No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:00:05 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:00:05] S0: Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Mati Staniszewski, the cofounder and CEO of ElevenLabs, which was founded to change the way we interact with each other and with computers with voice. Over three short years, they've skyrocketed to more than 300,000,000 in run rate. Mati and I talk about the future of voice, education, customer experience, and the other applications of this voice, as well as how to build a multisegment from self serve to enterprise and combined research and product company. Welcome, Mati. [00:00:37] S1: Sarah, thanks for having me. [00:00:38] S0: Thank you for doing this at seven in the morning. [00:00:40] S1: Our pleasure. Thank you for doing that at seven in the morning. It's great we got to finally do this together. [00:00:46] S0: I think a lot of our listeners will have used or played with 11 at some point, but for everybody else, can you just reintroduce the company?
00:00:46 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:00:46] S0: I think a lot of our listeners will have used or played with 11 at some point, but for everybody else, can you just reintroduce the company? [00:00:52] S1: Definitely. We, at ElevenLabs, we are solving how humans and technology interact, how you can create seamlessly with that technology. What this means in practice is we build foundational audio models, so models in a space to help you create speech that sounds human, understand speech in a much better way, or orchestrate all those components to make it interactive, and then build products on top of that, foundational models. And we have our creative product, which is a platform for helping you with narrations, for audiobooks, for voiceovers, ads, movies, or dabs of those movies to other languages, and our agents platform product, which is effectively an offering to help you elevate customer experience, build an agent for personal AI, education, new ways of immersive media. But all is underlined with that mission of solving how we can interact with technology on our terms in a better way. [00:01:45] S0: You started the company in 2022? That's right. And you've had amazing rocket ship growth since then. I'm sure it's fell to up and down different ways. Wanna ask you about that. Can you give a sense of what the scale of the company is today?
00:01:45 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:01:45] S0: You started the company in 2022? That's right. And you've had amazing rocket ship growth since then. I'm sure it's fell to up and down different ways. Wanna ask you about that. Can you give a sense of what the scale of the company is today? [00:01:57] S1: So we've grown to three fifty people globally. We started from from Europe. We started as a remote company and are still first... Remote first, but have hubs around the world with London being the biggest, New York being second biggest, Warsaw, San Francisco, and now Tokyo, one in Brazil. We are at 300,000,000 in ARR, which is roughly fiftyfifty between self serve, so a lot of subscription and creators using our creative platform, and then approaching 50% on the enterprise side using our agents platform at work, and that's on the SalesLed, classic SalesLed side, and we serve more than 5,000,000 monthly actives on that creative side of the work, And then on the enterprise side, we have a few thousand customers from Fortune 500s to some of the fastest AI growing startups.
00:01:57 · Mati Staniszewski, Sarah Guo
[00:01:57] S1: So we've grown to three fifty people globally. We started from from Europe. We started as a remote company and are still first... Remote first, but have hubs around the world with London being the biggest, New York being second biggest, Warsaw, San Francisco, and now Tokyo, one in Brazil. We are at 300,000,000 in ARR, which is roughly fiftyfifty between self serve, so a lot of subscription and creators using our creative platform, and then approaching 50% on the enterprise side using our agents platform at work, and that's on the SalesLed, classic SalesLed side, and we serve more than 5,000,000 monthly actives on that creative side of the work, And then on the enterprise side, we have a few thousand customers from Fortune 500s to some of the fastest AI growing startups. [00:02:46] S0: I think this is such a... You're an amazing founder, but I also think this is such an interesting company because it is very unintuitive to, I think, many people and investors in particular. I don't know if you faced this at the beginning, but I remember both here in 2022, there's a there's a class of companies that allow creation in some way when we look at your, like, first business beyond the research itself. And I would put Eleven and Midjourney and Suno and Haejin in this category. And I think there's, like, this overall sense of, like, who really wants to do this? What was your initial read of, like, how many people want to make voices or what made you believe that was gonna be much broader than... Like, if I look at dubbing, for example, it's not a huge market. I think
00:02:46 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:02:46] S0: I think this is such a... You're an amazing founder, but I also think this is such an interesting company because it is very unintuitive to, I think, many people and investors in particular. I don't know if you faced this at the beginning, but I remember both here in 2022, there's a there's a class of companies that allow creation in some way when we look at your, like, first business beyond the research itself. And I would put Eleven and Midjourney and Suno and Haejin in this category. And I think there's, like, this overall sense of, like, who really wants to do this? What was your initial read of, like, how many people want to make voices or what made you believe that was gonna be much broader than... Like, if I look at dubbing, for example, it's not a huge market. I think [00:03:32] S1: first piece was... Which is, as you mentioned, there is, like, a very... It's very tricky to do both the product and the research. [00:03:38] S0: Mhmm.
00:03:38 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:38] S0: Mhmm. [00:03:39] S1: I'm in in a lucky position that I... That my co founder and I known each other for fifteen years. I think he's the smartest person I know. Mhmm. And has been able to create a little of that research work to be able to create that foundation to then elevate that experience. But both of us are from Poland originally, and the original belief came from Poland. It's very peculiar thing, but if you watch a movie in Polish language, a foreign movie in Polish language, all the voices, whether it's a male voice or a female voice, are narrated with one single character, so you have like a flat delivery for everything in the movie. [00:04:09] S0: That's a terrible experience. [00:04:10] S1: It is a terrible experience, and it's still, like, you grow up, as soon as you learn English, you switch out and you don't want to watch content in this way, and it's crazy that still happens until today in this way for a majority of content. Combining that, and I worked at Palantir, and my co founder worked at Google, we knew that that will change in the future, and that all the information will be available globally. And then as we started digging further, we realized... [00:04:36] S0: So, in every language in a high quality way. Exactly. [00:04:40] S1: And big thing was like, instead of having it just translated, could you have the original voice, original emotions, original intonation carried across? [00:04:52] S0: Mhmm.