The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:02:20 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
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00:03:42 · Luke Harries
[00:03:42] S1: Yeah. So we met when we were 19, and we did a hackathon at Cambridge. We rocked up. It's me, Matti, this guy called Philip, who organized it. He's Polish, and he basically brought together his smartest friends and me to compete at this hackathon. My top tip for any young people listening is do hackathons with your smartest friends. Because what happened with that hackathon is, one, we end up winning the Microsoft Prize. So we each won an Xbox and immediately put that on eBay. So we got about £300. Two, it landed me my first job at Microsoft. And then I also got to meet Matti. And Matti and I, we stayed in touch pretty much every six months. We catch up. We riff on startups. And scroll forward about seven years, so this is year and a half ago, Matti's like, hey, Luke. I've just started a new company. Do you wanna go catch up? And I was angel investing then, and we were swimming in the Hampstead Heath Ponds. And when I tell Americans this, they're like, oh, ponds? You mean, like, small dirty puddle of water? I'm like, yeah. But it's actually quite nice. So we're swimming in this ponds, and he taps the degrees. He's like, oh, it's 11 degrees. No way. My company is called ElevenLabs. And he takes me through this grand plan of what he's going to do with ElevenLabs, which is step one, they're gonna build the world's best audio AI models. And step two, they're going to sell it to everyone. So for people listening on their way to work, for creators making audiobooks, voiceovers, they're gonna sell it to developers to make AI voice agents. And I was like, that is a terrible go to market plan. That's absolutely terrible. I was kind of angel investing there, but I was like, this is not something I want to invest. What do you mean step one, you're gonna build the world's best AI audio model, something no one else has ever done? Anyway, so I did an invest.
00:05:23 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:05:23] S0: And Oh, that's... This is the moment where you're like, this is a friend, Jack. You know, the supportive one. Didn't believe in it, but I just... I'll give you 10 k [00:05:30] S1: or something. I really should've. I mean, that 10 k would've done very well. Anyway, we stayed in touch, and then he phones me up about six months later being like, Luke, we've just hit a million users. It's going incredibly well. We're looking for someone to lead growth. So that hackathon was a lot of fun. Met Matti. And, also, Philip, the guy who organized it, he founded Wordware, which is the largest raise from YC ever. I think it's about $40,000,000. So, yeah, that's a a great hackathon to [00:05:56] S0: do. No fucking way. Yeah. I didn't know that was the [00:05:58] S1: same Philip. [00:05:59] S0: I love Philip. [00:06:00] S1: Oh, yeah. Philip's awesome. And that's still my LinkedIn cover photo It's me, Matti, and Philip packing over this computer when we're 19. I've not changed [00:06:07] S0: it since. Met Philip recently, and he is fantastic. [00:06:10] S1: You have to have him on the pod.
00:06:10 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:06:10] S1: You have to have him on the pod. [00:06:11] S0: Yeah. That's a very good shout. There's couple of things I just wanna unpack, which is you very kindly scrolled forward seven years. Most of my American guests don't and they painfully tell me about their Stanford second year and third year and every class that they did in between. I do just wanna touch on one thing that Matthew also told me to touch on which is Fellas, which is the company you started before joining Eleven Labs. What are some of the big takeaways from that when you reflect on it and how it shaped how you think about growth and product building?
00:06:37 · Luke Harries
[00:06:37] S1: I mean, Fella was a wild journey. It's me and my friend, Richie, and we just wanna do a start up. So we applied to YC. We got into YC actually with an AI developer tool, and we quickly realized we were trying to do, like, browser based automation where you automate tasks on people's behalf. So, you know, you're sending an email and it, like, auto completes it. But this was back in 2019 before LLMs were really a thing. The transformer paper had just came out, but, like, GPT three didn't even exist. So we're going to YC. We tried building prototype, and we're like, oh, this just isn't gonna work. And a brief detour is as we realized this wasn't gonna work, COVID hit. And we were there trying to brainstorm the next billion dollar idea whilst also seeing this, like, impending wave of what everyone thought was a killer virus crossing across the world. So we set up a COVID testing clinic in San Francisco. We were, like, one of the first people to realize COVID was gonna hit. We're following the largely on Twitter. And so we're like, okay. How do we actually set up all this testing? So we set up a drive through COVID testing. We were very European. We were like, of course, we're gonna do it not for profit. And, like, this this is a pandemic. We found a company which... AutoMYC, which was doing testing of, I think, sepsis. They decided to pivot into COVID testing. We distributed all their first tests. And one key lesson which is probably a bit niche is, like, don't do beta tests for pandemic testing because we set up this drive through clinic. We just posted in Bookface saying, like, hey. We're doing the first, like, 100 tests for free. Just come through. We want to check all our operations came out. And we accidentally ended up with an entire car park full of San Francisco tech billionaires rocking up in, like, their Lamborghinis and Ferraris to get, like, the first COVID test. So that was a lot of fun. But we were like, okay. You know, not for profit. The pandemic was hitting. It turned out the company we partnered with took a different approach. You know, they were some of the first people to do these testing, did incredibly well. One of the fastest companies ever to a $100,000,000 in revenue, and that company became Curative. Fred Turner, incredible founder, and is now building one of the largest health tech companies in Texas.
00:08:46 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:08:46] S0: Absolutely fucking nuts. Yeah. I remember we had we had we had the Hirox founders on. [00:08:51] S1: Yeah. Hirox? Yeah. [00:08:52] S0: Yeah. And they made money by turning a coffee shop into a COVID testing center Wow. In COVID, because, like, Hirox [00:08:58] S1: was Yeah. [00:08:59] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Planning, and it was for not... They didn't do not for profit, and it was, like, a fantastic business for them. Yeah. Yeah. That is absolutely nuts.