00:11:02 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:11:02] S0: Yeah, because I'm friends with MrBeast. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago, where you know, he was the largest creator in the world, and he used to run separate YouTube channels. Yeah. And he told me, he's just like, yeah, well, for my Japanese, like, the Japanese versions of my videos, like, he doesn't just dub them. He'll hire, like, a voice actor that's like... The voice is famous in that country. [00:11:23] S1: Yep. One day you you should... Whether with us or any other company, you should dub your podcast. It's so much knowledge that could break... Be brought into so many different entrepreneurs worldwide, like in Japan, if if if if those conversations were...
00:11:23 · Mati Staniszewski, David Senra
[00:11:23] S1: Yep. One day you you should... Whether with us or any other company, you should dub your podcast. It's so much knowledge that could break... Be brought into so many different entrepreneurs worldwide, like in Japan, if if if if those conversations were... [00:11:36] S0: It's funny you said Japan because I was thinking, I knew we were going talk today and I've been thinking about you the last few days. And I'm working on this episode for the founder of Honda for my other podcast founders. And what's surprising about that is, you know, it's not Honda, the cars at this point when this guy's alive. It's the most... He created the most successful mass produced motor vehicle in history, which is the Honda Super Cub. And the way they describe their company, he's like, we're just a research lab for engines. Literally. That's what he's like, all I do is think about engines all day. He actually separated out and made the Honda R and D a separate company because he thought it was so important. And then they were just funded by a percentage of sales, but then they turned over all the research to the manufacturing division. And he's just like, if you just have a research division and you only tell them to experiment and you've staffed with engineers and researchers, he's like, they're going to constantly invent new things. And then if you're a manufacturer, you can figure out how to apply those to products. I would never think... You would think, oh, they're car manufacturers. No. I'm I'm just a research team.
00:11:36 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:11:36] S0: It's funny you said Japan because I was thinking, I knew we were going talk today and I've been thinking about you the last few days. And I'm working on this episode for the founder of Honda for my other podcast founders. And what's surprising about that is, you know, it's not Honda, the cars at this point when this guy's alive. It's the most... He created the most successful mass produced motor vehicle in history, which is the Honda Super Cub. And the way they describe their company, he's like, we're just a research lab for engines. Literally. That's what he's like, all I do is think about engines all day. He actually separated out and made the Honda R and D a separate company because he thought it was so important. And then they were just funded by a percentage of sales, but then they turned over all the research to the manufacturing division. And he's just like, if you just have a research division and you only tell them to experiment and you've staffed with engineers and researchers, he's like, they're going to constantly invent new things. And then if you're a manufacturer, you can figure out how to apply those to products. I would never think... You would think, oh, they're car manufacturers. No. I'm I'm just a research team. [00:12:36] S1: To be honest, you know, and you started with this question, this is not too dissimilar from how I think about how we run ElevenLabs I [00:12:43] S0: know. That's why I'm telling
00:12:43 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:12:43] S0: know. That's why I'm telling [00:12:44] S1: you this. It's very much... Look, there's a focused research lab, there's research engineering on bringing that to the product work. Then we have a lot of small teams running after specific product problems that we can solve. And then of course, the way to go to market and deployment of how you bring that to the customers worldwide. But the general philosophy is like a lot of small teams, usually less than 10 people, having flexibility, autonomy to just run ahead and apply their best judgment in what we can solve for the customer. Okay. You need [00:13:15] S0: to say more about though, because this is where I still am a little confused by this. Somebody doesn't know who you are, they just met you for the first time, they don't know what ElevenLabs is, like, describe to that person how you view your own company. It's like a research lab. Is that the word you're going to use? How would you describe this? I would introduce
00:13:15 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:13:15] S0: to say more about though, because this is where I still am a little confused by this. Somebody doesn't know who you are, they just met you for the first time, they don't know what ElevenLabs is, like, describe to that person how you view your own company. It's like a research lab. Is that the word you're going to use? How would you describe this? I would introduce [00:13:32] S1: consistently the company as a combination of research and product deployment. Research is frontier audio models, text to speech, speech to text orchestration. Product is one platform that helps companies transform how they communicate with the world around them. And that can be marketing with helping them tell a story like Ramp creating their Super Bowl ad. It can be support working with Deutsche Telekom and creating voice agents for the call center, or it can be sales helping on inbound sales qualification to make sure that that streams through. Or even wider operations and working with the government of Poland to help create an agent that can take a healthcare appointment, follow-up with a patient to remind a mother at the appointment, ask how they are feeding. And that kind of one combination between those is building the research, building the frontier of all voice, of all audio, and on the product, doing the part of applying that audio, combining that with knowledge, combining that with the creative work to then allow companies, people to change how they communicate. [00:14:35] S0: And you are solely focused on audio?
00:14:35 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:14:35] S0: And you are solely focused on audio? [00:14:37] S1: On the research side, solely focused on audio product. We combine the best of audio with integrations, knowledge, LLMs to help deliver for... [00:14:46] S0: Explain why you think it's so important to be solely focused on audio on the research side. [00:14:51] S1: We think we have incredible talent to be able to go after that. The focus is so important in effectively building the best architecture for those audio models. We think audio is a good combination of not only science but also the arts that you need to solve. It is a little bit subjective. The voices that you produce will be subjective. So you really need to get it right. But ultimately, as you think about AI models, there is data, compute architecture that you need. On audio, we think a lot of the problems that still exist are on the architecture side. We want to be solely focused on solving those architecture problems so you can actually get the best quality out there. A lot of the team, lot of the people that work on our side are the best audio researchers in the world. They're also excited by the premise of being able to continue deploying the best frontier audio models. [00:15:42] S0: And you feel you have technology on the other side that no one else in the world has? [00:15:46] S1: We think so. Yes.