Mati Staniszewski on ElevenLabs, Voice AI & Building the Communication Layer for AI

Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder of ElevenLabs, an AI audio company he started in 2022 with his longtime friend Piotr Dąbkowski. He explains how a frustration with poorly dubbed content in Poland led them to build frontier speech technology, why ElevenLabs combines audio research with product deployment and how its focus on voice shapes where the company chooses to compete. Mati also describes the Palantir-inspired operating model behind ElevenLabs: small autonomous teams, a flat organization and forward deployed engineers who work directly with customers and feed what they learn back into the product. He discusses using AI to amplify human potential, helping people who have lost their voices speak again, why imperfections can make AI voices feel more human and his belief that voice will become one of the primary ways people interact with AI. After turning down multiple acquisition offers, Mati says he and Piotr are committed to building ElevenLabs independently and pursuing what they see as a rare opportunity to reshape how humans communicate with technology. Show notes: https://www.davidenra.com/mati-staniszewski Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Building an AI-Native Company Before ChatGPT (00:02:59) Why ElevenLabs Started With Audio & Dubbing (00:12:37) Research + Product Deployment: How ElevenLabs Is Built (00:16:15) Focus as a Competitive Advantage (00:18:47) Building an Ecosystem Around Voice (00:22:25) The Communication Platform & Deutsche Telekom (00:28:29) Forward Deployed Engineers & Lessons From Palantir (00:33:41) Flat Organizations, Transparency & AI-Native Management (00:37:19) Small Teams & Putting Engineers Everywhere (00:43:00) Where ElevenLabs Is Growing Fastest (00:44:38) Taste, Art & Science in AI (00:48:23) Using AI to Amplify Human Potential (00:55:19) Becoming an Entrepreneur & Building With Piotr (00:56:49) Why Mati Won't Sell ElevenLabs (01:04:01) Voice as the Interface for AI (01:06:49) Turning Conferences Into a Business Tool Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David 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, has been dominating for decades. And when I saw him, we had like a 30-minute conversation about this. You read all these biographies of history's 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 like, how you think about building your company AI-native from today?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael is a legend. He is, he must have so many interesting perspectives, especially like he's still running the company. So it will be interesting whether he applies some of that difference to to the current running of the show. But for us, you know, in some ways, given we are first-time founders, me and Piotr, my co-founder, my best friend of 15 years, Eleven Labs is the first venture we started.

• 0:59David Senra?

  That's insane. You started in 2022. You launched before the first version of ChatGPT, right?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  We did. It was still a year when the topics of the day were crypto and metaverse. So 2022 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 lot on the AI side.

• 1:20David Senra?

  What were you doing before you founded this company?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I was a panther. 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, 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 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 models for Knowledge Graph. Before that, did research at university around image visual models. So incredible brains, the smartest person I know for developing a lot of the research work.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  And I was happily on that intersection of building the product and bringing that to the customers. So that was before Pantera's BlackRock, building risk models, bringing that to customers. And by background, studying mathematics. So good intersection of the things I liked. And now at Eleven Labs, that's also what, what I do. And that's also from the company lens. 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 that 2022, 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.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:56David Senra?

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

• 2:58Speaker 01

  We started with audio.

• 2:58David Senra?

  Why?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  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 emotion, all the intonation disappears. And, and it's still, so we grew up with this. Everybody in Poland grows up with it, like, you know, one person dubbing. And then in 2021, we retested or re-experienced this still happening in, in their content. And then second thing happened, which was

• 3:34David Senra?

  Wait, it was still happening in movies in 2021, but you'd watch in Poland?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:38David Senra?

  Same thing that was happening when you were a kid?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:40David Senra?

  Okay.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  And 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 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.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  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

• 4:32David Senra?

  This is what you thought back in 2022 or what you think today?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  In 2022, 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.

• 4:48David Senra?

  So the first idea was

• 4:50Speaker 01

  First idea was dub.

• 4:51David Senra?

  Static content 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.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:59David Senra?

