The Ledger
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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 …”
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: 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: 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.”
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…”
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: 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: 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.”
ElevenLabs operates as a no-title organization
“They also were very very much of no title organization, which we carry over at 11 Labs”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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 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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”