ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski says the company has never employed product managers
Mati Staniszewski · The Trillion-Dollar Industries AI Is Disrupting: Voice, Law & the End of the Billable Hour · Jul 14, 2026 · at 7:14
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs. He discusses how ElevenLabs structures its engineering and product teams without traditional product managers.
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“We don't have any PMs.”
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More from Mati Staniszewski
Staniszewski: People disclose sensitive details more openly to AI than humans
“With AI, people are much more open to share what actually happened, give the information, and suddenly this emotional block of, like, in front of other human, I don't want to be able to say all of that, is, is, is very different.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs aims for human-level conversational voice fidelity in 2026
“We hope this year we'll do that same thing for voice where any conversation feels like you're speaking with another human.”
ElevenLabs reaches $600 million ARR after rapid revenue scaling
“It took us roughly 20 months to get to the first hundred million in ARR, roughly 10 months to get to 200, five months to get to 300 and that's how we closed, and end of the last year, and now we are at 600.”
Staniszewski: Voice AI performance depends on model architecture over scale
“It's the architecture that matters, not the scale. You really need to change how the model operates.”
ElevenLabs retained 100% of its initial 10 core employees
“From the first 10 people, we had zero attrition. Everybody is, ah, ah, still at the company from those core research and engineering talent building together with us.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs embeds software engineers in non-engineering teams like legal and talent
“The way we are structured is A lot of small teams, especially across the product engineering, but also in how we think about go-to-market optimized for specific industries, telco, financial services, healthcare, so every unit is very tightly knit together and …”