20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski

So we crossed to 100 million now. So the 20 months to 100, and then around 10 months to 200. Our biggest contract is around 2 million. Pretty serious stuff. I think we spoke with a good amount of investors between 30 to 50. We raised 2 million. 2 million, remember the price? 90 million. - This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stettings. And today we have one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world in the hot seat. So they did 20 months to $100 million in error. Just 10 months to $200 million in error, which they announced exclusively in this episode's day. They've raised over $350 million with the last round pricing them at $3.3 billion, 11 labs, and I'm so thrilled to welcome that co-founder, Matty to the hot seats day. But before we dive into the show's day, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platform's products and tools. 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I've wanted to do this one for a while, so thank you so much for joining me today. - Harry, thanks for having me after working on a number of projects together. I'm so happy we can finally speak. - Dude, I am so thrilled we could do this. Now I spoke to so many people beforehand, and I have say Luke was phenomenal on your team in prepping me so much, but I do wanna start a little bit with the origins pre. You grew up in Poland, and this was Luke's. How did growing up in Poland impact your mindset towards the world and company building first? - In Poland, it's a very different, much smaller world. For growing up, I was in a very lucky position where I was in service of what, so then went to high school in where I started seeing more of that world, which was of course incredible because that opens your eyes of what's possible that there's so much world beyond what you've seen, smaller cities. I think in a similar way as you think about building 11 laps, now it's the scale of what we don't know is still ahead of us, and this is like what's exciting, that we know that if we climb those additional hills to the mountain, so we'll see increasingly more. And I think the second thing was I saw the transition where in the suburbs of Warsaw, it's like a public school, so school where you would have just any kids that would live in the area. And in high school, and where I met my co-founder, you would have a slightly different crowd of people that would, when competitions need to go through a few steps together, and suddenly that density of talent was the most motivating factor to like explore more, learn more and do more, which now we are trying to, of course, replicate that 11 laps where in any other company I'm sure too, it's like you try to keep that density as high as possible because at the end of the day, that's what's most motivating being part of this incredible set of people. I was most inspired or given hunger because my dad always said like when we went into Chelsea, oh, it's a better life here. And like this is why people who have won live. And I didn't live there, and I wanted to fuck it live there. And it fed me with this insane hunger. Where did your insane hunger come from in those early days? Definitely was the combination of family, my older brother, we're kind of trailblazed going, abroad to study, then motivated us to, like you need to do the same. This is really helpful. And then the second it was really this community of people in high school, meeting my co-founder, was extremely smart, meeting some of our close friends, kind of going through the cycle of motivating each other. It's like, yes, we want to study at the best university. Yes, we want to go deeper and crash this exam. And I think this was a huge, huge element for all of us just going after it. And knowing that maybe it's possible at the time everything fell distant and it's still many of the things do. But I think without that kind of motivation through the people would be not possible. Speaking of the motivation through the people, you have a very special relationship with Yoko, founder, Piotr. Yes, yeah. I have to ask them, you come together, how does the idea for a Leaven Lab to come to be? Was it truly inspired by bad movie dubbing? It truly was, and there's two things that coincided for us starting Leaven Labs. One was, through the years prior, he worked at Google, I worked with Palantir, we would meet for a Huck Weekend project together. So we would try to explore a new technology. One was in a recommendation space, one during the crypto high, we built a crypto risk analyzer, which wasn't very easy and didn't work very well. And then once we did the project in audio, the idea was, can it analyze how you speak? Then gives you tips on how to improve speaking. And that kind of opened our eyes, what's possible in the technology space there. And then fast forward later that year, the moment hit from Palant, which is, wow, all movies are still dubbed, where you have all the voices from the original, whether it's male or female voice, narrated with one single character. So you have one voice narrating all the characters in a flat, no emotional way. So it's like an audiobook reading of a movie, a terrible experience. And something that we knew combining the experience from working on audio and now knowing this is a problem, that, okay, this will change. Few years from now, as you imagine, that kind of advancement, all the voices will have original emotions and intonation sound incredible. And that kind of kickstarted this idea. And of course, then it expanded too. Okay, we need to fix the research layer to actually make it happen. Then we started with a lot of creative platform work around 11 laps and then expanded to a gentick platform work. How now the interaction is shifting, where voice is this big interface for the technology around us. Well, you know, this very dubbing specific originally, you can expand it through to everything voice today. I mean, it must be the most boring movie experience, having one single voice for everything. It's terrible. So what do you do when you land on the idea then? In terms of your nice steps, you move into the research layer and determine whether it's possible to actually do this. We first tried to like do two things in parallel. Microfonder