[David Senra]
We ran into each other at Michael Dell's event a few months ago, and you're like, "Oh, I'm very curious how building a company today is different from building one in the past." And Michael has 40-plus years of experience. He's been dominating for decades. And when I saw him, we had a 30-minute conversation about this. You read all these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, and you just see this over and over again. It's like, "Oh, this time is different." Turns out, no, this time is not different. And Michael's like, "No, no, I actually think this time is different." So, I want to start with how you think about building your company, AI native, from today.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah, Michael is a legend. He must have so many interesting perspectives, especially like he's still running the company. So, it'll be interesting whether he applies some of that difference to the current running of the show. But for us,

[Mati Staniszewski]
in some ways, given we are 1st-time founders, me and Piotr, my co-founder and my best friend of 15 years, ElevenLabs is the 1st venture we started.

[David Senra]
That's insane. You started in 2022. You launched before the 1st version of ChatGPT, right?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We did.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
It was still a year when the topics of the day were crypto and metaverse. So 2022 was still a year where everybody was obsessed about those 2. So it was a perfect time because we could actually focus and build a

[Mati Staniszewski]
lot on the AI side.

[David Senra]
What were you doing before you founded this company?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I was at Palantir, so I was helping build optimization models and bring optimization models to the customers. So, NHS during the COVID response on how you distribute vaccines across UK, or working with oil and gas industry and figuring out how to optimize the energy work. So, a lot of optimization models and then working with customers on actually figuring out how you bring that into their production. And my co-founder was at Google, and he did a lot of the text models for knowledge graph. Before that, did research at university around image visual models. So, incredible brain, the smartest person I know for developing a lot of the research work. And I was happily on that intersection of building the product and bringing that to the customers. So that was before Palantir's BlackRock, building risk models, bringing that to customers, and my background is studying mathematics. So, good intersection of the things I liked, and now at ElevenLabs, that's also what I do. And that's also, from the company lens, when we started, that was the whole goal of, can we combine research and product deployment under one hood? On the research side, built all the audio models, starting with model to produce speech, text-to-speech model, and that was the 2022, the 1st model that could finally cross that human-like quality. And then over time, now it's entirety of audio models. Transcription models, localization models, orchestration for voice conversations with agents. And then on the product side, can we unify that as one platform that helps people, businesses transform how they would communicate with their audience?

[David Senra]
Wait, so the 1st idea, you started with audio?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We started with audio.

[David Senra]
Why?

[Mati Staniszewski]
The actual trigger point comes from where you're from, from Poland. Very peculiar thing. If you watch a movie in Polish, all the voices, whether it's a male voice or whether it's a female voice, get narrated with one single character. So you have one voice narrating the whole movie. All the emotional intonation disappears, and it's still... So we grew up with this. Everybody in Poland grows up with it. It's like one person dubbing. And then in 2021, we retested or re-experienced this still happening in their content. And then 2nd thing happened, which was-

[David Senra]
Wait, it was still happening in movies in 2021 that you'd watch in Poland?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Same thing that was happening when you were a kid?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
And it's crazy because of course it's cheaper, easier to do, quicker timeline, but the quality is poor, as you can imagine. It's a pretty terrible experience. And that was like a trigger point. In the future, that experience will be completely different. You will have original voice, original emotions, original intonation, and actually be able to experience that in that incredible way, which is very timely because just a week ago, we released finally a model that is able to do that extremely well and finally bring the content from one language to another. But maybe more broadly, that was also our eye-opening of how we interact with technology, how you can interact through technology will change. And that will apply the language barrier that will break, but also just the general conversations with devices, with digital world will happen differently across different modalities, across different channels, and we wanted to-

[David Senra]
This is what you thought back in 2022, or what do you think today?

[Mati Staniszewski]
In 2022, we knew that you will need to unlock the stories, the content across the modalities and channels. We didn't yet know how quickly the shift from static to interactive will happen. We hope this will happen, but we didn't know how quickly.

[David Senra]
So the 1st idea was-

[Mati Staniszewski]
1st idea was dub-

[David Senra]
... dub static content-

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly

[David Senra]
... that I was watching. I'm watching a movie in Poland. I want this to actually feel like I'm watching in my native language.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly.

[David Senra]
That had to appear like a tiny business, though, right, at the time? If that's your initial idea, you weren't going into it thinking this is going to be a giant business. You're one of the fastest-growing startups today.

[Mati Staniszewski]
We actually thought it's a huge business at the time, too. So we thought it's like, if we think about all the content, all the stories out there, how incredible if they were available in audio, and

[Mati Staniszewski]
whether it's some of the biggest streaming companies, whether that's TV, whether that's the conversations, all of those could be actually delivered in the local language. So we felt it's actually huge, and we still think it's huge. And then if you shift this to even the conversation we are having now, could this be in the future, this version where I speak Polish and you understand me in English, or I speak English and you understand me in any language that you want? In "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," there's this idea of a bubble fish that you put next to the ear, and you can understand everything around you regardless of the language they speak. So, we knew that we will get there. But initially, it was like dubbing. So I'll give you a full way of how it progressed. Initially it was dubbing, and then as we started diving into what we need to do to solve dubbing, we realized there are 3 steps in dubbing process. There is transcription step, then it's translation step to another language, and then you need to regenerate that in another, in another, in another language.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But the research that existed at the time for each of those steps wasn't very good.

[David Senra]
Which companies were doing the research?

[Mati Staniszewski]
There was a good Nvidia models, open source models.

[David Senra]
But wait, it's just an independent researcher? It's not any of the big companies?

[Mati Staniszewski]
No. I mean, everything was poor. Everything was robotic.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Everything was pretty robotic. It was still, you know, it was

[Mati Staniszewski]
still like you could immediately tell that it was like a robotic voice, and

[Mati Staniszewski]
nothing really crossed that uncanny valley yet. There was one good open source paper, an open source repo that I'm trying to recall, that was pretty good, but very unstable and still took so much time to generate. That was like the best. And Nvidia had some good research on some of those components for, especially on the speech-to-text side. Translation was okay-ish. I mean, DeepL at the time was doing incredibly well, and then you had the kind of Google Translate version of that. But all of the components to do dub were not good enough yet.

[Mati Staniszewski]
So that's part one. The research wasn't there. And part 2, when we started testing the dubbing idea with a lot of initial creators, the message we are getting back from the creators is like, "Great, I would love to get dubbing one day, but today I have different problems. My problems are I want to post-produce and change the line that was recorded in the wrong way," or, "Before I record my video, I want to be able to

[Mati Staniszewski]
narrate the script and see how it sounds." Or, "Instead of me speaking over a video, could I just have AI speak over that? So before I like even think about dubbing, can you give me that?" And that was, for us, was like, okay, before we can solve dubbing, let's solve the research component to generate speech and make it sound great.

[Mati Staniszewski]
And on the product side, let's actually deliver for people to be able to just narrate content. So, like, let's come down and ignore for a 2nd the language shift. Let's just help bringing content alive with audio with a high quality.

[David Senra]
I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should, too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. Let me make sure I understand this correctly. You're like, "We're going to dub. We're going to reach out to creators 1st." So I'm reaching a couple million people in English. Let me see if I can get this guy to say, "Hey, can I translate it? Can we dub this for Polish and Spanish and all these other things?" And then the feedback you're getting is, "Yeah, it's kind of nice, but I have many more immediate concerns, and can you help me with X, Y, Z?"

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly. And it kind of was 2 things at the same time were great because that was also true on the research side where you have this like 3 steps you need to solve in dubbing. Nothing in their space is good. We need to solve one of those steps ourselves. That's where Piotr comes in and is able to create and assemble the best research team to solve it, and he himself is an incredible researcher to actually bring that to life.

