Building voice-AI infrastructure and scaling go-to-market globally with Carles Reina, GTM @ ElevenLabs & Angel Investor

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Carles Reina, Go-to-Market Lead at ElevenLabs, an AI Audio research and deployment company that tripled it's valuation to $3.3BN in January, after confirming a new $180M funding round.

From starting out as a banker in Barcelona to scaling Uber’s first European team, and now investing in over 70 startups, Carles shares the hard-won lessons that drive startup success.

We dive into:

🔄 Career pivot: Leaving banking for Uber at 20 people and discovering the thrill of early-stage impact
📈 Building GTM from scratch: Lessons from Tractable & ElevenLabs—experimenting on ICPs, pricing, and pitches
💼 Angel investing playbook: How to break in as an operator-investor, source top deals, and add value beyond capital
🗣 Voice AI’s inflection point: Why high-quality speech models are the next frontier, and how ElevenLabs powers voice notes for surgery prep and on-demand customer support
🤖 Robotics meets LLMs: The “GPT moment” in hardware, investing in companies merging industrial robotics with large language models
✂️ Trimming strategies: Locking in gains (10–20%) at Series B/C while staying exposed to upside
🌐 Scaling globally: Personalizing GTM across the US, Europe, Asia, and beyond

This is a must-listen for GTM leaders, startup builders, and aspiring angels looking to roll up their sleeves, experiment at speed, and back the next wave of unicorns.