BILLIONS

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Carles Reina, the first investor and fourth employee at ElevenLabs, to unpack the AI bubble, the rise of Chinese models, and Europe's fight to stay in the race.
Carles helped build ElevenLabs' go-to-market engine on the road to over $600 million in annual recurring revenue. As the founder of Baobab Ventures, he also sees the other side of the boom: the funding rounds that may be getting ahead of reality.

Before the scale came 80 to 100 sales meetings a week, a Google Sheets CRM, and months of testing who would actually pay. Then came a sales model most teams would question: quotas set at 20 times base salary, uncapped commissions, and average quota attainment of around 167%.

But this conversation goes beyond the ElevenLabs growth story. We debate the commercial barriers Carles sees around Chinese AI models, why he believes Europe is not investing seriously enough in AI infrastructure, and what it takes to build a global company from day one.

He also explains why extraordinary growth and an AI bubble can exist at the same time - and why he expects some aggressively valued startups to face a funding reality check within six to nine months of this conversation.
In this masterclass, we break down:
The 100-Meeting Week: How Carles tested his way from creator demand to a repeatable sales motion, then hired reps who started closing deals within weeks.
The 20x Quota Rule: Why ElevenLabs set targets at 20 times base salary, rewarded overperformance with commission accelerators, and adjusted expectations when markets proved tougher.
Permission to Fail: Why Carles encouraged experiments with company money - and only needed one idea out of 100 to unlock the next stage of growth.
The AI Adoption Gap: Why strong Chinese models do not automatically translate into easy enterprise adoption, and why Europe needs more than technical talent to compete.
The Operator-Investor Playbook: Why Carles kept Baobab small despite $23M in commitments, and why he wants to return capital to investors along the way.
The Valuation Reality Check: How real AI demand can coexist with overheated funding rounds, and why a high valuation can become a liability at the next raise
Global from Day One: Why Carles challenges the one-market-at-a-time playbook, pushes founders to hire go-to-market talent early, and wants investors to do more than write checks.

TIMELINE
00:00 - Intro - from first investor to fourth employee at ElevenLabs
03:25 - 80-100 sales meetings a week: finding what actually sells
06:46 - Hiring "icebreakers" vs. scaling the sales team
09:36 - Selling the future: from developers to enterprise
12:25 - Building a sales team that experiments with AI
17:05 - The 20x quota rule, uncapped commissions & 167% attainment
21:46 - The incentive mistake that held back enterprise sales
24:13 - Chinese AI models: great technology, harder enterprise adoption
34:01 - Europe's AI infrastructure problem
34:38 - Hugging Face, Nvidia & the European funding gap
37:37 - Building Baobab Ventures: fundraising and early results
43:37 - AI bubble or real growth? The next funding reality check
47:53 - Three lessons for founders building globally

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Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, who has rapidly transitioned his enterprise platform from a pure SaaS model into a cutting-edge playground for autonomous AI agents.
Aaron has a masterclass view of the data infrastructure that legacy tech giants wish they controlled. In this conversation, we pull back the curtain on the high-stakes battle for sovereign AI.
We unpack the real fallout of the U.S. government's unprecedented export controls on Anthropic's frontier models, why data platforms like Snowflake are posting blockbuster quarters amidst the AI boom, and how specialized tools like Cursor show that the future of intelligence is multifaceted, not winner-take-all.
If you want to understand where the real economic value of applied AI resides over the next decade, this is the blueprint.
In this masterclass, we break down:
The Export-Control Precedent: Inside the unprecedented restriction of Anthropic's frontier model from non-US users and why Aaron calls it a brand-new moment in AI regulation.
The Safety-Rhetoric Boomerang: How AI safety messaging scared the government into a model-approval pipeline — and why some safety advocates may quietly prefer that outcome.
China's $50B Scenario: Why Aaron believes China can simply throw $50B at compute to stay in the race and why France, Japan, the UK, and Germany may be forced to build their own sovereign models.
The Multifaceted Intelligence Future: Why the AI market won't be "winner-take-all," and how Cursor's applied-layer harness (routing tasks across cheap and premium models) became the template.
Building for Machine Users: How Box adapted its file system MCP server, CLI, Markdown editing, HTML compatibility so agents and people work off the same data.
Why More Agents Make SaaS More Valuable: Why deploying 100x more agents than employees increases the value of the underlying CRM, ERP, and content systems instead of killing them.
The CS-Grad Dislocation: A grounded look at the shifting job market away from Big Tech layoffs and into AI startups and industries like life sciences and manufacturing.
TIMELINE :
00:00 – Turning Box from SaaS into an AI agent platform
03:00 – Sovereign AI: why countries will build their own models
05:51 – Can open and Chinese models catch up to the frontier?
08:51 – The chip embargo debate and Jensen Huang's argument
14:09 – AI safety, regulation, and government model approval
18:29 – Why AI won't be winner-take-all (the Cursor case study)
21:33 – How Box built a file system for AI agents
27:17 – Is SaaS dead? Why agents make software more valuable
30:48 – Will AI replace jobs? The truth about CS grads