[David Senra]
Yeah, because I'm friends with MrBeast, and I remember talking to him about this a few years ago where he was the largest creator in the world, and he used to run separate YouTube channels.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And he told me, he's just like, "Yeah, well, for my Japanese, like the Japanese versions of my videos," he doesn't just dub them. He'll hire like a voice actor that's like, their voice is famous in that country.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah. One day you should, whether with us or any other company, I think you should dub your podcast. It's so much knowledge that could be brought into so many different entrepreneurs worldwide, like in Japan,

[Mati Staniszewski]
if those conversations were-

[David Senra]
It's funny you said Japan because I was thinking, I knew we were going to talk today, and I've been thinking about you the last few days. And I'm working on this episode with the founder of Honda

[David Senra]
for my other podcast, Founders. And what's surprising with that is

[David Senra]
it's not Honda the cars at this point when this guy's alive.

[David Senra]
He created the most successful mass-produced motor vehicle in history, which is the Honda Super Cub. And the way they describe their company, he's like, "We're just a research lab for engines."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Hmm.

[David Senra]
Literally, that's what he's like, "All I do is think about engines all day." He actually separated out and made the Honda R&D a separate company because he thought it was so important, and then they were just funded by a percentage of sales, but then they turned over all the research to the manufacturing division. And he's just like, "If you just have a research division and you only tell them to experiment and you staff with engineers and researchers," he's like, "they're going to constantly invent new things, and then if you're a manufacturer, you can figure out how to apply those to products."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Hmm.

[David Senra]
I was like, "That's a..." Like, I would never think... You would think, "Oh, they're a car manufacturer." He says, "No, this is a research team."

[Mati Staniszewski]
To be honest, and you started with this question, this is not too dissimilar from how I think about how we run ElevenLabs today.

[David Senra]
I know. That's why I'm telling you this.

[Mati Staniszewski]
It's very much like there's a focused research lab, there's research engineering and bringing that to the product work, and then we have a lot of small teams running after specific product problems that we can solve. And then, of course, the way to go to market and deployment of how you bring that to the customers worldwide. But the general philosophy is like a lot of small teams, usually less than 10 people, having flexibility, autonomy to just run ahead and apply their best judgment in what we can solve for the customer.

[David Senra]
Okay, you need to say more about this, though, because this is where I still am a little confused by this.

[David Senra]
Somebody doesn't know who you are, they just met you for the 1st time, they don't know what ElevenLabs is. Describe to that person how you view your own company. It's like a research lab. Is that the word you're going to use? Like, how would you describe this?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I would introduce

[Mati Staniszewski]
consistently the company as a combination of research and product deployment.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Research is frontier audio models, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, orchestration. Product is one platform that helps companies transform how they communicate with the world around them. And that can be marketing with helping them tell a story like Ramp creating their Super Bowl ad. It can be support, working with Deutsche Telekom on creating voice agents for the call center, or it can be sales, helping on inbound sales qualification to make sure that that streams through. Or even wider operations and working with the government of Poland to help create an agent that can take a healthcare appointment, follow up with a patient to remind them about the appointment, ask how they are feeling. And that kind of one combination between those is building the research, building the frontier of all voice, of all audio, and on the product, doing the part of applying that audio, combining that with knowledge, combining that with the creative work to then allow companies, people to change how they communicate.

[David Senra]
And you are solely focused on audio?

[Mati Staniszewski]
On the research side, solely focused on audio. Product, we combine the best of audio with integrations, knowledge, LLMs to help deliver for the customer.

[David Senra]
Explain why you think it's so important to be solely focused on audio on the research side.

[Mati Staniszewski]
We think we have incredible talent to be able to go after that. The focus is so important in effectively building the best architecture for those audio models. And we think audio is a good combination of not only science, but also the arts that you need to solve. It's a little bit subjective. The voices that you produce will be subjective, so you really need to get it right. But ultimately, as you think about the AI models, there's data, compute, architecture that you need. On audio, we think a lot of the problems that still exist are on the architecture side.

[Mati Staniszewski]
We want to be solely focused on solving those architecture problems so you can actually get the best quality out there. A lot of the team, a lot of the people that work on our side are the best audio researchers in the world, and they're also excited by the premise of being able to continue deploying the best frontier audio models.

[David Senra]
And do you feel you have technology on the other side that no one else in the world has?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We think so, yes.

[David Senra]
This is a weird analogy. I'm so glad I'm reading this book at the same time we're talking, because

[David Senra]
for Honda, they kept trying to get him to diversify. He's got other products. Obviously, he builds a bunch of things with engines. But he's like, "Does that product have an engine?" And they're like, "No." He's like, "Then I'm not building that product." He's like, "I focus on engines." And sometimes it's on 2 wheels and 4 wheels and everything else, but it's just engines. It's very similar to what you're saying about audio. And he also said that he felt he had the best engine technology in the world and no one else could replicate what they did.

[Mati Staniszewski]
There is a common question as we think internally of like, it's 100% true of how you described it now, too. And when we think about new product, the big question is, do we think we have a unique advantage by applying our audio models in that product experience? If the product experience doesn't have a big bottleneck in that audio and the voice communication side, then it's not our forte.

[David Senra]
Explain a situation where you realized that you shouldn't go after that opportunity. Could you give me an example of what you're describing?

[Mati Staniszewski]
The

[Mati Staniszewski]
example would, I'll give you 2 slightly different spaces. One is,

[Mati Staniszewski]
for a long time,

[Mati Staniszewski]
and I think it's still true, the ideal version in the audio space is, if you create a marketing campaign, is how that combines with a lot of the image and video work to deliver a better content. 2 years ago, we would first try to see whether we can help people create effectively lip-dubbing or avatars for

[Mati Staniszewski]
their content. So let's say you switch from one language to another, you need to move the lips, or let's say you want to narrate something, you create an avatar. That was roughly 2 years ago. A lot of the models that existed on that site just weren't good enough, and

[Mati Staniszewski]
deploying a product in the space would be such a defocus and such a shift for the company that it didn't have the audio as a superpower. It still had a bottleneck of the quality of avatars, quality of a lot of the-

[David Senra]
Because the problem to solve there is video, not audio.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly. So this was still poor. So even if you had the best audio applied into that work, still the experience wouldn't be very good. So we decided to effectively pause any of that effort. Fast-forward today, it's of course shifting now. I think there's a good set of open source models now that exist in that space where the combination of audio, image, and video can actually deliver that result. So we are revisiting that today and the recent London ads engine of bringing an ad and bringing that internationally and shifting things in the video, perfect use case of that. But still, a conscious decision we are taking is not creating the model from scratch, so like true text-to-video or like video-free type models that exist. We want to be at that intersection where we know the audio can give you the unique advantage, which is usually you already have an existing asset, you need to modify that asset, add that audio component, and bring it home.

[David Senra]
Do you feel this intense focus or relentless focus on audio is kind of like defense against the larger labs?

[Mati Staniszewski]
For sure.

[David Senra]
Do you talk about this in the company?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We do. The big part is our focus is audio on the research side, and that's where we want to win. I think that we also talk about this in the long, long term, that advantage that we have today will hopefully still be there, but it might not be as big on just the pure research. That's why the other components, that's why the product is so important, and that's why the ecosystem is so important that we build around that product. And maybe just to explain what I mean by the ecosystem, of course, there's the brand and trust that you built, but there are also other parts that you can build. And in our case, this was investing into effectively a marketplace model where people can

[Mati Staniszewski]
create an asset, we authenticate it, and then you can share it and earn compensation as a result. So, like, trying to create a completely different model for how that works.

[David Senra]
Give me details about that because I don't know this.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah. An example is voices.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
So we did it with voices where people can create their voice, we authenticate it, then you can share your voice, your AI voice, and passively, as your voice is being used, you earn compensation. We have 20,000 voices today on the marketplace, and new people that come in now have a selection of different accents, different styles,

[Mati Staniszewski]
different languages, of course, different age, gender that you can pick. Every time you use it, that other person gets paid.

