CS153 ‘26: Frontier Systems - Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs

Welcome to week two of CS 153, also known as AI Coachella. Um, we are super lucky to be kicking off this week with Maddie. Mattie is the founder and CEO of 11 Labs. How many people here have heard of 11 Labs? All right, so pretty much everybody. Maddie and I go back a ways. About three years ago, I think when I was still running platform at Discord, um a friend said, “You know, an there’s a a little bot, like a texttospech bot on Discord that’s blowing up. Um you should check it out.” Um and you know, we had a lot going on at the time at Discord. And so I I I actually didn’t and I should have. And then a month later, somebody pinged me again and said, “You really should check out this bot.” And I I checked it out. It was called 11 Labs. And it was quite an extraordinary bot. It it it was a um a Discord bot that allowed you to generate audio clips with just a text prompt. Uh and within 24 hours, I’d asked one of our mutual friends, Nat Freiedman, to introduce us. Mattie was gracious enough to explain what they were working on. I had you’d let me come on as an angel investor. So, thank you. Um and since then Maddie has gone on to build one of the most um the fastest growing uh one of the most widely used and I would say trusted brands and services in frontier audio and speech. Um so thank you for joining us Maddie.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Good morning everyone. It was also a crazy thing an uh when we met for the first time it was me and my co-founder P. uh we both came from Google and Palunteer before that. So we were trying to like redo the company setup from scratch of like what not to do and we tried to like go against some of the lessons from those days. Um so we were allergic to meetings, we were allergic to um to like any email based communication internally but we also want wanted to not do any of the internal communication the standard way. So when we started we actually run a company on Discord. I did not know that. Oh, in that conversation you were you were helping us a on on on on the text to speech and we were trying to like figure out is that the right play for us to base all the company on Discord. We swapped from to Slack

uh which which was which was uh easier for Freddic but that was a that was an interesting few few first months of trying to build all the bots on Discord to like make it easy and quick for us. Th this was a bit of a theme we talked about last year too, which is that often gaming ends up being this petri dish for innovation. Some of the hardest infra product design experience problems that are solved in gaming then become sort of uh um leading indicators for the rest of the world. And the stuff you were doing and a bunch of other our friends were doing on Discord at the time have ended up becoming indicative of you know value in AI a few years later. Is that do you feel like that’s an a true assessment or uh am I overfitting?

Yeah, I think that the the true part there which you know we we were following the journey model at the time of like how Dave built that community piece on Discord and for us at 11 Labs when we started we knew that we want to fix two things. We want to fix the research and foundational models around audio and voice and then build product around that to to bring that AI into more of an applied AI setting and fix the problems that our customers are facing.

[Full transcript abbreviated — see summary note for content. The raw transcript contains the complete conversation between Andrej (host) and Mati Staniszewski covering ElevenLabs’ founding story, the Polish single-voice dubbing problem that inspired the company, research on cascaded vs fused audio architectures, the Javier Milei UN speech dubbing moment, business growth to $430M+ ARR, small-team philosophy, pricing strategy (capture ~1/10th of value delivered), safety and watermarking, work with ALS patients restoring voices, Ukraine DIA government app deployment, China distillation concerns, studio adoption, and on-device models.]