  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 going to be a giant business. Like you're one of the fastest-growing startups today.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  You know, we actually thought it's a huge business at the time too. Because 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, 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 fit it, we thought it's actually huge and still think it's huge. And then if you shift this to, to 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 that you speak. So we knew that we will get there. But initially it was like dubbing.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  So I'll give you like a full, full, full way of how kind of 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 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. But the research that existed at the time for each of those steps wasn't very good.

• 6:18David Senra?

  Which companies were doing that, the research?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  There was a good Nvidia models, open source models.

• 6:24David Senra?

  But wait, it's just an independent research or it's not any of the big companies?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  No, I mean, everything was poor. Everything was robotic. Everything was pretty robotic. It was still, you know, it was, um, still like you could, you could immediately tell it was like a robotic voice. And, and 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, 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 incredibly, doing incredibly well. And then you had the kind of Google Translate version of that.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  But all of the components to do dub were, were not good enough yet. 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 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 like even think about dubbing, can you give me that? And that was for us, I was like, okay, before we can solve dubbing,

• 7:48Speaker 01

  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 pump down and ignore for a, for a second, the language shift. Let's just help bringing content alive with audio with a high quality.

• 8:07David Senra?

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• 8:49David Senra?

  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, Eleven Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal.

• 9:32David Senra?

  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 Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built Eleven Labs 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.

• 10:15David Senra?

  Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. Let me make sure I'm understanding this correctly. You're like, "We're gonna dub, we're gonna reach out to creators first." So I'm, you know, reaching a couple million people in English. Let me see if I can get this guy to say, "Hey, can I translate to, can we dub this for Polish and Spanish and all these other things?" And then the feedback you're getting is, "Yeah, it's kinda nice, but I have a lot, I have many more immediate concerns and can you help me with XYZ?"

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, and it kind of was two things at the same time were great because that was also true on the research side where you have this like three 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.

• 11:02David Senra?

  Yeah, because I'm friends with Mr. Beast. And I remember talking to him about this a few years ago where, you know, he was the largest creator in the world and he used to run separate YouTube channels. And he told me, he's just like, "Yeah, well, for my Japanese, like the Japanese versions of my videos," like he doesn't just dub them, he'll hire like a voice actor that's like, their voice is famous in that country.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yep, 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, if those conversations were.

• 11:36David Senra?

  It's funny you said Japan because I was thinking, I knew we were gonna talk today and I've been thinking about you the last few days. And I'm working on this episode for the founder of Honda for my other podcast founders. And what's surprising with that is, you know, it's not Honda, the cars at this point when this guy's alive. It's the most, 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." 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.

• 12:18David Senra?

  And he's just like, "If you just have a research division and you only tell them to experiment and you have 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. Like I would never think, you would think, "Oh, they're a car manufacturer." He's like, "No, I'm, this is a research team."

• 12:36Speaker 01

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

• 12:43David Senra?

  I know, that's why I'm telling you this.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  It's very much like, there's 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, the general philosophy is like a lot of small teams, usually less than 10 people, having flexibility, autonomy to just run ahead and apply and apply their best judgment in what we can solve for the customer.

• 13:14David Senra?

  Okay, you need to say more about this though, because 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 Eleven Labs 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?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I would introduce consistently the company as a combination of research and product deployment. Research is frontier audio models, text to speech, speech to text orchestration product. It's 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 and 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.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And that's 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, to then allow companies, people to change how they communicate.

• 14:34David Senra?

  And you are solely focused on audio?

• 14:37Speaker 01

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

• 14:46David Senra?

  Explain why you're, you think it's so important to be solely focused on audio on the research side?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  We think we have incredible talent to be able to go after that. The focus is so important and effectively building the best architecture for those audio models. And this, like, we think audio is, there's 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 voices that you produce will be subjective. 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 people that work on our side are the best audio researchers in the, in the world.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And they're also excited by the premise of being able to continue deploying the best frontier audio models.

• 15:42David Senra?

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

• 15:46Speaker 01

  We think so, yes.

• 15:47David Senra?

  This is a weird analogy. I'm so glad I'm reading this book at the same time we're talking because like, 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 just do, I focus on engines." And sometimes it's on two wheels and four wheels and everything else, but it'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 they did.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  There is a, you know, common question as we think like internally of like, it's 100% true of, well, how you describe it now too. And like, when you 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.

