Building voice-AI infrastructure and scaling go-to-market globally with Carles Reina, GTM @ ElevenLabs & Angel Investor
Carles Reina's path from scaling Uber across Europe to becoming the first investor and eventual GTM lead at $3.3B AI unicorn ElevenLabs offers a masterclass in strategic career pivoting. He argues that angel investing can be a backdoor to executive roles when you lead with operational value rather than just capital, and reveals why voice AI finally succeeded where previous attempts like Alexa failed to sustain user engagement.
Key takeaways
- •Angel investors should lead with operational expertise before writing checks—helping with go-to-market strategy, contract negotiations, and pricing can open doors to executive opportunities.
- •Resource constraints force better decision-making: transitioning from billion-dollar budgets to seven-person teams teaches crucial lessons about profitable growth over growth at any cost.
- •Voice AI succeeded this time because modern models eliminated the human-in-the-loop requirements that made previous voice assistants clunky and limited.
- •The investor-to-employee path works when you become deeply embedded in the company's early challenges rather than remaining a passive check-writer.
- •Go-to-market execution often matters more than product perfection in the early stages of scaling AI startups globally.
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Best moment
From billions in funding to bootstrapping with seven people
like, trying to onboard drivers and fight with the cabbies and figure out, like, how do we keep, like, this this this growth and also, like, making it profitable and not wasting billions of dollars. All of that stuff, like, was for me, though, like, a very big school, but then, like, Fractable afterwards were, like, reach you with, like, seven people, like, starting with no money and all that stuff. We were like, okay. So how do you become even more creative? Because you need to actually be more creative. You don't have, like, billions to actually spend. So you go from, like, everything absolutely to nothing. Right? So the team that you work with, like, it becomes, like, really appealing, and you bounce it each it ideas to each other. I remember, like, Ras, one of the founders of Tractable,
“But, like, you would essentially buy it, play with it for five minutes, and then put it in a corner and never touch it again.”
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