YouSaid · the spoken record

Mati Staniszewski

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-09-08
most recent: 2025-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's shifting because if you ask me that, I should have taken that risk. So I don't usually try to take a quick action on top of that. But one that we are considering is an acquisition of another company now, which is a big company. And that company is in hundreds of millions of dollars. It would be a huge risk for bringing them in. And if we think we can do better internally, so I think we won't take that risk.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not most often. In the recent times, I like what Peter Tiel said about the biggest risk is not taking the risk and staying not taking a decision or staying.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too much of the founder brand kind of takes away from that, but my mind is changing a little bit. I think maybe you can elevate that by having a founder brand out there.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My answer here would be I don't know because in many ways, as we thought about the 11 labs, especially in early days, it's the people that build the company are the people that build the company. And in some ways, they kind of could still don't know to what extent like having some people that are very much out there, like let's say I'm now in this podcast, takes away from that. And we want to make it complementary because the reason we are successful, I think, is to a large extent because we've created incredible research. The engineers are just grinding and creating the best product experience go to market team is inventing new ways to combine self-surface and sales. So it's like all those parts and then supplemented by operation scaling the company from less than 100 to not 250 in the span of seven months while keeping culture intact. These are like all so hard things and with hyper growth, there's less time to be able to appreciate all those individuals than you would otherwise. And I sometimes worry by having that kind of, you know.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My word goes into law immediately. Yeah. I would proxy a lot of AI law to US law. I know this has a huge set of repercussions, but I would try to follow exactly how US is approaching a lot of AI related regulation and just implement the same or create another state in European Union and Europe that people can opt in that follows that law, do not make it too hard given all the repercussions.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, it's like Super Bullish is definitely not super bullish, but I think Google is, I would still put a lot that Google has a good future. And especially recently, they are catching up in many places. They are definitely in the race.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it gave me Google and the previous question. No. Yeah, I would invest in about 300. That was Google, but that's not enough. But you're super”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll choose Google or OpenAI. I would know the know-how of some of the incredible models. I think more Google. I would say Google. Gini, VO3 models, incredible innovations. And then at the same time, just the scale of operation would be interesting.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like Eight Sleep. I don't know if it's a consumer brand, but I do like EightSleep recently as changed quite significantly. I am a huge user of Google Maps and love Google Maps. Lovable, I really like from consumer-ish applications.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we previously would not do any of the product innovation if we knew that we are doing any research initiative ourselves. And I think now it's shifted that we will sometimes explore product with outside research, even if we don't have we don't build it internally.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do use cursor. Some people use CloudCode, but still more cursor. I think it's shifting a little bit. I'm also like, you know, to your other question, I don't care who was the investor, but they did say, which I think I would also as I think about that decision is I would be happily investing in a lot of the products I use. And I do use ChatGPT very often. Every so often I will use Anthropic for like testing where we are with the space, but I think they are investing more in coding rather than clot the consumer and OpenAI is clearly investing a lot in ChatGPT, the consumer solution.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, let's keep another positive. I would buy OpenAI, but I love Anthropic. If I was on the coding side, I think I would be buying.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you are helping, and I think many of the people in our ecosystem are, but I don't think most people do. Maybe another one which is not that specific to company building, but I do think voice will be the interface to the technology around us. It will be the primary interface for a lot of technology around us.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finger does help with the perception where there's you can to some extent, I think you can put away any of the greediness that comes with money just by taking some of the risk equation away.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, of course, exactly. That's what I mean. But it's like it's not the goal in itself, but you want to have this bottom set of good life that's covered, which we are extremely lucky as a company to have and to be able to offer. But then now the kind of the aspiration is much bigger, especially now that this basic layer is covered.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we do almost every round we can. We do secondary and a tender offer for all employees that have vested stocks so they can sell the stock. So they all feel that there's actually liquidity to the company. And I think it's valuable because we are betting for something huge and you want to know that you can take the risk to bet on some big outcome, which of course, you know, like I think it's very easy to say financial pair is not important. And I think it isn't, but there is like this basic layer that people want to.