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

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“Is that more people frequently don't fix the problem? It's like you don't need that many people to do something special. That's the first thing. Second is by keeping an as an organization today, we are 250 people, but really it's more like 20 teams can go to market of like five to 10 people that are just executing on specific project where they have higher ownership. They can move extremely quickly. They see the result and iterate with reality a lot quicker to improve 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
“Are all US, I think they are playing a different game. I think they are all from our experience so far a lot more keen to take the risk. Even our conversations are always like, how do we bet bigger rather than optimize for negatives? The one check I always try to do with Pyot for any of the partners that we bring beyond the capital network brand is always for the person you partner with or the person you partner with, how will they behave if it's not going well? So we usually try to get any of the back references for how they behave when the company was failing. All of the ones that we had are in a very positive, like they actually were really on the side of the founder, helpful when it was not going well, even more so than when it was going well. And I was doing the same check with some of the checks with other companies. And maybe this is getting used to that, like, you know, when you ask the kind of the set of companies that went up and down is so high. But in some of the investors, we spoke in Europe that checked.”
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
“Love our partners. I mean, we have unfreezing teams so incredible with the network. I mean, now Sekoya with Andro is just another level two iconic team. Also crazy help. NEA2 is just like bringing everyone.”
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 what I don't like founders that are trying to do that too much. If they are trying to get the first TMS sheet to bump the other ones, I think it's the wrong approach. Okay, if it's like order of magnitude off, it's probably wrong. It's like 5x, then yes. But if it's like plus minus 20%, that's like a wrong optimization. There's just so much more value that investors, partners can give than the money itself that I think should be optimized for.”
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 that does happen. So I got it. It was like, you know, and they came from the approach of like it would go too high, they won't be able to invest and they don't want to be part of that. So that happened.”
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
“At the time, I didn't, but I do. It's like I don't like them still, but I won't name the people. But so one example was a, let's say, a smaller fund. They felt that if they get us the termsheet, we'll use that to bump other termsheets.”
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, but it's, you know, the truth is the other way is true where a lot of the investors want to give the term sheet, but that is before any show of partnerships. So how do you know that this is a good partner? How do you know whether they are giving you good terms? Especially our FaceTime founder. You never run this. You don't know how much you are valued. You need to have some relative comparison. And this can happen through conversations with other companies, other founders, or comparing yourself to other companies in the field or running some form of a process. Roadshow probably sounds pretty bad because it sounds like a lot. You probably like the way we approach fundraising was always, especially in the early days, like few investors we really care about and first speak with maybe one or two that maybe aren't a priority so we understand whether the messaging that we want to put across makes sense. If it does, move straight to the top ones.”
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
“Speak usually with founders or our investors ask me to speak with the funders, it's usually that question what is it actually that you care about for the thing? What do you miss? And then it pronounces pretty quickly whether they are going after just the roadshow this there to bump it up because they think the value that the time sheet they got is just not valuable? Or is it that they actually want someone else but they don't want to, they want to keep the optionality of having the first one while running the process.”
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 lot of great companies get built on 11 labs, so I get to be in the conversations now more frequently where they would raise money from our investors. Recently, we had a company raise a series A that has built a healthcare voice bot which would effectively help patients calm them through the conversations in an incredible way. Then there's like another company building for a healthcare customer support. So quite a few. And now I'm in the conversations of them raising the money, which is an interesting one. And then usually it's clear that some of the people don't know fully what they are actually optimizing for. And it's good to talk, are they optimizing for the valuation? Are they optimizing for dilution? Are they optimizing for the right brand name to help them out? Is it the network of people that this brand name has? Is it the specific partner? Is it something different? And I think it's like pretty distributed.”
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
“Oh, yeah, speed is like for us, even from investor, from product perspective, it's like you need to, especially now, the speed of execution, speed of investing is the only thing you have.”
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
“Bay and Fotill London. So, Brian, I mean, A16Z was phenomenal. They did exactly what we spoke about, which was they've shown us that they cared before they invested. They introduced us to incredible people, to some celebrities to work on the voice licensing. So they were on it for two weeks prior or like week prior already to help out in any way they could. And then Brian flew to London, met with us, and then we signed preliminary timesheet, which was interesting. He flew in. We're negotiating. Also, my phone call to Piotr, to co-founder. It's like, hey, what about these terms? Can we accept this? And Piotr would give guidance on where is the hard line? What we can do? And then on speaker, we would sign together and finalize.”
