Assertion certainty 5/5 debate potential 1/5

ElevenLabs lacked product-market fit until pivoting from dubbing to voiceovers

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 21:28

Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, details the company's early struggle for engagement before pivoting from video dubbing to text-to-speech narration.

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“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 20, 22 period. And then when we shifted from dubbing into narration, voiceovers, then the product market signal started to hit.”

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Disclosure
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.”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 48:48 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 57:37 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 12:14 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
ElevenLabs speech-to-text beats OpenAI and Gemini on benchmarks
“Then speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini on benchmarks.”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 14:06 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
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 …”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 44:04 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs holds a 6 to 12 month research lead over competitors
“I think it depends on the use case, but six to 12 months, I would say.”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 48:27 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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