[David Senra]
Do you, as a company, make these voices, any of these voices, or is it just 3rd parties?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We, of course, created a system for people to do that, and some of them, when we see pockets that are missing, we'll ourselves try to go after and find people to fill those pockets that are missing and create those voices for the wider ecosystem to benefit.

[David Senra]
No one knows about 11 Reader. You have to do a better job. I was listening to your episode with Jon Carlson, who I love, and I don't think he even knew. He kept saying, he's like, "Why doesn't this exist?" You're like, "There's an app." And then the follow-up, he still talked to us like, "No, dude, I use that app. What you're asking for, Jon, is he already has it. You need to show it to him on your phone when you were recording the podcast with him." So I use George. That's the voice I... In fact, we do all these research reports for the people that come on.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Thanks for being a user. That's amazing.

[David Senra]
No, of course. It's a fantastic product, and it turns every document into essentially a podcast that I can listen to when my eyes are busy. But the funny thing is, we do these research dossiers about everybody that comes on, and so I put the one about you into 11 Reader, so I'm listening [Speaker 2 chuckling] to you about you in your own product.

[David Senra]
But in George's case, is that coming from you guys? Is somebody else getting paid when I'm listening to George?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah, somebody else is getting paid.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
It's a great voice actor that worked with us for now for a long time, and every time you listen, he gets paid.

[David Senra]
Do you understand when we sat down, I was like,

[David Senra]
one, I keep running into you everywhere, and so I was like, "Dude, we got to do a podcast together." But you're so confusing to me, and in a great way. This is not a negative thing. Because I was like, "I don't even know how to describe your company." You're doing all this research, but then you have all these other different products. This is very unusual, especially for somebody that's so super focused.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But

[Mati Staniszewski]
it is very fair, and I think we are seeing that everywhere across the AI companies of the model becomes the platform becomes the application. But for us, the unifying theme across all of them is that angle of communication. We think how you communicate as a company, how you think about content communicate, all of that is changing, and we want to be at the intersection of that. We build the best models to help you do that, and then build a platform that effectively delivers that content, delivers knowledge, delivers the conversation a completely new way. And of course, there's just so many different applications. There's 11 Reader that lets you enjoy content a completely new way.

[David Senra]
So research, platform, applications on that platform.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
And

[Mati Staniszewski]
we explicitly are not planning to touch any of the intelligence or knowledge work or coding. Not our strength, not our domain, but we are-

[David Senra]
That's a vicious battle, too.

[Mati Staniszewski]
A very vicious battle. Lots of great companies in there. But what we would love to be is, if you think about the next 3 years or however many years, there will be probably 3 platforms that you set all the interactions on those platforms. We want to be the leading platform for those interactions, for that communication.

[David Senra]
Wait, explain that.

[Mati Staniszewski]
The whole way, and that kind of builds on that theme. How you engage with content, how you engage with the other company will change. We want to help people, companies

[Mati Staniszewski]
have one place, one platform where you can set it up. You can set up your integrations, you can bring your knowledge, you can bring your brand, you can bring your assets from the company, and then deploy that for entirety of customer journey. Whether that's in the marketing example where you tell that story through content, capture that knowledge back about the user, whether that's in sales when you're trying to engage and bring your product to the customers, whether you are supporting that across the customer journey, or maybe in a simpler way, as you are trying to understand the customer journey,

[Mati Staniszewski]
every on-brand interaction that that journey has, we would love to be able to capture and help you make that better for-

[David Senra]
Okay. So let's make this concrete because I still want to be able to wrap my head around this. Let's take your most deeply integrated customer.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Right? And say it's Goldman Sachs. I'm making this up. And this is how they use this product, all the different products they use. Who's the company or one of the companies that is most deeply integrated with your company? And explain how all the different suite of products that they're using that are powered by your technology.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Deutsche Telekom is a great example. They will use-

[Mati Staniszewski]
A lot of the audio work to create a podcast in their app, in the Magenta, they will do that for the ads so they can create ads and distribute that to their audience. There was a lot of our Eleven creative work to be able to do that. Then they will use

[Mati Staniszewski]
our Eleven agents work for in call center where you call in, you want the help,

[Mati Staniszewski]
you get that help through the voice agent integrated with the knowledge from Deutsche Telekom, so you can make sure that if somebody is calling in to learn about the product, they get that information very quickly. If they are calling to get support on how to

[Mati Staniszewski]
get a refund or the recent billing request, they can get that help. And then more recently, they even deployed an agent inside of the network. So if you are a T-Mobile subscriber, if you call, you can ask agent to join the call and help you out, schedule a booking, or real-time translate your conversation to the other person, and they'll use our effectively combination of agents work and bringing that real-time dubbing to be able to communicate in other language. And that's across all of that, all of that information is captured back so you understand how customers engage with, in this case, with the full spectrum of the journey, marketing, the support, and then the wider operations, even sales, and we help them do all of that.

[David Senra]
Okay. So in a situation like that, because I think you mentioned, like, obviously a huge increase in your revenue. It's growing really fast. It's like you're targeting bigger companies, right? What was the 1st product Deutsche Bank used from you?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Deutsche Telekom.

[David Senra]
Deutsche Telekom, sorry.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah. The first was marketing. So it was 2 years ago,

[Mati Staniszewski]
most of the...

[Mati Staniszewski]
Two years ago, still most of the agents were really very good. They weren't very reliable. They weren't very quick. So marketing was the most obvious one, so they started with that. They deployed that. The quality of the content was

[Mati Staniszewski]
great, and so people could engage with the podcast. Effectively, the use case that you mentioned of, like bringing your

[Mati Staniszewski]
notes and then being able to read them out loud-

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm

[Mati Staniszewski]
... they were just creating that daily for all the customers so they could read about what's happening in the world through the podcast with ElevenLabs voices.

[Mati Staniszewski]
So that was the first use case. Then, of course, support is a combination of voice but also the integrations.

[David Senra]
Well, talk about how you expanded them from one product to the next. Like, how do you actually do that?

[Mati Staniszewski]
In that case, the main... And I guess mostly, like, how do we partner with them to help them bring that product to life, or-

[David Senra]
Yeah, they start with one, but you have 10 different products you could sell them.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So how do you go from one to 2 and then 2 to 5 and so on and so forth?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah, I think the main thing is, one,

[Mati Staniszewski]
you, of course, deploy the first one. You make sure that there is value behind that. So across any customer engagement, we try to make sure that we not only prove concepts, we prove the impact, prove the value, and only after that we try to get the companies working with us at the broader scale. So we prove the impact on the marketing side. To get the support going, what you actually need to do is not only the audio, you need to build the integrations. So you need to connect it with

[Mati Staniszewski]
all the CRM systems that Deutsche Telekom works with. You need to work on integrations with the outputs. So how do you connect it to the phone system, with SIP trunking or Twilio? How you make sure that that connection exists? So you would spend a lot of time on integrations, making sure that their logic is respected on how when you do pick up the phone call, the agent behaves the way you want it to behave. So here, our 4 deploy engineers would partner with the team, spend the time in Bonn, in this case, in Germany, working through side by side together on the integration, on just being able, making sure that the agent follows the flow that you want, has the knowledge that it should have. And then

[Mati Staniszewski]
in that step, the hardest thing in any voice agent work is actual deployment of how you actually test that it works. So then you need to trial that. We've

[Mati Staniszewski]
initially simulated that. You verify the calls, then you do it at smaller scale.

[David Senra]
And you're doing this with FTEs?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes. We do all that with FTEs, then we deploy, and then, of course, we scale over time.

[David Senra]
When did you realize that a huge path to greatly increasing your revenue was doing FTEs?

