From 100 sales meetings a week to $600M ARR - Carles Reina [ElevenLabs]

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Carles Reina, the first investor and fourth employee at ElevenLabs, to unpack the AI bubble, the rise of Chinese models, and Europe's fight to stay in the race.

Carles helped build ElevenLabs' go-to-market engine on the road to over $600 million in annual recurring revenue. As the founder of Baobab Ventures, he also sees the other side of the boom: the funding rounds that may be getting ahead of reality.

Before the scale came 80 to 100 sales meetings a week, a Google Sheets CRM, and months of testing who would actually pay. Then came a sales model most teams would question: quotas set at 20 times base salary, uncapped commissions, and average quota attainment of around 167%.

But this conversation goes beyond the ElevenLabs growth story. We debate the commercial barriers Carles sees around Chinese AI models, why he believes Europe is not investing seriously enough in AI infrastructure, and what it takes to build a global company from day one.

He also explains why extraordinary growth and an AI bubble can exist at the same time - and why he expects some aggressively valued startups to face a funding reality check within six to nine months of this conversation.

In this masterclass, we break down:

• The 100-Meeting Week: How Carles tested his way from creator demand to a repeatable sales motion, then hired reps who started closing deals within weeks.
• The 20x Quota Rule: Why ElevenLabs set targets at 20 times base salary, rewarded overperformance with commission accelerators, and adjusted expectations when markets proved tougher.
• Permission to Fail: Why Carles encouraged experiments with company money - and only needed one idea out of 100 to unlock the next stage of growth.
• The AI Adoption Gap: Why strong Chinese models do not automatically translate into easy enterprise adoption, and why Europe needs more than technical talent to compete.
• The Operator-Investor Playbook: Why Carles kept Baobab small despite $23M in commitments, and why he wants to return capital to investors along the way.
• The Valuation Reality Check: How real AI demand can coexist with overheated funding rounds, and why a high valuation can become a liability at the next raise
• Global from Day One: Why Carles challenges the one-market-at-a-time playbook, pushes founders to hire go-to-market talent early, and wants investors to do more than write checks.

TIMELINE

00:00 - Intro - from first investor to fourth employee at ElevenLabs

03:25 - 80-100 sales meetings a week: finding what actually sells

06:46 - Hiring "icebreakers" vs. scaling the sales team

09:36 - Selling the future: from developers to enterprise

12:25 - Building a sales team that experiments with AI

17:05 - The 20x quota rule, uncapped commissions & 167% attainment

21:46 - The incentive mistake that held back enterprise sales

24:13 - Chinese AI models: great technology, harder enterprise adoption

34:01 - Europe's AI infrastructure problem

34:38 - Hugging Face, Nvidia & the European funding gap

37:37 - Building Baobab Ventures: fundraising and early results

43:37 - AI bubble or real growth? The next funding reality check

47:53 - Three lessons for founders building globally

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