ElevenLabs

“We got a tiny check offered to us at like a hundred million price. And I was like, what's the point in doing?”

“It might compete on the model layer, but I don't think it will matter for 11 labs because I think they built really fantastic workflow around it.”

“So I look at like my biggest mistakes this year have been Suno, And 11 labs, and both of them I didn't do because they were small checks, probably like one percent each, and that didn't fit the model, and that was my lack of mental plasticity.”

“My biggest mistakes, most recently, 11 Labs in particular, is where I was like, you got like two percent, and I was like, it's just not enough. And actually two percent would have been great in hindsight.”

“11 labs at twenty five million. I could have had one percent of the company. And I was like, one percent. And like, no way. It was a twenty five million dollar fund. It's a three billion dollar company now. I would have been a fund return.”

“And I think the reason we've managed to get it working is because we've started with these incredible audio models, all these people come naturally to us. We've then been able to raise money Hire incredible founder type peoples who really own these individual …”

“And I was like, That is a terrible go to market plan. That's absolutely terrible. I was kind of angel investing them. I was like, this is not something I want to invest. What do you mean step one? You're going to build the world's best AI audio model, somethin…”

“Most launches get somewhere between 200,000 views and 700,000 views.”

“Actually, the day-to-day metric and ratio we're really thinking about is CAC to payback period, rather than CAC to LTV.”

“In terms of core engineering, I would say probably 60, 70% of code now is AI written, so still like the majority.”

“We're going to be doing a big enterprise marketing push in San Francisco. We're doing billboards, we're doing podcasts, we're doing newsletters, we're doing events on the ground, and we're not going to measure any one channel in isolation, but instead, we'll l…”

“Yes, and we've actually just hired our first in-house creator, whose only job is to create TikToks, YouTube videos, Instagram shorts, YouTube shorts for 11 Labs, and the way we actually hired this guy is, if you typed in 11 Labs on YouTube, he had the most vie…”

“What we've landed on as our North Star metric there is number of marketing sourced sales qualified leads.”

“We actually have done this funky move of we've led in a consumer product, which enables us to get the CAC incredibly cheap, and then people may move up to creator or even enterprise.”

“We want to build the best platform to make these end-to-end conversational AI agents, but we explicitly don't want to be building full digital avatar platforms, so that way we're able to be trusted partners to companies like Hey Jen, Synthesia, Captions, who a…”

“So for example, affiliates, we set up over a year and a half ago, and that now is bringing in over, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of MRR Per month. But this was set up a year and a half ago by one engineer in one week, and then no one's touched it sin…”

“What we've done is spin up separate teams. So we have an enterprise marketing team, which is just focused on going in on the top. They're like, how do I get these SQLs, which are marketing sourced? They're doing executive dinners, they're doing the events, the…”

“We set different payback periods depending on which product line and how aggressive we want to be, but these vary between, say, 12 months to 24, maybe even 36 months for that payback period.”

“Our enterprise marketing team by the end of this year will be 20 people, and that's just for enterprise marketing. And then separately, our mobile app will be its own five to 10 person growth team.”

“Like, say, like 11 Labs, Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, Ideogram. These are wonderful businesses that have great economics because the models are smaller.”

“Which was the only investor ever to do that was, so I tested your APIs and this thing doesn't work. This works. Voice here wasn't good. A stability wasn't very clear parameter. So he was the only person that tested our APIs, decided that it was actually valuab…”

“One of the enterprise clients, we told them that we are planning to launch our dubbing solution, combining those components later, later in that, it was it was, I think September later in that, that month. And they took the components and released dubbing two …”

“If you are not unsure in the interview, but let's say you are bringing them, giving them a chance, and you are not sure in the first weeks or months, you should separate straight away, rather than keep giving, giving the chance.”

“Where you do get the interest from investors, I think this is the best time to actually test whether they can be helpful. And before you accept any term sheet, any money, it's like, Now, can you help me with angels that you want on cap table? Do you want the i…”

“I think if you're launching something very new, very different, and you don't yet fully know, you know, like, a subset of customer base, but you know that there is a bigger one, I think horizontal is, is completely fine. If you know, and you have domain expert…”

“So we've built our own data centers for training, and then for inference, we of course use some of our great partners across across the traditional.”

“Almost every round we can, we do secondary and a tender offer for all employees that have vested stock so they can sell the stock.”

