It’s crazy to think I only joined ElevenLabs 77 days ago.
Before DeepSeek broke the internet. Before MCPs, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and GPT 4.5, and Deep Research, and Gemini Flash 2.5, and about a thousand other advancements.
Time moves fast in the AI space, but it moves at warp speed at ElevenLabs.
Here are 11 things I’ve learned in a short space of time…
ElevenLabs is more than a startup: it’s a startup factory
We offer a wide portfolio of audio products with nimble, lightweight product teams building and scaling each one. Teams coordinate closely, but operate autonomously, making ElevenLabs feel like a collection of startups under one roof.
Each of these products – or startups – is at a different growth stage. We’ve already achieved truly magnetic levels of Product-Market Fit with some, while we’re rapidly calibrating others and honing in what delights our users.
What makes this especially exciting is the scale of the opportunity. Each product has massive potential (TAM) in its own right and could thrive as a successful standalone company: combining all of them into a single business is what makes ElevenLabs such an exciting place to work.
The velocity here is unlike anything I’ve seen or even heard of before
Since I joined on the 14th of January, we’ve successfully worked through 65 different launches spanning product, partnerships, company announcements, and more.
I’ve personally led 5 product launches in 11 weeks, and it looks like there will be even more in Q2.
When you do something regularly, and when you want to do it well, it makes sense to systematise it. Our Head of Growth, Luke Harries, recently published (launched?) an excellent post on this:
Launch and Launch again – how to launch your products
Pace permeates through the organisation.
Everything moves ludicrously fast across the entire business, from product development to operations.
For example, last week, we discussed how to improve one of the pages on our website with the most traffic. Within 3 hours, Gergely Bihary had built a new experimental version of the page, and within 48hrs he’d delivered conclusive evidence from an A/B test that it was performing better than the previous version. This feedback loop would take weeks and multiple “stakeholders” at most other companies.
Similarly, when you make a request from finance or ops, they’ll nearly always get back to you within the hour with a solution.
One of our new hires summed this up really nicely during her first week last week: “Everything just happens instantly here!”
There’s a default expectation that things will get done almost immediately.
I thought I had cultivated a fast-paced environment at Encore, and we were certainly faster than most companies, but nothing prepares you for the warp sped that ElevenLabs moves at.
Working on a scalable software product with global reach is a breath of fresh air after running a hyperlocal marketplace
Working in SaaS has made me realise just how hard two-sided marketplaces are.
Starting, scaling and even just keeping a marketplace in a healthy steady-state requires you to build two totally different products for two completely different users. You are in constant pursuit of equilibrium between supply and demand, and getting liquidity right in every location across every category is an incredibly complex problem to solve.
Running a two-sided marketplace can feel like trying to keep a fire burning in windy conditions.
Moving into AI software has felt like discovering the internal combustion engine.
Hypergrowth is wild, but it doesn’t actually need to be chaotic
I think we were 110 people when I joined. We’re now 160+, and we expect to cross 200 over the Summer. (view our open roles)
I’ve heard and read stories from so many companies about the chaos of growing headcount so quickly during periods of hyperscaling, but so far this has felt incredibly smooth.
If you want to grow at this speed, you can’t do it without bulletproof people processes, and we’re lucky to have truly outstanding Operations, People & Talent teams. They maintain rapid throughput across comprehensive hiring and onboarding processes, and that makes everything run more or less like clockwork.
Palantir culture is infused in the company’s DNA
I’ve learned a lot of new acronyms and shorthand. BLUF. ACK. SME. FYSA.
IYKYK.
Video is more important than ever
I first came across ElevenLabs in the Summer of 2023 when I tried the product myself and felt like I was experiencing magic.
Throughout 2024, I saw Luke (who I met almost a decade ago) posting several product launches to LinkedIn almost every month, and most launches had slick, polished videos accompanying them that always grabbed my attention and “stopped the scroll”.
Now that I’m on the inside, I’ve learned that we have a world-class video team working on many videos in parallel at any given time. I think these videos play a huge role in our ability to reach new users, and excite existing ones.
I’ve also learned how to take my own relatively simple launch videos to a professional level, which has been fun.
I’m now convinced that companies need high-production value video if they want to cut through the noise in 2025.
Our AI audio models still feels like magic to me
I’ve been here eleven weeks, and I’m still blown away by what our tech can do.
I thought that the magic might wear off after being here a while, but I’m still in awe of what our research team have built and eager to know what’s cooking in the research kitchen.
It’s incredible that such a small team of researchers can beat the largest tech companies. Our CTO, Piotr Dabkowski, built the first human-like AI model pretty much single-handedly. And Tim von Känel and Flavio Schneider recently built Scribe, the world’s leading transcription model according to independent benchmarks.
Working without internal job titles actually works
Just before I joined, ElevenLabs announced that it was doing away with formal job titles. Instead of spending time negotiating a fancy title for myself, I simply joined the Growth Team and added “Growth at ElevenLabs” to my LinkedIn.
Working without a title means you rarely come across a piece of work and think “This is above me” or “This is below me” – if you see a problem to solve, you solve it.
It gives everyone the autonomy to run towards the highest-impact problems they can find, without needing to run everything through a team lead. I think it’s created a very fluid and flexible organisation, which might not be right for everyone, but it’s producing good results for us.
I’m sure that we’ll need to evolve and adapt this policy as we get bigger, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see it working so well during this chapter of the company’s growth.
The AI space moves FAST, and keeping up isn’t actually easier when you’re on the inside
Until this year, I was watching the AI space grow exponentially from the sidelines.
I thought that once I got inside, I’d be able to keep pace of progress, but I still can’t.
January feels like a lifetime ago. Since then, we’ve seen DeepSeek, Claude 3.7, GPT 4o, Gemini Flash 2.5, MCPs, and much more. I honestly can’t even comprehend where we’ll be by the end of 2025.
Being an employee is a lot more fun than I expected it to be!
Almost everyone I know has asked me – “So how is it no longer being a founder…?” – since I left Encore in December, and honestly… it’s so great!
I’m really enjoying the learning process of working at a bigger company in a space (audio) that I’m utterly obsessed with, and feel very lucky to have ended up here at ElevenLabs with such a talented team.
But that’s a longer post for another day.
If you’d like to define the future of audio with us, we’re hiring across all teams.
Check out our open roles here: elevenlabs.io/careers