00:01:02 · Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:01:02] S1: Welcome to Grit. I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history making companies. Today on the show, we have Mati, cofounder and CEO of ElevenLabs, the audio company building infrastructure for how we speak and listen in the world of AI. They are in the eye of the hurricane of all AI hurricanes right now, and it's an absolutely incredible story of starting in Europe and building what looks to be one of the preeminent businesses in LLMs today. Enjoy the episode. So your early employees, how much of it was, like, I don't know, researchers slash scientists versus... These rules start to get very blurry and fuzzy.
00:01:41 · Mati Staniszewski, Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:01:41] S0: But Researchers, in our mind, these are, like, people that can create net new work, new paper, get it out to the world, and this is, like, a true innovation that it could make any paper at any of their conferences and would be one of the best papers. So that's the researcher. Then you're right. There's standard full stack engineers. But then we also have, like, a category of research engineers, so people that can take an existing paper and improve it or do some of the modifications on the inference side to make the model serving and and and more optimal and and quicker or better. So kind of in those three categories, initially, we would optimize for researchers and research engineers. So that's why we started very much remote at the very beginning where we wanted to hire anyone who was the best in the world wherever they were. And we knew that the only way for us to get to the best talent would be to hire the researchers from... We had a person from from Korea, from from Europe, and and that was, like, kind of the the big part of, like, let's hire them wherever they are. Let's assemble the best researchers in the world in one place. And then, of course, full stack engineering came kind of in parallel at the same time to to start building building the product. [00:02:51] S1: Okay. And so your first... Let's say your first 10. Yeah. How many were each of those responsibilities?
00:02:51 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:02:51] S1: Okay. And so your first... Let's say your first 10. Yeah. How many were each of those responsibilities? [00:02:57] S0: So my cofounder, the smartest person I know, also an incredible researcher. So that's what he used to do at at Google and previously at at university. So so he was one of the researchers, but on top of Scout, we hired two people in the first 10, one, two people, then additional one research engineer. But the research engineer, like, in the early days, who kind of do everything, whether it's data, whether it's improving the model. So it, like, kind of infuses. But I would say from the first stand, including me and my cofounder, four of the people would be doing research or research engineering. Two or three people would do engineering, and three people would do go to market growth. So pretty quickly, we started looking into how we can get the technology out there to to both the self serve distribution and then sales led distribution through working with some of the companies. [00:03:47] S1: Yeah. And before we get too far ahead, like, maybe for those that don't know, what do you all do?
00:03:47 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:47] S1: Yeah. And before we get too far ahead, like, maybe for those that don't know, what do you all do? [00:03:52] S0: So we are ElevenLabs. We do combination of research and and product work, product deployment work focused on AI voice space. We are on a mission to be the voice of technology, and we do it for two two key ways. One is in agents platform offering. We help people build conversational agents across customer support for personal AI, across media entertainment to make interactions interactive. And then second is our creative platform offering where we help people create narration, voice over, dubbing, add music to their work in one holistic suite. So really stretching the use cases where voice can empower and now even more on the omnichannel experience in agent and omni modality experience on the creative side. [00:04:34] S1: What's crazy is the company started pre GPT three. Right? And you were, if my math is correct, like, 25 years old at that point, living in Europe and recruiting research researchers. Like, that doesn't... I'm trying to, like... That doesn't really add up to me. Like, how does that how does that, like... What are they even... What were they working on? Like, what research were they even doing? Yeah. How did that how did that work? [00:05:06] S0: No. It is... You know, it's like, in a way, it was also the best... In in many ways, it was the best. We started our company in 2022. It was it was kind of still the year where crypto, metaverse were kind of on their [00:05:18] S1: Right.
00:05:18 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:05:18] S1: Right. [00:05:19] S0: Final downhill moment. So AI, nobody was working on AI, which gave us an advantage of two things. One was we had a good amount of time to start work before the GPT moment where... Like a true viral moment where that gave us an advantage of working before others. And two, the people we were able to hire in those days were true missionaries and excited people about the space. [00:05:46] S1: You mean you're not competing with Zoc back then?
00:05:49 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:05:49] S0: You are not competing with other big players. Although happy to compete with them, we... I think we we are now... We we we we... I think we have a great spot for a lot of the researchers to do the best work of their lives in in audio and beyond. But the the main thing is that all the people that joined you at the time are, like, a true missionaries. They really believe in a mission, really believe in what the voice can do for the world. That was still, like... Currently, it became normalized that voice is going to be the future interface. It's an important part. Back then, nobody really cared about AI. Nobody really cared about voice. And and me and my cofounder, so we started a company. We knew each other for fifteen years, so we are best friends from high school. Took all the same classes. We both love mathematics Mhmm. And everything around it. And then for the years did everything together. Worked together, traveled together, lived together, and are still best friends, so the time is on our on our side. Mhmm. And and the idea came from from Poland. We are both from Poland, and there's a very peculiar thing. If you watch a movie in Polish language, like a foreign movie in Polish language, all the characters get narrated with one single voice. So whether it's a male speaker or a female speaker in the original movie, in Polish, you get just one voice narrating every Is that unique to Poland? It's unique to the post communist countries. There's, like, five countries in the world that do it this way, and Poland is, like, one of the few, which is... It's almost hard to imagine, but it's a terrible experience. And it still happens for most of the work today, most of the content today. So that was the initial trigger point of like, hey. We know this will change. We know that with the invention of transformer a few years back, with the fusion models, audio will be able to to get created in that way that's actually heavily emotional and has a good intonation. You can recreate any voice you want. And and with knowing what's possible across audio space, decided to start ElevenLabs. And, course, the vision quickly expanded from there where it's not only that that will change. It will be the entire interaction with technology around us that that will change.