Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs

1. 0:00 – 2:59

   Building an AI-Native Company Before ChatGPT

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [whooshing sound] 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 forty-plus years of experience-

   2. MSMati Staniszewski0:14

      Yeah

   3. DSDavid Senra0:14

      ... he's been dominating for decades. And when I saw him, we had like a thirty-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."

   4. MSMati Staniszewski0:29

      [laughs]

   5. DSDavid Senra0:29

      So I wanna start with, like, how you think about building your company AI native from today.

   6. MSMati Staniszewski0:36

      Yeah, Michael is a legend. He is, uh-- He must have so many interesting perspectives, especially, like, he's still running the, the company. So i-i-it'll be interesting whether he applies some of that difference to, to, um, to the current running of the show. But for us, you know, in some ways, given we are first-time founders, me and Piotr Szmaj, my co-founder and my best friend of fifteen years, ElevenLabs is the first venture we started.

   7. DSDavid Senra0:59

      That's insane. [laughs] You started in two thousand and twenty-two. You launched before the first version of ChatGPT, right?

   8. MSMati Staniszewski1:06

      We did.

   9. DSDavid Senra1:06

      Okay.

   10. MSMati Staniszewski1:06

       We-- It was, it was still a year when the, the topics of the day were, uh, crypto and metaverse. So two thousand and twenty-two was still a year where, like, everybody was obsessed about those two. So it was a perfect time because we could actually focus and build on a, a lo- a lot on the AI side.

   11. DSDavid Senra1:20

       What were you doing before you founded this company?

   12. MSMati Staniszewski1:23

       I was at Palantir, so I was helping build optimization models and bring optimization models to the customers. So, um, NHS during the COVID response on how you distribute vaccines across, across UK, or working with oil and gas industry and figuring out how to optimize, um, um, uh, their energy, uh, at work. So a lot of optimization models and then working with customers on, like, actually figuring out how you bring that into, into their production. And my co-founder was at Google, and he, he did a lot of the text, uh, models for knowledge graph. Before that, did research at university around image, uh, visual models, so incredible brains. 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, BlackRock, building risk models, bringing that to customers, and by background, study mathematics. So good intersection of the things I liked. And now at, at ElevenLabs, that's also what, what I do. And that's also from the company lens, and when we started, that was the whole goal of, like, 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 twenty twenty-two, the first 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?

   13. DSDavid Senra2:56

       Wait, so the first idea, you started with audio.

   14. MSMati Staniszewski2:58

       We started with audio.

   15. DSDavid Senra2:58

       Why?

2. 2:59 – 12:37

   Why ElevenLabs Started With Audio & Dubbing

   1. MSMati Staniszewski2:59

      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, the whole movie. All the emotional intonation disappears. And, um, and it's still-- So we grew up with this. Everybody in Poland grows up with it. It's like, you know, one person dubbing. And then in twenty twenty-one, we retested or re, uh, experienced this still happening in, in, in, in that content. And then second thing happened, which was-

   2. DSDavid Senra3:34

      Wait, it, it was still happening in movies in twenty twenty-one-

   3. MSMati Staniszewski3:36

      Yes

   4. DSDavid Senra3:36

      ... that you'd watch in Poland?

   5. MSMati Staniszewski3:37

      Yes.

   6. DSDavid Senra3:38

      Same thing that was happening when you were a kid.

   7. MSMati Staniszewski3:40

      Exactly.

   8. DSDavid Senra3:40

      Okay.

   9. MSMati Staniszewski3:40

      And it's, it's, it's crazy because it's, you know, of course, it's cheaper, easier to do, quicker timeline, but the, the quality is, is poor. Like, as you can imagine, it's a, 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, uh, a week ago, we, we released finally a model that is able to do that extremely well and, 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, will change, and that will apply in 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 do-

   10. DSDavid Senra4:32

       This is what you thought back in two thousand and twenty-two, or what do you think today?

   11. MSMati Staniszewski4:34

       In two thousand and twenty-two, we knew that you will, you will need to unlock the stories, the content across the modalities and channels. We didn't yet know how quickly the kind of the shift from static to interactive will happen. We hope this will happen, but we didn't know how quickly.

   12. DSDavid Senra4:48

       So the first idea was-

   13. MSMati Staniszewski4:50

       First idea was that-

   14. DSDavid Senra4:50

       ... dub static content-

   15. MSMati Staniszewski4:53

       Exactly

   16. DSDavid Senra4:53

       ... 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.

   17. MSMati Staniszewski4:58

       Exactly.

   18. DSDavid Senra4:59

       That had to be-- appear like a tiny business though, right, at the time? Like, if that's your initial idea, you were-- you didn't go-- you weren't going into it thinking, "This is gonna be a giant business." Like, you're one of the fastest-growing startups today.

   19. MSMati Staniszewski5:11

       You know, we, uh, we actually thought it's a huge business at the time too, because we thought it's like if, if we think about all the content, all the stories out there, how incredible if they were available in audio and, and, and, and it's, it's the-- whether it's some of the biggest streaming companies, whether that's TV, whether that's the conversations, all of those could be, could be actually delivered in the local language. So we thought it, we thought it's actually huge-

   20. DSDavid Senra5:32

       Okay

   21. MSMati Staniszewski5:32

       ... and we still think it's huge. And then if you shift this to, 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 Galaxy, there's this idea of a Babel 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 like a full, full, full way of how kind of it, it, it progressed.

   22. DSDavid Senra5:58

       Yeah.

   23. MSMati Staniszewski5:58

       Initially it was dubbing, and then as we started diving into what we need to do to solve dubbing, realized there are three 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. Um, but the research that existed at the time for each of those steps wasn't very good.

   24. DSDavid Senra6:18

       Which companies were doing that, the research?

   25. MSMati Staniszewski6:21

       There was some good NVIDIA models, uh, open source models.

   26. DSDavid Senra6:24

       But wait, it's just an independent researcher. It's not any of the big companies?

   27. MSMati Staniszewski6:27

       No. I mean, everything was poor. Everything was robotic.

   28. DSDavid Senra6:29

       Okay.

