The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 119 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Reyna: Open-source AI models won't commoditize ElevenLabs due to enterprise complexity
“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…”
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…”
Weitzman: Speechify Simba 3.2 ranks number one globally for quality
“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.”
Stebbings: 20VC Lost Hundreds of Millions Passing on Deel Over Ownership Targets
“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…”
Stebbings: ElevenLabs has $800M in revenue and is raising at $22B
“I think 11 Labs is at eight hundred million in revenue. Raising it twenty two billion.”
Rejecting 1% allocations in Deel and ElevenLabs cost Stebbings massive returns
“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.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs inference costs range from $30 to $100 per million characters
“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.”
Reyna: ElevenLabs is willing to lose money entering the government vertical
“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.”
Reyna: Enterprises waste three months trying open-source before returning to ElevenLabs
“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.”
ElevenLabs pays human sales reps full commissions for AI-closed deals
“Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if like a human actually closed it.”
ElevenLabs forces CVC investors to deliver revenue or face contractual penalties
“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…”
Reyna: Every $1M in sales adds $33M to ElevenLabs' valuation
“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…”
Reyna warned top platform partners before ElevenLabs launched competing AI agents
“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…”
O'Driscoll: Distributed SMB customer bases are more defensible than enterprise concentration
“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…”
Harries: ElevenLabs founders want to build a bigger company than Google
“Matty and Peter literally want to build a bigger company than Google.”
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 …”
Staniszewski: Owning data centers breaks even within two years versus renting compute
“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…”
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.”
ElevenLabs is considering acquiring a company worth hundreds of millions
“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.”
ElevenLabs speech-to-text beats OpenAI and Gemini on benchmarks
“Then speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini on benchmarks.”
Harries: ElevenLabs Tracks CAC Payback Period Over CAC to LTV
“Actually, the day-to-day metric and ratio we're really thinking about is CAC to payback period, rather than CAC to LTV.”
Motamedi: OpenAI model competition will not disrupt ElevenLabs due to workflow moats
“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.”
Weitzman: Sierra's core value is tool calling, unlike ElevenLabs
“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.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs builds and operates its own physical GPU clusters
“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.”
Reyna: Traditional sales forecasting is impossible in experimentation-driven startups
“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…”
ElevenLabs is testing consultative AI labs to drive enterprise revenue growth
“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…”
Reyna: Enterprise AI customer support automation is boring bottom-line optimization
“But at the same time, it's boring. Like the majority of companies will start with the bottom line optimization.”
Reyna scaled ElevenLabs revenue from zero to over $350M ARR
“He's scaled the revenue org from zero to over three hundred and fifty million in ARR.”
Reyna: Choose premium branding on lower teams over secondary on top teams
“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.”
Two ElevenLabs salespeople hit full-year quota by February
“We had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota.”
Reyna: ElevenLabs powers customer support AI competitors like Sierra and Decagon
“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.”
Reyna: ElevenLabs ignores PLG metrics when deciding on geographic expansion
“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…”
ElevenLabs generates revenue using an internal AI customer success manager
“And that has close deals for us already. We generate money from that AI customer success manager fundamentally because it is humanly, right?”
Reyna: Industry conferences yield zero return on investment for ElevenLabs
“The worst, like, ROI for us has always been, like conferences. It just, there's no ROI in there.”
Reyna targets $1B ElevenLabs revenue and three fund unicorns by 2026
“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.”
Reyna: Explicit warnings about workload filter out poor sales culture fits
“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…”
Stebbings: Passed on ElevenLabs seed round over 1% ownership
“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…”
Clements: Accel regrets missing out on investing in ElevenLabs
“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.”
O'Driscoll: ElevenLabs needs $5B in revenue for a 3x return
“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.”
Rampell: ElevenLabs was a consensus seed deal due to founder talent
“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.”
ElevenLabs' affiliate program generates tens of thousands in MRR with zero maintenance
“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…”
Harries: 60% to 70% of ElevenLabs' core engineering code is AI-generated
“In terms of core engineering, I would say probably 60, 70% of code now is AI written, so still like the majority.”
Stebbings: ElevenLabs is valued near $7B with $400M in annual revenue
“Now, this was recorded in May, but now the company is valued at close to seven billion dollars, does four hundred million in revenue”
ElevenLabs targets CAC payback periods between 12 and 36 months
“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…”
Luke Harries passed on angel investing in ElevenLabs early on
“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.”
Harries: ElevenLabs uses zero AI-generated code for research engineering
“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.”