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I frequently travel with my godkids. Whenever we travel out of state, I bring these 3 documents with me.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

I don’t have kids, and therefore, I take a lot of trips with my godsons.

Throughout the year, we take easy day trips around South Florida that don’t require too much planning, and we also take weekend trips to other parts of the state, like Key West and Orlando.

The boys have busy high school schedules, and I’m pretty busy, too, since I work full-time as a teacher.

Despite our time constraints, I really try to be intentional about making memories as a family. Whether big or small, we usually go on a few trips each year.

I bring 3 specific travel documents with me whenever we travel

Now that we’ve been traveling together for a while and are taking trips to other states, I’ve started bringing specific documents for each kid: a copy of their birth certificate, notarized travel consent forms from each parent, and their passports.

I don’t always bring these documents if we’re going on a road trip around Florida. However, I bring them whenever we travel by plane or go to a different state.

Before I started taking the kids on trips, I usually traveled solo and flew a lot. During those years, I didn’t have to think about which travel documents minors need to bring on planes.

However, this past December, I took the kids on a trip to Philadelphia and New York City. This was our first big flight together. During my trip preparations, I learned that minors aren’t required to have IDs when traveling with adults.

Even though IDs weren’t technically required, this wasn’t a risk I was willing to take

I made sure each of the boys took their passports on this trip, which was a good call because the TSA agents asked to see their IDs each time we went through security.

I don’t know what would have happened if they didn’t have their documents with them, but I’m glad we didn’t find out.

I’m super Type A and like to be prepared for worst-case scenarios, which is why I prioritized bringing these documents with me on our trip.

Before we went on our holiday, I found a generic travel consent form online and had each kid’s parent fill one out for their child. Then we went to get the documents notarized.

These documents outlined our travel dates and destinations, so if any officials ever asked to see them, they’re clear.

I brought the birth certificate copies as a double layer of security to prove that the people who filled out the consent forms are actually the kids’ parents.

Some people might think this is excessive. I think it’s wise.

Thankfully, nobody asked to see these documents

I can’t imagine a scenario when a flight attendant or TSA agent would want to see such detailed proof of our travel plans, but it’s not a chance I’m willing to take.

We’re taking a family cruise later this year, and the agent I spoke with during booking told me I’d need to fill out a travel consent form for each child before we board.

They emailed the form to me before we finished our call, which I really appreciated. I’ve worked in the cruise industry before, so I know major cruise lines have their own versions of these documents.

If you cruise with minors you don’t have legal custody over, you have to fill out and submit these consent forms before embarkation.

I love my godkids and am so blessed to take them on trips. I want our vacations to be unforgettable — but not because they were ruined because I didn’t have the right documentation.




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Sales reps at $11 billion AI startup ElevenLabs have to bring in 20 times their base salary, or they’re out — VP says

by with No Comment Xpandfy

At $11 billion AI startup ElevenLabs, the message to sales reps is simple: Hit 20x your base salary, or you’re out.

Speaking on the 20VC podcast on Friday, Carles Reina, VP of sales at the voice-cloning startup, talked through its “ruthless” quotas.

“So if I pay you $100,000 a year, your quota is $2 million. That’s it. If you don’t achieve your quota, then you’re going to be out, right?” Reina said. “And we’re ruthless on that end.”

ElevenLabs — which was recently valued at $11 billion after closing a $500 million funding round — operates in micro-teams of five to ten people each, according to CEO and cofounder Mati Staniszewski, who spoke on a separate 20VC podcast episode in September.

Reina said he prefers to operate in smaller teams that hit their quotas, and pay them more.

Small teams have become a growing trend in tech, with AI startups touting their ability to scale with far fewer employees by working alongside AI agents.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman wrote in January that a team of 15 people using AI can rival a team of 150 who aren’t.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg said on a Meta earnings call in July that he has “gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small, talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research.”

Reina said the “ruthless” quota has been successful at ElevenLabs, saying on the 20VC podcast that more than 80% of reps hit their sales quota.

ElevenLabs did not respond to a request for a comment.

He added that the firm compensates both the account executive and customer success manager if they upsell a company within the first 12 months.

“I’m paying double, but I don’t care,” Reina said. “It makes perfect sense because then I have these two people busting their ass to make sure that they actually can make more money, which is fantastic for me as a company.”