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a tiny bit tempting, but in a way, in the first one or two examples. So the first one was when we were doing Series A, was going really well. And then, of course, we were unclear how this will continue. It was like a very beginning of the curve. And the first one was like, okay, this is first time we ever are doing this. Let's understand what they are offering. But we were more interested into like seeing whether more about the process itself, like how it happens rather than actually giving the company. Then it was clear, okay, they don't actually want to acquire us. This is what we understand. And we need to be part of the company. So we were a flat no. And since then, through any of the conversation now that we know that this is even approaching this M&A.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the largest one didn't have money, but the ones that we went, it was like an interesting conversation because we would frequently try to like go into is the strategic partnership. And then they would be like, oh, can we consider? Are we open to M&A activity?”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Sekoya came in in series B, and that kind of doubled down that perception where it's like, okay, A16Z and Sekoya are part of the company. It's also very rare to have both of these investors in any of the companies. So it did help where a lot of clients would be respecting that. And now I kind of on top of that is just incredible mix. NFDG2. I think NFDG2 is like clients will usually not have that perception, but the”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, like, I think our first round was with A16E, and it did meaningfully move the needle for us. It was very clear that people respected.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do, but the way we've seen this kind of transition happen now is where you will have more specialized humans, where the agents are taking more of the manual parts that nobody really wanted to do or didn't require domain expertise. So like a good example is like if you're taking”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, so we have a public partnership with DecaGon, so we do. But of course, as you start going deeper, it depends a little bit where DecaGon goes and where we go. Are they going to verticalize or they will continue horizontal and go down? Well, we verticalize more. So there might be some areas where we overlap a little bit more. But today, given we are very partner horizontal approach that we treat all of them as good partners.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you can go deeper. You can, of course, expand from voice into conversational agents. And by that, I mean you start building omnichannel solution with email integration, WhatsApp integration, which is kind of that more classic customer support.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting because on the relative basis, I think our agent's work is already huge. But I think it's just scratching the surface. I think it's going, if we play it right, it's like a multi-billion dollar revenue generating business just from huge, of course, creating voice agents and going deeper. So I think this one is on the relative. And these would”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that the kind of variation of this is like can you parallelize a new effort without distracting the core work? And that's roughly why we are trying to approach this. Can we bring our work to a new place? Can we create a new product experience without affecting the core thing that's actually important for our users? If we can, then we'll likely invest, bring the people and do it. If it's distracting, then it becomes a question of like, is it worth the upside?”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we approached any of the fundraisers is can we bring some of the bets forward? In that case, it was even more span-on models, expand it to multi-model. Can we bring our work internationally, so expand into other regions, and then double down on Agentic platform, so start building even more of the true enterprise functionality, whether it's the reliability you need, whether it's integration with Salesforce ServiceNow, SipTrunking. So like investing in those was the most important. But at the time, it was for the X current revenue. So pretty good.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our biggest contract is around 2 million, and they are mostly in a call center, customer support, personal assistance base, all of those companies are orchestrating combination of the research, so speech to text, lemtheics to speech, and then bringing a lot of those integrations that now we create. So that's on the enterprise side, whether it's Cisco, these are not the contracts there, but Cisco, Twilio, recently working with Epic Games, these are some of our biggest deployments of the work. And then, of course, we are in lucky position that we still have a huge self-serve distribution of creators and developers building all the time.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our biggest part of the business now, and we're obsessing is building effectively conversational agent platform. Like the biggest customers are building.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The long term, yes, like we want to be an efficient company, I think now we have a very good metric for revenue per head. It's a good show. Are you an efficient company? But if we think there is a path for us to get there over time, we take easily the new hires that can help us. You know it extremely well as an investor. But of course, one of the key metrics is retention or how you think about NRR for any of the clients. So me bringing people now, helping us get the distribution before competition does might decrease my set of revenue I get. But if the NRR keeps growing and I don't hire more people in the next five years, not metric, of course, will change.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still small and still mightier, but we have a pretty global team now where we are trying to bring a lot of our go to market and engineering and every location we are at. So we think we can parallelize that, building in Brazil, in Japan, in India, in Mexico. So we are really going tool that local new ones to where we are building small outposts everywhere. And I think we can make it work.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's almost obvious. Three to four months. We have 50 offers or like joining. So 250 now, roughly 30 to 50 people that are already scheduled to join. And I think we'll get additional 100.