Sep 9, 2026 · 1h 11m · david-senra
Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
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ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski sits down with David Senra to discuss how intense product focus, Palantir-inspired engineering, and an ethical, human-first philosophy turned the audio startup into an enterprise AI powerhouse.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. David holds 31.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
David as informed peer 4.7 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 1.4 David pushing back 2.6
speaking balance: gold is David, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:06:50 Mati refutes the conference circus accusation
When David accuses Mati of wasting time at conference circuses against Daniel Ek's advice, Mati firmly counters that he limits events and uses them strictly as high-leverage client conversion engines.
Hardest push from David ▶ 1:00:15 David commands Mati never to sell ElevenLabsDavid aggressively rejects any temptation for Mati to sell the company, invoking biographies of legendary founders to insist no financial buyout can match long-term independence.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 31:10 Mati explains the true purpose of FDEsMati corrects the widespread industry misconception that forward deployed engineers are merely a professional services cost center, demonstrating how embedded frontline learning must systematically harden the core product.
David holds their own ▶ 11:40 David details Honda's structural separation of R&DDavid showcases his mastery of entrepreneurial history by drawing an exact structural parallel between ElevenLabs and Soichiro Honda's decision to wall off Honda R&D from commercial operations.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | David as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | David pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting ElevenLabs During the AI Shift | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | David opens with historical framing from his conversations with Michael Dell, asking how building an AI-native company differs today. Mati agrees respectfully and establishes ElevenLabs' origin prior to the ChatGPT boom, highlighting his Palantir background and co-founder Piotr's research at Google. | |
| The Polish Dubbing Problem and Global Ambition | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | David suggests that dubbing sounded like a tiny niche business at inception. Mati politely counters David's assumption, explaining they always viewed audio storytelling and global language removal as a massive market akin to the Hitchhiker's Guide Babelfish. | |
| Deconstructing Dubbing and Pivoting to Text-to-Speech | 3 | 6 | 2 | 3 | David presses on why existing big labs had not solved audio dubbing. Mati educates David by deconstructing the three-step dubbing pipeline and recounting how early creator feedback pushed them to solve speech generation first before cross-language translation. | |
| Sponsor: Ramp | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Mid-roll monologue sponsor segment read solely by the host for Ramp and Deel. There is no conversational interaction with the guest. | |
| Creator Workflows and the Honda R&D Parallel | 7 | 3 | 1 | 2 | David demonstrates substantial business history knowledge by detailing Soichiro Honda's organizational separation of Honda R&D from manufacturing. Mati validates the comparison and details how ElevenLabs mirrors that philosophy with small autonomous product teams. | |
| The Audio Moat: Science, Art, and Model Architecture | 6 | 4 | 2 | 4 | David demands clarity on how Mati defines ElevenLabs to outsiders and pushes on their audio-only focus using another Honda engine analogy. Mati explains that audio requires subjective art alongside science, emphasizing that architecture problems are where their moat lies. | |
| Product Discipline: Rejecting Premature Video Avatars | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | David asks for concrete examples of turned-down opportunities, and Mati explains walking away from video avatars and lip-syncing because it diluted focus away from audio. Mati also introduces their 20,000-voice marketplace where contributors get paid. | |
| Consumer Utility: Eleven Reader and Audio Personalization | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | David provides friendly, blunt pushback regarding ElevenLabs' marketing, teasing that nobody knows about Eleven Reader despite its quality. Mati explains that the platform pays voice actors like 'George' whenever listeners convert text to audio. | |
| Becoming the Definitive Enterprise Communication Platform | 4 | 6 | 1 | 4 | David asks Mati to ground abstract claims into concrete enterprise applications with a single customer. Mati walks through Deutsche Telekom's extensive rollout across marketing podcasts, call centers, and real-time network translation. | |
| The Forward Deployed Engineer Model in Enterprise Voice | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | David inquires how ElevenLabs cross-sells enterprise customers from one product to several. Mati explains their deployment model using Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who build custom logic directly on site. | |
