Staniszewski: ElevenLabs runs on autonomous teams of under ten people
Mati Staniszewski · Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs · Sep 9, 2026 · at 12:37
ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski explains the internal company structure and operating philosophy to David Senra.
0:00 / 0:36exact quote · 36.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 then we have a lot of small teams running after specific product problems that we can solve. And then, of course, the wider go-to-market and deployment of how you bring that to the customers worldwide. But it's, ah, the general philosophy is like a lot of small teams, usually less than 10 people, having flexibility, autonomy to just run ahead and apply their best judgment in, in, in what we can solve for the customer.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mati Staniszewski
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…”
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…”
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: 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 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: 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 …”