   29. MSMati Staniszewski6:29

       Everything was pretty robotic. It was still, you know, it was, um, s- still, like, you could, you could immediately tell it was, like, a robotic voice. Um, and, and, and nothing really crossed that uncanny valley yet. Um, there was one good open source paper, uh, an open source, uh, repo that I'm trying to recall that was, 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 in- incredibly, doing incredibly well. Um, and then you had the kind of Google Translate version of that. But all of the components to do dub were, were not good enough yet. Uh, so that's part one, the research wasn't there. And part two, when we started testing the dubbing idea with a lot of initially 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, "I want-- before I record my video, I want to be able to, uh, uh, narrate the script and how, 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, it was like, okay, before we can solve dubbing, let's solve the research component to generate speech and make it sound great. And on the product side, let's actually deliver for people to be able to just narrate content. So, like, let's punt down and ignore for a, for, for a second the, the language shift. Let's just help bringing content alive with audio with a high quality.

   30. DSDavid Senra8:07

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3. 12:37 – 16:15

   Research + Product Deployment: How ElevenLabs Is Built

   1. MSMati Staniszewski12:37

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

   2. DSDavid Senra12:43

      I, I know.

   3. MSMati Staniszewski12:43

      It's, it's [laughs]

   4. DSDavid Senra12:43

      That's why I'm telling you this.

   5. MSMati Staniszewski12:45

      It's very much like there is a focused research lab, there's research engineering on 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 it's, uh-- the general philosophy is like a lot of small teams, usually less than ten people, having flexibility, autonomy to just run ahead and apply, and apply their best judgment in, in, in what we can solve for the customer.

   6. DSDavid Senra13:14

      Okay, you need to say more about this though, 'cause this is where I still-- I'm a little confused by this. Somebody doesn't know who you are, doesn't-- they just met you for the first time. They don't know what ElevenLabs is. Like describe to that person how you view your own company. It's like a research lab. Is that the word you're gonna use? Like, how would you describe this?

   7. MSMati Staniszewski13:31

      I would introduce, uh, consistently the company as a combination of research and product deployment. 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, 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's kind of one combination of between those is building the research, building the frontier of, 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, to then allow companies, uh, people to, to change how they communicate.

   8. DSDavid Senra14:34

      And you are solely focused on audio?

   9. MSMati Staniszewski14:37

      On the research side, solely focused on audio product. We combine the best of audio with integrations, knowledge, LLMs to help deliver for, for-

   10. DSDavid Senra14:46

       Explain why you're-- y-you think it's so important to be solely focused on audio on the research side.

   11. MSMati Staniszewski14:51

       We think we have, um, incredible talent to, to be able to, to go after that. The focus is so important in effectively building the best architecture for those audio models. And this-- like we, we think audio is, um, there is like a good combination of not only science, but also the art that you need to solve. It's, it's a little bit subjective. The, the voices that you produce will be subjective. Uh, so you really need to get it right. But ultimately, as you think about 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. We wanna 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, the people that, that work on, on our side are the best audio researchers in the, in the world. They're also excited by the premise of being able to continue deploying the best frontier audio models.

   12. DSDavid Senra15:42

       And do you feel you have technology on the outer side that no one else in the world has?

   13. MSMati Staniszewski15:46

       We think so, yes.

   14. DSDavid Senra15:48

       This is a weird analogy. I'm so glad I'm reading this book at the same time we're talking because, like, the, uh, for Honda, they kept, 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."

   15. MSMati Staniszewski16:02

       [laughs]

   16. DSDavid Senra16:03

       He's like, "I just do-- I focus on engines, and sometimes it's on two wheels and four wheels and everything else," but he's like, "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, like, could replicate what

4. 16:15 – 18:47

   Focus as a Competitive Advantage

   1. DSDavid Senra16:15

      they did.

   2. MSMati Staniszewski16:15

      There is a, you know, common question as we think like internally of like it, it's, it's one hundred percent true of, well, how you, you describe it now too. And like 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. It's not our-

   3. DSDavid Senra16:39

      Explain a situation where you realized that you shouldn't go after that opportunity. Could you give me an example of what you're just ta- describing?

   4. MSMati Staniszewski16:46

      The, um, example would... I'll give you two slightly different spaces. One is on-- for, for a long time, the, um-- and I think it's still true. The ideal version in the, in the audio space is, um, if you've created a marketing campaign, is how that combines with a lot of the image and video work to deliver a better content. Two years ago, we would have first tried to see whether we can help people create effectively lip dubbing or avatars for, um, for, for their content. So let's say you switch from one image to another, you need to move the lips, or let's say you want to narrate something, you create an avatar. That was roughly two years ago. A lot of the models that existed on that side just weren't good enough, and deploying a product in this 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-

   5. DSDavid Senra17:42

      'Cause the problem to solve there is video, not audio.

   6. MSMati Staniszewski17:44

      Exactly.

   7. DSDavid Senra17:44

      Okay.

   8. MSMati Staniszewski17:44

      So like this was like still poor. So even if you had the best audio applied into that work, it's still the experience wouldn't be very good. So we decided to not-- to effectively, um, pause any of that effort. Password today is 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, the, the recent London ads engine of bringing an ad and bringing that internationally and sh-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, you know, VO 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, and bring it home.

   9. DSDavid Senra18:36

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

   10. MSMati Staniszewski18:45

       For sure.

   11. DSDavid Senra18:45

       Do you talk about this in the company?

5. 18:47 – 22:25

   Building an Ecosystem Around Voice

   1. MSMati Staniszewski18:47

      We do. I... The big part is like our focus is audio on the research side, and that's where, where we want to, we want to win. I think that we also talk about this like 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, uh, just to explain what I mean by the ecosystem, of course there's the, the, 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 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.

   2. DSDavid Senra19:32

      Give me details about that because I don't know, I don't-

   3. MSMati Staniszewski19:34

      Yeah.

   4. DSDavid Senra19:35

      I don't know about this.

   5. MSMati Staniszewski19:35

      And like an example is voices.

   6. DSDavid Senra19:36

      Okay.

