ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski: Why Voice Will Be the Fundamental Interface for Tech

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Jul 1, 2025

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, dives into the world of audio innovation and its pivotal role in technology. He reveals how his company's breakthroughs in text-to-speech enhance emotional and contextual understanding. Mati discusses viral successes like crafting Darth Vader’s voice for Fortnite and enabling real-time translations, aimed at breaking language barriers. He also reflects on his journey from a high school friendship in Poland to leading a groundbreaking AI firm, emphasizing the transformative power of voice technology.

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ANECDOTE

Origin Story of ElevenLabs

Mati Staniszewski and his co-founder Peter started ElevenLabs inspired by poor quality Polish dubbing in movies.
They aimed to create technology enabling original voice delivery with emotion and context in dubbed content.

INSIGHT

Unique Challenges in Audio AI

Audio AI models need to capture not just spoken text but how it's spoken with emotion and context.
This makes audio AI architecturally and data-wise very different from text AI.

ADVICE

Hiring and Workflow Advice

Hire researchers deeply interested in audio who embrace independence and high ownership of projects.
Keep research cycles short so engineers see results quickly and can iterate rapidly.

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Richard Feynman

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This book is an edited collection of reminiscences by Richard Feynman, based on recorded audio conversations he had with his friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton. It covers a variety of instances in Feynman's life, including his work on the Manhattan Project, his critique of the science education system in Brazil, and his various hobbies such as safe-cracking, painting, and playing the bongo drums. The book also includes his famous 'Cargo Cult Science' lecture, where he cautions against the superficial appearance of scientific investigation without a self-critical attitude. Feynman's stories are lighthearted yet insightful, reflecting his high intelligence, curiosity, and humor.

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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