[Mati Staniszewski]
And before I answer this, and of course, the last part is, like, as you deploy, the job isn't done. You still want to continue, evaluate, monitor, and refine the behavior over time. And that applies across all of the use cases, and FTEs for that are great too. So I used to be at Palantir, so it always felt like a big thing of how we want to work with customers. And it's like almost I don't like the word customers because in many ways, I feel like all of them are like partners where you are working together on the same problem and try to solve that. So there was a lot of the philosophy of the FTEs was there from the start, to make it specific, working with the partners side by side on their problem and their office.

[David Senra]
Hold on. This is actually really interesting. So tell me what you observed that was working at Palantir where you were like, "Ooh, if I start my company, I want to do that too," and why?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I think the most incredible thing was that, like, you were meant to be

[Mati Staniszewski]
on the same side of customer, obsessed of their problem, and try to understand them deeply from the beginning. So I used to work at BlackRock before Palantir. And BlackRock, when I joined, given the compliance, security, the 1st month or 2,

[Mati Staniszewski]
when you send an email, it gets verified by your team, gets trained before you send it externally. So it's like a

[Mati Staniszewski]
pretty detailed flow of making sure that it's good. In Palantir, when I joined, after the onboarding in the 1st month, I'm like, "Okay, you now need to work and understand the customer. You're flying to Aberdeen, to North Sea to work side by side with them, understand what's happening, and then bring it back." And that was complete shock for me and the kind of the approach and culture of like, I have never almost interacted with a customer on the BlackRock side. And now here I am in the 1st weeks, and meant to go there and be next to them, which was crazy. I thought it was great. I thought it was that mentality and every time kind of you are going to be there on the, I'll call it frontline, loosely, on the frontline-

[Mati Staniszewski]
... to work with them and bring that knowledge back, understand what is actually the problem, what's fixable problem, and then actually fix it. And that mentality is so true now at ElevenLabs too, where all of our FDEs, our go-to-market team too, is going to obsess of like, "How can I actually be there with the customer, understand the problem, and work with that?" There was other companies that I think were great, the small teams. They had usually small deployment teams that worked on a lot of that, the best idea wins concept was very true, where in that small team, you very quickly assembled the best knowledge of what you think should be done for that customer, and you had power to then actually enact on it.

[David Senra]
Define small.

[Mati Staniszewski]
About 5 people is considered in Palantir big, and in ElevenLabs it's going to be also relatively big. I'll tell you something more though on the FDE side, because

[Mati Staniszewski]
of course, now you probably see every company doing FDEs. And in our case, FDEs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are part of the product team. They are deeply embedded on understanding what's the roadmap of the product. But there's a second reason, which is, one, you want all the FDEs to actually solve the customer problem and stretch your product in that direction. But 2nd thing you want them to do is bring any of that knowledge back to the product so the product becomes better for the next generation of companies building on top of it. And I feel like the 2nd part is always frequently

[Mati Staniszewski]
missed, where it's like 1st, okay, FDEs are doing effectively a lot of the

[Mati Staniszewski]
hard integration work to solve the problem. But if you don't do the second step of how you actually learn the expertise and bring it back to the product, then it's effectively just services or just-

[David Senra]
Wait, say more about that second part. So you're gleaning information through trial and error, working closely with them. Then you can take that back and spread that knowledge across the other tens of thousands of customers that you have?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Is that what you're talking about?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly. And it's a product knowledge of how you operate with... There are simple things. Let's say you build an integration. How do I now have that integration available to everyone? That's a simpler version of that. But let's say you are working in healthcare space.

[Mati Staniszewski]
In healthcare space, if you deploy the work, then you want to optimize the product experience for

[Mati Staniszewski]
the right...

[Mati Staniszewski]
If you are now starting as a 2nd customer, you want to make sure that you have-

[David Senra]
So wait a minute. You're using-

[Mati Staniszewski]
Exactly

[David Senra]
... your customer base as almost like R&D, another form of R&D.

[Mati Staniszewski]
You are definitely accelerating your R&D through understanding the domain that you're working with. And it's kind of-

[David Senra]
Because their problems are not... Very rarely a company's problems is unique to that company.

[Mati Staniszewski]
That's right. And the beauty of that is kind of everybody benefits, because you work with one customer, you learn, you bring that into the product experience. You learn with another one, you learn, you bring it back to the product experience. Both of those customers benefited from having their product optimized for the better work. The domain expertise they have is still theirs. They can win based on the domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, can be reusable.

[David Senra]
What else did you learn working at Palantir?

[Mati Staniszewski]
They also were

[Mati Staniszewski]
very much of no title organization, which we carry over at ElevenLabs, which does help in that best idea wins approach, where people do feel... I feel like I'm mimicking you on that shirt.

[David Senra]
I thought the same thing. I was like, "You don't have to if you don't want to."

[Mati Staniszewski]
No, it's a complete coincidence.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Change of clothes.

[David Senra]
We're leaving that part in.

[Mati Staniszewski]
No titles, relatively flat organization, very few layers. So it's like between me and the C-suite, I worked there before the DPO, it was 4, 5 steps or less. So you always felt like a proximity between... I think it was like 4 or 3, actually. So it was a good proximity of being able to work together. At ElevenLabs, we have a couple 5 today, like maximum depth of how many layers there should be. And hopefully over time, actually, there will be fewer, not more layers, if AI helps you run the organization the way we would like to run.

[David Senra]
Well, say more about that. What can you not do today in the way you run your organization that you hope AI can change in the future?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I think there is

[Mati Staniszewski]
like always you want the information from the

[Mati Staniszewski]
person working as closely to the problem. So let's say you're developing a product. You want to speak with the engineer that actually develops that product rather than their manager. If it's a client conversation, similar, you want to understand what is that client saying from the person on the ground, rather a manager summarizing that information and giving that to you. And I think that information flow will change with AI, where you will have access to everything that's happening in a better granularity than you could ever have before, because it summarizes that back and forth. Second, I think that

[Mati Staniszewski]
in general,

[Mati Staniszewski]
roughly at ElevenLabs, most people will have close to 10 direct reports. So a pretty wide

[Mati Staniszewski]
set, which helps us build that small team approach that we have. And that too only works if you can amplify a lot of what's happening across all the teams, all the people that you work with,

[Mati Staniszewski]
to summarize information of what's happening in their teams, how they're performing, what are some of the gaps. That definitely helps and helps shift it from reactive to proactive, I think, too. What I mean by this is frequently in the past, I think you would

[Mati Staniszewski]
rely on specific individuals surfacing the information to you. Now,

[Mati Staniszewski]
as we think about ElevenLabs and how we run, it's like you can summarize all what's happening, all the data of what's working, what's not, and get that signal. I get that signal, and I can proactively engage on where I think it's not working, which helps. It helps, of course, everybody across the company because you have that same ability wherever you are. I think that maybe last part, which is very related to those 2, why it's even possible today. We took a choice to be extremely transparent with a lot of the- ... the data that we have, a lot of the docs that we write. So everybody has almost access to all the docs that are there in the company,

[Mati Staniszewski]
which ultimately helps you create that system where you can actually tap into that knowledge.

