About This Episode
Alejandra Otero joins Ceci and Bea for the first guest episode of Top of the Ops. Her title is Chief of Staff at ElevenLabs, but her scope maps to something closer to a go-to-market operator: capacity planning across every region, launching new markets, building internal AI agents with engineering, and keeping cross-functional execution tight at a company that closed 2025 at $330M ARR and raised $500M at an $11B valuation. She published her latest quarter as the best so far, adding more than $100M in revenue.
The conversation covers her path from civil engineering at Imperial through Goldman Sachs M&A and growth-stage venture capital into operator life, what changed when she walked into a dinner ElevenLabs was hosting at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, how the company keeps talent density and culture intact at scale, and why first principles thinking is the single skill she's heard emphasised most often at ElevenLabs. It's a practical, specific look at what running go-to-market inside one of Europe's AI category leaders actually requires.
What We Cover in This Episode
Engineer to Goldman to VC: An Unusual Career Sequence
Alejandra opens with the origin story. Civil engineering at Imperial wasn't the plan for a career in finance, and in hindsight she calls it "probably the wrong type of engineering" for someone drawn to innovation. Internships in coding and early big data moved her closer to clients and newer companies, and when Goldman Sachs came in first between finance and consulting, she took it. Banking was a heavy initial learning curve given she'd done very little finance or economics before that, but it set the foundation. The thread she looks back on is consistent: choose big challenges, keep pushing to learn, and stay close to where innovation is happening.
Why She Almost Went to Revolut (and What the VC Detour Gave Her)
Toward the end of her time at Goldman she was already thinking about startups. The blocker was pattern recognition: she didn't yet know what "good" looked like, and she couldn't tell whether the companies she was talking to (Revolut and Trade Republic among them) were best-in-class or not. Venture capital was the obvious detour, a couple of years to build that calibration, and covering Spain in her last VC role is what eventually put her in the room with ElevenLabs.
The Barcelona Dinner That Changed Everything
The move from VC to operator happened through one dinner. Alejandra had reached out to Carles (an angel investor, now running his own fund, also Spanish) for deal flow context on the Spanish ecosystem. He invited her to a dinner ElevenLabs was hosting in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress, mostly clients, prospects, partners, the ElevenLabs team, and her. She left the dinner energised, walked up to Carles, and pitched herself: generalist profile, no startup experience, very hardworking, open to any role that fit. It happened that he was looking for a Chief of Staff. Her reflection on why it worked: there aren't many category-defining AI companies hiring in Europe, and the ones that are can be counted without much effort. Being in the room when the right one was hiring mattered.
Operating Inside a Rocket Ship
When Bea asks what it actually feels like to operate at ElevenLabs' pace, closing 2025 at $330M ARR, raising $500M at $11B, adding more than $100M in a single quarter, Alejandra's framing is that most of the time the team is heads-down on the next big thing. Constant testing of new initiatives, doubling down on what works, discarding what doesn't. There isn't really a "what breaks first" answer because the company is constantly building rather than holding things together. The one structural challenge she flags is the one every scaling company eventually hits: preserving talent density and culture as headcount grows.
What the Chief of Staff Role Actually Looks Like
Alejandra is clear that her scope skews heavily toward go-to-market, which makes her role somewhat different from a classic central Chief of Staff. Day-to-day it includes capacity planning for the go-to-market team (which markets launch this quarter, who leads them, first hires once a lead is in place), building and prioritising account lists against ICP and top-down priorities, unblocking existing markets in partnership with the leads, and making sure post-sales and pre-sales work together efficiently. On top of that she runs a rotating set of project-based work streams with specific objectives. The most recent: building an internal "AI CSM" agent with an engineer to make their scale CSMs more efficient across the long tail of accounts.
First Principles Thinking as the Core Skill
When Bea asks about the split between hard and soft skills, and whether anything had to be re-learned moving from VC, Alejandra points to first principles thinking as the skill most consistently emphasised at ElevenLabs. Situations vary, context is new, and the expectation is to find a solution that works, ship it to start moving, and iterate from there. The rest, financial modelling ahead of H1/H2 planning, coordinating with RevOps and finance during plan cycles, comes and goes with the rhythm of the quarter.