   7. MSMati Staniszewski19:36

      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 thirty thousand voices today on the marketplace, um, and new people that, that come in now have a selection of different accents, different styles, uh, um, uh, different languages of course, different, uh, uh, age, gender that you can pick every time you use it, that the other person gets, gets paid.

   8. DSDavid Senra20:04

      Do you, as a company, make these voices, any of these voices, or is it just third parties?

   9. MSMati Staniszewski20:08

      We of course, created a system for people to, to, to do that. And some of them we-- like 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.

   10. DSDavid Senra20:22

       No one knows about Eleven Reader. You have to do a better job.

   11. MSMati Staniszewski20:25

       [laughs]

   12. DSDavid Senra20:25

       I was just listening to your episode with John Carlson, who I love, and I don't think he even knew. He kept saying, he's like, "Why doesn't this exist?"

   13. MSMati Staniszewski20:32

       Yeah.

   14. DSDavid Senra20:32

       You know, like there's an app, and then the follow-up he still talks about, I was like, "No, dude, I use that app. What you're asking for, John, is on-- he already has it. You need to like show it to him on your phone when you're recording the podcast with him." So I use George, that's the voice I-- In fact, we do all these like research reports for the people that come on.

   15. MSMati Staniszewski20:48

       Thanks for being a user. That's amazing.

   16. DSDavid Senra20:49

       No, of course. It's, it's, it's, it's a fantastic product, and it turns every document into essentially a podcast that I can, you know, listen to when my eyes are busy. But the funny thing is we do these research like dossiers about everybody that comes on. And so I put the one about you into Eleven Reader, so I'm listening to you-

   17. MSMati Staniszewski21:06

       [laughs]

   18. DSDavid Senra21:06

       -about you in your own product. But like in George's case, is that coming from you guys? Did somebody-- is somebody else getting paid when I'm listening to George?

   19. MSMati Staniszewski21:15

       Yeah. Somebody else is getting paid.

   20. DSDavid Senra21:16

       Okay.

   21. MSMati Staniszewski21:16

       That's, uh, a, a great voice actor that, uh, that worked with us for now for a long time, and every time you listen, he, he gets paid.

   22. DSDavid Senra21:23

       Do you understand when we sat down, I was like, you're, you, you, you're-- well, one, I keep running into you everywhere, and so that's like, dude, we gotta just do a podcast together. And but, like, you're so confusing to me in a, in a great way. This is not like a negative thing because like, 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.

   23. MSMati Staniszewski21:44

       But you know, like it's, it, it is, it is very fair, and I think we are seeing that everywhere across AI companies of like, you know, the, the model becomes the platform, becomes application. But for us, the unifying theme across all of them is, is that angle of communication. Like we think how you communicate as a company, as you-- 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 the knowledge, delivers the conversation a completely new way. And that's-- that of course, there's just so many different applications. There's Eleven Reader that lets you enjoy content a completely new way.

   24. DSDavid Senra22:19

       So research platform applications on that platform.

   25. MSMati Staniszewski22:22

       Exactly.

   26. DSDavid Senra22:23

       Okay.

   27. MSMati Staniszewski22:24

       And, and,

6. 22:25 – 28:29

   The Communication Platform & Deutsche Telekom

   1. MSMati Staniszewski22:25

      and you know, like 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-

   2. DSDavid Senra22:35

      That's a vicious battle too [laughs] .

   3. MSMati Staniszewski22:36

      A very vicious battle. Lots of, lots of great companies in there.

   4. DSDavid Senra22:39

      [laughs]

   5. MSMati Staniszewski22:39

      But what we would love to be is if you think about the next three years or however many years, there will be probably three platforms that you set all the interactions on those platforms. We want to be the leading platform for those interactions, for that communication.

   6. DSDavid Senra22:53

      Wait, explain that.

   7. MSMati Staniszewski22:54

      The whole way and, and that kind of builds on that theme. How you engage with content, how you engage with the, the-- that company will change. We want to help people, companies 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, bring your assets from, 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 try to engage and bring their-- your product to the, 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, every on-brand interaction that that journey has, we would love to be able to capture and help you make that better for-

   8. DSDavid Senra23:45

      Okay. So let's-

   9. MSMati Staniszewski23:45

      For the customer

   10. DSDavid Senra23:45

       ... let's make this concrete because I still like I wanna be able to wrap my head around this. Let's take your, like most deeply integrated customer-

   11. MSMati Staniszewski23:53

       Yes

   12. DSDavid Senra23:53

       ... right? And say, you know, it's Goldman Sachs, I'm making this up, and this is how they u- they use this product. All the different products they use, like who is the, 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.

   13. MSMati Staniszewski24:09

       Deutsche Telekom is a great example. They will use- 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. They will use a lot of our Eleven creative work to be able to do that. Then they will use a, um, uh, our Eleven agents work for in-call center, where you call in, you want the help, you get that help through the voice agent integrated with the knowledge from Deutsche Telekom. So you can, um, make sure that if you-- somebody's calling in to learn about the product, they get that information very quickly. If they are calling to get support on how to, um, uh, 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 another language. And that across all of that, all of that information is captured back, so you understand how customers engage with, uh, with, in this case, with the, the full spectrum of, of, of the journey, marketing, the support, and then the wider operations, even sales, and we help them do all of that.

   14. DSDavid Senra25:32

       Okay. So in a situation like that, 'cause, um, I think you, 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 first product Deutsche Bank used from you?

   15. MSMati Staniszewski25:46

       Uh, Deutsche Telekom.

   16. DSDavid Senra25:47

       Deutsche Telekom, sorry.

   17. MSMati Staniszewski25:47

       Yeah. The, the first was marketing. So it was two years ago. We, we, we-- the, the kind of the most of the-- the, the two years ago, still, most of the agents were really very, very good. Like they, they weren't very reliable, they weren't very quick, so marketing was the, the most, the most obvious one. So they started with that. They deployed that. The quality of the content was, was, uh, was great, um, so people could engage with the podcast. Effectively, the use case that you mentioned of like, you know, bringing your, um, uh, uh, uh, notes and then being able to read them out loud-

   18. DSDavid Senra26:21

       Mm-hmm.

   19. MSMati Staniszewski26:21

       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. Um, so that was the first use case. Then of course, support is a combination of voice, but also the integrations.