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
“Exactly what we are after and challenged us with the right questions from the start. And then he moved very quickly. He has very keen to partner with us. We are keen to partner with him. We are trying not to show it too much. But we were. And then at the same time, we know that Nat and Annialware were more perceived as the angels while we admire them from their We spoke with few funds in London”
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
“Emailed us, but then I met him here in London. He flew in, and it was like a weird setup where he emailed me, but it wasn't clear whether it will happen. It happened the last time. And then I see him in London in one of the hotels where he was staying. And the first thing he was saying was, which was the only investor ever to do that was, so I tested your APIs and this thing doesn't work. This works. Voice here wasn't good. Stability wasn't very clear parameter. So he was the only person that tested our APIs, decided that it was actually valuable what we are doing, gave me feedback on what we should change, and then told me, and I'm keen to invest, which of course triggered a conversation of what's the vision, what we are after, and what's special about that is that you can tell him very little, and he kind of has this beautiful ability of infilling all the context around it, comparing that to any of the past experiences and bringing any of those experiences that then might be relevant to you, but he gets it immediately. From the first conversation, he knew kind of”
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 NFDG. Now I feel like it's a good name, but I was pitching not on changing that to a different name for a while. Maybe now it's not possible anymore, but the interest started around kind of March 2023. We had a lot of the investors that were in a close conversation in the past like reapproached us. We effectively would be a little bit more in the waiting mode. Like let's see how we get through and let's optimize for the partners that we truly want. And what we truly wanted was a combination of making sure that people in globally, NSF, trust and know that we have arrived, like we are a company that can be trusted is building something ambitious. And then, of course, people that we would admire to be able to work with that creates something special. And that was definitely in that category. In the latter category, and it was a very fun thing because he approached 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
“Think the way we approach this is like do they have domain expertise that we don't have? That's one category. Second, can they help us validate ourselves in specific circles we might not have access to? So if you are an AI founder, it may be valuable to have set of AI founders in there. So you are part of the same events, same conversations. And then, of course, in our case, it was, can we have some of the go-to-market expertise where we had a lot of self-serve, some volunteer experience, but the sales led, how can we bring that in place as well?”
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 like kind of the second thing where you do get the interest from investors. I think this is the best time to actually test whether they can be helpful. And before you accept any terms sheet and money, it's like, now can you help me with NGLs that you want on CupTable? Do you want the introduction then? That's the best 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
“Today less, at the time, we do have a few investors that we think would be valuable that we might not have today in the space. Through the time, we would have few investors that we wouldn't try to proactively reach out, but if they reached out through any of the conversations, we would try to engage. But the engagement there wouldn't be like, hey, we might be racing. It would be much more of like, hey, can you help me with introduction to X? Hey, can you help me with this hiring problem? And this has worked tremendously well through the work where the investors are genuinely keen to help if you find the right person. And if you have a very clear problem and you don't try to like overuse their time too, like you come with one, two things that are concrete, useful, and then they know as well that if you are growing as a company, it's good for them to show the help too. So we'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
“100% What would frequently happen if the launch goes well is you will get more interest. And I think you'll get interest from investors, from events, from media. To a large extent, this is like the time you should really focus on getting the product and kind of all of that is like a distraction to a large extent. Like, you know, the first time we launched that happened, we started getting so much of that. And I'm sure I did the mistake then of like picking up a lot of those and doing more events than we should where like the best course of action would have been to just spend even more time with users and then early enterprises started getting interested so more of enterprises. I think on the investor side, I think you want to line up investors. You do want to tell them like, okay, I'm not racing now. I'm going to reconsider whether we need more capital in Q3 or Q2, whatever is the time period of time. And then when you actually need the money, then it's the best time to actually re-engage with them. But I would not like, I think it's a waste of time too, kind of be in this continuous fundraising most. It's distractive. You need 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
“Care about it all the time. We are all about users. What actually worked was working with the newsletters that were talking about AI, working with our friends from YouTube community that then posted on Discord that we are opening this up. Our Discord community was one of the most valuable. Reddit, those people picked it up quicker than anyone else. Hacker News posting there, like all of those were immensely more valuable. And we since then always spend a lot more time on any of the actual forms where our users are rather than where they are not.”
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 that's the first one 100% for us, making announcement close to something big you want to announce from the product, from the user, from hiring perspective. Tie it with that. I don't think celebrating the number itself is the right way. I mean, in a way, it's like you're giving away the company. What are you doing it for? And you want to show as much of that as possible. Second thing would be we really want to focus on how you actually get the users rather than just the media PR element. I don't think the latter is actually as valuable as it seems to a first-time founder. For us, I remember when we did the beta, we were speaking with some of the bigger publications and one rejected us, the other one accepted us, and we felt like it's a big deal. Then we did all the prep for the interview. We did the actual news. And then it was posted. We hold it like everything around this post that they told us the deadline for. And it had no impact. I think, I mean, it's like probably a few more people read about us from the investor scene, but we didn't really.”
