Growing to billion dollar valuation multiple times with Stan Masueras

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Stan Massueras - the guy who's scaled companies to billion-dollar valuations not once, but multiple times.

He was one of Facebook's first European sales hires in 2008, then helped Twitter expand across the continent and after that, he spent six years scaling Intercom to unicorn status.

Now he's doing it all over again at ElevenLabs, the voice AI company that went from zero to $6B+ in under three years.

In this episode, we'll dig into what it actually looks like to scale sales, how selling AI is fundamentally different from selling SaaS, and what Stan had to unlearn from the typocal Saas playbook to succeed at ElevenLabs.

If you want to understand what it takes to repeatedly win at the billion-dollar level - and what breaks inside companies growing this fast - this episode is for you.

Stan thanks for being here today!

TIMELINE :

00:00:00 - 00:01:17 : From Facebook to ElevenLabs: Meet the billion-dollar scaler

00:01:17 - 00:05:21 : Why selling software in Europe breaks the US playbook

00:05:21 - 00:10:10 : The AI sales revolution: Killing the SaaS sales hierarchy

00:10:10 - 00:13:56 : No middle management, no titles: How ElevenLabs runs flat and fast

00:13:56 - 00:18:34 : Inside ElevenLabs’ $300M ARR sprint: Remote, lean, relentless

00:18:34 - 00:22:47 : Mastering two motions: creative tools vs enterprise AI

00:22:47 - 00:26:39 : Expanding from voiceovers to luxury AI agents

00:26:39 - 00:30:54 : Taking updates seriously: enterprise upsell strategy and product marketing

00:30:54 - 00:34:22 : Deepfake fears & Hollywood deals: AI voice ethics in action

00:34:22 - 00:40:45 : Billion-dollar impact: AI accessibility, ALS, and global translation

00:40:45 - 00:54:44 : Career regrets, recruiting lessons, and the real rocket-ship mindset

REFERENCES :

- Sheryl Sandberg

- Jason Fried - (Basecamp)

- Carlos Reina

- Guillaume Kabane

- Dave Gerhardt

- Arthur Waller (PennyLane)

- Harry Stebbings (20VC)

- Matthew McConaughey

- Bruce Springsteen

- Mark Zuckerberg

- Skyblog (Note: Mostly inactive now; legacy site)

- Lemlist

- Deel

- Salesforce

- Oracle

- Canva

- Figma

- Zendesk

- Lovabl

- Synthesia

- HeyGen

- Coinbase

- Sales Navigator (LinkedIn)

- Y Combinator

- Station F

- SaasStock