In week two of CS 153 ("AI Coachella"), Anjney Midha interviews Mati Staniszewski, founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, tracing the company’s origins from an early Discord text-to-speech bot to a fast-growing frontier audio and speech platform. Mati explains ElevenLabs’ initial focus on solving AI dubbing inspired by Poland’s single-voice film narration, the shift to prioritizing emotional, natural-sounding text-to-speech for creators, and the evolution from cascaded pipelines (transcription, translation/LLM, and speech generation) toward real-time voice agents. They discuss tradeoffs between cascaded versus fused multimodal systems, efforts to detect and convey emotion, safety and voice authentication limits, on-device model deployment, collaboration with teams like Sesame, and business lessons on PLG plus enterprise deployment, team structure, pricing from customer value, and growth to over $430M revenue with ~450 employees.