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
“2023 publicly. We knew we started getting more of that signal that creators, narrators love the work. And to be honest, I think from that moment onwards, we saw a clear momentum. And then there was more events after the media picked it up, then more creators picked it up. But the moment of release, we knew that it's valuable. And then maybe last thing on that, it's like the product market fit concept. For us, we never like fully, I think, know what this actually means where we knew users loved our product at the time, but I wouldn't call it at the time we had product market fit us. We were thinking of like, okay, how do we make sure it's providing value for the next five to ten years? Then we'll decide this will be like something we would call, okay, this is clear product market fit. We think this is like self-sustaining for as long as we go into the future. So we wouldn't go by that definition. I think we are now closer to that, but we are still know we can create so much more value.”
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
“Voiceovers, then the product market signal started to hit. Maybe it's there. Remember this thing like three things that happened. First, we did a blog post around the first AI that can laugh and we sent samples that got picked up by newsletters and people were like, wow, this is incredible. The next day we had like thousand people on our waiting list. And the second thing happened, we invited the first hundred or so users to 11 labs to test it out. And we had this audiobook author who joined the platform. Our platform is like this small text box where you can type in text, tweet length, and narrate it. And he would copy paste his entire book 500 times, download it, stitch it together, then he released it. He released it on the platform at the time AI was banned. It passed through as a human content. And then it started getting reviews that it's great. And then he came back saying, I want my other book other friends to do it too. So I was like, okay, we are on to something. And then we launched in January.”
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 actually raised around in Q3 of 2022, but we announced it in Q1 of 2023. And we do that all the time is that we don't want to announce a round just for the sake of announcing a round. Our philosophy was always the round should have another purpose, which is bring the product out and help you get the product into the users, celebrate a set of customers to show that you are arrived in a specific sector, bringing a new research model into play. So every round that we would do would always tie into a product announcement. So we actually hauled on for announcement for a few months until we had our beta release and then we triggered, which was January 2023. But to your question, initially, when you worked on dubbing and that first early days and we were like emailing, we didn't have product market fit. It was like very clear that people were so allowed to reply and we sent samples. They weren't engaging. So we didn't through the 2022 period. And then when we shifted from dubbing into narration,”
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 main reason we race was to accelerate what we would want to do. First one was building a small data center. So we built one and back then it was, I think in Poland that we've invested few and then quickly after moved and started buying some in the US. And then team, we started hiring not many, but it felt like a lot of the time it was like additional two people, I think.”
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
“Yeah, it was only four years ago, which, you know, in the end, we found we had Credo concept here in UK, Credo from Z. We had one of our friends of PH from Oxford, Peter Chaban, who invested, was a co-founder of Polkadot, which is the cryptocurrency. So the way it had like a good set of early believers. But together, it took us a bit longer.”
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
“90 million The mod was exactly 11% of the equity, the first investor was buying. And then the other ones were layered in. So it's like just over a million.”
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
“Money, we started spending a little bit more on GPUs. We hired the first few people. All of that was going from our savings, which we are lucky to have from Google and Palantir. But I was like, okay, now it's actually getting a little bit more risky. And we want to double down. We want to invest even more. So we need money.”
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
“Pre serial was tough. It was similar questions that you asked. It was like how will we fix research? The second question, which was very interesting, we think the market is very small for what you are solving, which at the time was like, you know, it's like a combination of AI, voice. Nobody was thinking about that. So that was a surprising to ask, which we were very disagreeable. And Ferd was defensibility. Will it actually be better than what in Cubans from the FAMG companies will actually solve or how will you out-compete that on long term? So these are the three. So it was tough. I think we spoke with a good amount of investors between 30 to 50. And it was double hard at the time because we early 2022, we got an offer from one of the accelerators in US, not YC, and we were thinking like, should we take it or not? And we decided, no, we are rejecting. We think we can create something more valuable and we don't need that help at the time. So decided to go independent. And this triggered this more stressful time where suddenly now you need 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
“You do have, which I think is important as I think about any of those companies is like, how close you are from developing research to actually deploying research. And at the 11 labs, if you are actually creating new models, they get to production that are some of the most important things that our products work on almost immediately. So the gap is super quick. When bigger companies go for their usual corporate red tape to get any of that work done. And then three, I think we now have a very small MID team that can learn from each other and move pretty quickly. I don't think there is a guarantee you get that in some of the other companies. I think they are optimizing for a lot of people, but not necessarily the right 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
“No, of course. I think the talent, especially on the research side, is out of the scale across any of those companies, especially in the early days. Of course, to some extent, as you as I think about meta and others, they are, of course, paying for the know-how as much as they are paying for the Roth Halen 2. We're getting those early people gets you some insight into the models and architecture that you can then bring across and accelerate. So in early days, it's more valuable than late. But I think in our case, the reason I think it's still valuable is one, the upset for 11 is just getting started. So I hope we will be able to compete with any of those companies in the future at the same scale too.”