• 16:39David 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?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  The example would, I'll give you two slightly different spaces. One is on, for a long time, the, and I think it's still true. The ideal version in the audio space is, 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, 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 site just weren't good enough.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 17:42David Senra?

  Because the problem to solve there is video, not audio.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, 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 pause any of that effort. Fast forward 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 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, like you know, VO3 type models that exist. We want to be at that intersection where we know the audio can give you the unique

• 18:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:36David Senra?

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

• 18:44Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 18:45David Senra?

  Do you talk about this in the company?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  We do, I'm, 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 just to explain what I mean by the ecosystem, of course, there's 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.

• 19:32David Senra?

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

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Like an example is voices. 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, different languages, of course, different age, gender that you can pick. Every time you use it, that other person gets paid.

• 20:04David Senra?

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

• 20:08Speaker 01

  We, of course, created a system for people to do that. And some of them, we, like when we see pockets that are missing, will 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.

• 20:22David Senra?

  No one knows about 11 Reader. You have to do a better job. I was just in 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? And you're like, there's an app. And then the follow-up, he still talks, I was like, no, dude, I use that app. What you're asking for, John, is, he already has it. You need to like, show it to him on your phone where 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.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Thanks for being a user. That's amazing.

• 20:49David Senra?

  No, of course. 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 11 Reader, so I'm listening to you 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?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Somebody else is getting paid. It's a great voice actor that worked with us for, now for a long time. And every time you listen, he gets paid.

• 21:23David Senra?

  Do you understand, when we sat down, I was like, you're, one, I keep running into you everywhere. And so that was like, do we got to do a podcast together? And, but like, you're so confusing to me. And 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.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, like, it is, it is very fair. And I think we are seeing that everywhere across AI companies of like, you know, the model becomes a platform, becomes application. But for us, the unifying theme across all of them 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, that there is knowledge, that there is the conversation in a completely new way. And that's, of course, there's just so many different applications. There's 11 Reader that lets you enjoy content in a completely new way.

• 22:19David Senra?

  So research, platform, applications on that platform?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:23David Senra?

  Okay.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  And, and, 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-

• 22:35David Senra?

  It's a vicious battle, too.

• 22:36Speaker 01

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

• 22:53David Senra?

  Wait, explain that.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  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,

• 23:06Speaker 01

  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're trying to engage and bring your product to that, to the customers, whether you are supporting that across the customer journey. Or maybe in a simpler way, as you're 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-

• 23:44David Senra?

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

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:53David Senra?

  Right? And say, you know, it's Goldman Sachs, I'm making this up. And this is how they use, they use this product, all the different products they use. Like, who is 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.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Deutsche Telekom is a great example. They will use a lot of the audio work to create a podcast, and their app, and 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 11 creative work to be able to do that. Then they will use a, our 11 agents work for in call center, where you call in, you want to help, 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 information very quickly. If they're calling to get support on how to get a refund or the recent billion quest,

• 24:49Speaker 01

  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's across all of that. All of that information is captured back, so you understand how customers engage with, 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.

• 25:32David 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 first product Deutsche Bank used from you?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Deutsche Telekom.

• 25:47David Senra?

  Deutsche Telekom, sorry.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. The first was marketing. So it was two years ago, we, we, then that kind of the, most of the, that, two years ago, still, most of the agents were really very, very good. They weren't very reliable. They weren't very quick. So marketing was the most, the most obvious one. So they started with that. They deployed that. The quality of the content was, was, was great. And so people could engage with the podcast. Effectively, the use case that you mentioned of like, you know, bringing your notes and then being able to read them out loud. 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 11 up voices. And so that was the first use case. Then, of course, support is a combination

• 26:32Speaker 01

  of voice, but also of the integrations.

• 26:34David Senra?

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

• 26:39Speaker 01

  In that case, the main, and I guess can mostly like, how do we partner with them to help them bring that product alive?

• 26:46David Senra?

