ElevenLabs crossed $500M ARR in April 2026, up from $350M at the end of 2025.
Carles Reina built that revenue org from zero, as the company’s fourth employee and first investor: three years from nothing to past half a billion.
He recently laid out how he did it in a long, direct interview on Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, a set of rules specific enough to copy.
You can’t automate the engine, because the engine is people and some of his rules, like the 20x quota, stay there. What you can encode is the rest, the operational work:
who to target
which account is worth a call this week
which deals are actually real
That is where Claude comes in, with Carles’s rules instead of generic best practices.
By the end you’ll have four Claude agents, each built from one of his rules:
Concentrate on one proven ICP before scaling →
the Concentration AgentReach people humanly, not with transactional spray →
the Timing AgentLand and expand →
the Expansion AgentPublic pipeline reviews and conservative forecasting →
the Forecast Agent
Your reps keep the room, while your agents take the busywork.
Inside you will find:
Which Sales Rules You Can Actually Hand to Claude
Setting Up the Stack
How to Point Everything at One Winnable ICP
How to Get the Right Timing
How to Turn a First Small Contract Into a Whole-Account Plan
How to Strip the Optimism Out of Your Pipeline
Where the Agent Stops and the Rep Takes Over
Before you build anything, get honest about what is automatable and what is not. The fastest way to waste a month is to point an agent at work only a person can do.
Some of Carles’s rules are about people. They stay with you:
20x quotais a target you set and holdFirst contract in two weeksis a hiring and onboarding barReps in front of customersis a management choiceSelling humanly, not transactionallyis a principle, and it's his whole point: the moment outreach feels like AI spray, people ignore it
Build a sell more agent and you build nothing, because selling is the human part.
The other rules are really decision criteria and those can become software:
Concentrate on one proven ICPis an instruction about where to point your listReach people only when it's genuinely relevant, never with transactional volumeLand and expandis a repeatable way to read an account and find the next doorConservative, public forecastingis a set of rules for deciding which deals are real
Each of those is a judgment applied over and over against fresh data, which is exactly what an agent is good at.
So the split you are working with:
STAYS HUMAN (guardrails, not agents)
- The 20x quota and the willingness to enforce it
- Selling humanly, not with transactional spray
- Reps in front of customers
- Hiring for hunters
- The room: negotiation, relationship, the final call on a deal
BECOMES AN AGENT (a decision rule applied to fresh data)
- The Concentration Agent ← "concentrate on one proven ICP"
- The Timing Agent ← "reach people only when it's relevant"
- The Expansion Agent ← "land and expand through customer success"
- The Forecast Agent ← "radically transparent pipeline reviews"
The rest of this guide builds those four agents, and each one takes its name and its job straight from one of Carles’s rules.
The “human rules” don’t disappear, they become the guardrails you write into the agents’ instructions, so everything Claude produces is filtered through the same discipline Carles applies himself.
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