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Pete Maldonado, the visionary who took $6,000, one failed food venture behind him, and zero institutional backing and built a dominant food empire that's approaching $1 billion in revenue this year.
Pete and his co-founder Rashid bet everything on a category the entire industry assumed was dead: the gas-station meat stick.
For nearly ten years they bootstrapped taking less than $1M in primary capital prioritizing extreme operational focus and deleting complexity at every corner.
They stayed so maniacally disciplined that they only ever scaled one product format : meat sticksusing just 12 core recipes to capture market share from corporate giants.
But extreme efficiency comes with massive friction.
Pete opens up about the devastating reality of underestimating their explosive demand curve, which cost them 9 figures in lost revenue last year alone, the inside story of surviving an overnight COVID collapse with Trader Joe's, and why he chose to step down as CEO to hand over the keys to his co-founder.
In this masterclass, we break down:
The $6,000 Side Hustle Genesis: How a personal trainer used early Shopify tools and a $99 Photoshop Elements subscription to design a world-class brand from his desk.
The Rule of Deleting Complexity: Why going deep on a single SKU beats going wide, and how relentless simplicity early on became the reason they could scale at all.
The 9-Figure Forecasting Nightmare: The brutal operational pain of undershooting cultural shifts and cutting massive amounts of purchase orders when demand outpaces supply.
The Over-the-Register Museum Trap: How an unexpected plexiglass policy at Trader Joe's wiped out retail sales overnight during COVID—and the pivot that saved the team from layoffs.
The Hidden Weight of Personal Guarantees: Moving past bank-debt structures that put family homes on the line to engineer a 100% secondary private equity deal with Stride Consumer Partners.
Stepping Down at the Peak: Pete's candid psychological transition from active day-to-day CEO to hands-off Chairman to protect his family time and scale the company further.

TIMELINE :
00:00 – Building Chomps on $6,000: a $6,000 food brand from nothing
09:46 – Brand awareness vs. distribution: never hit a shelf before the customer knows you
11:53 – Riding the diet tribes: CrossFit, Paleo, Whole30, Keto, and now GLP-1
19:13 – The 2016 Trader Joe's inbound: staying methodical and rejecting advisor pressure to over-expand
28:05 – Forecasting demand and surviving COVID33:31 – The plexiglass "museum": surviving canceled COVID orders with zero layoffs
37:17 – Personal guarantees & the 100% secondary raise: de-risking the families
40:46 – Casting a wider net: breaking the bottom-of-funnel ROAS trap to unlock top-of-funnel scale
46:15 – Stepping down: from CEO to Chairman
REFERENCES
Rashid Ali 