   20. DSDavid Senra26:34

       Let's talk about how you expanded them from one product to the next. Like, how do you actually do that?

   21. MSMati Staniszewski26:40

       In that case, the main... Mm, and I guess can mostly like how do we partner with them to help them bring that product to life or-

   22. DSDavid Senra26:46

       Yeah, they start with one, but you have ten different products you could sell them.

   23. MSMati Staniszewski26:51

       Yeah. Yeah.

   24. DSDavid Senra26:51

       So how do you go from one to two, and then two to five, and so on and so forth?

   25. MSMati Staniszewski26:54

       Yeah. I think the main thing is, one, um, you of course deploy the first one. You make sure that there is value behind that. So across any customer engagement, you 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 a 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 all the CRM systems that, that Deutsche, Deutsche Telekom works with. You need to work on integrations with the output. So how do you connect it to the phone system, whether it's 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 f-- pick up the phone call, the agent behaves the way you want it to behave. So here, our forward deployed engineers would partner with the team, spend the time, in, 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 in that step, the, the, the hardest thing in any voice agent, uh, work is actual deployment of how you actually test that it works. Um, so then you need to trial that with, uh, with initially simulated that. You verify the calls, then you do it at smaller scale.

   26. DSDavid Senra28:18

       And, and you're doing this with FDEs?

   27. MSMati Staniszewski28:19

       Yes. We do all that with FDEs. Then we deploy, and then of course, we scale over time.

   28. DSDavid Senra28:24

       When did you realize that a huge path to greatly increasing your revenue was doing

7. 28:29 – 33:41

   Forward Deployed Engineers & Lessons From Palantir

   1. DSDavid Senra28:29

      FDEs?

   2. MSMati Staniszewski28:29

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

   3. DSDavid Senra29:10

      This is actually-- hold on. This is actually really interesting. So tell me what you observed that was working at Palantir, where you're like, "Ooh, if I start my company, I wanna do that too," and why.

   4. MSMati Staniszewski29:19

      I think the, the, the, the m-most incredible thing was that, like, you were meant to be on the same side of customer, obsessed of their problem and, and try to understand them deeply from the beginning. So I used to work at BlackRock before Palantir. In BlackRock, when I joined, given the compliance security, the first month or two, you-- when you send an email, it gets verified by, by your team. It gets trained before you send it externally. So it's like a, a, a pretty detailed flow of making sure that it's good. In Palantir, when I joined, after the onboarding in the first 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, like, the kind of the approach and culture of like, I have never almost interacted with a customer on the BlackRock side.

   5. DSDavid Senra30:15

      [laughs]

   6. MSMati Staniszewski30:15

      And now here I am in the first weeks.

   7. DSDavid Senra30:17

      [laughs]

   8. MSMati Staniszewski30:17

      I'm like meant to go there and, like, be next to them, which was crazy. I thought it was great. I thought it was that mentality and, like, every time kind of you are going to be there on the, I'll call it frontline, loosely on the frontline- Uh, to, to work with them and bring that knowledge back, understand what is actually the problem, what's fixable problem, and, and, and, and then actually fix it. Um, and that mentality is so true now at ElevenLabs too, where all of our FDEs, our go-to-market team too, is, is going to obsess of, like, how can I actually be there with the customer, understand the problem, and, and work with that. There was other components that I think were great. The small teams, they had usually small deployment teams that worked on, on a lot of that. The, the best idea wins, um, 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.

   9. DSDavid Senra31:10

      Define small.

   10. MSMati Staniszewski31:10

       About five people was 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 of course, now you probably see every, 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, 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 second 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 second part is always, uh, uh, frequently, um, missed, where it's like, first, okay, FDEs are, you know, doing effectively a, a, a lot of the, the, the, the hard integration work to solve the problem. But if you don't do the second step of how you actually learn the, the expertise and bring it back to the product, then it's effectively just services or, or just, um, just, uh-

   11. DSDavid Senra32:15

       Wait, say more about that second part. So you're get- 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.

   12. MSMati Staniszewski32:26

       Yes.

   13. DSDavid Senra32:26

       Is that what you're talking about?

   14. MSMati Staniszewski32:27

       Exactly.

   15. DSDavid Senra32:28

       Okay.

   16. MSMati Staniszewski32:28

       Exactly. And it's a product knowledge of, like, how you operate with... You know, there are simple things. Let's say you build an integration. How do I now br- have that integration available to everyone? That's an, a simpler version of that. But let's say you are working in healthcare space. In healthcare space, if you deploy the, the, the, the work, then you want to optimize the product experience for the right, uh, uh, the, um-- if you are now starting as a second customer, you want to make sure that you have-

   17. DSDavid Senra32:57

       So wait a minute. You're using-

   18. MSMati Staniszewski32:58

       Exactly.

   19. DSDavid Senra32:58

       You're using your customer base as almost like R&D, another form of R&D.

   20. MSMati Staniszewski33:03

       You are definitely accelerating your R&D through understanding the domain that's, that, that you're working with. And it's, it's, you know, it's-

   21. DSDavid Senra33:09

       Because their problems are not, very rarely a company's problems is unique to that company.

   22. MSMati Staniszewski33:13

       That's right. And the, and the beauty of that is, like, 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 the product optimized, um, 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.

   23. DSDavid Senra33:39

       What else did you learn working at

8. 33:41 – 37:19

   Flat Organizations, Transparency & AI-Native Management

   1. DSDavid Senra33:41

      Palantir?

   2. MSMati Staniszewski33:41

      They also, uh, were very, um, very much a no-title organization, which we carry over at ElevenLabs, uh, which does help in that, in that best idea wins approach, where people do feel, um-- I feel like I'm mimicking you on the, on the chairs. [laughs]

   3. DSDavid Senra33:56

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

   4. MSMati Staniszewski33:59

      [laughs] I know, it's a complete coincidence. Uh, uh, change my posture.