was, okay, can we use existing technology, stitch it together and create a double of a movie in a better way? And it quickly transpired that you get a good effect, but it was brilliant. So to actually fix it, let's take a step back and fix one of those components and make it great. At the same time when he was doing research, my mission was, does anybody actually want that dubbing product? So I was emailing all the YouTubers, getting the emails, scraping them and trying to message them, hey, if we had a dubbing product to make your movies available in all languages, would you be interested in that? Roughly, it was like 15% reply rate initially from the first batches that we sent all were personalized. I mean, we sent thousands of them. The interest was like, last last year, all of them were like, oh, I don't fully believe this is possible. Can you send us a sample? It would be great, but how will I operationalize this? YouTube doesn't support it. So it's like, it was somewhat of an excitement, but not like a burning problem I need to solve it. But then the second thing happened, so we started sending the samples, we started speaking more of the YouTubers and it correctly came that where they actually want help with as much simpler. They want to post produce and correct if somebody said something incorrectly. They want to understand how the script will sound before they need to produce it. They might not want to speak at all and they want to voice over over them. So a super simple problem which didn't include anything with language changing. And of course, my Govander, as he dived into the research, realized that you can actually build completely new text to speech model, which will be a lot more emotional, intonative, that will make that narration a lot better. So let's put a dabbing problem aside. And as we see, there's this huge other problem with a lot of the creators, let's solve this problem first and bring that research just on the text to speech layer. And that's only possible by creating your own models. Quick answer is yes. All the models at the time, you could tell immediately it's like Uncanny Valley, not very good. You cannot replicate voices. How should I know as an investor? Say again, I use this show just to get better as an investor. How should I know as an investor whether a problem needs its own model or whether you can just leverage alternative existing models? Well, I think the answer will definitely change now to like 2022. So that was the year where nobody yet, like kind of was thinking about AI. It was still kind of downfall of meta-vary scripted days. The attention to the models was like, no, I'm not a public eye. Charge GPT have been beginning of 2023. That's where it kind of all started spiking across. At the time, you didn't really have a choice. Like you knew as a user, as an investor, that what existed out in the market just wasn't very good. And then there was more of a question, will this team be able to solve and create something better? If you were creating 11 labs today, what would you do architecturally differently given the architecture that we have today? I think still a current question is, to understand you continue on that kind of single modality space where at the time it was mostly you trained a dedicated model for speech or dedicated model for image, video, etc. Over what is now more of a theme where you kind of train a more of a multi-model approach where you combine the reasoning and speech together to create even better speech experience. That's our most recent generation is effectively that, the 11v3. If we had that then, I think we would have probably skipped a few steps and our experience would have been even better. So off tangent, but I'm just concerned about bluntly the plateauing progression of models. And your GPT-5 is the embodiment of that. You move from like incredible feature descriptions to a description on cost. And when you have a description on cost and efficiencies, it's like, we've hit that. Do you agree? And are we in an element of incrementalism and plateauing? In voice, I think there's a little bit of like, it depends on the use case, but to make it more concrete, their use case is like narration. In narration, we think it's plateauing. The new model generations will not make narration of an audiobook drastically different. It will still be in a similar quality. But I think in general, the point is right, where if you just do research, eventually it will come out atize and eventually that advantage you can deliver from research isn't enough. So you really need to build product. And as you think about the 11, we combine both together. Do you think we're at a stage where scaling laws no longer equal an equivalent level of progression? In a biased way, I feel like the progression is still like just scratching the surface where it's just the moment of like still seeing that escape curve of AI getting adopted everywhere is just getting started while scaling us continue in the same way. So there's a difference between adoption and development. So I agree with you there in terms of the adoption, but actually the development progression. I think it's probably different answer on L-Lem space and different answer in a voice space. I think in a voice space you are still not slow-eraged. And then there's an interesting variation of like, as they all combine, what does that mean for the world? That could slightly deeper understanding of everything around you. But I think in voice you still will see pretty quick curve. On the L-Lemps, I agree. It's probably a little bit flattening to some extent. I speak to Andrew Reed before the show. I had a great chat to him last night and he said, ask him about like, why can't I open AI to it? And I remember chatting to Karen about this, Karen obviously being my partner. And there was two reasons why we didn't work together. One is the small chat which she is. He very kindly offered. And the other was like, no offense, it was super fricking early. And it was like, well, why would I open AI do this? No offense, two very young guys and London are doing like, how is this not gonna be done by them? How do you answer the question? Why wouldn't I open AI just do this? They would definitely will do something. But I think they lack the