[David Senra]
Okay, so I want you to say more about this because I think this is one of the things I want to talk to you about, because you're relatively young. This is your 1st company. Your first company you built,

[David Senra]
you got into AI right away, and then you were perfectly positioned for this huge explosion. Obviously, people have been talking about AI for 80 years or whatever, but you're at the right place, right time with, I think, the right set of skills based on what the company built so far. So, how different

[David Senra]
do you think in the future the way you run your organization can be than what it is today?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I think the small teams approach will definitely be there across many of

[Mati Staniszewski]
the companies that I believe will be created in the future. It also helps with a very different piece, which is if you just think about adopting AI technology, in our case, it doesn't have to be a top-down mandate of, like, you need to use this technology to get better, and then the teams enable others. Given it's relatively small and independent, people bottoms up, adopt what they think is best and are enabled to run with it straight away. So, that helped a lot in that sense. I'll give it to others, which we believe strongly on one, in all of the small teams that we have, in all of teams that we have, we bring even non-technical teams, we bring engineering talent in those teams. So our talent team, our ops team, our legal team, all of that will have engineers that help both automate some of the work, but also elevate everybody else in how they are using AI. I think that will be a bigger pattern in the future across the companies too, where I think increasingly some of the biggest and smartest companies will try to infuse all teams with engineering resources so they can get smarter.

[David Senra]
Is there any function that is centralized at ElevenLabs that then all these small individual teams can then access? Like-

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes

[David Senra]
... I spent some time with Luca Ferrari of Bending Spoons.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And he had this wild idea to me where he's just like, "Well, HR is actually really important." He thinks the fact that tech people are dismissive of it is ridiculous. And he's like, "But my HR is 50 people and they're all engineers." And then it's like one centralized HR that every single other, because he owns I don't know how many companies, they all utilize it. But it's just like 50, I think, 50 engineers in HR, and then all the different structures, teams, and companies he has tap into that for that resource.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Of course, there are centralized functions. Legal is a good example, of course, of how we are running that needs to be very central enablement of how we help people across go-to-market and other teams, how they are kind of learning the craft of how to sell ElevenLabs. And as you said, there's so many different products. You need to be very particular about how you deliver that to the specific customer so it's not confusing the customer in what we are offering or what we do. So yes, so there's a good amount of those functions. But they all too, similar to Luca's approach, all of them will have a good amount of engineering in them and figuring out how you scale that operation so it's not becoming hundreds of people in all locations, but how you can use the few people that you have and really bring that knowledge everywhere. One of the biggest ones for us is probably around rev ops of how you, or like the revenue engineering effectively function. We have so many tools that help you

[Mati Staniszewski]
get the knowledge,

[Mati Staniszewski]
whether it's code during the conversations, transcribe, bring it back, make it easier for you to fill on a field so you capture that knowledge and then don't have to spend manual time. And then of course, increasingly, we dogfood a lot of our own work, so trying to figure out how we can create AI agents to help replace part of that work, but still operate within the team. So a good example is AI SDR. People going on the website today on ElevenLabs, you can fill in the dropdown form

[Mati Staniszewski]
and leave information about your company. But you can also speak with a voice agent and leave that in a quicker and different way. So we've seen a lot of people go through that flow, and then interestingly, 2 things happen. One, people are

[Mati Staniszewski]
both making the experience easier, they enjoy it more, but 2, they leave a lot more information than they ever would for the dropdown form. They tell us so many about the problems, about the wider set of use cases so we can connect them better.

[David Senra]
That's really interesting. So because they're speaking and not typing, you get more information.

[Mati Staniszewski]
100%.

[Mati Staniszewski]
I mean, it's of course a quicker way of doing it, but also people just feel more at ease instead of going through this manual dropdown form. It's just I

[Mati Staniszewski]
feel like a better way on leaving the information. But now, because we think it's going to be such a big part where everybody, every company will have their revenue engineering function, but in our case, we want that kind of AI SDR function to be part of the company. We

[Mati Staniszewski]
want it to help everybody across wherever you are. We are a global company, so it's central, and then deployed to each local team, so each local team can refine it for the local nuance, but developed, of course, centrally.

[David Senra]
I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book "Zero to One." The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from 1st principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

[David Senra]
Do you still think of ElevenLabs as a single company just with... How many different products do you guys have right now?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We have 3 kind of core product lines, and then we have additional 3 that are developing

[Mati Staniszewski]
bets.

[David Senra]
But how many different like applications?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Well, within each of those, we'll have, I'd say, no. But like, let's say 6 are the kind of the core and then within that you can do, of course, maybe like

[Mati Staniszewski]
20, 30 different things.

[David Senra]
Yeah, it seems like you have a ton.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Like ElevenReader, for example.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes. But it's like ElevenReader, or we have Eleven Productions, which help you with the human loop aspect to correct the content and localize that to another language.

[David Senra]
Where's all the revenue coming from?

[Mati Staniszewski]
The biggest lines are on the agent side and the creative side. So, the number of use cases that deploy conversational agents is just skyrocketing today for us.

[David Senra]
And are you seeing a specific industry that's adopting them faster or no?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I think the quickest today for us is fintech, super quick.

[David Senra]
Like Revolut?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Revolut, exactly. Klarna, PagBank, like all of those companies are just moving at another speed, or Customers Bank in US here.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Then the healthcare, retail, e-commerce, and telcos are the 4 of the biggest ones.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Fintech is moving the quickest. Of course, it's slightly different regulatory aspects.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But then I think the healthcare, telcos is kind of the 2nd, and retail e-commerce is just this year started going through the wave.

[David Senra]
I want to ask you one more time, I just want to go back to this in case we missed anything. Is there anything else that you learned working at Palantir that we didn't talk about that you think is valuable?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Well, this is a stretch, and I'm biased, but in Palantir, frequently there was this concept of like how

[Mati Staniszewski]
you need a little bit of the

[Mati Staniszewski]
understanding of the art to do your job well, or like people need to effectively try to be artists, even if

[Mati Staniszewski]
we aren't.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Like one of the phrases that was used was artist colony, and if that was ever publicly said. I never fully appreciated the strength of that, but I do feel like a lot more about this now as we kind of intersect at AI and creative space in many ways. Whether it's building the audio research models, there's a lot of nuance in how that's delivered. Like, even every voice that is delivered, like George in ElevenReader, like everybody will have their own preference, and how you make sure you capture those voices, how you deliver those preferences is a tricky challenge. And then 2, as you work with some of the brands that are trying to define how they communicate with the world, that too requires some a lot of the art in that. And we're trying to bring, of course, a lot of the people to combine that. But blending that art and science, Palantir definitely tried to do. I think I'll let others judge to do it successfully, but we also will try to do and hopefully are doing good steps in that direction, whether it's the voice marketplace that we spoke about,

[Mati Staniszewski]
whether it's having a lot of creatives in the company building projects with us or around us, or the kind of 4.0 engineers or 4.0 creatives almost to work with the customers. I think that blend will be increasingly important. And everybody talks about taste now, how like taste will be defining front of AI. And

[Mati Staniszewski]
behind the buzzword, I think there is a lot of truth to that where, yes, increasingly everybody will be able to create everything,

[Mati Staniszewski]
and what defines above good product experience, good deployment experience will depend on

[Mati Staniszewski]
how the design language sounds, how tasteful it is, how you bring that across. So I think Palantir tried to do it. We are trying to do it too.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I think what you're getting at is there's this guy named Edwin Land. He's the founder of Polaroid. I discovered him because he was Steve Jobs' hero, and Steve Jobs talked about-

[Mati Staniszewski]
Oh, yeah. I remember it. Yeah.

[David Senra]
I talk to him about it on Founders episodes all over and over again. I should get a framed picture of Edwin Land and like put him in the studio or something. But he was the one that invented the idea that Steve Jobs used where he's like, "I want to build a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts." And the reason he just came to mind is when you brought up taste, he has this great quote where he says, "Taste is as rare as a unicorn." And so it's like people talk about it all the time, but it is definitely like a limiting factor, and I think it like will always be like a limiting factor. But I love this idea. I think this is my issue with a lot of why I don't live in San Francisco. Like, I drop in there, we do a bunch of recordings, obviously have a bunch of friends that are tech founders, but it's just like, I feel this gen, like the new crop of tech founders is like they lack the humanity. Where like one thing I liked about Steve Jobs or Edwin Land or the founder of Honda, they would say over and over again, it's like, "I'm just inventing technology to enhance humanity."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Where I think a lot, some of these people are just like, "I'm inventing technology to replace it." So this leads me to another thing that I wanted to ask you about since you worked at Palantir. You've seen Alex Karp be one of the only people, and he's done it for like a year and a half, and now it's like really, really like, I think his perspective has caught on where he's just like, "If you're running these labs and you keep going on TV or giving interviews talking about I'm building like nuclear weapons grade technology and it's going to take everybody's job." I see you at too many conferences, which I want to ask you about.