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we do. We hope to interview that as long as possible because it's a good signal of who we bring into the company. We get to meet them. But of course, we still think the company is still shifting in terms of how we approach that. One is now even more, we are optimizing for engineering technical skill set in all parts of the company than we would have six to 12 months ago. So it's even increasing in some aspects. But I hope we'll interview to like a thousand people.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the probably a traditional one. But as I think about kind of bringing people in and growing them into the company as like the full hiring process, you hire a person, you of course have very little time frequently to assess how they are. But then as they are in the company, you have a little bit more of the signal. I would have taken some decisions quicker than I would have with separating with people. If you are not unsure in the interview, but let's say you are bringing them, giving them a chance and you are not sure in the first weeks or months, you should separate straight away rather than keep giving the chance. I think that's the few times you've done that.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting one because in the early days we didn't have much inbounds. So all of that was outbound. And it was easier in a way to find people that we felt were right because you didn't have to filter through the noise. And now we have just so much with so many people that are going because the AI buzzword or now are at scale that makes sense. But no, I think it's fine. Not everybody is the risk taker at the same amount. So I'm not in any way discarding them.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can find people that want to work harder. And we've had it actually at some point in the team where we highlighted some people from West Coast of US and our people where we have quite a few from Central Eastern Europe where like, oh yeah, they don't work actually that hard as we do. I mean, we have such a, you know, to credit to the team, it's like the true missionaries that are there on the weekend all the time and really care. They really care about the success of the company beyond just working hard. I think they are and they feel part of the company, which is true. So I do think you can find the people in Europe that are phenomenal.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Devon Labs, I think about us as a global company. We are a global company, we want to win in the US, we want to win in Europe, we want to build in Asia. We have the best team and most of the team in Europe because the talent is incredible.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a good subset of people that really want to work hard and create something special, and they just don't have that opportunity because there is no as ambitious European companies trying to do that. So the only way they can do that is work for US companies. And I think now there's like, you mentioned lovable. I think they are showing that ambition too. And there's like just so many more. Lagora recently in Sweden that rates around. We spoke about Synthesia. So there's quite a few companies that are ambitious they want to show. And I think the people joining want to be part of the ambitious company that is competing on a global scale. And then maybe in the early days, I was even worried to a large extent. I think you want to be able to build from Europe, but not build only for Europe. And I think those two get conflated where sometimes building from Europe meant, okay, you are building for European ecosystem, which isn't the right thing. You still want the global aspiration. So even now, when I think about describing”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get Want a growth island here. We match a lot of our current talent with the advisors from our network of U.S. investors. And the goal is to grow people. We love growing people. Our approach is almost, if we can, we want to take a bet on the person growing rather than bring them externally.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We found that people joining in and seeing the wider set of organizations already having set of roles defined for them would make this a little bit harder. You can have a lower tenure and be a manager of people with much longer tenure if you are the right person. Titles we felt were taking away from that. While at the same time, we have a good structure internally within the sub teams, like who is the current lead of that team that will make the decision if people cannot agree on what's the right path. But that person can, and it's not guaranteed that the person will remain a leader. And it titles in a way when you give a title, it stays usually forever in any other company.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are some incredible companies that, of course, did similar stripe being one example. But in our case, it was especially small team. So we have a team of five. A lot of people join. And what we wanted to optimize for is like one, the main thing that matters is the impact. You can join and you can be the most impactful person from day zero in any of those teams. So the title shouldn't define what is your level of decisions. Second thing with the small teams that happens is that you have a lot of those small teams. So if you start looking at who gets the title or not, it just becomes a distraction given that teams are like those small units that just keep executing. So that's the second thing. And the third thing we wanted to like also make it very clear in that mix and still do. If you are joining 11 labs today, you can transition to being a leader of any team of any function super quickly. And titles felt limiting to that.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you're launching something very new, very different, and you don't yet fully know a subset of customer base, but you know that there is a bigger one, I think horizontal is completely fine. If you know and you have domain expertise and this is the category that are trying to win, I think go vertical.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unit Economics in most of those cases that you mentioned is pretty poor, but I think the strategy is that yes, one, the models will optimize in cost, and then two, they will be the brands that customers trust. And then they can actually use a lot of the signal back. And I think to 11 laps example too, I think our unit economics is much healthier than most of those companies. We control our research, our product and distribution, but it's still, if we had a new model that we need to release ourselves, we would optimize less for the cost structure so we can get that magic out quicker than other competitions even can think about creating their own model.