| Palantir Cultural Heritage: Client Frontlines and Small Teams | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | David prompts Mati to reflect on his Palantir experience compared to BlackRock. Mati explains how Palantir embeds engineers on the front lines to abstract client solutions back into the core product rather than merely providing custom services. | |
| Organizational Structure: Flat Hierarchy and AI-Driven Transparency | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Mati outlines Palantir's cultural influence on ElevenLabs, including flat hierarchies without titles and high reporting spans. He explains how AI synthesis can eliminate middle-management filtering by giving founders direct visibility into ground-level data. | |
| Scaling Through Small Teams and Embedded Engineering | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | David compares Mati's philosophy with Luca Ferrari's centralized engineering model at Bending Spoons. Mati explains how ElevenLabs infuses engineers into non-technical departments like legal and sales, noting that inbound leads speak significantly more details to voice agents than web forms. | |
| Sponsor: AppLovin | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Following an AppLovin ad read, David questions Mati about revenue distribution across ElevenLabs' application catalog. Mati reveals that conversational agents represent their fastest-growing revenue segment, led by rapid fintech adoption. | |
| Palantir's 'Artist Colony' and Cultivating Taste in AI | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | David asks if there were any remaining Palantir lessons. Mati shares the concept of the 'artist colony' and explains that in a world where model capabilities commoditize, subjective taste and human nuance will dictate winner-take-most product experiences. | |
| Technology to Enhance Humanity vs. Technological Replacement | 7 | 3 | 2 | 4 | David quotes Edwin Land and Steve Jobs on building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, criticizing modern tech founders for seeking to replace humanity rather than enhance it, and citing Alex Karp on AI nationalization. Mati agrees, emphasizing AI sovereignty and human-amplifying technology. | |
| Restoring Identity: Medical Voice Recovery and Tim Green's Emmy | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Mati highlights non-profit initiatives restoring voices for ALS patients and musicians, citing former NFL player Tim Green winning an Emmy using an ElevenLabs recreated voice. David jokes playfully about competing with him in podcasting. | |
| The Intimacy of Audio and Engineering Conversational Imperfection | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | David reflects on why podcasting generates deeper emotional attachment than reading books due to vocal intimacy and human imperfections. Mati confirms this dynamic, noting that adding artificial pauses and 'ums' to their conversational agents drastically improved user engagement. | |
| Overcoming Risk Aversion: The Path to Entrepreneurship | 8 | 2 | 3 | 6 | David launches into an impassioned monologue urging Mati never to sell ElevenLabs, drawing on examples from Evan Spiegel, Travis Kalanick, and Steve Jobs. Mati humorously points out that David is passionately convincing him of a position he already holds. | |
| Generational Conviction: Piotr's Genius and the AGI Inflection | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | David brings up Scott Wu's Colossus essay about giving maximum effort when generational opportunities arise. Mati praises his co-founder Piotr's quiet technical genius and conviction around reaching AGI through audio research. | |
| The Interface Shift: Voice as the Primary Modality for AI | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Mati predicts voice interaction will replace screens and keyboards within 12 months as AI gains emotional nuance. David reinforces this with an analogy to Alexander Graham Bell comparing the natural telephone interface to the coded telegraph. | |
| Strategic Networking: Cutting Through the Tech Conference Circus | 6 | 5 | 4 | 5 | David confronts Mati on why he attends so many tech conferences, citing Daniel Ek's maxim to 'stay away from the circus.' Mati rejects the premise that his attendance is frivolous socializing, explaining his disciplined methodology of pre-booking commercial enterprise meetings. |
Statements from this episode (40)
Staniszewski: 2022 was ideal for building AI while tech chased crypto
“We did. It was still a year when the topics of the day were crypto and metaverse. So, twenty-twenty-two was still a year where, like, everybody was obsessed about those two. So, it was a perfect time because we could actually focus and build on a lot on the AI…”
Staniszewski claims ElevenLabs built the first human-quality speech model in 2022
“Built all the audio models, starting with model to produce speech text to speech model. And that was that 20, 20 to the first model that could finally cross that human like quality.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs released a model that translates speech across languages
“Just a week ago we released finally a model that is able to do that extremely well and finally bring the content from one language to another.”