“Our biggest contract is around two million, and they are mostly in a call center, Customer support, personal assistance base.”

“There's like roughly, it was like, 15% reply rate initially from the first batches that we sent. I mean, we sent thousands of them. But the interest was like lackluster. All of them were, it's like, oh, I don't fully believe this is possible.”

“We'll have 400 by end of the year.”

“We want to grow talent here.”

“So they gave it to their intern and they, the intern has built that project and then it exploded, but it was, it did give them like in tens of millions of revenue over, over that period of time.”

“In our case, it was if we assume we continue training the models that the way we want to. So very continuously, a lot of those models. Then second for the data transfers, and as we think about continuously bringing more data we will likely on a two year horizo…”

“The way we approach fundraising was always, you know, especially in the early days, like, queue, queue investors we really care about, and First speak with maybe one or two that maybe aren't a priority so we understand whether, like, we are at all kind of perc…”

“A-sixteen Z was phenomenal. They did exactly what we spoke about, which was, they've shown us that they cared before they invested. They introduced us to incredible people, to some celebrities to work on the voice licensing. So they were like on it for two wee…”

“When we worked on dubbing and the first early days, and we were like emailing, we didn't have product, product market fit. It was like very clear that, you know, people were slow to reply, then we sent samples, they weren't engaging, so we didn't through the 2…”

“As an organization today, we are, you know, we're 250 people, but really it's more like 20 teams couldn't go to market of like five to 10 people that are just executing on specific project where where They have higher ownership.”

“So we crossed two hundred million now. 20 months to hundred, and then 10 months to 200.”

“Nine million post. The amount was exactly 11% of the equity that, that, that the first investor was buying, and then the other ones were layered in.”

“I think it depends on the use case, but six to 12 months, I would say.”

“Over what is now more of a theme where you kind of train a more of a multimodal approach where you combine a reasoning and speech together to create even better speech experience. So that's our most recent generation is effectively that the Releven v. Free.”

“I think you can find people that want to work harder, and we've had it actually at some point a team where we hired some people from west coast of US and our people where we have quite a few from central eastern Europe where like, oh yeah, they don't work actu…”

“Our philosophy was always the round should have another purpose, which is Bring the product out and help you get the product into the users and celebrate a set of customers to show that you are arrived in a specific sector bring a new research model into play.…”

“I think it's a waste of time to, Kind of be in this, like, continuous fundraising mode. It's, you know, destructive. You need to have conversation. It's not useful.”

“Scaling the company from less than a hundred to now, 250 in a span of seven months while keeping culture intact.”

“One that, that is, we are considering is an acquisition of another company now, which is a big company. And that company, you know, is in hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“It's interesting because it's on the relative basis, I think the, our agents work is, is, is already huge, but I think it's just scratching the surface. I think it's going to, if we play it right, it's like a multi-billion dollar revenue generating business ju…”

“On angels, we would usually optimize for do they have domain expertise that we don't have? That's one category. Second, can they help us validate ourselves in specific, specific circles we might not have access to? So like if you are an AI founder, it's maybe …”

“Piotr and people around him were able, so Piotr was able to assemble one of the best teams in the space. I think we have five to 10 people that are in the top In a top hundred”

“They definitely will, but I think they, you know, they lack the...”

“In narration, we think it's plateauing. You, the new model generations will not make narration of an audiobook drastically different. It will still be, it will be still in a similar quality”

“Well, it was, you know, I think the first, so we did the round in October of 24, so we were probably at 80 when we got the docs, and then it was signed then. We, so the way we approached any of the fundraisers, it's, can we bring some of the bets forward? In t…”

“The end of twenty-twenty-three, I think we were between 35, 35? Thirty-five million.”

“We did have acquisition offers.”

“Then speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini on benchmarks.”

“It was 250 K at twenty five million. We're a big fund. It's like one percent, but I should have done it and I would have done it if I'd spent more time on it and I hadn't tried to focus on efficiency and clock speed.”

“I think when you look at what 11 labs have done this year, scaling to four hundred million in ARR, Standing off competition from OpenAI in any of the other incumbents.”

“What we've landed on as our North Star metric there is number of marketing sourced sales qualified leads.”