   5. DSDavid Senra34:03

      We're leaving that part in. [laughs]

   6. MSMati Staniszewski34:05

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

   7. DSDavid Senra34:42

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

   8. MSMati Staniszewski34:50

      I think there's, um, like always you want the information from the, the, the kind of the, the person working as closely to the problem. So let's say you are developing a product. You want to work-- 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 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, back and forth. Second, I think the, in general, m- roughly at ElevenLabs, most people will have close to ten direct reports. So pretty, pretty wide, wide set, which helps us build that small team approach that we, that we have. And that too only works if you, if you can amplify a lot of what's happening across all the teams, all the people that you, that you work with, um, to summarize information of what's happening in their teams, how this is performing, what are some of the gaps. That definitely helps and helps shift it from reactive to proactive, I think, too, by-- What I mean by this is frequently in the past, I think you would rely on, on, on specific individuals surfacing the information to you. Now, 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, um, which helps. It helps, of course, everybody across the company because you've, you have that same ability wherever you are. I think that, that, that, that maybe last, last part, which is very related to those two, why it is even possible today. We, we took a choice to be extremely transparent with, with a lot of the- The data that we have, uh, a lot of the, the docs that we write, so everybody has almost access to all the docs that are there in the company, um, which ultimately helps you create that system where you can actually tap into that knowledge.

   9. DSDavid Senra36:51

      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, 'cause you're relatively young. This is your first company. Your first company you built, you, 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, like, you're at the right place, right, right time with, I think, the right set of skills based on what the company built so far. So, like, how different do you think in the future the way you run your organization can be than what it is today?

9. 37:19 – 43:00

   Small Teams & Putting Engineers Everywhere

   1. MSMati Staniszewski37:19

      I think the small teams approach will definitely be there across, across many of the, of the, of the companies that I, I, I believe will be created in the future. It also helps with a very different piece, which is, like, 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, it's relatively small and independent, people bottoms up adopt what they think is best and are able 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, in a lot of the small teams that we have, in a lot 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, in, in, in how they are using AI. I think that will be a bigger pattern in the future a-across the companies too, where I think increasingly some of the, the biggest and smartest companies will try to infuse all teams with engineering resources so they can, they can get smarter.

   2. DSDavid Senra38:27

      Is there any function that is, like, centralized at Eleven Labs that then all these small individual teams can then access? Like, um-

   3. MSMati Staniszewski38:35

      Yes

   4. DSDavid Senra38:35

      ... I spent some time with Luca Ferrari of Bending Spoons.

   5. MSMati Staniszewski38:37

      Yeah.

   6. DSDavid Senra38:38

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

   7. MSMati Staniszewski39:08

      Of course, there are centralized functions. Uh, legal is a good example of, of, of, of course, of, like, how we are running. That needs to be very ce-central enablement of how we help people across go-to market and other teams, how they are kind of learning the craft of, of how to sell ElevenLabs. And as you said, it's, you know, 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 and, and, and, and what we are offering or what we do. So, so yes. So, so there's a good amount of those functions. But they, 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, of people in all locations, but how you can use the few people that you have and, and really bring that knowledge everywhere. One of the biggest ones for us is, is, is probably around RevOps of, like, how you-- or, like, the revenue engineering effectively function. We have so many tools that help you get the knowledge, um, whether it's coach during the conversations, transcribe, bring it back, make it easier for you to, to, to fill on a field so you capture that knowledge and, 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 AISDR. People going on the website today on ElevenLabs, you can fill in the dropdown form, uh, and, and leave information about your company, but you can also speak with a, with a voice agent and leave that in a, in a, in a, in a quicker and, and a different way. So we've seen a lot of people go through that flow. Uh, and then interestingly, two things happen. One, people are n-both making the experience easier, they enjoy it more, but two, 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.

   8. DSDavid Senra41:00

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

   9. MSMati Staniszewski41:04

      Hundred percent. It's, uh, I mean it's of course a quicker way of doing it, but also people just feel more at ease instead of, you know, going through this manual dropdown form. It's just, uh, just a, a better, I feel like a better way on, on leaving the information. Um, but now because it's, it's-- 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 AISDR function to be part of the company. We don't-- we, we want it to, to, 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, local nuance but develop, of course, centrally.

   10. DSDavid Senra41:48

       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 first 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 thirty-five 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 wanna 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.

10. 43:00 – 44:38

    Where ElevenLabs Is Growing Fastest

    1. DSDavid Senra43:00

       Do you still think of ElevenLabs as a single company just with how many, how many different products do you guys have right now?

    2. MSMati Staniszewski43:05

       Uh, we have, uh, three kind of core product lines, and then we have additional three that are developing, developing bets.

    3. DSDavid Senra43:14

       But how many different like applications?

    4. MSMati Staniszewski43:17

       Well, within each of those we'll have, I'd say no, but like let's say six are the kind of the core and then within that you can do of course maybe like, uh, you know, twenty, thirty different things.

    5. DSDavid Senra43:26

       Yeah, it seems like you have a ton.

    6. MSMati Staniszewski43:27

       Yes.

    7. DSDavid Senra43:28

       Like ElevenReader, for example.

    8. MSMati Staniszewski43:30

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

    9. DSDavid Senra43:38

       Where's all the revenue coming from?

    10. MSMati Staniszewski43:39

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

    11. DSDavid Senra43:50

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

    12. MSMati Staniszewski43:54

        The-- I think the quickest today for us is fintech. Super quick.

    13. DSDavid Senra43:59

        Like Revolut?

    14. MSMati Staniszewski44:00

        Revolut, exactly. Klarna, Pug Bank, like all of those companies are, are just moving, moving, moving at another speed or Customers Bank in the US here. Um, then, uh, the healthcare, retail, e-commerce and telcos are the four of the biggest ones. Fintech is moving the quickest. Of course, it's, you know, slightly different reg- regulatory aspects. Um, but then I think the healthcare telcos is kind of the second and retail e-commerce are-- is just this year started, started going through the wave.

    15. DSDavid Senra44:30

        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?