genius that I'm happy my co-founder and a team has. But I think the true, true longer answer is, one is focus. I think in the early days, especially now when we spoke then, there was just so many different things you could do in AI space. And I think we took this bet that we want to really own and win in the voice AI research and product space. All our work is directly tied to voice. Then the second thing is, I actually think the number of researchers in the world working on voice and being exceptional is super small. Probably like 50 to 100 people at like this top level. So Piotr was able to assemble one of the best teams in the space. I think we have five to 10 people that are in a top 100. There is a MIT team which I'm kind of time and time again surprised how incredible they are. And to make it specific, I mean, text to speech was one that kind of have blown everything out of the water. Dan's speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini on benchmarks, now music, which is again, something that no big company has yet been able to crack or do. It's incredibly MIT team. And then even if I think if open AI does actually do something on research and I think they are trying, then that product layer is where you really need that big advantage of. If you are in a creative space, if you do narration, if you do voice over, if you're a DAB, you go through so many additional steps to really make it perfect. We do that well. If you're building a voice agent or conversational agent, you need to bring knowledge base integrations, functions. You need to then deploy, test, evaluate, monitor. All of these pieces are coming together in a platform. And I think open AI is not investing as much time. They could, but they aren't. So combination of MIT research team, speed of execution, and then actually focusing on the use case, I think, in a deeper way. You mentioned that kind of the MIT team. Those people are very valuable people. And an open AI or an anthropic or a meta would pay-- a lot of money it would seem for people like that. Do you worry about the war for talent? And how do you think about retaining talent when there's hundreds of millions of dollars going across the table for them? No, of course. I think the talent, especially on the research side, is out of the scale across any of those companies, especially in the early days. Of course, to some extent, as I think about meta and others, they are, of course, paying for the know-how as much as they are paying for the raw talent, too, where getting those early people gets you some insight into the models and architecture that you can then bring across and accelerate. So in the early days, it's more valuable than late. But I think, in our case, the reason I think it's still valuable is one, the apps say 4.11 apps just getting started. So I hope we will be able to compete with any of those companies in the future at the same scale, too. What you do have-- which I think is important, as I think about any of those companies, is how close you are from developing research to actually deploying research. And at 11 apps, if you are actually creating new models, they get to production, or some of the most important things that our products work on almost immediately. So that gap is super quick. Well, and bigger companies, you go through their usual corporate retap to get any of that to work done. And then free-- I think we now have a very small and mighty team that can learn from each other and move pretty quickly. I don't think there is a guarantee you'll get that in some of the other companies. I think they are optimizing for a lot of people, but not necessarily deride people. We mentioned that kind of the V1 and building to beta. And I think it was 2023 that you raised this precede. How did the fundraise process go? You're too young guys saying, hey, we're going to do this. How did the precede fundraise go? Precise was tough. There was similar questions that you asked us, how will we fix research? The second question, which is very interesting, we think the market is very small for what you are solving, which at the time was like a combination of AI, voice, nobody was thinking about that. So that was surprising to ask what we were very disagreeable. And for it was defensibility. Will it actually be better than what in Cubans from the F&G companies will actually solve? Or how will the outcome be that long term? So these were the free-- so it was tough. And it was double hard at the time because we early 2022. We got an offer from one of the accelerators in US, not WC. And we are thinking, should we take it or not? And we decided now we are rejecting. We think we can create something more valuable. And we don't need that help at the time. So decided to go independent. And this triggered this more stressful time, where suddenly now you need to raise money. We started spending a little bit more on GPUs. We hired the first few people. Like all of that was going from our savings, from which we are lucky to have from Google and Pantir. But it was like, OK, now we are actually getting a little bit more risky. And we want to double down. We want to invest even more. So we need money. How much did you raise in the pre-seed? We raised $2 million. $2 million. Remember the price? $90 million. It was that many posts. $90 a post. The amount was exactly 11% of the equity that the first investor was buying. And then the other ones were layered in. So it was just over $1 million. And this was 2023. That was 2020, didn't you? This was never-- No, dude, I mean, so you used to, like, stories like this on the show where it's like HubSpot. And you know, like, when was the out 2006, 2008 or '99, or whatever. Yeah, it was only four years ago, which we, you know, in the end, we found we had credo concept here in UK, credo from Zee. We had one of our friends, of Piotr from Oxford, Peter Chaban, who invested with a co-founder of Polkadot, which is the cryptocurrency. So they were like a good set of early believers. But together, it took us a bit longer. So you raised $2 million, then. What happens, then? You start building out the team. You start investing in GPs. Exactly. The main reason we raised was to accelerate what we would want to do. First one was building a small data center. So we built one and back