Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, explains how staying laser-focused on audio innovation has allowed his company to thrive despite the push into multimodality from foundation models. From a high school friendship in Poland to building one of the fastest-growing AI companies, Mati shares how ElevenLabs transformed text-to-speech with contextual understanding and emotional delivery. He discusses the company's viral moments (from Harry Potter by Balenciaga to powering Darth Vader in Fortnite), and explains how ElevenLabs is creating the infrastructure for voice agents and real-time translation that could eliminate language barriers worldwide.

Hosted by: Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Mentioned in this episode:

Attention Is All You Need: The original Transformers paper

Tortoise-tts: Open source text to speech model that was a starting point for ElevenLabs (which now maintains a v2)

Harry Potter by Balenciaga: ElevenLabs’ first big viral moment from 2023

The first AI that can laugh: 2022 blog post backing up ElevenLab’s claim of laughter (it got better in v3)

Darth Vader's voice in Fortnite: ElevenLabs used actual voice clips provided by James Earl Jones before he died

Lex Fridman interviews Prime Minister Modi: ElevenLabs enabled Fridman to speak in Hindi and Modi to speak in English.

Time Person of the Year 2024: ElevenLabs-powered experiment with “conversational journalism”

Iconic Voices: Richard Feynman, Deepak Chopra, Maya Angelou and more available in ElevenLabs reader app

SIP trunking: a method of delivering voice, video, and other unified communications over the internet using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Genesys: Leading enterprise CX platform for agentic AI

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Comedy/science-fiction series by Douglas Adams that contains the concept of the Babel Fish instantaneous translator, cited by Mati

FYI: communication and productivity app for creatives that Mati uses, founded by will.i.am

Lovable: prototyping app that Mati loves