{"id":49024,"date":"2026-04-13T07:02:02","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/an-elevenlabs-exec-says-hes-planning-to-double-his-team-size-and-he-warns-candidates-about-the-huge-amount-of-hours\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T07:02:02","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:02:02","slug":"an-elevenlabs-exec-says-hes-planning-to-double-his-team-size-and-he-warns-candidates-about-the-huge-amount-of-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/an-elevenlabs-exec-says-hes-planning-to-double-his-team-size-and-he-warns-candidates-about-the-huge-amount-of-hours\/","title":{"rendered":"An ElevenLabs exec says he&#8217;s planning to double his team size \u2014 and he warns candidates about the &#8216;huge amount of hours&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69dc695f05c9b303c4e7765d?format=jpeg\" alt=\"ElevenLabs logo\"\/><figcaption>An ElevenLabs exec said he is straight with potential hires about the company&#039;s expectations.<\/p>\n<p>Riccardo Milani \/ Hans Lucas \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>ElevenLab&#039;s VP of sales says he warns every new sales hire about the demands of the startup.<\/li>\n<li>Despite this, he said the team has a low churn rate and is doubling head count this year.<\/li>\n<li>In February, ElevenLabs announced it raised $500 million, bringing its valuation to $11 billion.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The vice president of sales at a hot AI startup said he gives candidates a warning before they sign on: Prepare to work hard.<\/p>\n<p>On an episode of the &quot;20VC&quot; podcast released on Saturday, Carles Reina, the fourth employee at AI voice cloning startup ElevenLabs, said he filters candidates by warning them about how tough the job is.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When I make an offer, I tell every single person ElevenLabs is going to be extremely difficult,&quot; Reina said. &quot;We are a hard company to work for because we have extremely high expectations.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>He said that he tells them they would have to work a &quot;huge amount of hours&quot; and he expects &quot;full commitment.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>While the warning keeps some candidates out, Reina said it has led to fewer staff leaving.<\/p>\n<p>In a February interview, Reina talked about the sales quotas his employees are expected to hit.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;So if I pay you $100,000 a year, your quota is $2 million. That&#039;s it. If you don&#039;t achieve your quota, then you&#039;re going to be out, right?&quot; Reina said. &quot;And we&#039;re ruthless on that end.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>In February, ElevenLabs announced that it raised $500 million in a Series D round, bringing its valuation to $11 billion. The startup, which was founded in London, had 350 employees as of November, according to investor Andreessen Horowitz.<\/p>\n<p>Reina&#039;s team is nearly doubling its head count by hiring 120 more sales employees this year, he said.<\/p>\n<p>The sales VP added he&#039;s worried that bringing on all these people may water down the culture.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you&#039;re not upfront about the expectation, I think you end up diluting because people come with different expectations, they essentially behave in a specific way that is not the way that you wanted,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Reina&#039;s pre-offer heads-up echoes how another European-origin startup filters for top talent.<\/p>\n<p>On a podcast appearance in January, the CEO of Swedish legal tech startup Legora said that he asks every candidate one question to gauge whether they are up for the challenge.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I still interview everyone, so I ask quite brutal questions about, &#039;Why take a hard job? You could go work somewhere else,&#039;&quot; Max Junestrand said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I try to create missionaries, not mercenaries,&quot; Junestrand said, referring to an analogy coined by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr years ago. &quot;And I think we&#039;ve successfully done that.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The two names are among a short list of European startups reviving excitement in the region&#039;s entrepreneurship and venture capital scene.<\/p>\n<p>Compared to their American counterparts, European companies have traditionally faced investor skepticism for being slow, overcommitted to work-life balance, and heavily tied by tech regulation.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An ElevenLabs exec said he is straight with potential hires about the company&#039;s expectations. Riccardo Milani \/ Hans Lucas \/ AFP via Getty Images ElevenLab&#039;s VP of sales says he warns every new sales hire about the demands of the startup. Despite this, he said the team has a low churn rate and is doubling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}