Noah Kagan 

Tim Ferriss 

Liz Carter 

The Million Dollar Weekend 

Nutrisystem 

Jenny Craig

Trader Joe's

Whole Foods

Sprouts

Thrive Market

Jack Link's

Slim Jim

Stride Consumer Partners

Shopify

WordPress

Amazon 

Whole30 Approved 

CrossFit 

Paleo 

Keto 

GLP-1

On this episode of BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Jason Wilk, four-time founder and CEO of Dave, the neobank built to take on the predatory overdraft fees that quietly bleed billions a year from the Americans who can least afford them.
Jason's story is one of the wildest comebacks in fintech. After going public via SPAC in January 2022, Dave hit a $5 billion valuation, then the macro turned.
Rates spiked, growth capital dried up, and within nine months the stock had collapsed 98%, dragging the company's market cap down to roughly $50 million, less than the cash sitting on its own balance sheet.Most teams would have panicked, slashed headcount, or sold cheap.
Jason did the opposite: he froze hiring, refused layoffs, killed every non-core product, and put the entire company behind one number, unit economics.
Today Dave is back to a nearly $4 billion market cap, with 2026 guidance of over $700M in revenue and over $300M in EBITDA, a ~$400M earnings swing in just a few years.
In this masterclass, we break down:
The $75 microloan bet : how Dave used cash-flow data instead of FICO to underwrite the smallest loan in the country, importing a model that worked in India and Africa but no one had cracked in the US.
120 meetings for a Series A : why traditional VCs had never even heard of overdraft fees, and what it took to finally get the check.
Surviving a 98% wipeout : the operational playbook Jason ran when growth capital ground to a halt and raising more was off the table.
Making millionaires at the bottom : how a Performance Stock Unit structure turned the crash into the biggest wealth-creation event in the company's history.
"VC money is just very high-APR debt" : why Jason wishes he'd taken his $10M Series A as venture debt and kept the equity.
Eating other people's margin : Dave's new credit card and multi-product roadmap, aimed at the $100B+ a year Americans pay in credit card APRs and late fees.
TIMELINE :
00:00 – Why he declared war on the $34 overdraft fee
01:55 – The $75 microloan that ignores your credit score
04:26 – 120 investor meetings to close the Series A
09:48 – Going public via SPAC at a $5B valuation
11:15 – How the stock crashed 98% in 9 months
16:19 – Making employees millionaires at rock bottom
19:38 – From burning $100M to $300M in EBITDA
23:17 – Why VC money is worse than a loan shark
27:00 – The new credit card attacking a $100B market
43:29 – Running a $4B company with 300 people

REFERENCES :
Jason Wilk

SV Angel 

Ron Conway

Paul Graham

GoBuyside / « Gocleff » 

Dave 

Plaid

Acorns 

BankSimple 

Norwest Venture Partners 

Tiger Global 

Y Combinator

On this episode of BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Peter Singlehurst, who built the private companies team from scratch at legendary investment firm Baillie Gifford, deploying billions into more than 100 of the most important private companies on the planet.
Peter operates on a timeline that makes typical venture capitalists look shortsighted. From backing Tesla in 2013 at a $3B market cap to entering SpaceX at a $30B valuation, his strategy completely bypasses the short-term noise of quarterly earnings.
In this masterclass, he breaks down why optimizing for the highest possible price at an IPO is a lethal mistake, the massive arbitrage hidden within the world's most misunderstood tech giant (ByteDance), and the raw post-mortem of their highest-profile mistake: Northvolt.
We break down:
The Philosophy Swerve: How a philosophy graduate skipped a PhD to build a multi-billion dollar growth engine and why Baillie Gifford deliberately hires people with no finance background.
The Death of the IPO Monopoly: Why the world's most valuable hyper-growth companies no longer need public exchanges to unlock liquidity.
Debt Kills, Dilution Doesn't: Peter's contrarian warning to scaling founders on why leverage is a ticking time bomb for pre-profitable businesses.
The ByteDance Arbitrage: The inside story of buying shares at ~4x free cash flow while Western investors ran away.
The Northvolt Post-Mortem: A transparent breakdown of their highest-profile mistake and how to spot a venture-stage asset masquerading as a growth-stage giant.
Disrupting the 2-and-20 Norm: How Baillie Gifford structures an ultra-LP-friendly 1-and-10 fee model charged on invested capital, not committed capital.
TIMELINE :
00:00 – "You get the shareholders you deserve": the long-term underwriting mindset
00:53 – From philosophy to growth equity: why Baillie Gifford avoids finance backgrounds
05:44 – Entry mechanics: Tesla's $3B public entry vs SpaceX's $30B private scale
08:23 – The leverage trap: why a little dilution never killed a business, but debt does
13:50 – Democratizing elite assets: how the Schiehallion Fund opens up Stripe, SpaceX & Databricks to everyday savers
23:15 – Designing the ideal IPO: why chasing the highest possible price destroys public-market trust
30:07 – The founder risk matrix: Bezos' 1997 shareholder letter & Musk's "bet the house" blueprint
35:30 – The ByteDance arbitrage: buying shares at ~4x free cash flow
52:47 – Flipping the venture fee model: the LP-friendly 1-and-10 on invested capital
56:09 – The Northvolt post-mortem: growth equity risk vs venture equity risk

REFERENCES
Elon Musk 

Jeff Bezos 

Jeff Bezos’s letter to his shareholders in 1997

Warren Buffett 

Larry Ashbrook

Hendrick Borginon 

Baillie Gifford 

Tesla 

SpaceX 

ByteDance 

Amazon 

Alibaba 

Anduril 

Bending Spoons

Airbnb

Spotify 

Stripe

Databricks

Affirm

Wise

Tempus

Klarna 

Figma

Northvolt

Uber

Lyft

Meta (Facebook)