Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs talks with David Senra about building a fast-growing AI voice company, staying independent, and the operational choices behind their growth.
The gist
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Small teams of 5 to 10 people with no formal titles and wide manager spans keep information flowing directly to leadership.
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Forward Deployed Engineers sit inside the product team, solve customer problems on site, then feed that knowledge back into the product for everyone.
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Voice carries emotion and trust in ways text cannot, so ElevenLabs optimizes for natural speech with imperfections rather than robotic polish.
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Embedding engineers inside HR, legal, and operations lets those teams scale their output with AI tools instead of adding headcount.
What they recommend · 1 pick
ElevenReader
Software & apps
"It's a fantastic product, and it turns every document into essentially a podcast that I can listen to when my eyes are busy. I put the one about you into ElevenReader, so I'm li..."
Also mentioned
0:56
ElevenLabs
· "ElevenLabs is the first venture we started. We started with audio. The actual trigger point comes from..."
1:23
Palantir
· "I was at Palantir, helping build optimization models and bring optimization models to the customers — NHS..."
5:43
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
· "In 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' there's this idea of a Babel fish that you put it next to the..."
6:59
DeepL
· "DeepL at the time was doing incredibly well, and then you had the kind of Google Translate version of that...."
27:33
Twilio
· "How do you connect it to the phone system, whether it's SIP trunking or Twilio? How do you make sure that..."
41:50
Zero to One
· "I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book 'Zero to One.' The quote says: 'The..."
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