“We've actually just hired our first in-house creator, whose only job is to create TikToks, YouTube videos, Instagram shorts, YouTube shorts for 11 Labs, and the way we actually hired this guy is, if you typed in 11 Labs on YouTube, he had the most viewed video…”

“So for example, affiliates, we set up over a year and a half ago, and that now is bringing in over, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of MRR Per month. But this was set up a year and a half ago by one engineer in one week, and then no one's touched it sin…”

“Matty and Peter literally want to build a bigger company than Google.”

“In terms of core engineering, I would say probably 60, 70% of code now is AI written, so still like the majority.”

“Now, this was recorded in May, but now the company is valued at close to seven billion dollars, does four hundred million in revenue”

“The way we think about it at 11 Labs, it's like, what channels really naturally resonate with the founders, and do they get really excited by? And so for us, Matty is fantastic in person, at large speaking events, at Fireside Chats, and so that's what he reall…”

“Actually, the day-to-day metric and ratio we're really thinking about is CAC to payback period, rather than CAC to LTV. We set different payback periods depending on which product line and how aggressive we want to be, but these vary between, say, 12 months, 2…”

“I was kind of angel investing them. I was like, this is not something I want to invest. What do you mean? Step one, you're going to build the world's best AI audio model. Something no one else has ever done. Anyway, so I did an invest.”

“Where we don't do any AI written or AI generated code is our research engineering, where it's just like research engineering and research, where it's a very different style of work, and also these code bases are so sensitive.”

“Our enterprise marketing team, by the end of this year, will be 20 people, and that's just for enterprise marketing, and then separately, our mobile app will be its own five to A 10 person growth team.”

“And most of the team actually is ex-PMs, Who are now doing growth, and so they're responsible for the marketing as well”

“We actually have done this funky move of we've led in a consumer product, which enables us to get the CAC incredibly cheap, and then people may move up to creator or even enterprise.”

“Well, I think, but if you look at 11, the entrepreneur was pretty consensus. Like, it's like, alright, Mahdi's super, like, that whole team is incredibly talented.”

“If that revenue comes from Epic games, putting voice in all their games and they're paying Epic games, half a billion dollars, Epic games is going to design them out. Are they going to grind them on cost? Are there's going to be a competitor? They have the bes…”

“At eleven billion, no.”

“11 or twelve billion, you want to make it three X, so you got to be worth thirty billion. Right. Thirty billion at scale. You're going to trade at six or seven times. Cause that's the way human life is to get over. Right. So that's five billion of revenue.”

“I think 11 Labs is a clear company that we wish we had been a part of. As you know, we haven't spent enough time with the founder, which is, you know, our loss. I think we really regret that one.”

“My biggest regret or omission experience is one of your companies, actually, it's 11 Labs. We could have invested at the seed round, but we would have only got one percent mark, and naturally, as an emerging manager, I thought it was important to retain the hi…”

“And I don't care if I don't make enough money to justify it or like I lose money. It doesn't really matter to me.”

“Impossible. But it's impossible if you think about it from an experimentation perspective, and I always tell my team, like, I want us to test as many things as possible. I only need one of those ones to work really well to give me another hundred million dolla…”

“I'm spending a lot of time these days on like, how do we prove that the idea of labs for companies where we essentially are their consultants and help them build those agents that will generate top line revenue with new ideas, new products is actually somethin…”

“But at the same time, it's boring. Like the majority of companies will start with the bottom line optimization.”

“He's scaled the revenue org from zero to over three hundred and fifty million in ARR.”

“Actually you need like the liquidity, but you also need the big whales. So each one of my account execs needs to have the ability of like closing big whales, specifically on the enterprise segment, but also having like liquidity in the pipeline so that they do…”

“We're like, yeah, we could go with open source models. Excellent. Do it. You try to operationalize it and they've lost three months and then they come back.”

“Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if like a human actually closed it.”

“Premium branding on the worst team. 100%. You get more exposure, and also, like, you have a lot more creative freedom, and also you're betting.”

“So how do you figure out something that works along the way so that, like, you put and end up saying, you know what, you will invest for every million dollars that you want to invest, you need to actually, like, bring X amount of revenues in the next 12 months…”

“For instance, like we don't pay commissions on pilots.”

“I think like the goal for me at 11 Labs is like, 50% improvement in productivity.”

“Today we've proven with 11 Lab that like we dedicated time to actually partner with like Woffing Capital from Toyota. With the Deutsche Telekom guys, with the Telefonica guys, with Liberty Global that actually joined our cap table.”

