The a16z Show
00:02:37 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:02:37] S0: So first of all, we partnered almost three years ago, and so it's great to hear all the kind notes. But also, they didn't realize when we partnered, the infrastructure team was three people. And of course, now I'm ElevenLabs founder. We love number 11 in the company. Infra team is 11 people. So we've seen the growth of the other side as well, I hear the companies here raised $66,000,000,000 in the total fundraising, so the number 11 is everywhere here. But I think that, to start off, I think first piece, I think the smartest person I got to know as my co founder, Piotr, who has been the research brain for creating a lot of the models and then being able to assemble what we think are the most incredible researchers in the voice space to really create the first text to speech model that could understand the context in a better way and turn that into the emotion intonation, then find a way to capture the characteristics of the voice so you have the voice sound with the right style, the right age, with the right gender, dialect, everything in one, And then the researchers across, of course, now expanded that to speech to text music and other work. So that's our foundation. And then the way we structure it to be able to ship quickly, especially with so many things happening in AI space, is a lot of small teams. So today we have roughly 20 product teams, each of five to 10 people size, which with full independence can go ahead and ship products. Of course, that carries some of the sometimes issues of duplicative work or sometimes people going at different speeds, but at the positive end, the ownership of each of the teams is extremely high, so people know that this is down to them to really deliver and ship, and it allows us to move extremely quickly. We bucket our work into creative space, so creative platform where we help with narrations, voiceovers, dubs for creatives and creatives in the immediate entertainment space, and then on the agents side where we help people recreate voice agent experience, conversational agent experience across customer experience all the way through to immersive media.
00:04:31 · Jennifer Li
[00:04:31] S2: Great. ElevenLabs has labs in the name, very similar to many of the other big labs, which means you're doing your first party R and D and model development, but also building all these 20 products. How do you think about balancing both, like keep progressing on the model research, but at the same time not delaying sort of the product launches?
00:04:50 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:04:50] S0: Yeah, it's very tricky. I'm sure many of you have the same thing. Like, do you build a product when you don't know if the research innovation will displace the product you just built? We had this in the early days too, so one of the simple examples was we had a model at work and one of the most common requests was could we do at different speeds for voices, so could you have additional slider to modify the speed of how audio gets generated and how quickly it speaks, And we are very against this idea of, no, we don't want to do any sliders, any toggles, we don't want to become same as previous generation of the editing suites. So instead, let's solve it on the research level where it will know based on the voice exactly how it should speak with the speed. And we resisted this for, I think, a good amount of nine months, and we couldn't solve it on the research side. And then the product was super simple solve that got all the users across. And now the approach we take in looking at this is if we think the research work will take more than three months, then the product is can do anything they want to start adding other models, adding some of the extensions. Of course, sometimes the timeline is tricky to predict, but roughly, the guidance we have from our internal research team, what are the initiatives we hope to ship this quarter, what are long term initiatives, And then for anything long term, you can use any other work to close that gap and make it better.
00:06:04 · Jennifer Li, Mati Staniszewski
[00:06:04] S2: I guess, first, you kind of have to figure out if the research commitment is going to meet the timeline first and then go on to align with the product teams. That makes a lot of sense. As everyone is moving to San Francisco and building in person and locked in in the same space, Eleven has always been building globally and having people more distributed. But you now have centers, I guess, in different locations from London, Warsaw, San Francisco to New York and other places. How do you think about building this global expansion and finding talent globally versus, I guess, the trade offs of building in the same place? [00:06:44] S0: Yeah, so me and my co founder are Polish. We started between Warsaw and London at the time, and I think ElevenLabs wouldn't have existed if we weren't starting from Europe. It's a very peculiar thing, but in Poland, if you watch a movie in Polish language, like a foreign movie in Polish language, all the voices, whether that's a male voice or a female voice, get narrated with one single character. No emotions, no intonation. As you can imagine, it's pretty terrible, and it's still happening today for most of the content out there. [00:07:10] S2: I've had a similar experience growing up in China, that we have a lot of western movies dubbed in Chinese So
00:07:17 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:07:17] S0: bad, so bad. And it's like in Poland, of course, post communist country, it's a cheaper way to do it. You don't have to hire as many people. You have one monotone audiobook reading of a movie, and that was kind of where the company started, and we started initially in Europe, and we realized that if we wanted the best people to solve what was a research problem at the time, we need to hire wherever they are, and we couldn't lock ourselves to just San Francisco or look at the West Coast. We knew that we need to find them across Europe, across Asia, and bring them into the company, so we started fully remote and started looking at those people, and then on engineering, we also were very against this traditional hiring method of looking at LinkedIn, looking at traditional background, and trying to figure out could we go and figure out a different method to hire people. That led to some very interesting hires. So we hired a person that had incredible open source text to speech model and was working in the call center at the same time as a recipient of the calls to make money. Wow. And he's now on the team, one of the most brilliant researchers we have doing all the data processing. But this same pattern kind of followed, and, of course, the early team was very distributed. And then as we started scaling, so beyond 30 people, we realized that the new people joining, there's benefit of them having a space to be next to others to get deeper into the culture, understand what are all the projects that are happening in the company, so we started the hubs where you can go into London and Warsaw and San Francisco, where you can work with others in person, and that's how we try to, like, marry those two. If you are early in your career, we try to hire you in the hub so you can immerse yourself in the company. If you are used to remote work, completely fine, but then if you want, you can always come and join us in the hub, and that worked really well. Currently, we continue hiring very untraditional backgrounds in some of the place of the company and then fusing that with very traditional backgrounds which can teach the others. And in sales, for example, we've done some of those experiments too where that combination worked really well.
00:09:12 · Jennifer Li, Mati Staniszewski
[00:09:12] S2: The lesson is you can really find talent everywhere. It's just how hard and how you you look for them. [00:09:18] S0: And I think in Europe also, this was an interesting one, in The US, people are very keen and excited to work, and if you go for any social event, like, you you want to talk about work. And in Europe, I didn't have this feeling where it's like most people don't want to do that. It's like the cultural piece is different. But then you do have the pockets of people that actually strive it too. They just don't have the companies where they could do that in. So I feel like our team from Europe is the most motivated and passionate set of people that we are lucky to have. [00:09:45] S2: Yeah, I can attest to that given I've met some of them very hardcore, very good work ethic for sure. And you have also maintained a pretty flat org structure and have people own quite laterally a lot of responsibilities. Can you talk about the rationale behind that? And I guess there was also a no title policy.