The vice president of sales at a hot AI startup said he gives candidates a warning before they sign on: Prepare to work hard.
On an episode of the “20VC” 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.
“When I make an offer, I tell every single person ElevenLabs is going to be extremely difficult,” Reina said. “We are a hard company to work for because we have extremely high expectations.”
He said that he tells them they would have to work a “huge amount of hours” and he expects “full commitment.”
While the warning keeps some candidates out, Reina said it has led to fewer staff leaving.
In a February interview, Reina talked about the sales quotas his employees are expected to hit.
“So if I pay you $100,000 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?” Reina said. “And we’re ruthless on that end.”
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.
Reina’s team is nearly doubling its head count by hiring 120 more sales employees this year, he said.
The sales VP added he’s worried that bringing on all these people may water down the culture.
“If you’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,” he said.
Reina’s pre-offer heads-up echoes how another European-origin startup filters for top talent.
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.
“I still interview everyone, so I ask quite brutal questions about, ‘Why take a hard job? You could go work somewhere else,'” Max Junestrand said.
“I try to create missionaries, not mercenaries,” Junestrand said, referring to an analogy coined by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr years ago. “And I think we’ve successfully done that.”
The two names are among a short list of European startups reviving excitement in the region’s entrepreneurship and venture capital scene.
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.
