The a16z Show
00:06:04 · Jennifer Li, Mati Staniszewski
[00:06:04] S2: I guess, first, you kind of have to figure out if the research commitment is going to meet the timeline first and then go on to align with the product teams. That makes a lot of sense. As everyone is moving to San Francisco and building in person and locked in in the same space, Eleven has always been building globally and having people more distributed. But you now have centers, I guess, in different locations from London, Warsaw, San Francisco to New York and other places. How do you think about building this global expansion and finding talent globally versus, I guess, the trade offs of building in the same place? [00:06:44] S0: Yeah, so me and my co founder are Polish. We started between Warsaw and London at the time, and I think ElevenLabs wouldn't have existed if we weren't starting from Europe. It's a very peculiar thing, but in Poland, if you watch a movie in Polish language, like a foreign movie in Polish language, all the voices, whether that's a male voice or a female voice, get narrated with one single character. No emotions, no intonation. As you can imagine, it's pretty terrible, and it's still happening today for most of the content out there. [00:07:10] S2: I've had a similar experience growing up in China, that we have a lot of western movies dubbed in Chinese So
00:07:17 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:07:17] S0: bad, so bad. And it's like in Poland, of course, post communist country, it's a cheaper way to do it. You don't have to hire as many people. You have one monotone audiobook reading of a movie, and that was kind of where the company started, and we started initially in Europe, and we realized that if we wanted the best people to solve what was a research problem at the time, we need to hire wherever they are, and we couldn't lock ourselves to just San Francisco or look at the West Coast. We knew that we need to find them across Europe, across Asia, and bring them into the company, so we started fully remote and started looking at those people, and then on engineering, we also were very against this traditional hiring method of looking at LinkedIn, looking at traditional background, and trying to figure out could we go and figure out a different method to hire people. That led to some very interesting hires. So we hired a person that had incredible open source text to speech model and was working in the call center at the same time as a recipient of the calls to make money. Wow. And he's now on the team, one of the most brilliant researchers we have doing all the data processing. But this same pattern kind of followed, and, of course, the early team was very distributed. And then as we started scaling, so beyond 30 people, we realized that the new people joining, there's benefit of them having a space to be next to others to get deeper into the culture, understand what are all the projects that are happening in the company, so we started the hubs where you can go into London and Warsaw and San Francisco, where you can work with others in person, and that's how we try to, like, marry those two. If you are early in your career, we try to hire you in the hub so you can immerse yourself in the company. If you are used to remote work, completely fine, but then if you want, you can always come and join us in the hub, and that worked really well. Currently, we continue hiring very untraditional backgrounds in some of the place of the company and then fusing that with very traditional backgrounds which can teach the others. And in sales, for example, we've done some of those experiments too where that combination worked really well.
00:09:12 · Jennifer Li, Mati Staniszewski
[00:09:12] S2: The lesson is you can really find talent everywhere. It's just how hard and how you you look for them. [00:09:18] S0: And I think in Europe also, this was an interesting one, in The US, people are very keen and excited to work, and if you go for any social event, like, you you want to talk about work. And in Europe, I didn't have this feeling where it's like most people don't want to do that. It's like the cultural piece is different. But then you do have the pockets of people that actually strive it too. They just don't have the companies where they could do that in. So I feel like our team from Europe is the most motivated and passionate set of people that we are lucky to have. [00:09:45] S2: Yeah, I can attest to that given I've met some of them very hardcore, very good work ethic for sure. And you have also maintained a pretty flat org structure and have people own quite laterally a lot of responsibilities. Can you talk about the rationale behind that? And I guess there was also a no title policy.