  Yeah. They start with one, but you have 10 different products you could sell them. So how do you go from one to two, and then two to five, and so on and so forth?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the main thing is, one, 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 you don't 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 Deutsche, Deutsche Telekom works with. You need to work on integrations with the output. So how do you connect it to the phone system, with SIP trunking or Twilio, how you make sure that that connection exists?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  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 four deployed engineers would partner with the team, spend the time, and 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 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 with, with initially simulated that, you verify the calls, then you do it at a smaller scale.

• 28:18David Senra?

  And you're doing this with FDEs?

• 28:19Speaker 01

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

• 28:24David Senra?

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

• 28:29Speaker 01

  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. And that applies across all of the, all of the use cases. And FDEs for that are great, too. And so I used to be at Palantir, so it's, it always felt like a, like a big, 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 like, in many ways, I feel like all of them are like partners, where you are working together on, on the same problem, and you're 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.

• 29:10David Senra?

  This is actually really interesting. So tell me what you observed that was working at Palantir, or like, ooh, if I start my company, I want to do that, too, and why?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I think the, the most incredible thing was that, like, you were meant to be on the same side of a customer, obsessed of their problem, and, 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 first month or two, You, when you send an email, it gets verified by your team, gets trained before you send it externally. So it's like a pretty detailed flaw 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 a customer.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  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 in a customer on the Blackrock side. And now here I am in the first weeks, 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 to work with them and bring that knowledge back, understand what is actually the problem, what's fixable problem and then actually fix it.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And that mentality is so true now at Eleven Labs 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. And 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.

• 31:09David Senra?

  Define small.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  About five people is considered in Palantir big and in Eleven Labs is 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 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 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.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And I feel like the second part is always frequently missed with like first, okay, FDEs are, you know, doing effectively a lot of the 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.

• 32:15David 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?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:27David Senra?

  Is that what you're talking about?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:27David Senra?

  Okay.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  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 have that integration available to everyone? That's a simpler version of that. But let's say you're working in healthcare space. In healthcare space, if you deploy the work, then you want to optimize the product experience for the right.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  If you are now starting as a second customer, you want to make sure that you have.

• 32:57David Senra?

  So wait a minute, you're using, you're using your customer base as almost like R and D, another form of R and D.

• 33:03Speaker 01

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

• 33:09David Senra?

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

• 33:13Speaker 01

  That's right. 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, 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 that domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, can be reusable.

• 33:39David Senra?

  What else did you learn working at Palantir?

• 33:41Speaker 01

  They also were very, very much of no title organization, which we carry over at Eleven Labs, which does help in that best idea wins approach where people do feel, I feel like mimicking you on that.

• 33:56David Senra?

  I thought the same thing. I was like, you don't have to if you don't want to.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  No, it's a complete coincidence.

• 34:02David Senra?

  We're leaving that part in.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  No titles, relatively flat organization, very few layers. So it's like, you know, between me and the C-suite. I worked there before the DPO, it was four, five steps or less. So you always felt like a proximity between, I think it was like four or three actually. So it was a good proximity of being able to work together. At Eleven Labs, we have a couple of five today, like maximum depth of how many layers there should be. And hopefully over time, actually there will be fewer, no more layers. If AI helps you run the organization the way we would like to run.

• 34:42David 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?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  I think there is like always you want the information from that kind of the person working as closely to the problem. So let's say you're 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 the manager is 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. Cause it summarizes that back and back and forth. Second, I think that in general, roughly at Eleven Labs, most people will have close to 10 direct reports.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  So a pretty, pretty wide buy set, which helps us build that small team approach 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. And 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. But what I mean by this is frequently in the past, I think you would rely on specific individuals surfacing the information to you. Now, as we think about Eleven Labs and how we run, it's like you can summarize all what's happening, all the data of what's working, what's not.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  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, last part, which is very related to those two, why it's even possible today. We took a choice to be extremely transparent with, with a lot of 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.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Which ultimately helps you create that system where you can actually tap into that knowledge.

• 36:51David 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 first company, your first company you built, 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, 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?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  I think the small teams approach will definitely be there across, across many of the, of the, of the companies that 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 relatively small and independent. People bottoms up, adopt what they think is best and are unable 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 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.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  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, they can get smarter.