[Mati Staniszewski]
No, I haven't been there.

[David Senra]
Okay, so I was just there. I was only there for a few hours, and Karp was the one that spoke 1st. And he's just like, "What do you think is going to happen?" He's like, "Your technology's going to get nationalized." Do you have any opinion on his perspective on this?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Not directly. So, of course, we've seen what happened in Anthropic case recently, given we spend, and most of our team is in Europe, spend a lot of time with the European teams and governments of how we think about building sovereignty and how important this will be. So no direct answer to your question. I do agree so much of the other part of what you said, which is AI really needs to work for the people. It needs to amplify human potential rather than replace it. And

[Mati Staniszewski]
I hope we will do a lot of the work and are doing a lot of work in that space, but I hope in some of the interviews that you mentioned and some of the conversations from other companies that this will be an increasing theme. ... of how, how they can bring that to, to reality too.

[David Senra]
The reason I, um, bring that, I ask you that question is because, uh, I think me and you were at a dinner with Scott Wu, founder of Cognition. I just recorded an episode with him. I've spent a bunch of time with Scott over the last few years, even before they launched Devin, um, I met him. And what I think he does well and what you do well is you guys are always talking about the positive benefits that your products are creating for people. Like, I think you told the story of a woman had lost her voice before she got married, and then she worked with you guys to recreate, and so therefore she could essentially redo her vows in her own voice. It's like a perfect example of that.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Voice is such a incredible identity that, like, probably in, in the case that you mentioned is so- some of our proudest work, where we can work with people that lost their voices to ALS, due to throat cancer, and work with them on, on bringing it back. That is, that is one example. Recently, we, uh, we, we worked with a musician that lost his voice, um, and

[Mati Staniszewski]
he wanted to still perform, so we worked on recreating that voice. Um, we, we set out a concert and he did a concert with his old band together with a AI voice, um, and now he's touring. And in the UK, he's going across places and, and, and, and touring across. Um, or, or, or, or a congresswoman last year lost her voice and still wanted to inspire others to do the work and, and, and was in the, in the Congress with, for the first time with AI voice, trying to, to bring that to life. Um, and the, I mean, the common theme, it's like the voice carries su- su- such an, like, additional element of, of, of emotional impact, of, of recognition. You, the moment you hear someone's voice, you recognize it if you know someone. Um, of course, that has a second part, which is like how we safeguard and how you think about safety across that future where voice can be created. Um, but yeah, that's, that's the, the, the work across there, the, the, the...

[Mati Staniszewski]
Um, today it's, it's over 10,000 people where we worked on, on bringing their voices back and, um, and hope to continue that. And outside of the, the accessibility space, of course, what, what happens in education, wider culture, here to, we partner today with 800 organizations to help, to help bring the technology to, to the people out there. One of the crazy one... Actually, that's a crazy story recently. Uh, sorry to interrupt you.

[David Senra]
Oh, go on.

[Mati Staniszewski]
There was, um, there, there's a,

[Mati Staniszewski]
like, 1st of all, a legend, a guy called Tim Green. He used to be best-selling author, a, uh, one of the top NFL players, and then unfortunately, he got ALS and, and couldn't do a lot of that work. And from all the things you could imagine him doing, he decided to go the complete extreme and he did a podcast. So he started a podcast.

[David Senra]
I'm gonna have to find this guy and chase him down. No, I'm kidding.

[Mati Staniszewski]
It's a... Well, you should, you should have an interview with him. And he, he-

[David Senra]
That's not what I meant.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But, uh-

[David Senra]
That's not what I meant, Matti.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Okay, okay. Fair, fair.

[David Senra]
I meant I will destroy him. No.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But he's, he's, uh, he's, uh, he does extremely well. He, he has great guests. He had Howard Gaultonick, uh, recently on, on his podcast, some of the NFL players. And, uh, and this year he won an Emmy for his work. So it's like, wow. So he's, uh, incredible.

[David Senra]
Wait, so you made that voice though?

[Mati Staniszewski]
We, we... Yes, we, we do his AI voice.

[David Senra]
That's incredible.

[Mati Staniszewski]
So that was, uh, one of our proud small brick, uh, contribution to, to his work. But it's, it's just so crazy, like, how, like, you know, it's like the most extreme thing you can do and, and, and he does it. He inspires... I, I don't know how many people got, got inspired, but, like, we had from hundreds to thousands of people reach out, uh, thanks, thanks to him on, like, how can we get our voice back too in the same way?

[David Senra]
Well, I think you hit on something which makes, is one of the reasons, um, and I discovered this accidentally, is like what makes podcasting so powerful is the voice, where it's like, you know, obviously I, I, like, love to read. I mean, there's books all around, like, scattered around the house everywhere. Obviously, I have like, I don't know-

[Mati Staniszewski]
Oh, you have quite a big library.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I have like 1,000 books in my other library, like probably 600 unread. Um, and there's some authors where I literally just fall in love with what they do and read every single thing they've ever written. But if you would ask, like, my emotional attachment to my favorite authors or my favorite writers, like Cormac McCarthy, for example, in fiction, compared to, like, my favorite podcasters, it's like not at all comparable. It's like I feel like I know because of the voice and, like, the, the human, like, element of that. I just feel like I know them in a way that I could never know, like, my favorite, you know, writer.

[Mati Staniszewski]
For sure. I mean, you also... It's, it's, it's, uh, even the conversation now, and it's like you, you, you... The voice carries so many other dimensions than text. Like, text, of course, you imagine, you interpret, but it doesn't have the emotion, it doesn't have the intonation, it doesn't have the imperfections, it doesn't have the pauses.

[David Senra]
The imperfection is really important 'cause, you know, some... We have some guests that come on here and they're like, "Okay, I said 'like' too much." It's like, that's how you speak. It's like we could... Yeah, we can edit it out if you want, but, like, I slur my words, I say, "Uh," I make all these kind of weird things. It's like, but that is just how I am. I don't ever wanna be, appear on a, like, a podcast, and you meet me in person, it's like this guy didn't even sound the same. Like, the imperfections. People admire imperfection, or excuse me, authenticity way more than they do perfection.

[Mati Staniszewski]
That's true.

[Mati Staniszewski]
You know, it's actually finally, it even applies in a, a non-human way, in a voice agent's way too. We, we... Initially, we are trying to create a perfect voice agent that doesn't do any, any imperfections.

[David Senra]
But it doesn't sound human.

[Mati Staniszewski]
It didn't sound human. And then, of course, the obvious thing,

[Mati Staniszewski]
uh, that, that, that was the clearest is like the ums, the ums, the pauses. And suddenly, the performance of working with that voice agent, like, skyrocketed. Everybody was like, "Oh, this is so human. This is good. I am happy to speak with that." So, uh, so yeah, it's making it imperfect. It's almost now the, the, the element of that. But

[Mati Staniszewski]
voice does carry that information. It, it kind of connects you in a completely different way. And why I think also it's such a hard research challenge, because here, you know, in, in text, you don't have that many of those, um, of, of, of those dimensions. You need a lot of data, of course, to create a good language model, but you don't have the dimensions of every voice being different, every voice sounding different to every person. Um, so, like, even doing benchmarks for text-to-speech is extremely hard. Because usually different models will have different voices. That already makes them incomparable.

