ElevenLabs might just be the most toxic company in GenAI right now

If you caught the recent 20VC podcast with ElevenLabs' VP of Sales, Carles Reina, you saw the mask slip completely. He wasn't just explaining a strategy. He was boasting about a "ruthless" culture where sales reps are expected to generate 20x their salary or face immediate termination. No performance improvement plans and no second chances. Just hit the number or get out.

Let’s put aside the dystopian signalling to investors for a moment and look at the actual business. What Reina revealed honestly does not look like a sustainable success story at all.

Yes, they were recently valued at $11 billion and they have posted huge revenue numbers. But so has every other bloated entity in this bubble. You have to consider the timeline. For a long time ElevenLabs was the only decent product for GenAI voice so they had no commercial equals. But in 2026 the landscape is a commodity. We have OpenAI, Google, and Deepgram all offering voice tech that is nearly indistinguishable from the "premium" stuff.

ElevenLabs is left trying to sell a luxury production suite featuring celebrity rights, agents, and a marketplace to a market that is already racing to the bottom where "good enough" is the standard.

"Product Market Fit is BS":

This brings me to the most telling part of the interview. Reina explicitly stated his belief that "Product Market Fit is BS".

Think about the implications of that philosophy. He is effectively saying that market demand doesn't matter and only "sales aggression" does. It is a convenient way to shift 100% of the blame onto the employee. If you can't sell a commoditised product at a premium price, it's not because the market has moved on. It's because you aren't working hard enough.

He uses this logic to justify what he calls "honest pipeline reviews" which is essentially corporate-speak for public shaming. They openly expose "low performers" to the rest of the team to humiliate them into quitting or working 80-hour weeks.

The "80%" Lie:

Reina claims 80% of their reps hit this insane 20x quota and uses this as proof of their success. But if you look past the hype, that figure is actually a bad sign.

If you are truly the market leader in a peak bubble, like selling water in a desert, you shouldn't need a culture of terror and public executions to hit your numbers. Contracts should be landing on your desk automatically. The fact that they have to burn through their workforce just to sustain that 80% stat means they are desperately force-feeding a product that isn't in as high demand as they pretend. They are manufacturing these metrics by firing anyone who doesn't hit them immediately. This creates a survivor bias that looks good on a slide deck but rots the company culture from the inside.