11. 44:38 – 48:23

    Taste, Art & Science in AI

    1. MSMati Staniszewski44:38

       Well, this is a stretch and I'm biased, biased, but, uh, in Palantir, frequently there was this concept of like how, um, how you, you, you need, you need a little bit of the understanding of the art to do your job well or like people need to, uh, uh, um, need to effectively try to be artists even if, if, if, if, if, if we aren't, uh, uh, 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, a lot more about this now as we kind of intersect that 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 ev- even the-- every voice that is delivered, you like George and ElevenReader, like everybody will have their own preference and, and how you make sure you capture those voices, how you deliver those preferences is, is, is, is a tricky challenge. And then two, 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, of the, of the art in that. And we're trying to, to bring, of course, a lot of the, the people to combine that. But blending that art and science, Palantir definitely tried to do. I think I will let others judge to do it successfully, but we also will, will try to do and, and, and, and hopefully are doing good steps in that direction, whether it's the voice marketplace that we talked about, uh, whether it's having a lot of creatives in the company building projects with us or, or around us or the kind of forward deployed engineers or forward deployed creatives almost to, 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, of AI and, um, behind the buzzword, I think there is, there is a lot of truth to that where, yes, increasingly everybody will be able to create everything and, um, and what defines a both good product experience, good deployment experience will depend on, on, on, um, on how the design language sounds, how, how, how tasteful it is, how you bring that across. So I think Palantir tried to do it. We are trying to do it too.

    2. DSDavid Senra46:41

       Yeah. I think what you're, you're getting at is there's this guy named Edwin Land, uh, he's the founder of Polaroid. I discovered him because, um, he was Steve Jobs' hero, and Steve Jobs was talking about-

    3. MSMati Staniszewski46:49

       Oh, yes. Yeah, I remember it. Yeah.

    4. DSDavid Senra46:50

       I've talked to-- I talked to him about it on Founders episodes over and over again. I should get a framed picture of Edwin Land and like put him in the studio or something. But, uh, he was the one that invented what-- 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 will al-- I think it, it like will always be like a limiting factor. But I love this idea. I think this is my issue with a lot of, um, 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, the new crop of tech founders is like they, they, 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 te-technology to enhance humanity."

    5. MSMati Staniszewski47:41

       Yeah.

    6. DSDavid Senra47:42

       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 cau-- 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, [chuckles] you know, technology and it's gonna take everybody's job." I see you at too many conferences, which I want to ask you about.

    7. MSMati Staniszewski48:09

       No, I haven't, I haven't been there.

    8. DSDavid Senra48:10

       Okay. So I was just there. I was only there for a few hours, and, and Karp was the one that, uh, spoke first, and he's just like, "What do you think is gonna happen?" He's like, "Your technology is gonna get nationalized." Do you have any opinion on w-what-- like his perspective

12. 48:23 – 55:19

    Using AI to Amplify Human Potential

    1. DSDavid Senra48:23

       on this?

    2. MSMati Staniszewski48:23

       Not directly. So, so of course, you know, we've seen what happened in Entropic case recently, uh, given we, we, we, we spent, um, 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, and, and, and how important this, this, this will be. Uh, so no direct answer to your question. I do agree so much of the, 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, um, and I-- and then-- and, and I, I hope we will do a lot of, of the work and are doing a lot of work in that space. But I, I hope in the-- some of the interviews that you mentioned and some of the, the conversations from other companies, um, that this will be an increasing theme. Of how, how they can bring that to, to reality too

    3. DSDavid Senra49:09

       The reason I, um, bring that up, 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

    4. MSMati Staniszewski49:46

       Voice is such a incredible identity that's-- like, probably-- and, and 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 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, uh, AI voice. Um, and now he's touring, and in the UK he's going across places and, 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 is like the voice carries such, such, 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 work across there. The, the, the, um, today it's, it's over ten thousand 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 today we partnered today with eight hundred 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.

    5. DSDavid Senra51:26

       No, go.

    6. MSMati Staniszewski51:26

       There was, um, there, there's a-- like first of all, a legend, a guy called Tim Green. He used to be bestselling 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.

    7. DSDavid Senra51:50

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

    8. MSMati Staniszewski51:52

       It's, uh-- well, you should, you should have an interview with him. And he, he-

    9. DSDavid Senra51:55

       That's not what I meant

    10. MSMati Staniszewski51:56

        But, uh-

    11. DSDavid Senra51:57

        That's not what I meant, Mati.

    12. MSMati Staniszewski51:57

        Okay. Okay. Fair. Fair. [laughs]

    13. DSDavid Senra51:59

        Man, I will destroy him. No, I'm kidding. [laughs]

    14. MSMati Staniszewski52:01

        [laughs] But he's, he's, uh, he's, uh-- he does extremely well. He, he has great guests. Had Howard Bluthneck, uh, recently on, on his podcast, some of the NFL players, and, uh, and this year he won an Emmy for his work.

    15. DSDavid Senra52:15

        Oh.

    16. MSMati Staniszewski52:15

        So it's like, wow. So he's, uh, incredible.

    17. DSDavid Senra52:18

        Wait, so you made that voice, though?

    18. MSMati Staniszewski52:20

        We, we-- yes. We, we do his AI voice.

    19. DSDavid Senra52:22

        That's incredible.

    20. MSMati Staniszewski52:24

        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?

    21. DSDavid Senra52:46

        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 just scattered around the house everywhere. Obviously, I have like, I don't know-

    22. MSMati Staniszewski53:01

        Oh, you have quite a big collection

    23. DSDavid Senra53:01

        ... I have like a thousand books in my other library, like probably six hundred 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.

    24. MSMati Staniszewski53:31

        For sure. I mean, you also-- it's, it's, it's, uh-- you're in 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.

    25. DSDavid Senra53:45

        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 can-- 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 just like, "This guy doesn't even sound the same." Like the imperfections. People admire imperfection or, excuse me, authenticity way more than they do perfection.

    26. MSMati Staniszewski54:13

        That's true. 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-

    27. DSDavid Senra54:24

        But it didn't sound human.

    28. MSMati Staniszewski54:25

        It didn't sound human. And then of course, the obvious thing, uh, that, that, that was the clearest is like the ums, the um, the pauses, and suddenly the performance of working with that voice agent like skyrocket. Everybody was like, "Whoa, this is so human. This is good. I'm 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 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 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.

