Sub Club by RevenueCat
00:23:06 · David Barnard
[00:23:06] S0: Yeah. That's gotta be a lot of fun moving to more of that startup. I I love the way Jack described it early on. It's just such a cool way to operate a company, especially a multi product company is that you're almost like little startups inside the company. And so I love that kind of flexibility and focus for for teams to be able to focus on the individual products they're working on and move fast. So that's really cool. And then, you know, speaking of that, one one of the unique things I was reading about, the team structure at ElevenLabs is that engineers that you hire are are filtered against having a solid product instinct. You almost think of the engineers more as the PM, and then the the more PM type folks are more growth leads. So how does that work?
00:23:47 · Jack McDermott, David Barnard, Tanmay Jain, Jacob Eiting
[00:23:47] S1: Yeah. One thing that we've seen is is we we have a belief, right, that that we we wanna either be building or or growing. Right? And we we kinda view the... Those two sides as the key to cogs in the wheel that kinda drive our ultimate growth. And so what does that mean? On one hand, I think means that what we see at ElevenLabs, and this is true for for myself and for Tanmay as well, like, we we have a lot of former entrepreneurs, a lot of former startup founders on the team, probably the highest amount that I've been at, at least in the company by far. And then on the engineering side, we we look and we screen for those that that build side projects on their own that can identify a user pain point and, like, really build and be obsessed with that. A lot of engineers that join our team just love the the ability to kind of like the refreshing feel of being able to engage end to end and own a product cycle from like idea stage all the way to through on execution. So it's been a bit successful as well, like kind of self selecting the types of engineers that want to build and own in that style of culture. And I think it's self selected on the growth side as well. [00:24:57] S0: Where where do you slot in there, Tanmay? Are you a growth product manager? Are you an engineering product manager? What... What's your role specifically? [00:25:05] S2: Yeah. Me and Jack have had multiple conversations about this, and it is whatever it takes to, you know... [00:25:12] S3: That's why I always [00:25:12] S2: tell people.
00:25:12 · Tanmay Jain, Jacob Eiting
[00:25:12] S2: tell people. [00:25:13] S3: People are like, what's my job? I'm like, I don't know. Help developers make more money. Figure it out. [00:25:17] S2: Quite quite quite literally. I'm... I I will merge sometimes very questionable PRs that my engineering team loves. I will review Figma designs. I will ship paywall experiments myself. I'll be reviewing creative content that our agencies are putting out. It's everything that needs to happen, and you just kinda figure it out. And I think that's why it is like catnip to founders or former founders. [00:25:39] S3: Yeah. Well, I was gonna ask and follow-up with that. It's like, what have you done or what does the company do to kind of, you know, I guess, like, broad scope there is one thing. But, like, is there something they... Obviously, being just at ElevenLabs is exciting. It's good to be at a company that's growing and doing something unique. But is there anything they do to, like, get found? Because I find it's hard. Like, people that build stuff, they wanna build stuff. They don't... And often their own stuff. Right? To get them to jump on a team is tough. So what does ElevenLabs do to to get folks to to come into the Borg, you know? It's a good environment, probably. Which I guess is Tanmay. It's kinda what you were hinting at.
00:26:11 · Tanmay Jain, Jacob Eiting
[00:26:11] S2: Yeah. It's... I I can I can say, like, what the sell to me was? I've only been here for about four months now. But, you know, when I came in, it was super fresh and, like, the sell was very much be a founder. Right? Like, be a found... I've I've been at big companies. I've been at slightly smaller companies. My wife works at a PM at a large, you know, FANG company as well. I see her day to day. The last thing I'd want to do is spend my life in PR and legal reviews. As as a former founder who who would ship something and get feedback the next day. And then you come to a place like ElevenLabs. It's like, hey. We are a successful company. We have amazing quality talent who take extreme ownership on everything that they do. And you get to go and join this a class set of people who you then get to... And you get given full autonomy to go own a space and move as quickly as you humanely can and want to. It... It's like catnip for a founder. Like, the only rate limiter really is your own capability. [00:27:05] S3: Right. It's tough to set up. How do you... I was gonna ask, do you have like an overarching, like, for example, marketing function? That's like setting like, okay, how do we talk? Like, you know, you're you're doing a growth campaign and they look at it or something or... Because like some... I did something I think we sometimes, I don't wanna say struggle, like, but it's... I I do like setting teams just do whatever. But then the challenge sometimes is consistency. Right? And like the voice. Like how does... How do you do that in that setting?
00:27:31 · Jack McDermott, Jacob Eiting
[00:27:31] S1: Yeah. One thing that's been nice too. So we we have all of these small pods that that build and grow individual prod... You know, individual products or apps. And then of course, there there's a set of shared or org wide roles that that help to bring everything together. So think of everything from operations to creative and brand to SEO and our web development side. So at the end of the day, there are some things that are important enough and that are wide enough in their scope that we want a cohesive brand or we want a fully operate... Like a fully operational organization. But... So it's trying to find the... I think it's trying to find the balance between, like, where does a traditional hierarchical or matrix org kind of work? Where do you need that that shared support? So every little, you know, team is not having to rebrand themselves, but there... There's kind of that that shared set of guidelines. And there's also just a lot of work that that goes into ElevenLabs to make sure that there's standards and guidelines around, you know, brand and and and comms and and ops, like the the ability to to do that now on a really small team too because you you you have access to a ton of AI tools to help you expand that impact. So there are a ton of shared roles that can drop on and you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time. [00:28:54] S3: So you can just like grab off the shelf like the, hey, here's our standard how we do this. Then maybe you mess it up and it has to be corrected.
00:28:54 · Jacob Eiting, Jack McDermott
[00:28:54] S3: So you can just like grab off the shelf like the, hey, here's our standard how we do this. Then maybe you mess it up and it has to be corrected. [00:29:01] S1: Yeah. Or or like, hey, what what does great look like in SEO? Right? Like, oh, well, there's a few folks here that have decades of experience in that specific area that that might lend well to work that we're trying to do on, you know, mobile web to app or the way that we're we're trying to solve a specific problem. Right? So being able to be very collaborative, like at the end of the day, I think we all view ourselves as part of the ElevenLabs team and have a really tight knit group. It helps to do a a week long off-site that we've done for the past couple of years. [00:29:34] S3: The whole team, like everybody, the company. [00:29:35] S1: The whole... Yeah. The whole company. So... [00:29:37] S3: It's in the hundreds probably. Right? If I'm guessing... Yeah. Now we're [00:29:40] S1: we're up to about 300, four... Going up to 400 right now. And we we just got everyone together in Italy this fall for a week. The year before that, we all met up in Croatia. So to build both kind of the human connection and then to let great people operate, I think, has been has been the key.