#564 - VO - Mati Staniszewski - ElevenLabs - “Humans were never meant to write, but to speak.”

Mati Staniszewski (0:06)

I'm Mati, I'm one of the co-founders of ElevenLabs. We are 600 people, we are 600 million in AR and revenues. We of course want to create a global company, but want to build a strong European ecosystem. As a company, we try to do two things. We try to do the research and the product deployment. We started with the first model to produce text to speech, to produce voice.

Matthieu Stefani (0:24)

So I'll send you a text and you make me a voice. That's the idea, right ?

Mati Staniszewski (0:28)

Exactly. So you frequently work with foundations for people that lost their voice, due to throat cancer, due to ALS. And when they lose the voice, we help them recreate their voice so they can speak again. The reason we started with voice is we thought that for solving the communication with AI, the voice is the biggest opportunity because to access the benefits of AI, you will need to learn how to communicate with it. And we want to solve that. The great future of that would be more of a Jarvis from Iron Man. You can ask it questions, you can ask it for help. We now embed an engineer in every non-technical team.

Matthieu Stefani (0:57)

Wow, listen to that folks, I mean one engineer in each team like HR, Finance, Legal, all of them.

Mati Staniszewski (1:04)

One of my favorite lines is, You can outsource the thinking, but you cannot outsource the understanding. And with AI, you can ask all those questions to outsource the thinking and get the answer, but you cannot outsource whether you actually understand it.

Matthieu Stefani (1:22)

We are the average of people we spend the most time with. My name is Mathieu Stéphani, and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes and artists to raise my average and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors.

It's 11.11, so we had to start right now. Whatever if I didn't have time enough to tell you everything. So the first thing, yeah, we can put the headsets on. It's going to be better. Mati, welcome. I just wanted to check something. Are you the real Mati here ? I mean, do you speak English ?

Mati Staniszewski (1:56)

I speak English.

Matthieu Stefani (1:58)

Can you speak in Polish ?

Mati Staniszewski (2:00)

Yes, I can speak Polish as well.

Matthieu Stefani (2:02)

I don't understand much, but thank you, good day.

Mati Staniszewski (2:05)

Hi everyone, hi, I'm happy.

Matthieu Stefani (2:07)

German ?

Mati Staniszewski (2:09)

Not German, Norwegian.

Matthieu Stefani (2:11)

Norwegian ? Korean ?

Mati Staniszewski (2:13)

Not Korean.

Matthieu Stefani (2:14)

Okay, then maybe you're the real Mati, because you would be, ElevenLabs, Then you would be able to answer.

Mati Staniszewski (2:20)

Luckily, we can actually localize all of those lines too.

All right. I'm not French yet, but I'm trying to learn as well.

Matthieu Stefani (2:27)

OK, are you ? OK. Well, actually, I understood that you were like you didn't have any home anymore, right ? You're just living in the world.

Mati Staniszewski (2:38)

It's a little bit.

It's true. It's as you're trying to build a global company, we feel like the way to do it is having this very local obsession of building and being on the ground in all the cities and countries. I'm so happy to be in Paris. We just opened our office in Rue de Bachamont. It's 11 Rue de Bachamont. No way.

Matthieu Stefani (3:00)

I love Rue de Bachamont. I love this area. Yeah. The Hotel Bachamont is quite cool.

Mati Staniszewski (3:04)

I haven't been there, but the street looks beautiful and the energy is great.

So I'm definitely trying to be a citizen of the world and traveling where the teams are. But our biggest basis in London, my heart and where I'm from was this Polish, of course, and a big part of the team is across now US, across Europe. We started from Europe, are investing so much in Europe and now increasingly in Asia as well. So truly, truly, truly, truly across the key, key elements. Recently started seeing a momentum in Latin America too. So building teams there, truly global company, which I'm hearing is also true for your work.

Matthieu Stefani (3:47)

Yeah, in the recent weeks, it's at some point I woke up in some places or I was in a cab and I just said, Oh, I remember this city and the guys, I was in Aix-en-Provence and they said, Well, you're not in fucking Aix-en-Provence, you're in Lyon, asshole. And I was like, Oh fuck, yeah, he's right. So I was just, yeah, mixing everything.