• 38:27David Senra?

  Is there any function that is like centralized at Eleven Labs that then all these small individual teams can then access? Like I spent some time with Luca Ferrari of Benning Spoons.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:37David Senra?

  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 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. 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 like tapped into that for that resource.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Of course, there are centralized functions, legal is a good example of, of course, of like 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 Eleven Labs. 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 what we are offering or what we do. So, 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,

• 39:52Speaker 01

  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 like how you, or like the revenue engineering effectively function. We have so many tools that help you get the knowledge, whether it's coached during the conversations, transcribed, 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 dog food 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 Eleven Labs, you can fill in the dropdown form. And leave information about your company.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  But you can also speak with a voice agent and leave that in a quicker and a different way. We've seen a lot of people go for that flow. And then, interestingly, two things happen. One, people are both making things 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.

• 41:00David Senra?

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

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. It's, 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 a better, I feel like a better way on leaving the information. But now, because 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 A I S D R function to be part of the company. We don't, we 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 new ones, but developed, of course, centrally.

• 41:48David 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 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 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.

• 42:30David Senra?

  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. You still think of Eleven Labs as a single company just with, how many different products do you guys have right now?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  We have three kind of core product lines, and then we have additional three that are developing, developing bats.

• 43:14David Senra?

  But how many different like applications?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Well, within each of those, we'll have, let's 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, you know, 20, 30 different things.

• 43:26David Senra?

  Yeah, it seems like you have a ton.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:28David Senra?

  Like Eleven Reader, for example.

• 43:30Speaker 01

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

• 43:38David Senra?

  Where's all the revenue coming from?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:50David Senra?

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

• 43:54Speaker 01

  The, I think the quickest today for us is fintech, super quick.

• 43:59David Senra?

  Like Revolut?

• 44:00Speaker 01

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

• 44:30David Senra?

  I want to ask you one more time, 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?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Well, this is a stretch, and I'm biased, but in Palantir, frequently, there was this concept of like how, how you need, you need a little bit of the understanding of the art to do your job well, or like people need to, need to effectively try to be artists, even if we aren't. Like, one of the phrases that was used was artist colony, even 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

• 45:21Speaker 01

  delivered, like even the, even every voice that is delivered, you like George in Eleven Reader, like everybody will have their own preference and, and how you make sure you capture those voices, how you deliver those preferences 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 art in that. And we're trying 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'll let Lotters judge to whether successfully, but we also will, will try to do and, and hopefully are doing good steps in that direction, whether it's the voice marketplace that we talked about, whether it's having a lot of creatives in the company,

• 46:05Speaker 01

  building projects with us or around us, or the kind of for the point engineers or for the point 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 defined in front of AI. And 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, and what defines above good product experience, good deployment experience will depend on, on 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.

• 46:41David 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 was talking about.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember it.

• 46:50David Senra?

  I've talked, I talked about 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 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, I think, 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 jet, like the new crop of tech founders is like, they, they lack the humanity.

• 47:33David Senra?

  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 that technology to enhance humanity."

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:42David 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 is 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, you know, technology, and it's going to take everybody's job." I see too many conferences, which I want to ask you about.

• 48:09Speaker 01

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

• 48:10David Senra?

  Okay, so I was just there, I was only there for a few hours, and Karp was the one that spoke first. And he's just like, what do you think's going to happen? He's like, your technology is going to get nationalized. Do you have any opinion on, like, his perspective on this?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Not directly. So, so of course, you know, we've seen what happened with Anthropic case recently, given we, we, 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, this will be. So no direct answer to your question. I do agree so much with 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, and I, and I, I mean, I hope we will do a lot of the work and are doing a lot of work in that space, but I hope in the, some of the interviews that you mentioned and some of the, the conversations from other companies, that this will be an increasing

• 49:05Speaker 01

  theme of how, how they can bring that to, to reality too.

• 49:09David Senra?

