00:52:46 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:52:46] S0: Well, I think you hit on something which makes... Is one of the reasons, and I discovered this accidentally, is like what makes podcasting so powerful is the voice. Where it's like, you know, obviously, I, like, love to read. I mean, there's books all around, like, scattered around the house everywhere. Obviously, I have, like, I I don't have, like, a thousand books in my other library, like, probably 600 unread. And there's some authors where I literally just fall in love with what they do and read every single thing they've ever written. But if you would ask like my emotional attachment to my favorite authors or my favorite writers, like Cormac McCarthy, for example, in fiction, compared to like my favorite podcasters, it's like not at all comparable. It's like I feel like I know because of the voice and, like, the the human, like, element of that. I just feel like I know them in a way that I can never know, like, my favorite, you know, writer. [00:53:31] S1: For sure. I mean, you also... It's it's it's... You're in the conversation now and it's like, you, the voice carries so many other dimensions than text. Like text, of course, you imagine, you interpret, but it doesn't have the emotion. It doesn't have the intonation. It doesn't have the imperfections. It doesn't have the pauses.
00:53:31 · Mati Staniszewski, David Senra
[00:53:31] S1: For sure. I mean, you also... It's it's it's... You're in the conversation now and it's like, you, the voice carries so many other dimensions than text. Like text, of course, you imagine, you interpret, but it doesn't have the emotion. It doesn't have the intonation. It doesn't have the imperfections. It doesn't have the pauses. [00:53:45] S0: The imperfection is really important. Cause, you know, some... We have some guests that come on here and they're like, okay, said light too much. It's like, that's how you speak. It's like, we can... Yeah, we can edit it out if you want, but like, I slur my words. I say, oh, I make all these kinds of weird things. It's like, but that is just how I am. I don't ever want to appear on a podcast and you meet me in person, this guy didn't even sound the same. The imperfections... People admire authenticity way more than they do perfection. [00:54:12] S1: That's true. You know, it's actually funnily, it even applies in a non human way, in a voice agent's way too. Initially, we are trying to create a perfect voice agent that doesn't do any... [00:54:24] S0: It doesn't sound human.
00:54:24 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:54:24] S0: It doesn't sound human. [00:54:25] S1: It doesn't sound human. And then, of course, the obvious thing that that that was the clearest is, like, the ums, the ums, the pauses. And suddenly, the performance of working with that voice agent, like, skyrocketed. Everybody was like, oh, this is so human. This is good. I am happy to speak with that. So so, yeah, it's making it imperfect. It's almost now the the the element of that. But voice does carry that information. It it it kind of connects you in a completely different way. And why I think also it's such a hard research challenge because here in text, don't have that many of those dimensions. You need a lot of data, of course, to create a good language model, but you don't have the dimensions of every voice being different, every voice sounding different to every person. Like even doing benchmarks for text to speech is extremely hard because usually different models will have different voices. That already makes them uncomparable. [00:55:19] S0: Did you know when you were younger that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? [00:55:23] S1: I would say I didn't know this was a path for a You did or did not? Didn't. Was... [00:55:28] S0: Because you're European. [00:55:30] S1: In Poland, was... Yeah. For sure, a little bit of that though. You're joking, but I think it's true. [00:55:34] S0: No. I'm being serious.
00:55:34 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:55:34] S0: No. I'm being serious. [00:55:36] S1: Taking the risk of not starting something, wasn't a common conversation ever happening. I had a lack of having an incredible family that gave me opportunity to study abroad and then that opened your eyes of like, okay, now you can work with some of the great companies. Then when you work with those great companies, they realize you can actually do things. Palantir was great for that for sure, where it's like, you can actually go and work with the customer, try to figure out the problem. That seemed very risky to me, but you can do that. So kind of step by step that opened the eyes of like, okay, maybe this is a path, maybe it is possible to start your own thing. [00:56:15] S0: The time you had that realization to the time you started ElevenLabs, what was the? [00:56:18] S1: So then as you kind of- Was it [00:56:20] S0: a year, two years? Like, what was it? [00:56:22] S1: So over my time at Palantir, my co founder is Piotr Dąbkowski, at Google, we would start doing a hack weekend projects together. So through the years, we tried to explore new technology and build together. I think a few years prior, we knew that we would love to work on something together, but you want to work something about that you like, you think it's a true problem and you're obsessed about. That came to us in 2021. So a few years, two years, two, three years. [00:56:48] S0: How many acquisition offers have you had? [00:56:51] S1: Like concrete ones, three or four. [00:56:53] S0: When's the last one?
00:56:53 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:56:53] S0: When's the last one? [00:56:55] S1: Last one was last year, like June last year. [00:56:58] S0: You're gonna sell? No. The reason I ask you... [00:57:01] S1: AI is changing the world. We can build the frontier of that change. We are going all in. Mean, don't [00:57:10] S0: passionately pay attention to your VCs, dude. Incentives are different than yours. The reason I ask you is there's two reasons this came to mind. Some of this is like all intuition, you can't even describe this. But Evan Spiegel sat in that exact same chair that you're in. People gave me shit. They're like, Why do want to interview Evan? Look at his market cap. I like, I don't give a shit about his market cap. I don't look at companies that way. Obsessed with products. And like that dude has soul in the game. Like, and I hope he wins. I have no idea. Like, I I I don't know anything about, you know, just I don't use it. Like Snapchat, specs, anything, whatever it is. It's just like, he is differentiated. I did... There's just something about him that I like that I, like, just want him to work out well. Right? And so that... And I'm getting the same exact vibe. Was like, man, I want Mati to, like, win. I want him to succeed. There's just something very likable about you. And then the second reason is because, obviously, Scott Wu, he's he's coming on the show, like, every few months because I I really like Scott a lot. I'm just because he's genius. [00:58:03] S1: He's so so good as well.
00:58:03 · Mati Staniszewski, David Senra
[00:58:03] S1: He's so so good as well. [00:58:04] S0: Well, yeah. But he's articulate and brilliant and optimistic, but everybody is running at that dude right now. Everybody, the amount of people that want to buy his company. This is something we talked about. I hope he holds out because I would like to see a lot more people just be like, No, I'm like in this forever. It's not just to get a big bag of money. Like go listen to Travis from Uber. You know, made billions and billions of dollars from Uber. And he's just like, That did not make me happy. I need something to work on. And see, that's why that's your question because I asked Scott that too. He's just like, well, there are obviously a ton of people trying to either get him or his entire company and all his talent. And he's just so far said, no, I'm not selling. [00:58:49] S1: Love Scott. I think they should build independent company too. Think they have an opportunity to be one of the hyper AIs of the future or however you call the hyper clouds of the future. I think he can do it. Have an incredible team and I think we can do it too. I think it's, you know, I really mean it. I think the opportunity that currently exists for entrepreneurs with the wider shift, the things haven't been written. It's such a good time to build I something think shows like [00:59:24] S0: this are really important because most of the podcasts are made by VCs. It's just like the content that entrepreneurs... [00:59:29] S1: It's The content that entrepreneurs It's self serving in many ways, I feel.