The push for higher performance isn’t limited to AI startups.

In April, Google said it was restructuring its compensation structure to increase rewards for top performers. “High performance is more important than ever,” Google’s head of compensation told staff at the time.




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I worked at Tesla and Waymo. Here are the leadership lessons I bring to my startup.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Spencer Penn, the 33-year-old founder of LightSource, who lives in San Francisco. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to California 10 years ago, back when Tesla was a boutique car business. We were making 1,000 vehicles a week.

My friends and family were telling me it was a big career mistake to work at Tesla. They said it would never be someone’s main car, that it’s a tech toy, that it’s an iPad with wheels on it. But I was just excited to see what this Elon guy was up to.

My interactions with Elon were always very positive, but I’m not a fanboy. There were some things that were very notable about his leadership style.

Tesla is a very flat organization. When I was there, even relatively young and out of college, it was two levels between Elon and me. That’s very unusual to have such close proximity so early in your career.

Just because it’s a flat org structure, doesn’t mean it’s a horizontal power dynamic. Elon is the king. What he says goes. If you wanted to get something done, you really did have to go through Elon.

The drawbacks were that the guy didn’t have that much time. In 2017, he was running three different companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He was just getting started with OpenAI. He had two and a half days a week to really focus on Tesla exclusively. You’d have to get things approved in that period of time.

But he was also very focused on the product. He would get involved in the way that things felt. If you wanted to change a texture on a paint, you’d want to get his buy-in.

Many CEOs go the opposite direction. They let themselves get so far removed from the product. Elon always felt the product was the thing, and the innovation would be what drives the company forward.

I like to embody that here at our company. I still do demos. If you take your hands off the wheel, things might veer in a direction you don’t like.

Elon has a knack for setting overly ambitious goals. There are benefits and drawbacks. Sometimes, you lose credibility. Certain products like the new Roadster were unveiled back when I was an employee, and they’ve yet to be delivered.

But there are certain things where you shoot for the moon and you do hit the stars. Nobody thought Starlink would be as successful as quickly as it has been.

If you apply the right amount of pressure, you can see where the leaks are. That kind of ambition is everything.

That’s the final thing Elon does: he’s really a risk taker. He’s bet the company multiple times; he always keeps putting the chips back on red. I think about that a lot. Sometimes it can be hard for professional management to take the risks they need to. Sometimes you can sleepwalk into a long-term, uncompetitive position.

There was some internal signaling. People knew that Elon was in the factory. They knew that he was going to stay there until the issues were fixed. Elon works about as hard as any human on earth possibly can.

There’s a hotel right across the street from the Fremont factory. Part of me always felt like, instead of setting up pillows in a conference room, I would like our CEO to be well-rested and go to the hotel five minutes away. But the signaling was very potent.

I try to embody that to some degree here, too. I like to come into the office five days a week. I want people to know that I’m coming in early and I’m staying late. I unload the dishwasher in the office. I’m assembling IKEA furniture.

How I found Waymo compared

Waymo was a very different organization. It’s a very vertical org structure. Google is a large organization with lots of levels, and that translated directly to Waymo, which is a much smaller business.

Even though it’s a very vertical org structure, it’s a horizontal power structure. It’s like it’s rotated 90 degrees from Tesla.

Some people compared the org to slime mold. It starts to spread and find all the crevices on its own. Individual contributors could construct their own ideas.

There are benefits and drawbacks. There is the possibility that there are duplicative teams doing the same things in different ways. But it also leads to a lot of creativity.

At Tesla, it was very clear that Elon and his lieutenants were driving a lot of the decisions. The decisions that the more junior people made would be incremental. At Google, I found that a lot of the best ideas come from the individual folks in the business, because they’re given the freedom to roam.

In a startup, you have limited resources. You have to be focused, but a lot of the best ideas come from experimentation.

We had an engineer who asked if he could move his start date by a month. He was like, “I want to spend a month before I get into work catching up on everything that’s happening in AI.” He came to the table, and he had so deeply immersed himself that he had a lot of new and fresh ideas. Many of those ideas have become product features.

I have to delegate innovation to folks on the team to find those opportunities. That’s something I learned from Google.




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