“We had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota.”

“We post automatically, we have a bot that actually will post automatically into the sales channel every single week, a summary of, like, what percentage of quote attainment, year to date, for that specific quarter, and all of that stuff, and the forecast.”

“We have, we're generating a good amount of revenue, but like government work fundamentally just like it's a tiny portion of it.”

“Literally, we lost a quota. We end up changing all of that, form the ground up, and then you could see, like, people starting closing deals in the first month, and it was, like, insane, because, like, it was day and night.”

“But I also think, like, you look at, like, all of our competitors, like, you mentioned Sierra, DecGone, and all of the other ones, we power all of them.”

“For us, like, all of the stats are publicly open to everyone, so everyone knows how much revenues we make, everyone knows how each one of the reps.”

“For every one million dollars in revenues that any single person signs. And I don't care if it comes from like the SDR, the account exec, the CSM, or it's an engineer that went all in and then managed to get a contract. It's like every single million has thirt…”

“We have verticalized sales teams right now in specific markets. Markets that are much bigger or markets that are much more mature, 100%. We'll have people that only do like VFSI, only teams that do like healthcare.”

“I don't even look at the PLG numbers. I don't. I don't care about those ones. I look at, like, what are the enterprises? What are the companies in the market? How is my portfolio construction in that market? And how can I close some of those numbers, some of t…”

“And that has close deals for us already. We generate money from that AI customer success manager fundamentally because it is humanly, right?”

“11, I mean, like, I talked to Matic for 30 minutes and I committed, right?”

“The worst, like, ROI for us has always been, like conferences. It just, there's no ROI in there.”

“A thousand dollars a month. When you start spending a thousand dollars a month as a business, your brain completely switches because you don't want to put it anymore in your credit card. And at that point, you start believing, like, shit, I'm spending a lot of…”

“We, we're about adding about like another a 120 people, more or less.”

“Oh, I mean, for me, like if I get three unicorns and 11 Labs crosses a billion dollars in revenues, I would be very happy. Three unicorns for the funds.”

“So when we launch our agents product, I called the biggest platforms, agents platform that were operating in our platform, and I told them, like, guys, FYI, like in the next couple of months, we're going to be launching our agents product. We're going to be co…”

“A lot of people were talking last year about, like, oh, open source models are gonna take over, like, even on the AI voices space, like, you're gonna get commoditized and so on. And for a period of time, I kind of believed it. I was like, yeah, I mean, There i…”

“Like when we do a dinner with like execs in a given city that has the best ROI that that you could have.”

“Media entertainment in the beginning did not work for us. It just didn't.”

“It's like the fastest product in terms of revenues that we've ever had.”

“When I make an offer I tell every single person, it's like, 11 Labs is going to be extremely difficult, right? Extremely difficult. We are a hard company to work for because we have extremely high expectations. You're going to work, like, a huge amount of hour…”

“We do customer support, and the majority of our customers starts with customer support, and we make an absolute ton of money on that.”

“For the like standard model is anywhere from 70 to a hundred bucks. And for the V three fast model, it's like 30 bucks.”

“There have been several companies where we've had, like, one percent offered to us, Deal, 11 Labs, Starcloud, where we were like, one percent, we can't be doing that, and now I look back and all of them would have returned huge amounts of money.”

“I think 11 Labs is at eight hundred million in revenue. Raising it twenty two billion.”

“I look at ours, and our biggest mistake, and I can look at Deal, 11 Labs, I can look at Granola, and Starcloud, Fractile, could have done them all, but would have had one to two percent, and all of them we turned down purely for ownership, and that is hundreds…”

“The newest Speechify Simba 3.2 model is ranked number one in the world for quality. Above all the frontier labs, 10 x more affordable and stuff like 11 Labs.”

“Then they built their best product ever, which was agents. Agents is amazing because the buyer is no longer a software engineer. The buyer is a CTO, CIO, CEO, executive in the company.”

“If you use a tool like Sierra, the wedge right now is voice, but the important part is tool calling. 11 Labs lets you do some tool calling, but that's not the bread and butter.”

“11 Labs, I think Piotrek at 11 Labs literally bought a bunch of GPUs early, early on and set them up in his house, and then they just kept building bigger and bigger and bigger clusters. They do the same thing that we do.”