  The reason I bring that, I ask you that question is because 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, 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 he 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.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Voice is such an incredible identity that's like, probably, and the case that you mentioned is some of our product's work, where we can work with people that lost their voices to ALS due to fraud cancer and work with them on bringing it back. That is, that is one example. Recently, we, we worked with a musician that lost his voice, and he wanted to still perform, so he worked on recreating that voice. We set out a concert, and he did a concert with his old band together with an AI voice. And now he's touring, and in the UK, he's going across places and touring across. Or a congresswoman last year lost her voice and still wanted to inspire others to do

• 50:30Speaker 01

  the work and, and was in the, in the Congress with, for the first time, with AI voice, trying to bring that to life. And the, I mean, the common theme is like, the voice carries such an, like, additional element of emotional impact, of recognition. The more you hear someone's voice, you recognize it, if you know someone. 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. But, yeah, that's, that's the, the work across there. The, the, today is over 10,000 people where we worked on bringing their voices back and, and hope to continue that. And outside of the accessibility space, of course, what happens in education, wider

• 51:15Speaker 01

  culture, here to, we partner today with 800 organizations to help, to help bring the technology to the people out there. One of the crazy ones, actually, that's a crazy story recently, sorry to interrupt you. There was, there's a, like, first of all, a legend, a guy called Tim Green. He used to be a bestselling author, a, one of the top NFL players, and then unfortunately, he got ALS 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. He started a podcast.

• 51:50David Senra?

  I'm going to have to find this guy and chase him down.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  No. Well, you should, you should have an interview with him, and he.

• 51:55David Senra?

  That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant, Matty.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. That's fair.

• 51:59David Senra?

  Then I would destroy him. No.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  But he is extremely well. He has great guests. That Howard Bultnick recently on his podcast, some of them fire players. And this year he won an Emmy for his work. So it's like, wow. So he is incredible.

• 52:18David Senra?

  Wait, so you made that voice though?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  We, yes, we do his AI voice.

• 52:22David Senra?

  That's incredible.

• 52:23Speaker 01

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

• 52:46David Senra?

  Well, I think you hit on something which makes is one of the reasons. And I discovered this accidentally. It's like what makes podcasting so powerful is the voice. Where it's like, you know, obviously I like love to read. I mean, there's books all around, like scattered around the house everywhere. Obviously have like, I don't know. Yeah, I have like a thousand books in my other library, like probably 600 unread. 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 podcasts, which is like not at all comparable. It's like, I feel like I know because of the voice and like 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.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, you also, it's, it's, you're in a conversation now and it's like 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, doesn't have the imperfections. It doesn't have the pauses.

• 53:45David Senra?

  The imperfection is really important. Cause you know, 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, yeah, we can edit it out if you want, but like I slur my words. I say, oh, I make all these kinds of weird things. It was like, but that is just how I am. I don't ever want to be up here on a like a podcast. You meet me in person, it's 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.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  That's true. You know, it's actually finally, it even applies in a non-human way, in a voice agent's way too. We initially, we are trying to create a perfect voice agent that doesn't do any.

• 54:23David Senra?

  It's not gonna sound human.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  It didn't sound human. And then of course, the obvious thing that was the clearest is like the ums, the ams, the pauses. And suddenly the performance of working with that voice agent like skyrocketed. Everybody was like, whoa, this is so human. This is good. I'm happy to speak with that. So, so yeah, it's making it imperfect. It's almost now the element of that. But voice does carry that information. 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, 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.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  So like even doing benchmarks for text to speech is extremely hard. Because usually different models will have different voices. That already makes them uncomparable.

• 55:19David Senra?

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

• 55:23Speaker 01

  I would say I didn't know this was the path.

• 55:25David Senra?

  You did or did not?

• 55:26Speaker 01

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

• 55:29David Senra?

  Cause you're European.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  In Poland, it was, yeah, for sure, a little bit of that though. I, you know, you're joking, but I think it's true.

• 55:34David Senra?

  No, I'm being serious.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Taking like the risk of like not, you know, like starting something, 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, Panter was great for that for sure. Where it's like, you can actually go and work with the customer, try to figure out the problem, you can take, that seemed very risky to me, but you can do that. So kind of step by step that opened eyes of like, okay, maybe this is a path, maybe it is possible to start your own thing. And.

