Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (00:08): Mati, always great to see you. Thank you for being here and excited to talk about ElevenLabs. For those that are less familiar with what ElevenLabs does, spend a minute, tell us about what the company does.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (00:18): ElevenLabs is an audio AI research and product deployment company with the mission of making information accessible across voices, across sounds, across languages. Whether it's narrative models to get the emotion and human quality out there for text to speech, whether it's turning audio to other languages and making it accessible, or creating those interactive models with high speed, low latency. That's the research pillar.
And then on the product side, we try to harness that research in a way that's an end-to-end solution for our customers. Whether you're creating an audiobook, creating a movie voiceover or turning that to the global market, or if you're deploying a voice AI agent and you want to bring that into the fold, we've built a platform to make this possible.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (00:58): You've had a slightly uncommon journey at ElevenLabs, but before we get into that, let's rewind back to the beginning and talk about your relationship with Pi, your childhood best friend. You grew up together in Poland and decided to start ElevenLabs together.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (01:16): I think for a long time we knew that we would love to work together. After high school, we of course were keen to get some experience and learn a little bit more of the craft. I was at Palantir and he was at Google. One thing we would do mostly for fun through the years was meet up together for hack weekend projects, and mostly those were projects to learn about technology, learn what we can do, see how people use it.
One of those projects was in the audio space. We created a way for you to analyze how you speak and give you tips on how to speak better. I frequently speak too quickly, my pitch is high, my accent isn't perfect, so all those tips were coming across. I still haven't applied all of them, but it worked. It was a lot of fun and we knew what's possible in the audio space, and that was I think roughly in early 2021.
(02:05): And then fast forward to mid to late 2021, the idea came for both of us, which came from where we are both from, Poland, where you have this very peculiar way of watching foreign movies. When you have a foreign movie in the Polish language, all the voices, whether it's male or female, are narrated with one single narrator: no emotion, no intonation, one voice across the entire movie. That still happens today.
And this was like, okay, this technology and what we know will be possible will change in the next few years. You will have all that content accessible across any language with that incredible original quality. And of course, as we started diving slightly deeper, we realized that the problem is much bigger than just dubbing in Poland or dubbing internationally. The wider audio accessibility isn't there, and that kind of idea we were excited about solving, combined with just loving and wanting to work together, was perfect.
Yeah, you probably have never experienced a single narrator voiceover on top of a movie, right?
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (03:02): I have not. But in our diligence of ElevenLabs, we watched a foreign film that was dubbed in Polish, and it is a terrible experience.
Pioneering a category in the way that ElevenLabs has, there was a lot of invention and unknowns when you were doing that, of would this be even possible: to create synthetic voice and audio that was on par with humans? Did you guys have any doubts as to would this be possible, would you succeed at this, at the very beginning?
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (03:34): Of course, many doubts. You want to prove that you can do it versus you are scared that you'll never be able to. When we built the first prototype, we wanted to see what's possible to fix the dubbing problem, and we implemented a prototype in the first months. When we would showcase this to a lot of the users or even ask them in vacuum, it was very clear that this was a problem, but not the top one problem that they have.
Usually top one problem would be: I want to just create a voiceover for my content and I don't have tools for that because everything is bad. So then we realized, okay, the only way to really fix it is to take a step deeper and actually build our own research, our own models from scratch. Let's focus on text to speech, the one where we see the biggest problem, where we see the biggest value that we can provide, and let's try to tackle that.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (04:22): For a lot of the companies that we encounter, finding product-market fit takes months or even years in some cases, and you guys blew right past that. After you launched your first product, what was that feeling like when you felt like you'd captured lightning in a bottle and you were onto something?
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (04:41): So we created this blog post, “The first AI that can laugh,” with samples of that work. We distributed that everywhere we could in different Discords and Reddit communities. It started getting attention. We made it to top one on Hacker News. We had a waiting list and the first 1,000 users signed up, and that felt like, okay, this is great. This is another level than what we've seen.
We created a showcase of creating synthetic voices and that similarly got a lot of attention because the voices sounded really good. They represented sets of emotions, accents, characteristics that people weren't used to. When we did the closed beta, we started rolling in people. The first batch was 11 people, of course.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (05:25): Of course.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (05:25): Exactly. That was like all the multiples. The spread of use cases that we had was more than we expected. Our initial prototype when we launched the beta was this small box where you could type probably 300 text characters, something along those lines, so like a tweet.