00:10:03 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:10:03] S0: Yeah, so we removed titles a year ago and it's going well. It still works, and I do think that... But I thought a lot of AI companies kind of do it too already with member of technical staff being, like, the usual piece you have for engineering, and then in a lot of the go to market, you are just go to market, not VP of sales or other roles, so I think it's it's actually a a pretty common pattern. But in our case, we we we had a small team approach where you have extremely small amount of people, usually the five to 10, and and we wanted to make it very clear that every team... We we we create those teams. You have six months to prove it. If it's proven, that team will stay and continue working. But it really is that the moment you join, you can have any impact on the company. So you can have any role in that team. The tenure will not define your position in the hierarchy. If you are smart and quick and passionate, you can elevate yourself very quickly, which this really helped. And also, it's a common layer to the external world where everybody looking at ElevenLabs knows that we are the go to market team, mis go to market team, there's no, like, positioning to the same extent. What this allows us to do is, I think, when we speak with a lot of our partners, with a lot of our customers, they also know that they are getting the best people always, and we can also send people to different conferences, different events, regardless of that positioning. I think the tricky thing in the flat structure, there's not only positives, In the way we currently have, it's it's a set of leads effectively for the subdivisions, so the research, creative work, agents work, go to market, self serve, and sales led, and of course, ops. Only And that's the layer of leads, and then under that, there's pretty flat small team approach across across the world. But then you really want the leads to be able to carry the complexity around the team, so suggest things between one team to another if they see that there's something valuable between them happening.
00:12:00 · Mati Staniszewski, Jennifer Li
So I think picking those people that can context switch between is super important, and then letting the team fully focus on that, and then having which is, which was interesting learning where if you if you put a person into all the Slack channels and give them transparency, they actually get frequently distracted because then they read all the messages. You can still choose not to read them, but they still they still do, so you kind of need to cut the access to a lot of those pieces to force the attention, and that kind of works. All those small things work work really well. [00:12:33] S2: Maybe we can borrow some of that lesson too. Let's switch in gear a little bit. You're you're on the front line seeing a lot of the creative work, whether it's from art, music, or advertising that are starting to adopt AI tools. And in the beginning, that was not the case. There was a lot of resistance. And now we're just seeing the the adaptation and the the welcoming of using more of the generative AI tools, including, you know, AI audio. And you have done some really smart things from the marketplace payouts to, like, working with these creative industries I remember how much you stress, like, we have to find a way to work with them and sort of observing sort of market shift over time. So the question is, how do you actually adapt to these changes and find ways to work with the industry in the infancy, in the beginning, and how did you navigate some of the challenges in that?
00:13:32 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:13:32] S0: So I think the first piece is actually spending time with the industry and trying to understand what are their priorities, their incentives. Of course, it's sometimes tricky. Sometimes you then end up being starstrucked. We had an honor and pleasure to work with Jarrett on some of his incredible work and and learn from him on, like, what is important and, like, which parts of the production process you can actually use AI, which ones you wanna keep, where is it actually helpful. And so so I think that's the super important thesis across all the partnerships in the space. In our case, we we try to figure out how to do that on the on the voice space, which is, of course, with that technology, a, how will the voice acting space look like in the future, and then, two, of course, to be able to cater to all those different use cases, you need such a big array of different voices, different languages, different accents, different styles. So we launched Voice Marketplace where you could create your voice and then share it, and when the voice is shared, you earn money in the return. Today, have almost 10,000 voices. We paid $10,000,000 back to the people in the community. There are some crazy stories from the voices. One of our first voices will say a deep Spanish voice, and the magic of the technology is that the same voice now is available on all different languages in the same way. So it's 30 different languages at the time now it's 70, but 30 languages at the time, and we had the Spanish voice join us, and it wasn't picking up on the Spain. Nobody really liked it as much, and then it picked up in an English speaking country, that same voice, because of that deepness, and now it's our top free voice for all the use cases. Hidden messages, you can all register to our Voice Marketplace and maybe earn some money too. The... So that's the the... I think the second important thing is, like, figuring out how we can be part how we can bring the industry together to disrupt together rather than just to disrupt, and with labels, I think I'm still learning how to interact. So we worked with labels, Merlin and Kobalt, so fourth majors, to bring their music into the music model so we can do it in a licensed way, so you can generate that and give commercial rights so you're fully protected. That was a hard process.