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
ElevenLabs uses consumer products as low-CAC entry points for enterprise growth
“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.”
Stebbings: ElevenLabs scaled to $400M ARR in 2025 despite OpenAI competition
“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.”
Stebbings: 20VC missed ElevenLabs' seed round by rushing for efficiency
“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.”
Staniszewski: Fire new hires immediately if unsure during first weeks
“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.”
Staniszewski: Launch horizontal for novel tech, vertical when domain expertise exists
“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…”
Enterprise Client Made Tens of Millions From Intern-Built ElevenLabs Hack
“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.”
ElevenLabs Reaches $200M ARR, Doubling Revenue in 10 Months
“So we crossed two hundred million now. 20 months to hundred, and then 10 months to 200.”
Staniszewski: Continuous fundraising mode is destructive for startup founders
“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.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs voice agents can become a multi-billion dollar revenue business
“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…”
ElevenLabs employs 5 to 10 of world's top 100 voice AI researchers
“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”
Staniszewski: OpenAI will definitely enter the AI voice market
“They definitely will, but I think they, you know, they lack the...”
Staniszewski: New AI Models Will Not Drastically Improve Audiobook Narration
“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”
Harries: Scaling horizontal AI products requires foundational models and founder-type product leads
“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 …”
Harries Passed on Angel Investing in ElevenLabs Over Terrible GTM Plan
“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…”
Harries: 60% to 70% of Core Engineering Code at ElevenLabs Is AI-Written
“In terms of core engineering, I would say probably 60, 70% of code now is AI written, so still like the majority.”
Harries: ElevenLabs Uses Consumer Entry Point to Acquire Cheap 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.”
Harries: ElevenLabs Won't Build Digital Avatars to Avoid Competing With Clients
“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…”
ElevenLabs splits growth into distinct top-down enterprise and bottom-up developer teams
“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…”
Harries: ElevenLabs Targets 12 to 36 Month CAC Payback Periods
“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.”
Stebbings: Passed on ElevenLabs at $25M valuation, missing a fund return
“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.”
Stebbings: Passing on a 2% stake in ElevenLabs was a major mistake
“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.”
Stebbings: Passing on Suno and ElevenLabs were my biggest mistakes
“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.”
Weitzman: Agents is ElevenLabs' best product because buyers are C-suite executives
“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.”
Reyna: Account executives need both whale deals and fast-closing pipeline liquidity
“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…”
Reyna: ElevenLabs does not pay sales commissions on pilots
“For instance, like we don't pay commissions on pilots.”
Reyna targets a 50% sales productivity increase at ElevenLabs
“I think like the goal for me at 11 Labs is like, 50% improvement in productivity.”
ElevenLabs partnered with Toyota, Deutsche Telekom, and Liberty Global
“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.”
ElevenLabs uses an automated Slack bot for weekly sales rep leaderboards
“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.”
ElevenLabs reps closed deals in month one after dropping vertical strategy
“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.”
Reyna: ElevenLabs makes all revenue and rep performance open internally
“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.”
Reyna committed to investing in ElevenLabs after a 30-minute conversation
“11, I mean, like, I talked to Matic for 30 minutes and I committed, right?”
Reyna: $1,000 monthly spend marks buyers shifting off credit cards
“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…”
Reyna: Executive dinners yield the highest ROI for enterprise GTM
“Like when we do a dinner with like execs in a given city that has the best ROI that that you could have.”
ElevenLabs hired the creator behind their top YouTube search result
“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…”
ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski avoids Twitter in favor of in-person keynotes
“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…”
Harries: ElevenLabs enterprise marketing team will reach 20 people this year
“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.”
Harries: ElevenLabs' growth team consists primarily of former product managers
“And most of the team actually is ex-PMs, Who are now doing growth, and so they're responsible for the marketing as well”
Staniszewski: Nat Friedman was the only investor to test ElevenLabs' APIs
“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…”
Staniszewski: Test investors with specific requests before accepting a term sheet
“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…”
ElevenLabs offers employee secondary sales in almost every funding round
“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.”
ElevenLabs' Largest Enterprise Contract Is Approximately $2 Million
“Our biggest contract is around two million, and they are mostly in a call center, Customer support, personal assistance base.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will cultivate local European talent over US executives
“We want to grow talent here.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs Pitched Lower-Priority VCs First to Test Pitch Messaging
“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…”
Staniszewski: a16z connected ElevenLabs with celebrities before investing
“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…”
ElevenLabs has 250 employees split into roughly 20 small teams
“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.”
ElevenLabs raised its pre-seed round at a $9M post-money valuation
“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.”
Staniszewski: Every funding round must tie directly into a product launch
“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.…”