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did the maths. In our case, it was if we assume we continue training the models the way we want to, so very continuously a lot of those models. Then second, for the data transfers, and as we think about continuously bringing more data, we will likely on a two-year horizon break even for having our own and not renting. Assuming, of course, you know, you need to assume some improvement in the GPU infrastructure, but assuming that wasn't too high of an improvement, we would have been successful. And we were. I think the ROI made sense there. And now it pays dividends because we can just do more experiments quicker. And this can still be wrong at some point. There might be innovation that kind of breaks that equation. But for the current time, it just makes more sense, more control.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a lot. So that research piece of six to 12 months is enough for us to then do the second thing well, which we do in PyRL from the start, is build phenomenal product experience.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's both. I think it's the way we approach this in the companies. We have research product and the ecosystem that we built, which is a combination of distribution and a brand. But research for us is a head start. We are investing in research. We'll continue investing in research. We want to be the best across the voice technologies. But all this gives to us is advantage over the competition for the next year, two, maybe three.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think the first reaction should be that hey, everything is fine. I think you should be authentic and tell the team what you are feeling. Like, how has this happened? Go through what have we done wrong. And that frustration was clear. I don't think we, I think it was valuable for us to talk, we are angry at ourselves. This is wrong. And then as we move from that stage, like, yes, we are angry. What are we actually going to do about this and move to that second stage very quickly? The thing I've done a mistake sometimes of just going to the second stage. It's not a problem. Let's just go through and solve it. I think it's actually super valuable to talk through what has happened. But then you need to go into the second thing. And then in the long term, that will work out. Then you can, the relentless execution will prove itself out and show to the world. And the worst if you repeat the mistake, then someone needs to feel the repercussions. But if you've learned from that and haven't repeated the mistake, it's fine.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I can mention. And to their credit, I don't think the time that we told them it was actually a factor. I think they were just trying to do something quick. And we had a lot of calls with them those days because we were thinking like, what do we do? Is the contract give us flexibility to not continue? So we spoke through of them of like, hey, why did you launch? I don't think it was dictated by our timeline, but the timeline was very close to each other. And they told us that they thought it's a good hack weekend idea. So they gave it to their intern. The intern has built that project. And then it exploded. But it did give them intensive millions of revenue over that period of time. So it was significant.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dubbing was our story. We told that to everyone. We knew that this is the thing we want to solve first. We had all the components to be able to do it. We're just waiting to optimize it to make it perfect. And then suddenly this partner released it and got all the attention. All the media, Twitter, all the users were like, whoa, this is the most incredible thing that has happened. How amazing that you can speak in another language and still sound the same. You could feel the morale in the company was low. People were like, you know, we spoke about this. We knew for like almost two years that this is something we want to solve. And how did it happen, that the customer had this and solve this first? So research engineering wasn't happy. Like how did they do it before with the components we gave them? They go to market, wasn't happy because like, how did we sell this to the customer? Now we are like all the potential clients we could have had isn't isn't good. And of course me and Piotr were like, hey, this was our idea. Like, why would you do?”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there was like moments where I could feel this kind of tension between the go to market research engineering and this like a specific story where in 2023, late 2023, so we did the text to speech, we then did voices. We could recreate a voice, then we create like a basic way for speech to text internally. So we had all the components that we originally were speaking about to create dubbing. And we haven't done dubbing yet publicly and we gave all the components to some of our customers. So they could use text to speech, the voices. And there was like a lot of pressure that it's a valuable technology we can give to our enterprise clients. One of the enterprise clients, we told them that we are planning to launch our dubbing solution combining those components later in that month. And they took the components and released dubbing two weeks before we did. And that was one of the low moments for me, for my co-founder, for the entire team.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit depends in the product by a product area. So we have a team working on our studio interface team that will be responsible for all the core experience when you log in, team responsible for the entire voice agent suite and with Tinders, a team working on some of the more enterprise components, another team working on some of the self-serve elements. So all of the teams will be organized there on the product area. And then the other parts we try to shard it pretty quickly. So we will have a separate team for talent. Of course, the team for people. And they will have a high degree of independence when they actually execute, which helps.”
2025-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source