Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski discusses the founding and rapid growth of ElevenLabs, detailing how childhood frustration with Polish movie dubbing inspired the creation of frontier speech AI. He shares how his experience at Palantir shaped ElevenLabs' flat, small-team organizational structure and forward deployed engineering model. Staniszewski also explains why the company remains strictly focused on voice and audio research, the mission to preserve human voices, and why he has consistently rejected acquisition offers to build an enduring, independent AI company.
- Early ElevenLabs conversational agents flopped because their speech was unnaturally articulate; adding human disfluencies like pauses, "ums," and "uhs" caused user performance and acceptance to skyrocket. Read →
- Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski started ElevenLabs in 2021 to fix foreign movie dubbing, motivated by Poland's single-voice narration style. Read →
- ElevenLabs restricts pure research strictly to audio architecture, relying on outside LLMs and third-party tools for intelligence and knowledge retrieval. Read →
- Spotify CEO Daniel Ek warned David Senra to "stay away from the circus" of industry conferences, but ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski turned them into a core enterprise pipeline. Read →
- Mati Staniszewski organized ElevenLabs without executive titles, running autonomous units of fewer than 10 people who make direct decisions for the customer. Read →
- ElevenLabs co-founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski rejected multiple buyout offers early, choosing long-term independence over immediate financial security. Read →
- For decades, humans bent their behavior around machines by learning keyboards, screen layouts, and programming languages. Voice models reverse that relationship. Read →