Innovators
1 Curated Dialogues
Jennifer Li
Key Views & Dialogues
ElevenLabs CEO: Why Voice is the Next AI Interface
ElevenLabs combines a research foundation with roughly 20 autonomous product teams, turning voice breadth into a marketplace with nearly 10,000 voices and $10 million returned to contributors. Enterprise demand has pushed the company toward sales, orchestration, telephony, security, and compliance, while a three-month research rule and a ban on foundation-model customers show how shipping speed and strategic discipline are evolving.
View summary (6)
- ElevenLabs keeps research ambitious without letting it become a product bottleneck. After resisting a simple speed control for nine months because the company hoped research would make voices infer pacing automatically, it adopted a three-month rule: beyond that horizon, product teams may bridge the gap however they choose. “We don’t want to become the same as the previous generation of the editing suite” was the rationale for resisting the slider, not an absolute constraint.
- Shipping velocity comes from roughly 20 autonomous product teams of five to 10 people, backed by a research foundation. That structure tolerates duplicated work and uneven speeds in exchange for unusually high ownership and the ability to pursue creative tools and conversational agents simultaneously. Each new team gets six months to prove itself; the infrastructure team grew from three people at the partnership to 11.
- Its distributed model is a global-talent thesis, not merely a remote-work policy. ElevenLabs hired globally and unconventionally—including an open-source text-to-speech developer who was working in a call center—then added hubs once headcount exceeded 30. Titles were removed, tenure does not determine hierarchy, and information access is deliberately limited when transparency becomes distraction.
- The voice marketplace converts model breadth into an ecosystem with measurable creator economics. Nearly 10,000 voices are available and $10 million has been paid back to contributors; one deep Spanish voice found little demand in Spain but became a top-three voice after being offered in other languages and taking off in an English-speaking market because of its deepness. Staniszewski’s preferred posture is to help industry participants “disrupt together rather than just disrupt.”
- Enterprise expansion required abandoning the conceit that engineers could simply perform sales. The customer-facing mix is now roughly 80% sales and 20% engineering, while the product has expanded from text-to-speech into speech-to-text and orchestration, and enterprise deployments require telephony, evaluation, monitoring, security, and compliance. The production ambition is eventually “four nines or five nines,” though Staniszewski concedes that reliability is difficult in AI.
- At 350 employees, incentives have become part of product and competitive strategy. Staniszewski calls quotas and commissions “a lagging indicator of strategy”: the company may still grant commission while killing a strategically wrong deal, including a recent request from a foundation-model competitor to license ElevenLabs models for demos. The resulting policy explicitly prohibits sales to foundation-model companies.