Inside The Pipeline: B2B Sales and GTM
00:00:05 · Tris Tusa
[00:00:05] S0: Welcome to episode four of Inside The Pipeline. I realized up until this point, I haven't actually introduced myself, nor has my co host Ben, who's not here right now, but I can introduce him a bit. I'm Tris Tusa. I work in growth with Throxie and presenting and putting together a podcast is one of my jobs. Ben is on the product team here at Throxy. So he's helping our clients book meetings with prospects. And he also presents on the podcast with me. So I'm very lucky to have him. Now both of us are very, very excited about today's guest, who is Oscar Lanzendorf, who works in go to market at one of the biggest AI companies in the world right now, ElevenLabs. For those of you who don't know ElevenLabs, they specialize in voice AI. So for example, imagine if you could just write a sentence on your laptop and it speaks back to you. Imagine if you could clone your voice so that you can text on your laptop and then, it speaks out in your exact tone of voice. That is what ElevenLabs does. They're currently valued at $6,600,000,000 and they have high profile partnerships with the likes of Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey, some of the most famous voices in the world. I could feel Oscar's energy from as soon as he came into the room, and it's clear that he resonates exactly the message that ElevenLabs are trying to put out there. We also found it very interesting to talk to him about how he approaches sales. He definitely has more of an old school way of looking at things. Anyway, enough of the introduction. I'll hand it straight over to our chat with Oscar, which took place in our office in the middle of December. Enjoy. Welcome, Oscar Lanzendorf. We were just clarifying before exactly how to pronounce your name, but I'm glad that I didn't butcher it. Welcome to our office. Welcome to London. What have you been up to this morning?
00:02:14 · Oscar Lanzendorf, Tris Tusa
[00:02:14] S1: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me, first of all. It's great to be here. This morning has been started off with a walk, actually, and then went to the to the office and went a lot of meetings already, a lot of calls, and now I'm here. [00:02:28] S0: And you guys have just got, I think you were telling us before, a new office in Soho. That's right. How many people have you got in London at the moment? [00:02:36] S1: At the moment, I think it's over a 100. Wow. Yeah. 100 [00:02:39] S0: people. ElevenLabs. Obviously, you are working in go to market, one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world. And there's been a lot of publication, I think, over the last few months, a recent partnership with Meta. I think you'd also agree that the Matthew McConaughey announcement Yes. Got a lot of traction. How's it been over the last six months? How's it been since you joined?
00:02:39 · Tris Tusa, Oscar Lanzendorf, S2
[00:02:39] S0: people. ElevenLabs. Obviously, you are working in go to market, one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world. And there's been a lot of publication, I think, over the last few months, a recent partnership with Meta. I think you'd also agree that the Matthew McConaughey announcement Yes. Got a lot of traction. How's it been over the last six months? How's it been since you joined? [00:03:04] S1: Well, when I joined, we were already very successful and growing super fast. Until now, I think a lot has changed. It's a completely different company, to be honest. We've grown in size. Like, we doubled in headcount. When I was joining, we were less than 200 people. Now we're more than 400 people. We've doubled in revenue. We actually went in increments. When I started, we were close to over 100,000,000 in revenue. In less than ten months, we went to 200, and now we're close to breaking the 300. All of that actually in, like, less than a... Like, ten to fourteen month period of time. Right? So it's been it's it's been really growing extremely fast, and we also doubled in valuation from 3.3 to 6,600,000,000, and that's just all been happening in nine months. [00:03:47] S2: So that that revenue growth, first of all, extraordinary. How many different sort of lines of revenue are there in... Within that number? So, like, talk to me like I'm an idiot that doesn't understand ElevenLabs at all. What are the different ways you guys are delivering for your customers and therefore making
00:03:47 · S2, Tris Tusa
[00:03:47] S2: So that that revenue growth, first of all, extraordinary. How many different sort of lines of revenue are there in... Within that number? So, like, talk to me like I'm an idiot that doesn't understand ElevenLabs at all. What are the different ways you guys are delivering for your customers and therefore making [00:04:04] S0: And and maybe even go right back to the start. What does ElevenLabs do for someone who doesn't know Yeah. What ElevenLabs is?
00:04:10 · Oscar Lanzendorf
[00:04:10] S1: Maybe I'll just start with this. So at the first layer, how I like to explain ElevenLabs to people is on the first instance, we are a research company. Right? So similar to, like, OpenAI and Anthropic, we have a deep belief that everything starts within the research of our own models. So every time you use a product from ElevenLabs, you will use our own proprietary models. And when we feel that these models are at a level that they're great, they're really excellent in the field, and they're breaking all the benchmarks, then we feel comfortable to bring out products on this. Right? So we can just say, alright. We wanna do now text to speech. We wanna do speech to text, and we wanna have these own building blocks that people can use in their own systems and orchestrations. And out of that then, and, you know, a couple of these products that you've seen are things like our dubbing functionality, which allows you to dub into over 70 languages, you know, things like voice cloning and voice changers, up to things like music, which allow you to create songs from written text to things that are more agentic, such as our agents, right, which combine these different building blocks. So on the first layer, we're a model company. On the second layer, we're a products company. And to put it into very simple terms, we automate a lot of the things that currently humans are doing in the loop. We do these via AI. And most of the times, we do them like 10 x better because our AIs basically are available twenty four seven. We speak more than 32 languages. This is now talking on the agentic side, and we're pretty much connected to all of your systems. So our AIs are always up to date. They can reference data that is backed in your system. They can handle a different variety of queries, and this is basically what we do. We try to give the Internet a voice. So everything before that was communicated with machines via writing or coding can now be done via voice.
00:05:54 · Tris Tusa, Oscar Lanzendorf, S2
[00:05:54] S0: Am am I right in saying that the initial idea for the company came from your founders who are Polish, who had watched TV programs with terrible, terrible dubbing. [00:06:09] S1: That's right. That's right. That was the original story. Right? So [00:06:12] S0: Yeah. Yeah. [00:06:12] S1: Back in Poland... I'm I'm not Polish, but that is the story that we were told. And every time we tell the story, there's a Polish person they attested. They did not have dubbing. They... I don't know how it's currently done. Probably, we're we're solving most of these problems. But they didn't have dubbing, and it was only one narrator with the same voice, with the same tonality, speaking for every single character in the movie or series whatever. So that's a terrible experience. [00:06:36] S0: Must have [00:06:37] S2: been very strange to watch. [00:06:38] S1: Yeah. And that is basically the thesis on which it started. [00:06:41] S2: Surely there were two genders. [00:06:43] S1: Or was there just one person? One person. One person. So... And speaking in the same tonality of voice. Yeah. You know?