Staniszewski: Localizing all media content into native languages is a huge business
“We actually thought it was a huge business at the time too. So we thought it's like, if we think about all the content, all the stories out there, how incredible if they were available in audio and it's the, whether it's some of the biggest streaming companies…”
Staniszewski: Voice generation was entirely robotic and unconvincing prior to 2022
“No, I mean, everything was poor. Everything was robotic. Everything was pretty robotic. It was still, you know, it was still like you could immediately tell it was like a robotic voice and nothing really crossed that uncanny valley yet.”
Senra: MrBeast hires famous Japanese voice actors for YouTube dubs
“And he told me, he's just like, yeah, well, for my Japanese, like the Japanese versions of my videos, it's like, he doesn't just dub them. He'll hire like a voice actor. That's like the voice is famous in that country.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs runs on autonomous teams of under ten people
“To be honest, you know, and you started with this question, this is not too dissimilar from how I think about how we run 11 Labs today. It's very much like there's a focused research lab, there's research engineering on bringing that to the product work, and t…”
ElevenLabs builds voice agents for Deutsche Telekom and Poland's government
“It can be support, working with Deutsche Telekom and creating voice agents for the call center, or it can be sales, helping on inbound sales qualification to make sure that that streams through. Or even wider operations and working with the government of Polan…”
Staniszewski: Most remaining AI audio model problems are architectural
“On audio, we think a lot of the problems that still exist are on the architecture side. We want to be solely focused on solving those architecture problems so you can actually get the best quality out there.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs only builds products where audio is the bottleneck
“And, like, when we think about new product, the big question is, do we think we have a unique advantage by applying our audio models in that product experience? If the product experience doesn't have a big bottleneck in that audio and the voice communication s…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will not build text-to-video foundation models from scratch
“Still a conscious decision we are taking is not creating the model from scratch. So like true text to video or like, you know, VO free type models that exist. We want to be at that intersection where we know the audio can give you the unique advantage”
Staniszewski: Pure AI research advantages diminish long term without product moats
“I think that we also talk about this like in the long, long term, that advantage that we have today will hopefully still be there, but it might not be as big on just the pure research. That's why the other components, that's why the product is so important. An…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has 20,000 voices on its marketplace
“We have 20,000 voices today on the marketplace.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs pays voice actor 'George' per user listen
“Yeah, somebody else is getting paid. That's a great voice actor that That worked with us for now for a long time. And every time you listen, he gets fed.”
Staniszewski: AI companies follow an evolution from model to platform to application
“And I think we are seeing that everywhere across AI companies of like, you know, the model becomes a platform, becomes application.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs refuses to build for knowledge work or coding
“We explicitly are not planning to touch any of the intelligence or knowledge work or coding, not our strength, not our domain”
Staniszewski predicts three platforms will control customer interactions within three years
“If you think about the next three years or however many years, there will be probably three platforms that You set all the interactions on those platforms.”
Staniszewski: Deutsche Telekom deployed an AI agent inside the T-Mobile network
“And then more recently, they even deployed an agent inside of the network. So if you are a T-Mobile subscriber, if you call, you can ask agent to join the call and help you out, schedule a booking or real-time translate your conversation to the other person. A…”
Staniszewski: The hardest part of voice agents is testing deployment
“In that step, the hardest thing in any voice agent work is actual deployment of how you actually test that it works.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs embeds forward deployed engineers in product, not GTM
“In our case, FDs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are part of the product team. They are deeply embedded on understanding what's the roadmap of the product.”
