00:32:58 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:32:58] S0: You're using your customer base as almost like R and D, another form of R and D. [00:33:03] S1: You are definitely accelerating your R and D through understanding the domain that you're working with. It's, because [00:33:09] S0: And their problems are not very rarely a company's problems is unique to that company. [00:33:13] S1: That's right. And the beauty of that is like kind of everybody benefits because you work with one customer, you learn, you bring that into the product experience. You learn with another one, you learn, you bring it back to the product experience. Both of those customers benefited from having the product optimized for the better work. The domain expertise they have is still there as they can win based on the domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, can be reusable. [00:33:39] S0: What else did you learn working at Palantir? [00:33:41] S1: They also were very much of no title organization, we carry over at ElevenLabs, which does help in that best idea wins approach where people do feel, I feel like mimicking you on that church. [00:33:56] S0: I thought the same thing. Was like, you don't have to if [00:33:58] S1: you don't want to. No, it's a complete coincidence. Change of course. [00:34:03] S0: We're leaving that part in.
00:34:03 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:34:03] S0: We're leaving that part in. [00:34:05] S1: No titles, relatively flat organization, very few layers. It's like, between me and the C suites, I worked there before the DPO, it was four, five steps or less. So you always felt like a proximity between, think it was like four or three actually. So it was a good proximity of being able to work together. At ElevenLabs, we have a couple of five today, like maximum depth of how many layers there should be. Hopefully over time, actually there will be fewer, no more layers, if AI helps you run the organization the [00:34:41] S0: way we would like to run. Well, say more about that. What can you not do today in the way you run your organization that you hope AI can change in the future?
00:34:50 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:34:50] S1: I think there is always you want information from the person working as closely to the problem. So let's say you're developing the product, you want you want to to speak with the engineer that actually develops that product rather than their manager. If it's a client conversation similar, you want to understand what is that client saying from the person on the ground, rather a manager summarizing that information and giving that to you. I think that that information flow will change with AI where you will have access to everything that's happening in a better granularity than you could ever have before because it summarizes that back and forth. Second, I think that in general, roughly at ElevenLabs, most people will have close to 10 direct reports. So a pretty wide blight set which helps us build that small team approach that we have. And that too only works if you can amplify a lot of what's happening across all the teams, all the people that you work with, to summarize information of what's happening in the teams, how this is performing, what are some of the gaps. That definitely helps and helps shift it from reactive to proactive, I think too. What I mean by this is frequently in the past I think you would rely on specific individuals surfacing the information to you. Now, as we think about ElevenLabs and how we run, you can summarize all what's happening, all the data of what's working, what's not, get that signal, I get that signal, I can proactively engage on where I think it's not working, which helps. It helps, of course, everybody across the company because you have that same ability wherever you are. I think that maybe the last part, which is very related to those two, why it's even possible today. We took a choice to be extremely transparent with a lot of the data that we have, a lot of the docs that we write. So everybody has almost access to all the docs that are there in the company, which ultimately helps you create that system where you can actually tap into that knowledge.
00:36:51 · David Senra
[00:36:51] S0: Okay. So I want you to say more about this because I think this is one of the things I want to talk to you about because you're relatively young. This is your first company. Your first company you built, you got into AI right away, and then you were perfectly positioned for this huge explosion. Obviously, people have been talking about AI for eighty years or whatever, but you're the right place, right time with, I think, the right set of skills based on what the company built so far. So how different do you think in the future the way you run your organization can be than what it is today?
00:37:19 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:37:19] S1: I think the small teams approach will definitely be there across many of the companies that I believe will be created in the future. It also helps with a very different piece, which is like, if you just think about adopting AI technology, in our case, it doesn't have to be a top down mandate of like, you need to use this technology to get better and then the teams enable others. Given it's relatively small and independent, people bottoms up adopt what they think is best and are unable to run with it straight away. That helped a lot in that sense. I'll give it to others which we believe strongly on. One, in all the small teams that we have, in all the teams that we have, we bring even non technical teams, we bring engineering talent in those teams. So our talent team, our ops team, our legal team, all of that will have engineers that help both automate some of the work, but also elevate everybody else how they are using AI. I think that will be a bigger pattern in the future across the companies too, where I think increasingly some of the biggest and smallest companies will try to infuse all teams with engineering resources so they can get smarter.
00:38:27 · David Senra
[00:38:27] S0: Is there any function that is centralized at ElevenLabs that then all these small individual teams can then access? I spent some time with Luca Ferrari of Bending Spoons. And he had this wild idea to me where he's just like, well, HR is actually really important. He thinks the fact that tech people are dismissive of it is ridiculous. And he's like, but my HR is like 50 people and they're all engineers. And then it's like one centralized HR that every single other, because he owns I don't know how many companies, they all utilize it. But it's just like 50, I think, 50 engineers in HR, and then all the different structures, teams, and companies he has tap into that for that resource.