Mati Staniszewski on ElevenLabs, Voice AI & Building the Communication Layer for AI

David Senra (0:02)

We ran into each other at Michael Dell's event a few months ago, and you're like, oh, I'm very curious how building a company today is different from building one in the past. And Michael has 40 plus years of experience, he's been dominating for decades. And when I saw him, we had like a 30 minute conversation about this. You read all these biographies of history skills entrepreneurs, and you just see this over and over again, it's like, oh, this time is different. Turns out, no, this time is not different. And Michael's like, no, no, I actually think this time is different. So I want to start with like how you think about building your company AI native from today.

Mati Staniszewski (0:36)

Yeah, Michael is a legend.

He must have so many interesting perspectives, especially like he's still running the company. So it will be interesting whether he applies some of the difference to the current running of the show. But for us, in some ways, given we are first time founders, me and Piotr, my co-founder, my best friend of 15 years, ElevenLabs is the first venture we started.

David Senra (0:59)

That's insane.

You started in 2022 You launched before the first version of Chetch.TBT, right?

Mati Staniszewski (1:05)

We did. It was still a year when the topics of the day were crypto and metaverse. So 2022 was still a year where 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 side.

David Senra (1:20)

What were you doing before you founded this company?

Mati Staniszewski (1:23)

I was a Palantir, so I was helping build optimization models and bring optimization models to the customers. So NHS during the COVID response on how you distribute vaccines across UK or working with oil and gas industry and figuring out how to optimize the energy work. So a lot of optimization models and then working with customers on actually figuring out how you bring that into the production. My co-founder was at Google and he did a lot of text models for Knowledge Graph. Before that, did research at University around image visual models. So incredible brain, the smartest person I know for developing a lot of the research work and I was happily on that intersection of building the product and bringing it out to the customers. So that was before Palantir's BlackRock, building risk models, bringing it out to customers and by background, study mathematics. So good intersection of the things I liked and now at ElevenLabs, that's also what I do and that's also from the company, when we started, that was the whole goal of like, can we combine research and product deployment under one hood?

On the research side, built all the audio models, starting with model to produce speech, text to speech model. And that was that 2022, the first model that could finally cross that human-like quality. And then over time now it's entirety of audio models, transcription models, localization models, orchestration for voice conversations with agents. And then on the product side, can we unify that as one platform that helps people, businesses transform how they would communicate with their audience?

David Senra (2:55)

Wait, so the first idea, you started with audio.

Mati Staniszewski (2:58)

We started with audio. The actual trigger point comes from where you're from, from Poland. Very peculiar thing, if you watch a movie in Polish, all the voices, whether it's a male voice or whether it's a female voice, get narrated with one single character.

So you have one voice narrating the whole movie. All the emotional intonation disappears.

And so we grew up with this. Everybody in Poland groups up with it, one person dubbing. And then in 2021, we re-tested or re-experienced this still happening in that content. And then second thing happened, which was...

David Senra (3:34)

It was still happening in movies in 2021, but you'd watch in Poland?

Mati Staniszewski (3:37)

Yes.

David Senra (3:38)

Same thing that was happening when you were a kid?

Mati Staniszewski (3:40)

Exactly.

David Senra (3:40)

Okay.

Mati Staniszewski (3:40)

And it's crazy because of course it's cheaper, easier to do, quicker timeline. But then the quality is poor, like as you can imagine, it's a pretty terrible experience. And that was like a trigger point.

In the future, that experience will be completely different. You will have original voice, original emotions, original intonation, and actually be able to experience that in that incredible way, which is very timely because 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. But maybe more broadly, that was also our eye-opening of how we interact with technology, how you can interact through technology will change. And that will apply in the language barrier that will break, but also just the general conversations with devices, with digital world will happen differently across different modalities, across different channels, and we wanted to do that.