ElevenLabs CEO: Why Voice is the Next AI Interface

1. Key Themes

Building a Global-First Company with Distributed Talent

11 Labs started in Europe (Poland/London) and deliberately built a distributed team to access the best talent globally. "We realized that if we wanted the best people to solve what was a research problem at the time, we need to hire wherever they are. And we couldn't lock ourselves to just San Francisco or look at the west coast." [00:08:06] This led to unconventional hiring success stories, including "a person that had an incredible open source text to speech model, and was working at the call center at the same time as a recipient of the calls to make money. And he's now one of the most brilliant researchers we have doing all the data processing." [00:08:48] The company now operates hubs in London, Warsaw, San Francisco, and New York, balancing remote work with in-person collaboration for early-career employees.

Balancing Research Innovation with Product Velocity

The company employs a "three-month rule" to navigate the tension between waiting for research breakthroughs versus shipping product features. "If we think the research work will take more than three months, the product team can do anything they want to start adding other models, adding some of the extensions." [00:05:51] This prevents product teams from being blocked by uncertain research timelines while maintaining focus on foundational model improvements. The structure includes ~20 small product teams of 5-10 people each with "full independence to go ahead and ship products." [00:03:42]

Strategic Partnership with Creative Industries Through Economic Alignment

Rather than disrupting voice actors and musicians, 11 Labs created a voice marketplace where creators can monetize their voices across 70 languages. "We have almost 10,000 voices. We paid $10 million back to the people in the community." [00:27:00] This approach extended to music licensing: "We worked with labels that Merlin and Cobalt and four of majors to bring their music into the music models...in a licensed way so you can generate that and give commercial rights." [00:16:36] The music licensing took 18 months to negotiate, with the key being "adding forcing functions or forcing timings...this is when we do it. And we either do it together or we do it separately." [00:17:01]

2. Contrarian Perspectives

Removing All Titles Company-Wide

11 Labs eliminated titles across the entire company a year ago. "We removed titles a year ago. And it's going well, it still works...every team, we create those teams. You have six months to prove it...the moment you join, you can have any impact on the company...The title will not define your position in the hierarchy." [00:11:00] This is particularly contrarian for a 350-person company transitioning to enterprise sales, where titles typically matter for customer credibility. The rationale: "When we speak with a lot of our partners, with a lot of customers, they also know that they are getting the best people always. And we can also send people to different conferences, different events, regardless of that positioning." [00:12:09]

Hiring Engineers to Do Sales Initially

Against conventional wisdom, 11 Labs initially tried to have engineers handle sales rather than hiring traditional salespeople. "We didn't realize when we partnered, the infrastructure team was three people...we want to be engineering company. We don't want sales people we would like to reinvent that and have like engineers do the sales. We did hire one traditional sales person and one non traditional sales person like an engineer we told him like do sales now and that really as you can imagine didn't work out." [00:21:36] While this failed, they now maintain an 80/20 mix of traditional sales backgrounds with engineering-oriented people.

Limiting Slack Access to Reduce Distraction

Rather than maximizing transparency through unlimited Slack channel access, 11 Labs deliberately restricts it. "If you put a person into all the slack channels and give them transparency, they actually get frequently distracted because then they read all the messages. And then you can still choose not to read them, but they still do. So you kind of need to cut the access to a lot of those pieces to force the attention." [00:13:16] This contradicts the common startup value of radical transparency.

Granting Commission for Killed Deals

11 Labs will pay sales commissions even when they decide not to close a deal for strategic reasons. "If they are seeing a deal that might be competitive in nature, and our pricing table would suggest that they can go very low and earn higher commission, but they think it's wrong, it's better to come to us. We are happy to still grant commission, but kill the deal." [00:30:08] Example: "One of our foundational level competitors came to us wanting to license our models for demos. And of course, the incentive would suggest that you should sell to them, but luckily, we didn't." [00:30:34] This ensures incentives don't override strategic judgment.

3. Companies Identified

11 Labs

AI audio company providing text-to-speech, speech-to-text, music generation, sound effects, and conversational AI agents. "We started with voices, then created orchestration of how to build voice agents. And now also created a fully licensed music model." [00:01:21] The company has paid out "$10 million back to the people in the community" through their voice marketplace with "almost 10,000 voices." [00:27:00] They've successfully transitioned from creator-focused PLG to enterprise, working with fortune 500 companies.

Spotify (implied through "John")

Referenced as a customer innovating with 11 Labs technology. "John here is creating some of the incredible new podcast experiences. And that came from testing early models of turning a text into a more notebook-lm style of a podcast with incredible voices that you can select for German speaking voices, English speaking voices." [00:26:42]

Merlin, Cobalt, and Four Major Music Labels

Music licensing partners that took 18 months to negotiate agreements with. "We worked with labels that Merlin and Cobalt and four of majors to bring their music into the music models...in a licensed way so you can generate that and give commercial rights so you're fully protected." [00:16:36]

4. Operating Insights

Explicit Pre-PMF vs Post-PMF Team Designation

Once past 100 people, 11 Labs designates teams as either pre-product-market-fit (ship fast, 6-month prove-it timeline) or post-PMF (focus on reliability and long-term optimization). "On the post-product market fit, you're working for the long term. You test and evaluate a lot before. You only deploy when that's truly ready. The pre-product market fit, your mission is to ship until you think we've hit the product market fit. And usually we give the six-month period of proving it out. If not, we kill the product." [00:27:15]

Using Alpha Labels for Enterprise Customers

To maintain shipping velocity while serving enterprise customers, 11 Labs clearly labels products as "alpha" and lets customers choose their risk tolerance. "We delineate very clearly what's alpha, what's not alpha...as we work with customers and partners, they can decide whether they want the access to alpha in the first place. And when they do, that's clearly shown that this is an alpha product that might not be stable." [00:26:06]

Shielding Team from Long Enterprise Sales Cycles

During the transition to enterprise sales, leadership deliberately shielded the PLG-oriented team from information about long sales cycles. "The side that did it was very skeptic about going enterprise and waiting the six months or 12 months to results. And in the early days, we needed to shield them from that information. And trust us will do this, and it will work. But they were very skeptic. And then, of course, after 12 months, it worked out." [00:24:54]

5. Overlooked Insights

The Polish Dubbing Origin Story as Market Insight

The company's genesis came from a uniquely Polish problem that revealed a massive global opportunity. "In Poland, if you watch a movie in Polish language, like a foreign movie in Polish language, all voices, whether that's a male voice or female voice, get narrated with one single character. No emotions, no intonation...it's pretty terrible, and it's still happening today for most of the content." [00:07:20] This "cheaper way" post-communist approach to content localization identified a wedge into the massive content localization market. The insight: looking at cost-cutting measures in emerging markets can reveal where AI will disrupt developed market workflows.

Commission Structure as Lagging Indicator of Strategy

Mateusz revealed a profound insight about scaling go-to-market: "In some ways, the quota, the commissions, are effectively a lagging indicator of strategy. And then strategy is leading of what will happen in the future. So you need to find a way to resolve those two together where you want to make sure the quota and commissions and the strategy that you want to drive are closer together." [00:29:24] This suggests that commission plans become outdated strategic documents, and the gap between current incentives and future strategy creates misalignment that most companies don't proactively address. The realization marked when "we are becoming a bigger company because there are clear behaviors that happen based on the commissions." [00:29:49]