Sub Club by RevenueCat
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.
00:29:40 · Jack McDermott, David Barnard, Tanmay Jain
[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. [00:29:58] S0: Yeah. As Jacob was alluding to, it does seem like it's a really hard thing to build those kind of teams and get that kind of founder mindset. And I'll say personally, the the engineers I've had the most fun working with, like, on on my own products, are those really, like, product minded engineers? How do you filter for that? Is there a specific, like, the way you frame the the job rack, the the interview process? [00:30:21] S1: We take a good hard look at public GitHub profiles to see who... Like, who's engaged and what. And we look at specific companies too that that we know have really strong kind of like product building cultures, and and try to to attract folks that that wanna join a company like it. [00:30:39] S2: I was saying as well, it just... It becomes a referral flywheel. Right? Yeah. The people that come in, then they also know people like themselves. People they wanna
00:30:46 · Jacob Eiting
[00:30:46] S3: work with. Right? Yeah. Exactly. It's it's a crazy thing. Like, you know, there was a period when people go like, oh, you're just gonna be drawing from a limited pool of folks. But like the risk reward is just so high to like do that. Right? You have to be careful because, like, sometimes people refer, oh, I knew this person from college. I never really worked with them. You gotta dig a little bit and be like, okay. How do you actually know them? Like... And maybe, like, bonus referrals kinda probably creates that issue. But, yeah, it's just... It's often really hard to tell until you've, like, worked with somebody. Right? Like even somebody says they've done. Right? Obviously, you know, on the internet, everything's a lie. Right? Nobody knows I'm a dog. But like, it's very imperfect. But yeah, it does like just unlock a ton. And you know, I think about engineers and product folks too, kind of just everybody. They get so conditioned at other places as, Tanmay, as you were talking about, like, to just waiting for the PR review or, like, the legal review and, like, become so conditioned to not take risks and things like that. And it sounds like you all operate in this sense, which is like, especially in a period where the growth is so rapid. Like, if if ElevenLabs, like, has a hiccup or, like, doesn't iterate for a quarter, you're done. Like, there's somebody coming way fat. You know? There's so much to be gained right now that, like, there's somebody right behind you ready to take that space. And so you... But so you don't have time. I mean, it's not that legal and PR review and all that's not important. It's just that it's it's maybe not existential. It's less existential than than moving. Right? And so it's like, okay, how do we balance? And that takes, I don't know, I mean, assume founders and leaders who are at the company who are tolerant to mistakes and risk. Right? Is probably one thing. And then making sure that folks know. It's like, you can do... You can just do things, you know? Which is not typical corporate culture, I think, in a... In in the world.
00:32:27 · Jack McDermott, Jacob Eiting
[00:32:27] S1: The one thing I was just gonna say on that note is like, we hear this a lot, right, that that, you know, speed is becoming the moat. Right? And I think that we kind of live by that and and have tried to really embrace just the speed and size of iteration and the the amount that we ship. And so to some extent, it's like, to your point, Jacob, like, understanding what what bricks might fall. Right? And our support team does an amazing job because there... There's often, you know, blips in the model that that might come up or specific... You're like very important things, but things that you you often need to make a trade off between, Are we gonna get this model, you know, a 105% fine tuned? Or are we good to move quicker and to continue to push the edges? And so I think when that becomes the company's, like, guiding principle and ethos, then then it's pretty clear that, you know, moving quicker is is more important than ensuring that there's, like, me see coverage of every little thing. And so I I think that that's why the... These things, the small team sizes, the founder led background, the speed, like, they all need to fit together. You know, they all need to [00:33:39] S3: fit together. Right? You need people who are, like, take responsibility too. Right?