then it was-- I think it's a Poland that we've invested few and then quickly after moved and started buying some in US. And then team, we started hiring not many, but it felt like a lot of the time. It was like additional two people. I think two more. [LAUGHTER] Sorry, I didn't get two for them. That's it. Did you-- because you kind of did the pre-seed raise and the beta launch at the same time. Did you have product market fit on the beta launch with that early science that it was working? We actually raised the round in Q3 of 2022, but we announced it in Q1 of 2023. And we do that all the time. It's that we don't want to announce a round just for the sake of announcing a round. Our philosophy was always-- the round should have another purpose, which is bring the product out and help you get the product into the users, celebrate a set of customers to show that you are arrived in a specific sector, bring a new research model into play. So every round that we would do would always tie in to a product announcement. So we actually hold on for announcement for a few months until we had our beta release. And then we triggered, which was January 2023. But to your question, initially, when we worked on that being in the first early days, and we were like emailing, we didn't have product market fit. It was very clear that people were so out to reply. And we sent samples. They weren't engaging. So we didn't through the 2022 period. And then when we shifted from dabbing into narration, voiceovers, then the product market signal started to hit. Maybe it's there. I remember this thing. There were three things that happened. First, we did a block post around the first AI that can laugh. And we sent samples that got picked up by newsletters. And people were like, wow, this is incredible. And the next day, we had like 1,000 people in our waiting list. And the second thing happened. We invited the first 100 or so users, 2, 11 labs, to test it out. And we had this audiobook author who joined the platform. Our platform is like this small text box where you can type and text, tweet length, and narrate it. And he would copy paste his entire book 500 times, download it, stitch it together. Then he released it. He released it on the platform. At the time, AI was banned. It passed through as a human content. And then it started getting reviews that it's great. And then he came back saying, I want my other book author friends to do it. So it's like, OK, we are on to something. And then we launched in January 2023 publicly. We knew we started getting more of that signal that creators and the writers love the work. And to be honest, I think from that moment onwards, we saw a clear momentum. And then there was more events after the media picked it up. Then more creators picked it up. But the moment of release, we knew that it's valuable. And then maybe last thing on that-- it's like the product market fit concept. For us, it never fully, I think, know what this actually means, where we knew users loved our product at the time. But I wouldn't call it at the time we had product market fit. As we were thinking of, OK, how do we make sure it's providing value for the next five to 10 years? Daniel decided, the desk will be something we would call. OK, this is clear product market fit. We think this is self-sustaining for us long as we go into the future. So we wouldn't go by that definition. I think we are now closer to that. But we are still know we can create so much more value. So many things I want to unpack there. You said about the timing of your announcements and aligning it to actually material news items. Do you have any big lessons on announcements, how to do launches that you found particularly work well that other founders should know? So that's the first one. 100% for us, making announcement close to something big you want to announce from the product, from the user, from hiring perspective, tied with that. I don't think celebrating the number itself is the right way. I mean, in a way, it's like you're giving away the company. What are you doing it for? And you want to show us much of that as possible. Second thing would be we really want to focus on how you actually get the users rather than just the media, PR element. I don't think the latter is actually as valuable as it seems to a first-time founder. For us, I remember when we did the beta, we were speaking and with some of the bigger publications and one rejected us, the other one accepted us, and we felt like it's a big deal. Then we did all the prep for the interview, we did the actual news, and then it was posted. We hold it like everything around this post that they told us the deadline for, and it had no impact. I think it, I mean, it's like probably a few more people read about us from the investor scene, but we didn't really care about it at the time. We were like, all about users. What actually worked was working with the newsletters that we're talking about AI, working with our friends from YouTube community that then posted on Discord that we are opening this up. Our Discord community was one of the most valuable. Reddit, those people picked it up quicker than anyone else. Hacker news posting there, like all of those were immensely more valuable, and we since then always spend a lot more time on any of the actual forums where our users are rather than where they are not. I think we grossly overestimate the importance of traditional press. Oh, 100 was time when I was first in tech crunch. I was like, I'm gonna be like viral. Everything's gonna work. Yeah, and then it happens and you're like, you know, three followers. And this was when it was much bigger, and it's like, I completely agree with you there, the gross ruse. The other element kind of tied to that is how do you think about fundraising? And this is the most fun as fundraising pre or post launch. What is frequently happening if a launch goes well is you will get more interest. And I think you will get in from investors, from events, from media, to large extent. This is like the time you should really focus on getting the product and kind of all of that is like a distraction to large extent. Like, you know, the first time we launched that that kind of happened, we started getting so much of that. And I'm sure I did the