• 56:15David Senra?

  From the time you had that realization to the time you started 11 Labs, what was the?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  So then as you kind of.

• 56:19David Senra?

  Was it a year, two years? Like what was it?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  So over my time as a Panter, my co-founder's time at Google, we would do, start doing a hack weekend projects together. So through the years, we tried to explore new technology and build together. I think a few years prior, we, we knew that we would love to work on something together. But, but you want to work something about that you are like, you think it's a true problem and you're obsessed about. And, and that came to us in 2021. So a few years, two years, two, three years.

• 56:49David Senra?

  How many acquisition offers have you had?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Like concrete ones, three or four.

• 56:53David Senra?

  When's the last one?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Last one was last year, like June last year.

• 56:58David Senra?

  You gonna sell?

• 56:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:00David Senra?

  The reason I ask you.

• 57:01Speaker 01

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

• 57:09David Senra?

  Then don't pay attention to your VCs dude. Their incentives are different than yours. The reason I ask you, there's 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. I'm obsessed with products. And like, that dude has soul in the game, like, and I hope he wins. I have no idea, like, I, I don't know anything about, you know, just, I don't use like Snapchat, specs, anything, whatever. Cause it's just like, he is differentiated. I did, 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 Matty to like win. I want him to succeed.

• 57:53David Senra?

  There's just something very likeable 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 really like Scott a lot.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  I'm Scott is genius. He's so, so good as well.

• 58:03David Senra?

  Well, yeah, but he's 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 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, you go listen 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. And see, that's why that's your question, because 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.

• 58:46David Senra?

  And he's just so far said, no, I'm not selling.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  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, the hyper clouds of the future. So I think, I think he can do it. He's, he has, they have an incredible team. And I think we can do it too. I think it's, you know, I really mean it. I think the opportunity that, that currently exists for entrepreneurs of, with the wider shift, 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.

• 59:23David 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, the content that entrepreneurs are.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Self-serving in many ways, I feel.

• 59:32David Senra?

  Well, the content entrepreneurs are consuming or created by VCs is a weird thing to me. 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, it's 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 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. 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 11 Labs is probably the best idea you will ever have in your life. And you're how old?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Thirty-one.

• 1:00:14David Senra?

  Okay. So you're gonna sell your best idea at 31? You got four decades ahead of you, maybe five. Hold on. And you're gonna work on your second, third, fourth, fifth best idea? Dude, the money's not worth it. It's not worth it. You're gonna get the money anyways.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Well, you're convincing me something I'm already convinced on.

• 1:00:29David Senra?

  I know, but, but they all say this shit. The founders all say this and it's like really hard when it's like, dude, I'm gonna drop 50 billion on you. Like it just, the numbers are getting crazy. So I understand why people do it. I'm not knocking them. I'm just saying, I would like, I'm very interested in entrepreneurs that there's no price. Like 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 two 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.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I'm with you there. It's, you know, there, there, I, I agree. Many people I think will say it. In our case, we had a lack of having acquisition offers, which we turned down and that was not, not, not an option. And any of those acquisitions would, you know, it's not two trillion, but they would have made, made life easy, of course. But it's not, I think it's, that in itself should never be an interesting proposition. And like you said, it's like, you know, we do appreciate this is likely the, the best idea, the best timing to have that, the kind of lack of when it's all happened is such a, such an incredible coincidence. And like, I don't know how the world will look like in five to 10 years.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Like 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? Like all of those questions are out there. And I think they will be a big part. So of course, the, the best thing, the thing we can do for the world and for us is just to continue building.

• 1:02:06David Senra?

  Did you read Scott Wu's piece in Colossus, the Colossus magazine?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:11David Senra?

  That's done by my friend, Patrick.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:13David Senra?

  I'll text it to you right when we're done. You can put in 11.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  I'll listen to it on the way.

• 1:02:18David Senra?