13. 55:19 – 56:49

    Becoming an Entrepreneur & Building With Piotr

    1. DSDavid Senra55:19

       Did you know when you were younger that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

    2. MSMati Staniszewski55:23

       I, I would say I didn't know this was the path for a while.

    3. DSDavid Senra55:25

       You did or did not?

    4. MSMati Staniszewski55:26

       Didn't. I was, you know, I, uh-

    5. DSDavid Senra55:29

       'Cause you're European.

    6. MSMati Staniszewski55:30

       In Poland it was-

    7. DSDavid Senra55:31

       [laughs]

    8. MSMati Staniszewski55:31

       Yeah, no, for sure a little bit of that, though. I, you know, you're joking, but I think it's true.

    9. DSDavid Senra55:34

       No, I'm being serious. [laughs]

    10. MSMati Staniszewski55:36

        Taking like, the, the risk of, of like, not, you know, like starting something, it, it wasn't like a common conversation ever happening. I mean, I had a lack 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 like, you can actually do things. You can... Like, 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. You can take... That seemed very risky to me, but you can do that. Um, so kind of step by step that opened the eyes of like, okay, maybe this is the path. Maybe it is possible to start your own thing and-

    11. DSDavid Senra56:15

        From the time you had that realization to the time you started ElevenLabs, what was the-

    12. MSMati Staniszewski56:18

        So then as you kind of-

    13. DSDavid Senra56:19

        Was it a year, two years? You were... Like, what was it?

    14. MSMati Staniszewski56:22

        So over my time at Palantir, my co-founder Piotr, uh, uh, time at Google, we would do, start doing, uh, hack weekend projects together. So through the years, we tried to explore new technology and build together. I think few years prior we, we knew that we would love to work on something together, but, um, but you want to work something about, that you are like, you think it's a true problem and you're obsessed about. And, um, and that came to us in twenty-twentyone. So a few years. Two years. Two, three years.

14. 56:49 – 1:04:01

    Why Mati Won’t Sell ElevenLabs

    1. DSDavid Senra56:49

       How many acquisition offers have you had?

    2. MSMati Staniszewski56:51

       Like, concrete ones, three or four.

    3. DSDavid Senra56:54

       When's the last one?

    4. MSMati Staniszewski56:55

       Last one was last year. Like June last year.

    5. DSDavid Senra56:58

       You gonna sell?

    6. MSMati Staniszewski56:59

       No.

    7. DSDavid Senra57:00

       The reason I ask you-

    8. MSMati Staniszewski57:01

       AI is changing the world. We can build at the frontier of that change. We, we, we are, we are, we are going all in. This is, uh, this is, I mean-

    9. DSDavid Senra57:09

       Then don't pay attention to your VCs, dude. Their incentives are different than yours. The reason I ask you is there's two, two reasons this came to mind, and, you know, some of this is like all intuition. You can't even describe this. But Evan Spiegel sat in that exact same chair that you're in. You know, people gave me shit. They're like, "Why you wanna interview Evan? Uh, you know, 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.

    10. MSMati Staniszewski57:29

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra57:29

        I'm obsessed with products.

    12. MSMati Staniszewski57:31

        That's it.

    13. DSDavid Senra57:31

        And like that dude has soul in the game. Like, and I hope he wins. I have no idea, like I, I, I don't know anything about, you know, just I don't u- like Snapchat, specs, anything, whatever the case. It's just like he is differentiated. I d- there's just something about him that I like, that I like just want him to work out well, right? And so that... And I'm getting the same exact vibe. I was like, man, I want Mati to like win. I want him to succeed.

    14. MSMati Staniszewski57:53

        Thank you.

    15. DSDavid Senra57:53

        There's just something very likable about you. And then the second reason is because obviously Scott Wu, he's, he's coming on the show like every few months because I, I really like Scott a lot.

    16. MSMati Staniszewski58:02

        Um, it's 'cause he's a genius. He's so, so good as well.

    17. DSDavid Senra58:03

        Well, not only that, but he's c- articulate and brilliant and optimistic, but everybody is running at that dude right now. Everybody. Like, the, the amount of people that wanna buy his company, and this is something we talked about. And like, I hope he holds out because I, I would like to see a lot more people just be like, "No, I'm like in this forever." It's not just to get a big bag of money. You know, like, go listen to, to, to Travis from Uber. You know, 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." Um, and see, that's why I asked you the question, 'cause I asked Scott that too, and he's just like, well, there are obviously a ton of people trying to, to either get him or his entire company and all his talent, and he's just so far said, "No, I'm, I'm not selling."

    18. MSMati Staniszewski58:49

        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, or however you call the, the hyper clouds of the future. Um, so I think he, I think he can do it. He's, uh, he, he has, they have a, a incredible team, and I think we can do it too. I think it's, you know, I, I really mean it. I think the opportunity that, um, that currently exists for entrepreneurs of, of with the wider shift, the, the, the things haven't been written, and it's like it's such a, such a good, good time to build something special and, and-

    19. DSDavid Senra59:23

        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-

    20. MSMati Staniszewski59:29

        Yeah, it's true. It's, uh [laughs]

    21. DSDavid Senra59:30

        The content that entrepreneurs are-

    22. MSMati Staniszewski59:31

        It's all self-serving in many ways, I feel

    23. DSDavid Senra59:32

        Well, the content that entrepreneurs are consuming are created by VCs. It's just, it's a weird thing to me.

    24. MSMati Staniszewski59:36

        Yeah. Yeah.

    25. DSDavid Senra59:36

        Um, 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, 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?" [laughs] Like, no one's just gonna 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 million 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, like ElevenLabs is probably the best idea you will ever have in your life.

    26. MSMati Staniszewski1:00:12

        No, for sure.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:00:12

        And you're how old?

    28. MSMati Staniszewski1:00:13

        Thirty-one.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:00:14

        Okay, so you're gonna sell your best idea at thirty-one? You got four decades ahead of you, maybe five.

    30. MSMati Staniszewski1:00:19

        Yeah, but it's-
15. 1:04:01 – 1:06:49

    Voice as the Interface for AI

    1. DSDavid Senra1:04:01

       Because your opinion is that the next form factor isn't a device. It's actually just the way you're gonna interact with AI is just your voice.