What She Expected vs. What She Found
Eleven months in, the biggest surprise wasn't the growth trajectory. She'd seen the numbers in VC. It was the level of execution. She expected chaos and unstructured scrambling at that pace and found the opposite. She compares the bar to her first weeks at Goldman: hardcore intensity around every deliverable, detail and effort at a level that is "crazy" across the organisation. The drivers she identifies are hiring (Mati and Piotr personally interviewed every candidate in the final round until very recently, and the talent team is deeply embedded), and example effects. Carles, the person she works most closely with, is always online, deeply prepared, passionate about every meeting, and that pulls everyone else up.
How the Role Keeps Changing
Scope shifts quarter to quarter. Last year, ElevenLabs didn't yet have a lead in India, which is a major market for them with a big team. Alejandra spent a couple of quarters working directly with that team to make sure execution stayed on track; once Kartik joined to lead it, she stepped off. The AI CSM started small but is scaling across the GTM team with new capabilities being scoped now. Once that's in a steady state, it'll hand off and something else will take its place. Intensity stays the same; the scope is constantly rotating, and she's explicit that this is a feature of the job she enjoys.
How ElevenLabs Uses AI Internally
Because of the nature of the business, ElevenLabs screens for people who are genuinely excited about AI, which makes adoption largely organic. Everyone has access to Claude. The RevOps team lays the connective foundations so tools work end-to-end. Teammates who are particularly good with specific workflows run live demos in the weekly call. A lot of knowledge sharing happens that way. Alongside the informal layer, there are centrally built agents replacing parts of workflows that were previously impossible without hiring significantly more people. The AI SDR on the website is one example: when a visitor fills out the contact form, they can speak to an agent, describe their use case, and the system routes enterprise-priority leads to the right team. A go-to-market bot lets anyone on the team query, for example, the latest healthcare accounts and resolution stats before prepping for a call.
Central vs. Distributed AI Building
Both layers coexist. Centrally built agents cover the basics so every new hire is productive quickly and nobody is working below the team's baseline. Alongside that, every person is encouraged to build their own tools to optimise their day-to-day in whatever way works best. As organisations scale, the question of how much to centralise versus distribute becomes structural. ElevenLabs' answer is both, with a clear line between the company-wide infrastructure and the personal tooling each operator is free to build.
Alejandra's Personal AI Stack
She uses Claude the most. The two biggest needle movers personally: SQL and Slack. For SQL she doesn't write queries anymore. She tells Claude the three tables, the structure, and the dashboard she wants, and skips the join-debugging that used to consume her time. For Slack, because ElevenLabs is a Slack-first, heavily async organisation with a global team, message volume is very high, and Claude is excellent at surfacing "where did someone send me that message?" or summarising the latest developments in a project channel she's catching up on.
Discipline, Priorities, and the Slack Dopamine Trap
Bea asks how, as a former VC trained to step back and see the big picture, she avoids being dragged fully into execution. Alejandra's answer is explicit intentionality. She plans the week, month, and quarter against a small number of priorities and holds herself accountable to the one or two things that have to happen. She's self-aware that Slack offers "instant gratification" in a way that's structurally similar to Instagram (small tasks, emojis, quick wins), which makes it easy to let the big, hard pieces slip. Naming that trap is part of how she resists it.
On Human Salespeople in an AI-Native Go-to-Market
Ceci asks a deliberately provocative question: with AI SDRs, automated research, and CRM automation, where is the remaining value of a human salesperson? Alejandra's view, consistent with how ElevenLabs operates, is that human-to-human interaction is critical for enterprise and larger clients, not something they're looking to replace any time soon. The AI leverage sits in the one-to-many digital channels. And crucially, because ElevenLabs is growing so fast, the question isn't about replacing people. It's about raising per-head productivity (this year's target: workflows 50% more productive) so revenue grows faster than the team. Ceci adds her own agreement from the Seqera years: enterprise B2B sales into large pharma requires someone who can read an organisation, find the next champion, and navigate complex multi-stakeholder cycles, which is exactly where operators and AEs should be doubling down.
The Unexpected Customer Support Moment
Bea asks about surprising use cases of ElevenLabs voice agents in the wild. Alejandra's anecdote: with agents in production for customer support, they've started seeing the inflection point where the caller genuinely forgets they're talking to an agent. She mentions one call ending with a cheerful "vaya con dios, thank you so much, have a great day." The surprise was a great signal. The contrast with the traditional airline-customer-support experience, "press one for this, press two for that," eventually yelling to reach a human, is exactly the experience the agents are replacing.