[David Senra]
Did you know when you were younger that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I would say I didn't know this was a path for a while.

[David Senra]
You did or did not?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Didn't. I was, you know, I-

[David Senra]
Because you're European.

[Mati Staniszewski]
In Poland it was... Yeah, for sure a little bit of that, though. You're joking, but I think it's true.

[David Senra]
No, I'm being serious.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Taking the risk of

[Mati Staniszewski]
not

[Mati Staniszewski]
starting something, it wasn't like a common conversation ever happening. I mean, I had the luck of having incredible family that kind of gave me opportunity to study abroad, and then that kind of opened your eyes of like, okay, now you can work with some of the great companies. And then when you work with those great companies, then you realize you can actually do things.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Palantir was great for that, for sure, where it's like you can actually go and work with a customer, try to figure out the problem. That seemed very risky to me, but you can do that. So kind of step by step, that opened the eyes of like, okay, maybe this is a path. Maybe it is possible to start your own thing, and...

[David Senra]
From the time you had that realization to the time you started ElevenLabs, what was the-

[Mati Staniszewski]
So then as you kind of-

[David Senra]
Was it a year, 2 years? Like, what was it?

[Mati Staniszewski]
So over my time at Palantir, my co-founder's, Piotr, time at Google, we would start doing hack weekend projects together. So through the years, we tried to explore new technology and build together. I think a few years prior, we knew that we would love to work on something together, but you want to work something that you think is a true problem and you're obsessed about. And that came to us in 2021, so a few years, 2 or 3 years.

[David Senra]
How many acquisition offers have you had?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Like concrete ones, 3 or 4.

[David Senra]
When's the last one?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Last one was last year, like June last year.

[David Senra]
You going to sell?

[Mati Staniszewski]
No.

[David Senra]
The reason I ask you-

[Mati Staniszewski]
AI is changing the world. We can build the frontier of that change. We

[Mati Staniszewski]
are going all in. This is,

[Mati Staniszewski]
I mean-

[David Senra]
Don't pay attention to VCs, dude. Their incentives are different than yours. The reason I ask you is there's 2 reasons this came to mind. And some of this is all intuition, you can't even describe this, but Evan Spiegel sat in that exact same chair that you're in. People gave me shit. They're like, "Why you want to interview Evan?

[David Senra]
Look at his market cap." I was like, "I don't give a shit about his market cap." Like, I don't look at companies that way. I'm obsessed with products. And that dude has soul in the game. And I hope he wins. I have no idea.

[David Senra]
I don't know anything about

[David Senra]
Snapchat, specs, anything, whatever. It's just like he is differentiated. There's just something about him that I like that I just want him to work out well, right? And I'm getting the same exact vibe. I was like, "Man, I want Matti to win. I want him to succeed." There's just something very likable about you. And then the second reason is because obviously Scott Wu, he's coming on the show every few months because I really like Scott a lot.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Because he's a genius. He's so good as well.

[David Senra]
Well, yeah, but he's articulate and brilliant and optimistic, but everybody is running at that dude right now. Everybody. Like, the amount of people that want to buy his company, and this is something we talked about. And I hope he holds out because I would like to see a lot more people just be like, "No, I'm in this forever." It's not just to get a big bag of money.

[David Senra]
Go listen to Travis from Uber. He made billions and billions of dollars from Uber. And he's just like, "That did not make me happy. I need something to work on." And see, that's why I asked you the question, because I asked Scott that, too, and he's just like, "Well, there are obviously a ton of people trying to

[David Senra]
either get him or his entire company and all his talent." And he's just so far said, "No, I'm not selling."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Love Scott. I think they should build independent company, too. I think they have an opportunity to be one of the hyper AIs of the future, or however you call the hyper clouds of the future.

[Mati Staniszewski]
So I think he can do it.

[Mati Staniszewski]
They have an incredible team, and I think we can do it, too.

[Mati Staniszewski]
I really mean it. I think the opportunity that

[Mati Staniszewski]
currently exists for entrepreneurs with the wider shift, the

[Mati Staniszewski]
things haven't been written, and it's such a good time to build something special and-

[David Senra]
I think shows like this are really important because most of the podcasts are made by VCs, right? It's just like the content that entrepreneurs-

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah, it's true.

[David Senra]
The content that entrepreneurs are-

[Mati Staniszewski]
It's almost self-serving in many ways, I feel.

[David Senra]
Well, the content entrepreneurs are consuming are created by VCs. It's just a weird thing to me.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And what I would say is it's like the amount of fucking founders that I've talked to that have sold their company are like, "Shit." Like, "I had something, it was going really well. They gave me a bunch of money. Now they tell me what to do." I was like, "What did you think the money was for?" Like, no one's just going to give you a bunch of money and then you still retain the independence to do whatever you want. And then it's in all these freaking biographies from Ted Turner to, like, there's just a 1000000 people that talk about it after the fact. And they got huge bags, billions and billions of bags. They're like, "I'd give the billions back if I could just have my company back." And listen, man, I think you're smart and driven, but highly likely, ElevenLabs is probably the best idea you will ever have in your life.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Oh, sure.

[David Senra]
And you're how old?

[Mati Staniszewski]
31.

[David Senra]
Okay, so you're going to sell your best idea at 31? You got 4 decades ahead of you, maybe 5.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah, but it's-

[David Senra]
Hold on. And you're going to work on your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th best idea? Dude, the money's not worth it. It's not worth it. You're going to get the money anyways.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Well, you're convincing me of something I'm already convinced of.

[David Senra]
I know, but they all say this shit. The founders all say this, and it's really hard when it's like, "Dude, I'm going to drop 50 billion on you."

[David Senra]
The numbers are getting crazy, so I understand why people do it. I'm not knocking them. I'm just saying I'm

[David Senra]
very interested in entrepreneurs that there's no price. Again, I've repeated this over and over again, it's super important to understand. It's like everybody's like, "Oh, if you love what you do, you do it for free." No, there's another level. If you love what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop. How much money would you have to give Steve Jobs and say, "I'll give you 2 trillion, Steve, but you can't work on Apple." He'd say, "Go fuck yourself." There's not a dollar amount in the world that could stop him from doing that, and the world is better because he didn't stop doing it.

[Mati Staniszewski]
I'm with you there.

[Mati Staniszewski]
I agree. Many people, I think, will say it. In our case, we had- Lack of having acquisition offers, which we turned down, and that was not

[Mati Staniszewski]
an option. And any of those acquisitions would... It's not 2 1000000000000, but they would have made

[Mati Staniszewski]
life

[Mati Staniszewski]
easy, of course.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But I think that in itself should never be an interesting proposition. And like you said, it's like we do appreciate this is likely the best idea, the best timing to have that kind of lack of when it's all happened is such an incredible coincidence. And I don't know how the world will look like in 5 to 10 years.

[Mati Staniszewski]
How will the universal high-income piece and conversation come in? How the wider society will adopt the technology? How will you actually provide that? All of those questions are out there, and I think they will be a big part. So of course, the best thing that I think we can do for the world and for us is just to continue building.

[David Senra]
Did you read Scott Wu's piece in Colossus, the Colossus magazine?

[Mati Staniszewski]
No.

[David Senra]
That's done by my friend Patrick.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yes.

[David Senra]
I'll text it to you right when we're done. Put in 11.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Okay, I'll listen to it on the way.

[David Senra]
Yeah, put it in 11 reader and listen to it. What I loved, what his perspective was, at the end, he's like, "Listen," he thinks he, same thing, right person, right set of skills, right time. He thinks this teaching AI how to code,

[David Senra]
teaching computers how to code is one of the most interesting problem he could think of. And he's like, "Listen, I could accept that if I try and fail." But what he felt was intolerable, I forgot the word he used, but it's something like intolerable, is like, "I didn't even try."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
He's like, "I just want to give this one opportunity, the best opportunity in my lifetime," which he understands. I think he's around your age, too. He's like, "I'm just going to give it everything I have and see what happens."

