00:57:22 · John Collison, Mati Staniszewski
[00:57:22] S0: employees in the Ukraine? [00:57:24] S1: We we we had a few, but they reached out because they were developing their central map called Diia. They developed it over the years, but now before they were double dawning of how this can... Doubling down on how this can be a a way of supporting the citizens. And, course, there's a easy part of, like, how you create a first agenda government where you have help with the benefits and what's happening on the frontline or education, so that's delivered to everyone, health care so you can book your checkup or appointment. How you create all of that, and of course, we traveled to Kyiv. We worked with them on bringing that and making that available for voice so everybody can access it. But the thing we've learned while being there was that model of what we speak about, where you have technical resources in each of the teams, they actually have the same in every of the ministries. So every ministry had technical resources working on creating that agentic version of their work. And then it was like a central digital transformation team that would assemble this all together to deliver that for the central citizen support, which I thought was brilliant. [00:58:25] S0: That's very
00:58:25 · John Collison, Mati Staniszewski
[00:58:25] S0: That's very [00:58:26] S1: straightforward by Ukraine. So tech forward, like the most advanced set of work we've seen. So we got a little bit validated, like, okay, maybe technical resources in each of the teams is a good idea. And that works happily for us. And and, you know, you you mentioned some of the other parts, do you hire the senior or younger? The... Like, main thing we try to filter for, of course, the culture piece is so important. You can scale people, but scaling culture is much harder. So so so, like, you wanna optimize for that being right. And in our case, it's first principles, taking ownership, striving for excellence, but staying humble. And the main thing that's kind of in that ownership part that I think works well for the AI world is agency. Like, if you are if you have that agency to explore regardless of where you are in the experience cycle, it's it's going to be a tremendous amplifier to your work. [00:59:13] S0: My biggest takeaway from all this has been that around agency, where I feel like high agency people are the winners of the advances in AI and within organizations, low agency people will lose out.
00:59:13 · John Collison, Mati Staniszewski
[00:59:13] S0: My biggest takeaway from all this has been that around agency, where I feel like high agency people are the winners of the advances in AI and within organizations, low agency people will lose out. [00:59:28] S1: Yeah, completely agree. Probably the most proud thing that and I are is as we scale the ElevenLabs, the people that are at ElevenLabs, it's been like just the culture and seeing the expansion of the culture, where culture builds the company now rather than any single person or any single product builds the company, that was probably the biggest validation and happiness. And there is the kind of the other angle of that where I think people are striving to be incredible in their craft and their work, but at the same time have fun in a lot of their work, and that kind of combination of agency and just enjoying what you do probably the best thing we've been able to do today at ElevenLabs. [01:00:09] S0: Well, it sounds like a really fun stage, like we were saying. Interesting research breakthroughs, really fast growing business. So I'm sure you're enjoying it. Andy, thank you. [01:00:16] S1: John, thank you so much.