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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
ElevenLabs CEO on voice AI, teams, enterprise, and licensing
- ElevenLabs sustains fast, high-quality shipping by running many small, high-ownership product teams alongside a strong research core led by its cofounder.
- The company balances research versus product pragmatism by shipping product “gap fixes” when research breakthroughs are unlikely within roughly three months.
- A remote-first talent strategy (with regional hubs) helps ElevenLabs hire exceptional and non-traditional candidates globally, while maintaining culture through in-person immersion where needed.
- To reduce creative-industry resistance, ElevenLabs built creator-aligned economics via a Voice Marketplace and pursued fully licensed music generation through lengthy label negotiations.
- As ElevenLabs moves from creator-first PLG to enterprise adoption, it is building orchestration, integrations, reliability, and governance—while adapting culture and incentives for long sales cycles.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasUse small, independent teams to keep shipping speed high.
ElevenLabs runs ~20 product teams of 5–10 people with high autonomy and ownership, accepting some duplication as the cost of moving quickly.
Set a time threshold for when product should patch what research can’t.
They avoided “UI sliders” in favor of solving problems at the model level, but adopted a rule of thumb: if research will take >3 months, ship a product workaround now.
Remote-first can be a competitive advantage if paired with intentional hubs.
They hired globally (including non-traditional backgrounds) and later added hubs (London/Warsaw/SF) to help new or early-career hires absorb context and culture.
Flattening hierarchy works, but requires strong cross-team ‘leads’ and focus control.
ElevenLabs removed titles and kept few leadership layers; to avoid distraction from radical transparency, they limit broad Slack exposure so teams maintain attention.
Creator-aligned monetization can turn AI skepticism into participation.
The Voice Marketplace lets users create/share voices and earn revenue; they report ~10,000 voices and $10M paid back to the community, reframing AI as opportunity.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesSo we launched Voice Marketplace, where you, you could create your voice and then, uh, share it. And when the voice is shared, you earn money in the return. Today, we have almost ten thousand voices. We paid ten million dollars back to the people in the community.
— Mati Staniszewski
We don't want to do any sliders, any toggles. We don't want to become same as previous generation of, of the editing suites. So instead, let's solve it on the research level, where it will know based on the voice exactly how it should speak with the speed.
— Mati Staniszewski
I think ElevenLabs wouldn't have existed if we weren't starting from Europe.
— Mati Staniszewski
So we removed titles a year ago, and then, um-- and it's, it's going well. It still works.
— Mati Staniszewski
In some ways, the, the quota, the commissions are a effectively a lagging indicator of strategy.
— Mati Staniszewski
SPEAKERS
Mati Staniszewski
guestCofounder and CEO of ElevenLabs, an AI voice technology company.
Jennifer Li
hosta16z host/interviewer moderating the session with ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