  Put in 11 reader and listen to it. But I loved what his perspective was at the end. He's like, listen, you know, he thinks he, same thing. Right person, right set of skills, right time. He thinks this teaching AI how to code, teaching computers how to code is, you know, one of the, 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. Like, so I was just like, he's like, I just wanna give this one opportunity, the best opportunity in my lifetime, which he understands. He's, I think he's like around your age too. He's like, I'm just gonna give it everything I have and see what happens.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  It's like some version of like biggest risk is not taking any risks. And, and some version of like, you should just go after it.

• 1:03:06David Senra?

  Does your, your co-founder think about this the same way?

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's also all in. He doesn't like public presence. As in like interviews, podcasts, but he, he truly is a genius. I hope one day he comes on the podcast too.

• 1:03:18David Senra?

  He certainly wants.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  You know, the kind of the definitely AGI built and how that world will change is very deeply in his mind. And he knows that he is, he can be, and he and now the wider research team are all part of that change. So it's, it's unique opportunity. I think all of us realize that like how unique the timing is and what we can do with that timing and what we can do for the world. I think that's like, it's, you know, that we are four and a half years in as a company and

• 1:03:59David Senra?

  Because you're

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  scale. It's crazy.

• 1:04:01David 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.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  A 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.

• 1:04:25David Senra?

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

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Voice is definitely part of it, but it, it kind of understands you. 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 learned how, how technology around works and learn the language of that technology, the keyboard, the screen, the coding languages even. They are the kind of, you, you need to learn how the technology works so you can 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.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  So, so I think 12 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 in an incredibly better way, both our knowledge, both the emotional part of that conversation, and deliver, deliver similar conversation we are having now.

• 1:05:33David Senra?

  And if that's the case, then the market for this and even the, 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, 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.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. It will, 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. Probably the screen, the phone will like kind of be able to be back in the back pocket if you want to need it in the same way as you do now. So it'll be, be cool.

• 1:06:17David Senra?

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

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  It was one of the slides that we, we thought that yes, Babblefish will exist and will hopefully make it happen, but less so that we will create Babblefish itself, but we will enable everyone out there to have Babblefish in their existing, existing devices, existing presence, existing work. That was definitely one of the, the, kind of the north stars that we were thinking about.

• 1:06:49David Senra?

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

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  I don't do that many, I think.

• 1:06:56David Senra?

  I get these emails. So, so Daniel, 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 he's like, his line for this is like, stay away from the circus.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14David 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, I obviously love Michael Dell, so I do his too, and I do nothing else. And because of Daniel's advice, just like stay away from the circus. Like the people that show up at these things, they don't, they're not doing any work. They're just there to distract, like you don't have to do it. And so then I got all these emails and invitations, like come to this thing. And I open it up and I see your face everywhere. What are you doing?

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  No, I usually try to do two per, two to three per quarter, usually, conference events. 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 prospecting partners or clients. So, 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, so a lot of the, the events are a great, great way for us to, to, to catch time with a lot of the, the people that we work with.

• 1:08:22David Senra?

  And then turn them into customers.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  And turn them into customers.

• 1:08:24David Senra?

  All right. So you are

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Or expand the one to two or five, whatever this is. You know, the, the common trope, 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, I'm European, so I drank alcohol at the time as well. And, and then I like felt tired. I didn't think I did anything. And, and it, it like, it seemed fun, but, but it wasn't very productive. And then, and then I had the period was like not

• 1:08:54David Senra?

  Did you have nothing to sell at the time?

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  At the time I didn't, I wasn't, 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 to the conference and just like flowing through it. And I, and I think 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're doing something important. It's completely unimportant. And, 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 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 a lot of the, there's like some repeating crowd across those events.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  So you want to do that once, which is kind of different. And, 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're pitching them and they are relaxing. That's like a bad recipe for disaster. But, 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 pre-arrange a lot of time. I never go and like 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, the main thing is, is trying to grab time with the people that are there and that has been working really well.

• 1:10:15David Senra?

  Are you still drinking?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  No, on the weddings, but apart from that, it's, it's

• 1:10:19David Senra?

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

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:35David Senra?

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

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Deal.

• 1:10:41David Senra?

  All right, man. Thanks for doing this.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:10:43David Senra?

  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 first found me through Founders.