Victoria Weller, ElevenLabs' Chief of Staff, says a chief of staff fills gaps at small companies, starting with compliance and moving to hiring, taxes and entity setup.
ElevenLabs got through its full SOC 2 compliance process in seven weeks, according to Weller, who led the effort as she took on operational gaps.
Weller left Palantir for a faster pace and joined ElevenLabs after its CEO, a former Palantir colleague, convinced her she was not bureaucratic.
ElevenLabs' chief of staff on owning every startup gap
Victoria Weller's career shows what an early-stage chief of staff actually does. At ElevenLabs she owns whatever is unowned, from compliance to taxes, because a fast-growing startup has no one else to take it. The job rewards people who stop waiting for an expert and find the answer themselves.
Takeaways
Early-stage chiefs of staff fill every gap. Weller took compliance first and got ElevenLabs through SOC 2 in seven weeks, then moved to hiring and tax and entity work. Herold, former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, calls it an early-stage role demanding an entrepreneurial mindset. Weller says it can grow into COO.
Nobody knows better, so find answers yourself. Weller's advice to her younger self is that no one else holds the answer. At ElevenLabs she recently had to work out how to file the year-end report with HM Revenue and Customs herself, with no expert to lean on.
ElevenLabs wants content accessible in any language. The text to speech product turns an EPUB file into an audiobook with distinct character voices and uses context so a sad sentence sounds sadder, across 28 languages. A hospital reads surgical risks to patients, and people who lost voices to throat cancer use it.
Voice cloning is gated by verification. Instant cloning needs thirty seconds of audio and professional cloning thirty minutes. Voice owners read a random sentence aloud, which staff check manually before training. Families wanting a deceased mother's or relative's voice, a frequent request, must show next-of-kin permission.
AI builders share the duty to stop deepfakes. Weller says people learned to doubt photos once Photoshop spread, and audio needs similar public education. AI companies still carry an ethical duty to build safeguards. ElevenLabs offers the AI Speech Classifier, which checks whether a clip came from ElevenLabs without an account.
User growth pulled ElevenLabs straight to Series A. Founded in 2022 by its CEO and CTO, ElevenLabs launched in public beta in February 2023 and left beta in August. With millions of consumer users, it raised a pre-seed and skipped seed for a Series A, which Weller credits to growth and AI's upside.
AI is far bigger than ChatGPT. Herold criticises people who treat ChatGPT as the only AI tool, pointing to the directory There's An AI For That, which lists around 8,000. Weller credits OpenAI with the fundamental shift that came when people first used ChatGPT.
From astrophysics to startup operations
Grew up in Munich, applied to study architecture at the University of Edinburgh, then switched to astrophysics at the last minute and was admitted without higher-level physics.
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Worked as a research assistant at Charité's Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, studying how the cardiovascular system changes in microgravity, work that became a Springer Brief.
Interned at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and spent three months simulating sun baffles at microsatellite startup Brilliant Space Technologies.
Earned a master's in applied physics at Columbia University, then worked at quantum encryption startup Crypt.
Joined Palantir as a reliability engineer in 2019, having left research because its time frames were too slow and the people she clicks with were in business.
Left Palantir for a faster pace and joined ElevenLabs, whose CEO, a former Palantir colleague, was convinced by her operational ideas that she was not bureaucratic.