Mati Staniszewski on ElevenLabs, Voice AI & Building the Communication Layer for AI
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How did ElevenLabs build an AI‑native company before ChatGPT?
We ran into each other at Michael Dell's event a few months ago. And you're like, oh, I'm very curious how building a company today is different from building one in the past. And Michael has 40 plus years of experience, he's been dominating for decades. And when I saw him, we had like a 30 minute conversation about this. You read all these biographies of history squeeze entrepreneurs and you just see this over and over again. It's like, oh, this time is different. Turns out, no, this time is not different. And Michael's like, No, no, I actually think Think this time is different. So I want to start with like how you think about building your company AI native from today.
Yeah, Michael is a legend. He is uh he must have so many interesting perspectives, especially like he's still running the company. So it uh it will be interesting whether he applies some of that difference to to um to the current running of the show. But for us. You know, in some ways given we are first time founders, me and Piotr, my my co founder, my best friend of fifteen years, eleven laps is the first venture we started.
That's insane. You started in two thousand twenty two. You launched before the first version of Chat GPT, right?
We did. We just it was still a year when the the topics of the day were uh crypto and metaverse. So twenty twenty-two was still a year where like everybody was obsessed about those two. So it was a perfect time because we could actually focus and build on a a l a lot on the AI side. What were you doing before you founded this company? I was a puntier. So I was helping build optimization models and bring optimization models to the customers. So um NHS during the COVID response on how You distribute vaccines across across UK, or working with the oil and gas industry and figuring out how to optimize their energy work. So a lot of optimization models and then working with customers and like actually figuring out how you bring that into their production.
And my co-founder was at Google and he he did a lot of the text uh models for knowledge graph. Before that, Did research at university around image uh visual models. So incredible brain, the smartest person I know for developing a lot of the research work. And I was happily on that intersection of building the product and bringing that to the customers. So that was before Palantir's BlackRock, building risk models, bringing that to customers, and by background, study mathematics. So good intersection of the things I liked. And now at the 11 laps, that's also what I do. And that's also From the company lens, when we started, that was the whole goal of like can we combine research and product deployment under one hood?
On the research side, built all the audio models, starting with model to produce speech, text-to-speech model. And that was the 2022, the first model that could finally cross that human-like quality. And then over time, now it's entirety of audio models: transcription models, localization models, orchestration for. voice conversations with agents. And then on the product side, can we unify that as one platform that helps people, businesses, transform how they would communicate with their audience?
Wait, so the first idea, you started with audio. We started with audio. Why?
The actual trigger point comes from where you're from, from Poland. Very peculiar thing. If you watch a movie in Polish All the voices, whether it's a male voice or whether it's a female voice, get narrated with one single character. So you have one voice narrating the whole the whole movie. All the emotion, all the intonation disappears. And um and it's still so we grew up with this. Everybody in Poland groups up with it like you know, one person dubbing. And then in twenty twenty one, we retested or re uh experienced this still happening.
It was still happening in movies in 2021, but you'd watch in Poland. Yes. Same thing that was happening when you were a kid. Exactly. Okay.
And it's it's it's crazy because it's, you know, of course it's cheaper, easier to do, quicker timeline, but then the quality is is poor, like as you can imagine.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did ElevenLabs build an AI‑native company before ChatGPT?
0:02–10:25
2
Why did the founders start with audio and dubbing in Poland?
10:25–20:49
3
How does ElevenLabs combine research and product deployment into a single platform?
20:49–31:27
4
What competitive advantage does a pure focus on voice give ElevenLabs?
31:27–42:38
5
How does the forward‑deployed engineer (FDE) model from Palantir work at ElevenLabs?
42:38–54:14
6
Why does ElevenLabs refuse acquisition offers and stay independent?
54:14–1:02:13
7
How is voice becoming the primary interface for interacting with AI?
1:02:13–1:06:02
8
What long‑term impact will voice‑first AI have on communication and society?
1:06:02–1:11:02
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