Staniszewski: Launch horizontal for novel tech, vertical when domain expertise exists
Mati Staniszewski · ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Sep 8, 2025 · at 52:41
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder and CEO of AI voice platform ElevenLabs. He addresses whether early-stage startups should launch horizontally across multiple use cases or focus narrowly on a specific vertical.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 expertise, and this is the category you're trying to win, I think go, go vertical.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mati Staniszewski
ElevenLabs built its own data centers for training AI models
“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.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs' Eastern European team worked harder than US West Coast hires
“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…”
Staniszewski: LLM Progression Is Flattening While Voice AI Progresses Rapidly
“In voice, you still will see Pretty, pretty, pretty quick curve. On the lamps, I agree, it's probably a little bit flattening to some extent.”
ElevenLabs speech-to-text beats OpenAI and Gemini on benchmarks
“Then speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini on benchmarks.”
Staniszewski: Enterprise partner beat ElevenLabs to AI dubbing launch in 2023
“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 …”