Anton Osika says he chose Lovable to build for the 99 percent of people who cannot code, not developer productivity tools.
Mati Staniszewski says he held on to doing work himself too long and must now hire people better than himself in legal, finance and sales.
Mati Staniszewski says product, brand and taste will decide AI winners as competition intensifies, especially in research.
Why Europe's fastest AI CEOs barely plan past six months
ElevenLabs and Lovable are growing at a pace that breaks the usual playbook for running a company. The AI platforms underneath them shift too fast to plan far ahead, so both first-time CEOs keep organisations flat and plan in quarters at most, hiring experience only where they lack it. Building from Europe gives them deep talent but a thinner bench of people who have scaled before.
Takeaways
Planning horizons have shrunk to months or hours. Lovable does very little planning and keeps a roughly six-month launch roadmap. ElevenLabs teams set quarterly initiatives but give research no timelines, and they integrate new releases within 24 hours. Brian Halligan says platform shifts make planning beyond six months hard.
Small teams and wide spans preserve speed. ElevenLabs grew from zero in 2022 to over $200m in revenue, with 300-plus people in about 30 small teams. Mati Staniszewski has 15 direct reports and Anton Osika has five. Halligan, who had about ten at HubSpot, recommends flat organisations.
Hire veterans for predictable functions, generalists elsewhere. Lovable hires experienced people for sales and some marketing and fills the rest with high-slope generalists. About half of Staniszewski's reports had done the role before. He says the sales leader sets the culture for the whole sales team.
Product and taste will decide AI winners. Osika is not very worried about OpenAI or Anthropic, arguing their first launches would be inferior. Staniszewski expects competition, especially in research, to intensify, and says product, brand, design and taste will separate the winners.
Years inside a good company came first. Both founders say they would not have succeeded at 21. Staniszewski learned at Palantir to build from customer problems, and Osika says senior engineers would have been scared to work for him. Halligan notes each had seven or eight years at one good company.
Europe has hungry talent but thin networks. Stockholm has become a talent destination, and Eastern European engineers want to build something generational. A less mature startup network makes distribution harder, and employees need convincing that equity has value, which ElevenLabs tender offers helped provide.
How the CEOs manage their time
Staniszewski's assistant Hana and a script sort his email into priority tiers from P0 to P2, and P0 messages get same-day replies.
He plans his calendar at least a quarter ahead, including which continents he will be in, aiming to spend about a month in the US.
Osika runs a 15-minute Monday brainstorm, then schedules Lovable's tweets himself in Typefully.
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On this episode 3
Show 1
Halligan kept no-meeting Wednesdays and a monthly list of eight priorities.
He also wore a hat with a big No on it to make declining requests easier.