00:07:24 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:07:24] S1: You know, there's so many, and it's kind of the bar changes for all of us. The first moment for us was... Well, first moment for us, they always use my voice as a testing voice because he has this weird accent. And and the first time was, like, when when we could replicate my voice based on a good sample, that was, a first wow moment to to myself. And you always go for this moment, like, this is not how my voice sounds like. And then you listen to yourself side by side, and it's, like, definitely how it sounds like, unfortunately. Then the the second moment was where we first got it to laugh, and people were like, okay. This is actually the thing that that makes the the whole experience more human. The the laughter, the pauses, the ums, the ums, the imperfections. So we started getting those out, and that was the moment for us because we made it to the top of hacker news with the first AI that can laugh model, which was a very proud moment for us. And and then, of course, for the years, kind of that extended where you might remember in 2023, 2024, there was a Javier Milei speech that went viral where you could speak other languages. So it was translated from... Into English. And and it was the first time where you could still hear his voice out there. So that's the kind of continuous wow moment that was was something that's completely impossible. And then we saw that happen time and time again with Narendra Modi, with president Zelensky, all the way to recently one of the, I feel like, pinnacles of the voice performance, Matthew McConaughey giving his newsletter and these iconic lines in in in Spanish and Portuguese, where for the first time, his family who speaks that language could hear him speak those languages too. But for more recent pieces, the two two ones that we are excited about bringing to production, I think the first one is finally figuring out the emotional intelligence in that interactive experience. So in the voice agent experience where it doesn't only get the right intonation and emotion, but can understand the other side. So if somebody is stressed, it gets and delivers that soothing, reassuring emotion. If someone is excited, maybe it matches that. If someone speaks slowly, it makes sure to slow down.
00:09:37 · Mati Staniszewski, Andrew Reed
And that emotional intelligence is something that we are finally seeing internally a path to solving, which will be just a continuous step change to what's possible. And then the second one, which will apply there but also apply into general audio spaces, audio general intelligence, where you can combine audio models together in one stream. So you could theoretically have a model that narrates, then pauses, and let's say, starts singing with that same continuous voice. And that's something that's extremely hard to combine today and and something that would be would be possible, I think, very, very soon. [00:10:13] S0: And voice, you mentioned voice agents. And it seems like everybody is, at least on the customer side, everyone's buying a voice agent. And I think intuitively, you think customer support, the old phone tree replacement. What's actually going on in the world of voice agents? What do think are the most interesting overlooked opportunities, spots where startup founders should focus?
00:10:36 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:10:36] S1: Yeah, of course, the customer support is probably the one that everybody heard and knows about very, very well. I think the second thing and the second thread we are seeing is increasing shift to revenue generating opportunities where voice agents can act in sales, whether it's inbound or outbound set... Of of sales. It doesn't replace the entire experience but takes and amplifies part of that experience. Maybe a good example is Deliveroo, where Deliveroo will have voice agents that contact the restaurants to capture their opening times. And based on their opening times, they can update the riders and drivers and, of course, the people ordering on when to get to to that work all the way through to the inbound sales where increasingly people that's a good example of Deutsche Telekom will be contacting to inquire about the service, inquire to buy a product. And instead of going for the dropdown, instead of going for the form, you can speak with the voice agent to leave that information. We do it ourselves too, we have a good metrics of an understanding of what's happening there. One, of course, so much simpler and quicker to go through instead of going through that form. But the second thing that started happening in that inbound sales flow is we we had a lot more information that people started leaving because they would speak about the use case they are coming with, but then where it's not working, where it's working, some of the other use cases that they are evaluating, which we can combine and then just deliver such a much better experience afterwards. On the overlooked side, I think my favorite example is the citizen support education and health care will completely change. On the citizen support, all of us would benefit from just generally better government access, whether that's understanding how to fill in the taxes that I think many of you went through earlier this month, all the way through to just learning how... What is the policy for travel abroad and and and and how that might affect the the space. We've recently seen that work deployed in government of Ukraine, who we think is, like, one of the most advanced governments on that front. We traveled to Ukraine working with their team, and what they are trying to solve is they they have a a government app, which every citizen can access and get information about what's happening.
00:12:48 · Mati Staniszewski
But given the war, given the front line and lack of that access, they wanted to figure out a new channel for people to be able to call in and get that information. So they created Voice Agent effectively where you can call in and get the information about what's happening on the front line. You can get education help and some of the lectures delivered to your kids all the way through to proactive engagement about staying safe and staying out there. And maybe last example on education front, and that's probably my favorite one as I think about that changing, it's just how incredible would it be to have someone that is an incredible teacher available 20 fourseven where you can ask him questions, whether it's all the way through to Richard Feynman. And and you can learn physics with them on the headphones while you are teaching that subject or learning that subject. And and that's something that we are seeing pockets of. Like, a great example is Masterclass, where Masterclass, of course, collaborates with incredible teachers to deliver static lectures. But recently, they launched an interactive version of that. So for... I don't know if that will be a good reference for for this this audience, but we recently worked with them on bringing Gordon Ramsay that can teach you cooking. So while you are in the kitchen, he can shout at you effectively to get to get better. Or maybe a better one, there's a Chris Voss where you can, of course, learn negotiation, but you can learn by negotiating with Chris life on the phone to to to to get better, which I thought was a phenomenal subject.
00:14:18 · Andrew Reed, Mati Staniszewski
[00:14:18] S0: Have you negotiated against Mati a number of times around financing rounds? I understand now. [00:14:22] S1: I think it helps you to say this, but I think the opposite opposite is true. [00:14:28] S0: I have some more questions. I want to save time for the audience as well. Maybe one, as Constantine mentioned, more than $100,000,000 of net new ARR in Q1. Obviously, the business is going very well. And you're pioneering the startup founder building a foundation model applications. Any counterintuitive lessons about building a company in this era that for the founders in the audience they may want to take home with them?
00:14:52 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:14:52] S1: So we are, just for reference, we are just over 400 people, over 400,000,000 in revenue, but still keep the teams extremely small. So it's rough, arbitrary a little bit. Cap is less than 10 people. It's for each of the research product. Even the go to market ops talent teams are all smaller than that size. Most of people will have 10 direct reports or so, so it keeps relatively flat and allows us to move a little bit quicker. One thing that we've done, which is in this model, and very surprisingly, this is a very similar model that we've seen actually with the government of Ukraine. Each of the teams, even the teams that aren't technical teams, will have engineers within them. So our people team, our go to market team, our legal team will have an engineer in that team that helps to build, of course, automation, upscale, up level the rest of the people. And recently, that really helped because, as I'm sure many of you are going through, everybody will be vibe coding and coding a lot of the help, even if they are not technical. So now that kind of shifted the responsibility not responsibility, but shifted the requirement of how good the review needs to be for a lot of that work. Security infrastructure implications, you will want to make sure that the output is right. And I think on the engineering side, you can put that expectation. On the non engineering side, the ability to do that is relatively hard. So that technical resource in those teams helped us a lot to figure this this out. And in general, there's just so many incredible work you can do by having that, whether that's the scraping on the hiring and recruiting front and analyzing what worked in the past to improve in the future, whether that's upskilling the legal team on how to use those tools and then figuring out ways of we recently introduced the scoring system. For those on the go to market on sales side, you frequently will end up in this negotiation with your sales team of, can I give indemnity provisions? What's the liability cap? Can I give the set of clauses? And then you kind of need to draw the line of how many things you give. And I ended up being in so many of those conversations that we gave already a lot or we didn't. So now we introduced the scoring system that you can give per size of the customer.