Staniszewski: Deploying forward deployed engineers without product feedback loops equals services
“And I feel like the second part is always frequently missed was like first, okay, if these are, you know, doing effectively a lot of the hard integration work to solve the problem, but if you don't do the second step of how you actually learn the expertise and…”
ElevenLabs operates as a no-title organization
“They also were very very much of no title organization, which we carry over at 11 Labs”
ElevenLabs caps organizational depth at four to five layers
“At 11 Labs, we have a couple of five today, like maximum Depth of how many layers there should be”
Staniszewski: AI will transform internal company information flows through summarization
“And I think that that information flow will change with AI where You will have access to everything that's happening in a better granularity than you could ever have before, because it summarizes that back and back and forth.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs grants nearly all employees access to all internal documents
“We took a choice to be extremely transparent with a lot of the data that we have, a lot of the docs that we write, so everybody has almost access to all the docs that are there in the company”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs embeds engineers in non-technical teams like legal and ops
“In all the small teams that we have, in all the teams that we have, we bring, even non-technical teams, we bring engineering talent in those teams. So our talent team, our ops team, our legal team, all of that will have engineers that help both. Automate some …”
Staniszewski: Voice agents extract far more inbound lead data than web forms
“One, people are both making their things easier. They enjoy it more, but two, they leave a lot more information than they ever would for the dropdown form. They tell us so many about the problems, about the wider set of use cases, so we can connect them better…”
Staniszewski: Every Company Will Have a Revenue Engineering Function
“We think it's going to be such a big part where everybody, every company will have their revenue engineering function”
Staniszewski: Conversational Agents and Creative Tools Drive Most ElevenLabs Revenue
“The biggest nines are on the agent side. And the creative side. So the number of use cases that deploy conversational agents is, is, is just skyrocketing today for us.”
Staniszewski: FinTech adopts ElevenLabs conversational voice agents faster than other sectors
“Then, ah, the healthcare, retail, e-commerce, and telcos are the four of the biggest ones. FinTech is moving the quickest. Of course, it's, you know, slightly different regulatory aspects. But then I think the healthcare telcos is kind of a second and retail e…”
Staniszewski: Taste will increasingly define the winners of AI product development
“Blend will be increasingly important, and everybody talks about taste now, how, like, taste will be the finding front of AI, and behind the buzzword, I think there is a lot of truth to that, where, yes, increasingly everybody will be able to create everything,…”
Staniszewski: Most ElevenLabs staff is in Europe, working on AI sovereignty
“Most of our team is in Europe, spend a lot of time with the European teams and governments of how we think about building sovereignty and how important this will be.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has helped over 10,000 people restore lost speaking voices
“Today it's over 10,000 people where we worked on, on bringing their voices back”
Staniszewski: Adding pauses and filler words dramatically improved voice agent performance
“We initially, we are trying to create a perfect voice agent that doesn't do any imperfections. It doesn't sound human. And then of course the obvious thing that, that, that, that was the clearest is like the ums, the pauses, and suddenly the performance of wor…”
Staniszewski: Benchmarking text-to-speech models is extremely difficult due to voice differences
“So like even doing benchmarks for text to speech is extremely hard. Because usually different models will have different voices. That already makes them uncomparable.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has received three or four concrete acquisition offers
“Like concrete ones, three or four.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will not sell and is going all in
“No. AI is changing the world. We can build a frontier of that change. We are going all in.”
Staniszewski: Cognition can become one of the future hyper AI companies
“Well, Scott, I think they should build independent company too. I think they have an opportunity to be one of the hyper AIs of the future or however you call the hyper clouds of the future.”
Staniszewski says communication will be the next bottleneck for accessing AI
“The next bottleneck of how you actually get access to that intelligence will be how you communicate with that intelligence, how you collaborate with that intelligence, and we can solve that.”
Staniszewski predicts conversational AI will deliver human-like dialogue within 12 months
“So, so I think 12 months from now, what will happen is, is similar as we are speaking. It's, I think the technology will be able to understand us at an incredibly better way, both our knowledge, both the emotional part of that conversation and deliver, deliver…”