Sub Club by RevenueCat
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?
00:33:39 · Jacob Eiting, Jack McDermott, David Barnard
[00:33:39] S3: fit together. Right? You need people who are, like, take responsibility too. Right? [00:33:42] S1: The advice is, like, not to go out and and just find a bunch of former founders and bring them into a very Total... Hierarchical culture. Like, that's that's not going to work. You're gonna have a lot of clashes and they're gonna leave. And there there's gonna be lots of ideas that that compete. But when you create systems that fit together, right, small teams with driven product minded engineers and founders that fit with, like, this go fast and ship move, then I think that's where you really start to get harmony, and and you can kinda deliver bigger results. [00:34:15] S0: One of the challenges with with moving fast and then and then even, you know, as much as I praised it, like, building toward the Twitter thread or the viral TikTok is that you can sometimes end up building kinda flash in the pan, gimmicky things. How do you think about balancing that kind of moving fast and creating those big launches, but then also kind of building toward this more retentive use cases, a product that is gonna be used for years and meaningful for years versus just kinda moving quick and slapping out a bunch of features that don't end up getting used?
00:34:15 · David Barnard, Jack McDermott
[00:34:15] S0: One of the challenges with with moving fast and then and then even, you know, as much as I praised it, like, building toward the Twitter thread or the viral TikTok is that you can sometimes end up building kinda flash in the pan, gimmicky things. How do you think about balancing that kind of moving fast and creating those big launches, but then also kind of building toward this more retentive use cases, a product that is gonna be used for years and meaningful for years versus just kinda moving quick and slapping out a bunch of features that don't end up getting used? [00:34:46] S1: It's a really good question. It's one that I can already reflect on, you know, over the last year and a half. A couple of the features or or growth campaigns that that we built and launched that might might in hindsight look like a flash in the pan. One thing that our CEO and and co founder, Mati, told me a couple weeks ago, he he encouraged a quote from Brian Armstrong on Coinbase, where action gets information. And so I think at the end of the day, like, if you're willing to take action, you're gonna ultimately get more... You know, you're gonna have more information about your market, about your users, about your pricing model than than just not pursuing So I do think that, like, the the way to think about it, right, is that in hindsight, it might be a flash in the pan. But in forward sight, it might actually help guide your future decisions. So I think that that's been one thing that I felt to be be true here.