Global Hyperlocal: Building a European Rocket Ship
Ceci raises the Europe vs. US debate familiar to anyone who's spent time in VC. Alejandra is proud of ElevenLabs being European, and specifically notes that they've tapped into strengths across the continent, particularly engineering talent from Eastern Europe that historically hadn't been channelled into aggressive startup outcomes. The model she describes for go-to-market is "global hyperlocal": a global team with regionally-localised leadership in India, Europe, Oceania, Japan, Korea, and Spanish LatAm. Each region has its own leads and feels specific to that market. Research is the opposite: hire the best researchers in the world wherever they are. The US remains a huge market, and they have a significant team there. Bea adds an observation: being intrinsically European gives you a built-in head start when selling across fragmented markets, because you know that a French buyer, a Nordic buyer, and a Romanian buyer don't purchase the same way.
What Actually Makes a Great Chief of Staff
Beyond the usual "structured thinker" line, Alejandra names two underweighted qualities. First, strong cross-functional communication. You're coordinating across many teams and translating top-down strategy into execution. Second, something Carles has said in the past that stuck with her: the ability to join a situation, figure things out on your own, and proactively run with them. The whole reason to hire a Chief of Staff is to reduce the workload of someone already stretched across too many priorities. If you start by adding to their plate instead of taking things off it, that's not a great start.
Biggest Challenge, Honestly
The hardest part for her isn't a scope problem. It's discipline. With so many directions to go and a natural instinct to help, the risk is spending the day replying to every Slack message and never landing the one or two things that have to happen that day, that month, that quarter. Her counter is a deliberate practice of asking herself, every day, what the non-negotiables are, and protecting that time.
Advice for Anyone Considering the Operator Move
Her advice for people thinking about moving into an operating role (or a Chief of Staff role specifically, because both are "trendy" right now): be clear about why. Roles vary enormously across companies, and the experience is very driven by the person you work for and what they're solving. Being excited by the mission, the team, and the person you'll be working with matters more than the title. She's clear about her own luck on that front, and the advice is a reminder that the job can look very different depending on who it's with.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Alejandra Otero?
Alejandra Otero is a Chief of Staff at ElevenLabs focused on go-to-market, strategy, and expansion. She's a civil engineer by training (Imperial College London), spent several years at Goldman Sachs in M&A, then worked in growth-stage venture capital before moving into operator life at ElevenLabs. She's Spanish, based in London, and has been in the seat at ElevenLabs for roughly 11 months.
What does a Chief of Staff at ElevenLabs actually do?
At ElevenLabs specifically, Alejandra's scope sits inside the go-to-market organisation. Day-to-day: capacity planning across markets, deciding which new markets to launch and when, helping hire leads and first AE/SDR cohorts, curating priority account lists against ICP, unblocking existing markets with their leads, and ensuring post-sales and pre-sales work together. She layers project-based work streams on top of that quarterly. Most recently: building an internal AI CSM agent with an engineer to give their scale CSMs more leverage across the long tail of accounts.
How does ElevenLabs use AI internally?
Both centrally and individually. Centrally-built agents (AI SDR on the website, internal go-to-market bots, the AI CSM Alejandra is building) cover the organisational baseline. Alongside that, every person is encouraged to build their own tooling to optimise their specific workflow. Claude is the common tool, knowledge sharing happens live in weekly calls, and RevOps lays the connective foundation so everything works end-to-end.
Is human sales still needed at an AI-native company?
Yes, especially at the enterprise end. ElevenLabs isn't trying to replace enterprise salespeople with AI; they're using AI to raise leverage in the one-to-many digital channels and grow revenue faster than the team. The human-to-human layer, building trust, navigating complex accounts, finding new champions inside buying organisations, is where sales operators should be doubling down.
What skills matter most in a fast-growth operator role?
First principles thinking. Strong cross-functional communication. The ability to walk into a new situation, figure it out independently, and proactively run with it (rather than requiring extensive onboarding or hand-holding). Self-discipline around priorities, because the number of things that could be done will always exceed the number of things that should be done.
How does ElevenLabs maintain culture at scale?
Two main levers. Hiring: until very recently, the founders personally interviewed every candidate in the final round, and the talent team is deeply embedded and central to the company. And example effects: early hires set the bar, and leaders who are always online, deeply prepared, and passionate about every meeting pull the standards of everyone around them up.