeah like they raise money saying like we're gonna be doing pure research right or like on profit no exactly exactly right so like there is like a flip side of it but of course like when you look at like venture which is like power law but at the same time it's like you need to be like looking at a lot of different companies then maybe research have are like outliers in many ways right final one and then a quick fire what do you want to do with that but do you want this to be a venture fund that's like a 500 million dollar fund in its own right so far like what I want to do is like it's want to build a general fund something that like actually will like I would leave us all ideally like smaller funds like keep raising relatively often but being there for founders like I want to be there for founders I was it has to be the operator like fund that actually is there for them is like doing the right thing and can you be there for founders did if you go 40 and you're sales data honestly and then you do another fund I think it is possible I think it's like it looks like a prioritization of your time and where you put the you put the effort I talk constantly to my founders like on WhatsApp all the time I will dedicate like weekends late nights early mornings yeah kids no that helps for sure right absolutely a lot but like I go to like kids I 100% want and but and maybe at some point when you end up like having to decide on which one you go further right do you take one do you take the other one is one yeah I want to do a quick fire and I've loved it so what if you changed your mind on in the last 12 months like that like it's particularly uninvesting it's like you need to also be investing in like and founders that actually care about like sales not only like like the technical aspect of it was the single biggest mistake you see sales leaders make today that they don't spend enough time talking to customers directly and signing contracts themselves what's the biggest mistake CEOs make in how their relationship is with their sales leaders that they would just force a number to their sales leaders and expect the data deliver without understanding what are the implications of all what channel or method is like super outdated in sales often people say that like co-cooling you do that what what is outdated are dated I think is like emails like sending an email no one replies there is so much like our balance that are like fundamentally hey I generated like no one replies like the the commercial rate on emails these days has dropped to like like 0.00 something what's your biggest insecurity what's my insecurity that like I might not be able to get to the end of the quarter for the number that I wanted that's that ever happened yeah 100% but like you leave with it right like we all make mistakes all the time and you leave with it but I think it's important because like as a sales leader you always need to be worrying like am I going to get to the end of the quarter because it means that like you are pushing really fucking hard if you know that like you're going to be get there you're going to get there you're going to relax I don't want that let's be honest you don't need the money anymore whatever 11 labs ravolute is angels it's not about the money are you a better sales leader because you're richer yes I don't compensate it on how much sales we make. So it means that I'm fully independent because that is not like I don't believe
I don't believe like if the company makes X amount of money, then it's fantastic. If they make Z fantastic, my goal is to make sure we make as much money as possible based on the plan that we've committed and the plan is absolutely bananas, right? Like we always like shoot for the stars, but my goal is to make sure that I get company to an equity side, not on how much money we make. I think it's wrong. If I were to say the person is listening to the next 60 seconds, and this is all that they're going to take from our conversation, and from all of your writing, from everything they've seen and the news about you, what would you most want that person to take from this and from everything in the next 60 seconds? Constantly up on people, I think it's important. But like essentially spend time with the team, spend time with your customers, treat them as a community, not as a proper transactional sale, be with them, be on the road, all the time, because if you're not, you're missing the reality of what your team, what your company's going through, and the only way to actually be a better sales leader and the only way to actually get to your sales target is fundamentally going through the pain yourself every single day. Dude, this has been such a joy. I've loved this. It also feels like I've known you for a long time, but thank you for being so brilliant. Thank you so much for inviting me. This was really, really good. But before we leave you today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by, and have been tracking closely, rocks. I've been watching this team closely, and the speed they're operating at, and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable. Rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse, and CRM, and delivering board-level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach, and opportunity management. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep, and consolidate your stack, try rocks at rocks.com/signup. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM, and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, layer in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls, and record and transcribe meetings. Monaco creates reminders, dross, follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward. So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates, and faster revenue growth. If you're an early stage startup, tired of duct taping sales tools together, and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at Monaco.com. If updates to your dot com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, the worst site your team's favorite design tool, and is used by companies like Poplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, so you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish. Without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs, whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages. All my great-your-full.com. Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free stay at framer.com/20VC for 30% off. 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. Framer.com/20VC rules and restrictions may apply.
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