Company: Eleven Labs
Stage: Pre-Seed
Headcount: 5
Tell us your story
I was born in a town just outside of Warsaw. I moved to the city to go to high school which is where I met my co-founder, Piotr. Those who knew me back then would attest to my fondness for quirky maths which persisted well beyond high school. While I was at Imperial College (studying maths) I also had my first true start-up experience, putting together Mathscon.
Mathscon was the first student-led Mathematics conference in the UK, focused on exploring the fun side of maths outside of university. The whole experience was a rollercoaster: building and managing a 20 person strong team, finding speakers, planning workshops, coordinating all logistics for 300 people; it was a lot to handle! I have the fondest memories from that period. I remember learning poker maths with Liv Boerre, and talking about the geometrical fundamentals of everyday life with Conrad Wolfram.
After graduating, I worked on applying the analytical skills I gained to building products. This was first at Opera Software, then at BlackRock, and finally at Palantir. The enjoyment that comes from creating something new that people love using pushed both Piotr and myself to set up weekend hack projects. We thought up many interesting startup projects: a new optimizer, a new recommendation algorithm, a new voice tech product.
We first built accent detection software. This then matured into our idea for automating dubbing which stuck. Maybe that’s due to us both growing up knowing the real pain of watching foreign movies with terrible voice overs! That’s the story of how Eleven Labs got started and we’re now on a mission to make all spoken content available in any language & voice.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
Through stories, experience and advice from founders and investors the one thing that people keep coming back to is how maintaining focus is crucial to building a company. I’ve increasingly come to understand just how true this is.
After we started Eleven Labs we’ve had so many people reach out with new project directions, advice and ideas. All of this is great but we’ve definitely had to maintain focus. Focus in the way that Steve Jobs defines it: “people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are”.
On a daily basis, we get to understand how true that statement is.
What can't you stop thinking about?
The Future! That’s pretty broad, but I am fascinated by how AI will blend into our daily lives and what sorts of mechanisms will be implemented to protect us from it getting out of hand.
We feel like we can already see the future within our niche: a future where anyone can access all spoken content in any language and gain access to the best education or entertainment out there. Or use the same technology to communicate with others. To let you sound like yourself while speaking the language you don’t.
And our minds are equally set on putting the necessary protections in place. That’s in order to minimise the risk of our technology being used for nefarious purposes.
We have our own ideas, but something like this will require well-coordinated efforts and thorough work for sure.
If I could tell you just one thing...
Don’t follow the trends and keep focused on what you believe in.
It’s often tempting to jump to things that are on everyone else’s mind. But in the majority of cases this will only produce a minor, short-term impact. And it might even delay or tarnish your long term goals.
Doing the thing you actually believe in maximises your chances of seeing it through to the end.
A little space for shoutouts
Thank you to our partners (Florence & Elli) and our families, who actively encouraged us to start Eleven Labs.
To our investors for believing in our vision and for their great honest advice and quick answers.
And finally, big thanks to the whole Eleven team for setting our relentless pace while making sure what we do every day is still really fun!
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Bob Iger. I am inspired by what he did at Disney and even more by how he instilled the sense of belonging and common purpose across the whole organisation.
At the end of the day, it’s the people that make the company and he was great at uniting his vast teams, across all ranks, behind a single vision. I’m sure he would have a lot of good advice for us at Eleven.