The Ledger
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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 …”
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.”
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: 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”
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”
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.”
Staniszewski: AI model cost declines will validate weak application-layer unit economics
“The unit economics in most of those cases that you mentioned is pretty, pretty poor, but I think the strategy is that yes, one, the models will optimize in cost, and then two, they will be the brands that customers trust, and then they can actually use a lot o…”
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' 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: Only 50 to 100 top voice AI researchers exist globally
“The number of researchers in the world working on voice and being exceptional is super small. Probably like 50 to a hundred people at like this top level”
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: 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…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will cultivate local European talent over US executives
“We want to grow talent here.”
ElevenLabs reached $35M ARR by the end of 2023
“The end of twenty-twenty-three, I think we were between 35, 35? Thirty-five million.”
ElevenLabs lacked product-market fit until pivoting from dubbing to voiceovers
“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…”