Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:00:17 · Mati Staniszewski, Brian Halligan
[00:00:17] S1: So here, we don't give any timelines. We do the research initiatives beyond the plan. You need to stay nimble that, like, the moment it comes out, you have twenty four hours to start integrating that into your product. That's like the most important time to really to really be ahead. [00:00:46] S2: Okay, this is a real treat. I interviewed two friends of mine, Mati from ElevenLabs and Anton from Lovable, Two terrific CEOs and companies that are absolutely ripping, and they're both doing it from ye olde Europe. So we're going to get into it on the Europe thing, but there's some topics that are just terrific. These two are kind of blossoming before our eyes. They're right in the the heart of hyper growth, and we get to see, like, how they think about co founders, how they're thinking about delegation and letting go, how they think about building their exec teams, managing all the chaos coming in at them when you're in hyper growth, there's just a lot of chaos, and really just pushing to keep the speed up. It's a really good episode. I hope you enjoy it, and I'll be back at the end with my takes. Okay. You two are in your early thirties, similar ages. You've got some very good experience under your belt. A lot of founders I'm meeting and a lot of founders are getting funded are rated in school, right out of school, '21, 22. What would your companies be like if you had started them when you were 21 or 22? I'll let you go.
00:00:46 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:00:46] S2: Okay, this is a real treat. I interviewed two friends of mine, Mati from ElevenLabs and Anton from Lovable, Two terrific CEOs and companies that are absolutely ripping, and they're both doing it from ye olde Europe. So we're going to get into it on the Europe thing, but there's some topics that are just terrific. These two are kind of blossoming before our eyes. They're right in the the heart of hyper growth, and we get to see, like, how they think about co founders, how they're thinking about delegation and letting go, how they think about building their exec teams, managing all the chaos coming in at them when you're in hyper growth, there's just a lot of chaos, and really just pushing to keep the speed up. It's a really good episode. I hope you enjoy it, and I'll be back at the end with my takes. Okay. You two are in your early thirties, similar ages. You've got some very good experience under your belt. A lot of founders I'm meeting and a lot of founders are getting funded are rated in school, right out of school, '21, 22. What would your companies be like if you had started them when you were 21 or 22? I'll let you go. [00:01:56] S1: Well, I think it would have been hard. I think it still would have the pleasure of working with my co founder. I know him since high school. Okay. So we always were best friends. We do This everything [00:02:08] S2: is Mati from ElevenLabs?
00:02:08 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:02:08] S2: is Mati from ElevenLabs? [00:02:09] S1: Exactly. So I'm working across voice AI research and product deployment. We are on a mission to create a voice of technology. So, think I still would have started that with my co founder, which would have been the advantage. The disadvantage is I don't know how I would approach the first customers, how the world at the time, I didn't even know the world of entrepreneurship existed. So, I studied mathematics. When you study mathematics, the clear career paths you take is either finance or consulting. I chose finance. I joined BlackRock. And then only after BlackRock, I learned about Palantir and decided to join them where it turned out you can actually be deployed with the customer, learn about the problems, try to understand those problems and bring them back and build the product, which was the first glimpse into how to build something from scratch. But before that, that was still something further out of I didn't know how to approach. So I don't think I would be able to understand the first early dynamics of starting something in the same way. [00:03:06] S2: Okay. You're several 100,000,000 in revenue. If you had started right out of school with your buddy, where would
00:03:06 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:06] S2: Okay. You're several 100,000,000 in revenue. If you had started right out of school with your buddy, where would [00:03:12] S1: you be? Nowhere? The other thing, think we would have probably worked on a very different idea. I think it took, of course, the pleasure of having the co founder I known inside out. Then over the years, got experience of working at other companies, which helped us understand some of the dynamics here at Google, Palantir, so we understand how to build things at scale. But then the third thing, which I think was the most important, was the idea. And of course, for the years, we looked into different projects from trying to build a crypto risk analyzer during the crypto days, which was really hard, to recommendation system. But then when we stumbled on voice, we knew that A, this is a good timing where the technology is going for the shift. We can be part of that shift of that technology. And then two, this is a huge problem that the users, the world have and we can solve it. If I started something on 2021, 2022, I just don't think we would work on the same idea and probably wouldn't sustain the pain the same way we do now that we approach voice. [00:04:12] S2: Got it. Anton, Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like?
00:04:12 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:04:12] S2: Got it. Anton, Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like? [00:04:19] S0: I also think it might have not been as ambitious because, I mean, I had never done something entrepreneurial. And the biggest disadvantage being that young would have been that I wouldn't know why to hire very senior engineers and what type of great senior engineers are out there. Because they would be very scared of working for me. But I think I would have a lot of other advantages, maybe even being more naive. Already then, I think I surrounded myself by super, super smart people. So I think I could have built something very different with fast registration pace. Okay. Could have been successful. [00:04:59] S2: And I got a little bit of what you took from Palantir. You had some very interesting experiences before Lovable. Can you talk a little bit about them and what kind of you took from those that you're leveraging at Lovable? [00:05:11] S0: Yeah, sure. So if you go way back, I also studied like sciences and physics specifically. When I was, I did this long internship at CERN, where understood CERN particle physics and where they discovered a lot of the recent physics. But there's a lot of smart people there. [00:05:30] S2: Yes.
00:05:30 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika, Mati Staniszewski
[00:05:30] S2: Yes. [00:05:30] S0: And I was like, wait, they're all working on these impossible problems without any elasticity. So I'm not going to be here. I'm going to go out applying great innovation to the real world. And then I was kind of inspired to start a company when I was in university, which I'm very happy about. But I ended up doing some finance actually, unfortunately. [00:05:56] S1: Okay, it's simple. [00:05:57] S0: Which was a bit too boring for me. Okay. But fortunately I started this community Stockholm AI, and this was around when deep learning was like taking off in twenty fifteen, sixteen. And I did the foundation models of training recurrent new, like large, small language models before it was cool and met great people there. And one was the founder at Sana, so Joel, who recently sold Sana to Workday for a billion dollars. [00:06:24] S2: Yes, congratulations. [00:06:25] S0: Yes, great job by the team there. My contribution was bringing in some of those smart people that went on to grow it to what it became. And I was there for three years and it was like, oh, AI, like let's build it. We were, you all were super young, but learned super fast and it became successful. Then I joined as a co founder at a company that just got into YC, and that was in recommendation systems, specifically for e commerce. That could have been absolutely wildly successful, the company. It had a lot of things going for it. But after [00:07:01] S2: a