[Mati Staniszewski]
It's like some version of

[Mati Staniszewski]
biggest risk is not taking any risks, and some version of you should just go after it.

[David Senra]
Does your co-founder think about this the same way?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah. He's also all in. He doesn't like public presence,

[Mati Staniszewski]
as in interviews, podcasts, but he truly is a genius. I hope one day he comes on the podcast, too.

[David Senra]
Anytime he wants.

[Mati Staniszewski]
He is, of course, a great researcher, but beyond the researcher, he also can bring a lot of those ideas in business and other parts of the space and kind of understands what's happening and how it happens. But on the research side,

[Mati Staniszewski]
the kind of the AGI pill and how that world will change is very deeply in his mind, and he knows that he can be, and he and now the wider research team are all part of that change. So, it's

[Mati Staniszewski]
unique opportunity. I think all of us realize that how unique the timing is and what we can do with that timing and what we can do for the world. I think that we are four and a half years in as a company and-

[David Senra]
Because your-

[Mati Staniszewski]
... at that scale, it's crazy.

[David Senra]
Because your opinion is that the next form factor isn't a device. It's actually just the way you're going to interact with AI is just your voice.

[Mati Staniszewski]
100% will be one of the biggest ways. In general, intelligence keeps developing. The next bottleneck of how you actually get access to that intelligence will be how you communicate with that intelligence, how you collaborate with that intelligence, and we can solve that. We can solve that for everyone out there.

[David Senra]
12 months from now, how do you think the way you communicate with AI is different than it is today then?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Voice is definitely part of it, but it kind of understands you. It's able to connect the IQ plus the EQ part of it. Emotionally understand you, knows how you're feeling, can adjust based on that, can pause, can think, can reinsert itself into the conversation. In some crazy way, for the decades, we learn how

[Mati Staniszewski]
technology around works and learn the language of that technology, the keyboard, the screen,

[Mati Staniszewski]
the coding languages even.

[Mati Staniszewski]
You need to learn how the technology works so you can

[Mati Staniszewski]
control it. And now, what I think we can solve is flip it back to how we want to communicate, how the most primal way is voice conversation, and you can bring technology on our terms. So, I think 12 months from now, what will happen is similar as we are speaking. I think the technology will be able to understand us in an incredibly better way, both our knowledge, both the emotional part of that conversation, and deliver similar conversation we are having now.

[David Senra]
And if that's the case, then the market for this and even the use case, the amount of people using AI will drastically explode. I think there's actually a historical equivalent that just popped to mind when you were speaking, where it's like Alexander Graham Bell was talking about the difference between the telegraph and the telephone. And the telegraph could send messages over long distances, but you had to learn how to program it and use it, and you had to learn this language to send it. And he's like, "The phone, you just pick up and do exactly what you do already."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah, 100%.

[Mati Staniszewski]
I think even I'm looking at around the room, I feel like there will be so many devices as well that will just be able to work on your terms. Hopefully the screen, the phone will kind of be able to be back in the back pocket because you won't need it in the same way as you do now. So it'll be cool.

[David Senra]
When you 1st started the company, you mentioned this from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy." So, was you and your co-founder's ideal version of your product the Babelfish?

[Mati Staniszewski]
It was on one of the slides that we thought that, yes, Babelfish will exist and we'll hopefully make it happen. But less so that we will create Babelfish itself, but we will enable everyone out there to have Babelfish in their existing devices, existing presence, existing work. That was definitely one of the

[Mati Staniszewski]
kind of the north stars that we were thinking about.

[David Senra]
Okay, another question I have for you.

[David Senra]
Why do you always pop up at all these conferences?

[Mati Staniszewski]
I don't do that many, I think.

[David Senra]
I get these emails. So Daniel Ek, obviously a close friend of mine, he hounds me on this, and he's right. He's like, "Dude, you have one of the most elegant businesses in the world." He's like, "All you have to do is sit inside a room and make podcasts, and every single thing that you want in life will come to you." And his line for this is like, "Stay away from the circus."

[Mati Staniszewski]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And so the only ones I do, obviously do events for my partners, like Ramp, where I saw you at the Ramp dinner. And I obviously love Michael Dell, so I do his too, and I do nothing else. And because of Daniel's advice, just stay away from the circus. The people that show up at these things, they aren't doing any work. They're just there to distract. You don't have to do it. And so then I get all these emails and invitations, like, "Come to this thing," and I open it up, and I see your face everywhere.

[David Senra]
What are you doing?

[Mati Staniszewski]
No, I usually try to do

[Mati Staniszewski]
2 to 3 per quarter, usually, conferences or events.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But in our case, it's a little bit different because for a lot of the people that are usually on the conferences, they are partners or prospective partners or clients. So, it is usually a great way of forcing function of having them in one place and trying to figure out how we build together. That's the benefit of the breadth of the work we do, that a lot of, especially on the conversational agents work, that applies to most of the businesses of how they think about communicating with their customers, how they are thinking about changing customer journey. So, a lot of the events are a great way for us to

[Mati Staniszewski]
catch time with a lot of the people that we work with.

[David Senra]
And then turn them into customers.

[Mati Staniszewski]
And turn them into customers.

[David Senra]
All right, so you are welcome.

[Mati Staniszewski]
Or expand the one to 2 or 5, whatever it is. The common trope, and I remember thinking back in the day when we started, I got the 1st invite for one of those conferences, and it's like, "Oh, this is super cool, super fun." And then you go. I'm European, so I drank alcohol at the time as well. And then I felt tired. I didn't think I did anything. And it

[Mati Staniszewski]
seemed fun, but it wasn't very productive. And then I had the period was like

[Mati Staniszewski]
not-

[David Senra]
Did you have nothing to sell at the time?

[Mati Staniszewski]
At the time, I didn't know

[Mati Staniszewski]
what's the purpose of the conference. I think it was the lack of preparedness on my side, where I was going into the conference and just flowing through it. And I think it was a kind of terrible thing. It's like you go there, you have the sessions, and some of them are, of course, good, but most of them are not relevant to you or your business, or they are the circus part that you mentioned, that you feel you are doing something important. It's completely unimportant. And that's kind of... Then I didn't do any events, and then I realized that it's like, actually, you can do them well. You do need to prepare. You need to pre-arrange a lot of the one-on-ones you want to do during the conference. Everybody is there at that time. You don't want to do too many of them because there's some repeating crowd across those events, so you want to do the ones which is kind of different. And of course, you want to be pretty explicit to the other side, too, that they know what they are, that you are pitching them and they are relaxing. That's like a bad recipe for disaster.

[Mati Staniszewski]
But many people want that, too. They are there to do exactly the same thing, do business and figure it out. So now it works really well for me. I do good prep. We pre-arrange a lot of time. I never go and try to be there for just the sessions or just the content or way. Of course, I speak frequently on those conferences, but the main thing is trying to grab time with the people that are there, and that has been working really well.

[David Senra]
Are you still drinking?

[Mati Staniszewski]
No. On the weddings, but apart from that, it's yeah.

[David Senra]
Every time I go to Europe, I have the same thought when I get back, "I should drink more."

[Mati Staniszewski]
It's so much fun.

[David Senra]
It's like they just know how to have fun.

[Mati Staniszewski]
There are social circumstances where I would drink. They are just so infrequent now that

[Mati Staniszewski]
I wouldn't do it.

[David Senra]
Okay. Next time we are at one of these rare conferences together, let's make sure we have a drink. All right? Deal?

[Mati Staniszewski]
Deal. Deal.

[David Senra]
All right, man. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. Always. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show 1st found me through "Founders."