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
“On benchmarks. Now, music, which is again something that no big company has yet been able to crack or do. It's incredibly mighty team. And then even if I think if OpenAI does actually do something on research and I think they are trying, then that product layer is where you really need that big advantage of. If you are in a creative space, if you do a narration, if you do a voiceover, if you're a dab, you go through so many additional”
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
“Definitely will do something, but I think they lack the genius that I'm happy my co-founder and a team has. But I think the true longer answer is one is focus. I think in the early days, especially when we spoke then, there was just so many different things you could do in AI space. And I think we took this bet that we want to really own and win and devoice AI research and product space. All our work is directly tied to voice. Then the second thing is I actually think the number of researchers in the world working on voice and being exceptional is super small, probably like 50 to 100 people at like this top level. So Pyrrh was able to assemble one of the best teams in the space. I think we have five to ten people that are in the top 100. It's like a mighty team, which I'm kind of time and time again surprised how incredible they are. And to make it specific, I mean, text to speech was one that kind of have blown everything out of the water. Then speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini.”
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 know, it's probably a different answer on LLM space and different answer in the voice space. I think in voice space, you are still not slower rate. And then there's an interesting variation of as they all combine, what does that mean for the world? Like it's slightly deeper understanding of everything around you. But I think in voice, you still will see pretty quick curve. On the lamps, I agree it's probably a little bit flattening to some extent.”
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 biased way, I feel like the progression is still just scratching the surface where it's just the moment of still seeing escape curve of AI getting adopted everywhere is just getting started while scaling does continue in the same way.”
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
“In voice, I think there's a little bit of like it depends, it depends on the use case. But to make it more concrete, their use case is like narration. In narration, we think it's plateauing. The new model generations will not make narration of an audiobook drastically different. It will still be in a similar quality. But I think in general, the point is right where if you just do research, eventually it will commoditize and eventually that advantage you can deliver from research isn't enough. So you really need to build product. And as you think about 11, we combine both together.”
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 still a current question is to what extent you continue that single modality space where at the time it was mostly you train a dedicated model for speech or dedicated model for image, video, et cetera, over what is now more of a theme where you kind of train a more of a multi-model approach where you combine the reasoning and speech together to create even better speech experience. That's our most recent generation is effectively that 11v3. If we had that then I think we would have probably skipped a few steps and our experience would have been even better.”
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 the answer will definitely change now to 2022. So that was the year where nobody yet kind of was thinking about AI. This was still kind of downfall of meth of various crypto days. The attention to the models was like non-in the public eye. ChatGPT happened beginning of 2023. That's where it kind of all started spiking across. At the time, you didn't really have a choice. You knew as a user, as an investor, that what existed out in the market just wasn't very good. And then there was more of a question, will this team be able to solve and create something better?”
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
“Quick answer is yes. All the models at the time you could tell immediately it's like Uncanny Valley, not very good. You cannot replicate voices.”
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
“Not like a burning problem I need to solve it. But then the second thing happened, so we started sending the samples, we started speaking more with the YouTubers, and it quickly came that what they actually want help with is much simpler. They want to post-produce and correct if somebody said something incorrectly. They want to understand how the script will sound before they need to produce it. They might not want to speak at all and they want to voice over the movie. So a super simple problem, which didn't include anything with language engaging. And of course, Michael Vander does, he dived into the research, realized that you can actually build completely new text-to-speech model, which will be a lot more emotional, internative, that will make that narration a lot better. So let's put a dubbing problem aside. And as we see, there's this huge other problem with a lot of the creators. Let's solve this problem first and bring that research just on the text-to-speech layer.”
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
“First, try to do two things in parallel. My co-founder was, okay, can we use existing technology, stitch it together, and create a dub of a movie in a better way? And it quickly transpired that you get a good effect, but it wasn't brilliant. So to actually fix it, let's take a step back and fix one of those components and make it great. At the same time, when he was doing research, my mission was, does anybody actually want that dubbing product? So I was emailing all the YouTubers, getting the emails, scraping them and trying to message them, hey, if we had a dubbing product to make your movies available in all languages, would you be interested in that? Roughly it was like 15% reply rate initially from the first batches that we sent all were personalized. I mean, we sent thousands of them. The interest was like luckluster, all of them were like, oh, I don't fully believe this is possible. Can you send us a sample? It would be great, but how will I operationalize this? YouTube doesn't support it. So it's like, it was somewhat of an excitement.”
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