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

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

00:00 Introduction
02:14 Staying Competitive in AI Audio
04:55 The Origin Story of ElevenLabs
05:52 Building a Company with a Friend
07:27 Early Projects and Innovations
11:30 Challenges in Voice AI Development
15:52 Hiring and Team Structure
19:00 Viral Moments and Product Evolution
26:23 Voice Agents and Future Applications
31:51 Discussing Richard Feynman and Enterprise Applications
32:33 Understanding Conversational AI Stack
33:41 Challenges in Enterprise Integrations
35:32 Foundation Models and Competition
37:23 Customer Priorities: Quality, Latency, and Reliability
38:42 Future of Voice Interaction and AI
44:41 Voice Authentication and Security
46:55 Advantages and Disadvantages of Being Based in Europe
51:23 Lightning Round