In the beta program, we had a few book authors, and those book authors would copy-paste their entire book into that box, paste, download, paste, download a few hundred times, a few thousand times in some cases. Then they would have created that book, put it on the platform, the people loved the experience of listening, and they would come back to us in days after with a group of other book authors that wanted to do the same.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (06:07): Amazing.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (06:07): Our product just wasn't yet suited, but it was clearly like, okay, there's virality, there's the potential. So through the beta, we started lining up more of those users, more of the AI influencers to help us distribute the message, and then we launched publicly. We were happy throughout, but at the same time we knew now we needed to scale more for what we wanted to do next. It happened quicker than we expected, but at the same time it was great.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (06:38): The breadth of use cases of ElevenLabs’ technology is just immense. I know we've talked a lot about some of the things you're most proud of and you're most inspired by. Maybe share others that you've really enjoyed seeing come to life in the last year or so.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (06:52): I'll ask you a question so it gives me more time to think for this one. As you think about the conversational AI use cases, is there any in particular that you feel the pain of today, that you would just love to fix?
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (07:04): I mean, I can answer that right now. I just moved into a new house and switching internet should be straightforward. I've had to call customer service three times in the last six days. Each call is 30 minutes and I still don't have internet in my new place. And that's a huge pain point, very real time. And so I've had a tough couple of days dealing with that.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (07:24): Now, I wish that you told me which is the provider, because we are working with one in the UK that is trying to fix exactly this problem.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (07:31): Oh my God.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (07:31): Please accelerate that deal. Apart from the call center experience, what would be the most exciting company for you or for ElevenLabs to work with?
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (07:42): Ooh, most exciting company. I have three young kids, so we spend a lot of time watching animated movies. I know you're already working with Disney, but I think Disney and companies like Disney that are creating very compelling animated films, and being able to engage with those characters, I think would be so cool and my kids would love it.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (08:04): Agree. I think a recent one, which just shows how this technology can be used in a different way, is something that made all of us proud. We worked with Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton. Unfortunately she lost her voice, or was losing her voice, and worked with us to recreate that voice and be able to, despite unfortunate circumstances, continue pushing and trying to inspire others to do work. It was one of the first times when that was used in Congress to deliver incredible speeches.
And just yesterday, we are now part of the Polish presidency in the EU. We are going to dub the conferences into other European languages so people around Europe can listen to them, which is so close to where we started the company and the mission. So it is great to finally see those come alive from what we thought would happen a few years ago.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (08:55): And…
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (08:56): We still think there will be another moment this or next year where just everything will start getting multi-translated, and maybe all the way to a real-time translated experience where you could have that true experience of conversation or “Babel fish” where that works.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (09:11): We're thrilled to officially be working together and be on the journey with you, but what ultimately compelled you to work with us and to invite us on the ride with you?
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (09:22): We’ve been able to work on projects before you partnered. Something that was so incredible was that you were helping ElevenLabs before the investment happened, and seeing that time and time again was just a reaffirmation that this is exactly the partner we would love as we think about the next 10 years or 20 years together.
What I didn't know when we started speaking is the breadth of the help. Whether it was introductions to some of the talent, of how we can work with the industry together to really bring audio to them, whether it was some of the biggest enterprises that we couldn't get to and finally getting quick introductions, all the way to: we were looking for a GM, a general manager in Japan. It was pretty late in the process, we needed a reference check. We asked your ICONIQ team — within 12 hours I got the best reference check I ever got from two people, very detailed, and we hired the person.
Seth Pierrepont, ICONIQ General Partner (10:11): It's amazing when it lines up like that, and that's awesome to hear. One of the things I love about my job is I get to be somewhat along for the ride as founders like yourself are building incredible businesses that are impacting the world in some profound way, and there are many proud moments along the way of doing that.
Some come in the form of incredible moments where you give a congresswoman her voice. These moments are deeply personal for both the founders and for my relationship with the founders. And so I hope that through our many conversations that we have had and that we continue to have, that we knock it out of the park.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs (10:50): I hope we can make the voice as part of one of the movies accessible to your children in a very different, more interactive, educational way. So that would be one of the goals. That would be a great, great moment.