    2. MSMati Staniszewski1:04:08

       Hundred percent will be one of the biggest ways. Like, in, 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, for, for everyone out there.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:04:25

       Twelve months from now, how do you think the way you communicate with AI is different than it is today then?

    4. MSMati Staniszewski1:04:30

       Voice is definitely part of it, but it, it kind of understands you. It, it is-- it's, 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. Like, you know, in some crazy way, for the decades, we, we learn how, uh, how technology around works and learn the language of that technology, the keyboard, the screen, um, the coding languages even. They're the kind of-- You, you, you need to learn how the technology works, so you can, um, um, 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 comm-- conversation, and you can bring technology on our terms. So, so I think twelve months from now, what will happen is, is similar as we are speaking. It's-- I think the, the technology will be able to understand us at a, an, an, an incredibly better way, both our knowledge, both the emotional part of that conversation, and deliver, deliver similar conversation we are having now.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:05:33

       And if that's the case, then the, the market for this and even the, the, the use case, the amount of people using AI will drastically explode. I think there's a actually 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, you know, 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, like, learn this language to send it. And he's like, "The phone, you just pick up and do exactly what you do already."

    6. MSMati Staniszewski1:06:00

       Yeah. Hundred percent. It will, uh-- I think, you know, that even, even I'm looking at around the room, I feel like there'll be so many devices as well that will just be able to work on your terms. Hopefully, the screen, the phone will, like, kind of be able to be back in the back pocket if you won't need it in the same way as you do now. So it'll be, will be cool.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:06:17

       When you first started the company, you, you, you mentioned this from The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. So was you and your co-founder's ideal version of your product, the Babel Fish?

    8. MSMati Staniszewski1:06:27

       It was on one of the slides that we, we thought that, yes, Babel Fish will exist and will hopefully make it happen, but less so that we will create Babel Fish itself, but we will enable everyone out there to have Babel Fish in their existing, existing devices, existing presence, existing work. That was definitely, uh, one of the, the kind of the North Stars that we are thinking about.

16. 1:06:49 – 1:11:06

    Turning Conferences Into a Business Tool

    1. DSDavid Senra1:06:49

       Okay, another question I have for you. Uh, why do you always pop up at all these conferences?

    2. MSMati Staniszewski1:06:55

       I don't do that many, I think.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:06:56

       I get these emails, so, so Daniel Ek, obviously a close friend of mine-

    4. MSMati Staniszewski1:07:00

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:07:00

       -uh, 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 he's like-- His line for this is like, "Stay away from the circus."

    6. MSMati Staniszewski1:07:13

       Yeah. Yeah.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:07:14

       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, I obviously love Michael Dell, so I do his too, and I do nothing else. And 'ca- 'cause of Daniel's advice, just, like, stay away from the circus. Like, the people that show up at these things, they don't, they aren't doing any work. They're just there to distract. Like, 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. [laughs] What are you doing?

    8. MSMati Staniszewski1:07:38

       So the... No, I, I usually try to do two per, two to three per quarter, usually conference or events. Um, but in our case a little bit different because for a lot of the people that are usually on the conferences, they are our partners or prospective partners or clients. So, so it, it is usually a, a great way of, 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, so a lot of the, the, the events are, are a great, great way for us to, to, to, to catch time with a lot of the, the people that we work with.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:08:22

       And then turn them into customers.

    10. MSMati Staniszewski1:08:23

        And turn them into customers.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:08:24

        All right, so you are-

    12. MSMati Staniszewski1:08:25

        Or expand the one to two or five, whatever it is. You know, the, the common trope of, of... And I, and I, and I remember, like, thinking back in the day when we started, I got the first invite for one of those conferences, and it's like, "Oh, this is super cool, super fun." And then you go, um, I'm European, so I drank alcohol at the time as well. And, uh, and then I, like, felt tired. I didn't think I did anything, and, and it, it, like, it, it seemed fun, but, but it wasn't very productive. And then, and then I had the period was like n-not-

    13. DSDavid Senra1:08:54

        Did you, did you have nothing to sell at the time?

    14. MSMati Staniszewski1:08:56

        At the time, I didn't... I was-- I didn't know how to, like, 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, like, flowing through it, and I, and I feel it was a kind of terrible thing. It's like you, 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, like, you know, you feel you are doing something important. It's completely unimportant. And, um, and that's kind of, you know... 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 prearrange 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 a lot of the-- there's, like, some repeating crowd across those events. So you want to do the ones which is kind of different. Um, and of course you want to be pretty explicit to the other side too, that they know what they are like. You know, that you are not... You are pitching them, and they are relaxing. That's, like, a bad recipe for disaster. Uh, but, uh, but many people want that too. They are there to do exactly the same thing, do business and figure it out. So, so now it works really well for me. Like, I do good prep. We prearrange a lot of time. I never go and, like, try to be there for just the sessions or just the content or when. Of course, I speak frequently on those conferences, but the main, the main thing is, is, is trying to grab time with the people that are there, and that has been working really well.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:10:15

        Are you still drinking?

    16. MSMati Staniszewski1:10:16

        No. On the weddings, but apart from that it's, uh, it's, uh-

    17. DSDavid Senra1:10:19

        Every time I go to Europe, I have the same thought when I get back, "I should drink more." [laughs] So much fun. It's like they just know how to have fun.

    18. MSMati Staniszewski1:10:29

        There are social circumstances where I would drink. They are just so infrequent now that, that there's, that I wouldn't do it.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:10:35

        Okay, next time we are at one of these rare conferences together, let's make sure we have a drink.

    20. MSMati Staniszewski1:10:39

        [laughs]

    21. DSDavid Senra1:10:39

        All right. Deal?

    22. MSMati Staniszewski1:10:41

        Deal. Deal.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:10:41

        All right, man.

    24. MSMati Staniszewski1:10:41

        See you.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:10:41

        Thanks for doing this.

    26. MSMati Staniszewski1:10:42

        Thanks. Great to talk.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:10:43

        Appreciate it. 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 four hundred 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 first found me through Founders. [electronic sound]

Episode duration: 1:11:07