mistake then of like picking up a lot of those and doing more events than we should where like the best course of action would have been to to just spend even more time with users. And then early enterprises started getting interested so more of enterprises. I think on the investor side, I think you wanna line up investors. You do want to tell them like, okay, I'm not racing now. I'm going to reconsider whether we need more capital and Q3 or Q2, whatever is the time period of time. And then when you actually need the money, then is the best time to actually reengage with them. But I would not, like, I think it's a waste of time too. Kind of being this like continuous fundraising most. It's, you know, destructive. You need to have conversation. It's not useful. - Yeah. - G-G's three that you'd like to have that you engage with in between cycles or do you not even do that? You just say, hey, I'm heads down on building. I'll come to you when I'm ready. - Today less, at the time, we do have a few investors that we think would be valuable that we might not have today and this space. Through the time, we would have few investors that we wouldn't try to proactively reach out, but if they reached out through any of the conversations, we would try to engage. But the engagement there wouldn't be like, hey, we might be raising. It would be much more of like, hey, can you help me with introduction to X? Hey, can you help me with this hiring problem? And this has worked tremendously well through the work where the investors are genuinely keen to help if you find the right person. And you have a very clear problem. And you don't try to like overuse their time too. Like you come with one, two things that are concrete, useful, and then they know as well that if you are growing as a company, it's good for them to show the help too. So we've done that. - It's also a good litmus test to see if they genuinely are interested in being there or if it's just platitudes of nice. - Oh yeah. - 100% totally agree with you. - Before, it's kind of the second thing where you do get the interest from investors. I think this is the best time to actually test whether they can be helpful. And before you accept any time sheet and money, it's like, now can you help me with angels that you wonder on cup table? Do you want the interaction there? That's the best time. Any advice on angel selection for founders in the early days? I think the way we approach this is like, do they have domain expertise that we don't have? That's one category. Second, can they help us validate ourselves in specific circles we might not have access to? So like if you are an AI founder, it's maybe valuable to have set of AI founders in there. So you are part of the same events, the same same same same conversations. And then of course, the in our case, we have some of the go-to-market expertise where we had a lot of self-serve, some party experience, but the sales led, how can we bring that in place as well? - You mentioned starting with the author. Suddenly it was going well and you were seeing this great grounds well and great adoption. And this is kind of January to June 23, I believe. And then in June 23, you raised like $19 million from Brian Kim and Andrewson and then Nat and Daniel from. - I can't remember what it's called, MDFG, you also know? - Yeah, and of DG, it's Nat Friedman Daniel Grass. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can. - And FDG, wonderful. And that was quite a shock, 'cause it wasn't a London fund, it wasn't in Nice, it wasn't in Excel. How did that round come to be? - Yeah, the NFDG. Now I feel like it's a good name, but I was pitching that on changing that to like a different name for a while. Maybe now it's not possible anymore, but the, so it was like the interest started around kind of March 2023. We had a lot of the investors that were in a close conversation in the past like we approached us. We effectively would be a little bit more in the waiting, like let's see how we get through and let's optimize for their partners that we truly want. And what we truly wanted was a combination of making sure that people in globally NSF trust and know that we have arrived, like we are a company that can be trusted is building something ambitious. And then of course people that we would admire to be able to work with, that creates something special. And Nat was definitely in that category, in the latter category, and it was a very fun thing because he approached us. Does he just DM me? How does he just approach you? He emailed us, but then I met him here in London, he flew in and it was like a weird setup where he emailed me, but it wasn't clear where it all happened and it happened last time. And then I see him in London in one of the hotels where he was staying. And the first thing he was saying was, which is the only investor ever to do that was, so I tested your APIs and this thing doesn't work, this works, voice here wasn't good, this stability wasn't very clear parameter. So he was the only person that tested our APIs, decided that it was actually valuable what we are doing, gave me feedback on what we should change and then told me like, and I'm keen to invest, which of course triggered a conversation of what's the vision what we are after. And what's special about Nat is that you can tell him very little and he kind of has this beautiful ability of infilling all the contacts. around it, comparing that to any of the past experiences and bringing any of those experiences that then might be relevant to you, but he gets it immediately. From the first conversation, he knew kind of exactly what we are after and challenged us with the right questions from the start. And then he moved very quickly. He has very keen to partner with us. We are keen to partner with him. We are trying not to show it too much, but we were. And then at the same time, we know that Nat was in Nat and Anja where more perceived as the angels, while we admired them from their Github and Summer and Days, that was still like an angel category for many of the externals. So we knew this is our chance to bring a huge investor to actually position us as a top company. And we spoke with all the classic tier one funds and A16z was just one of the most- - We spoke to the funds in London. - We spoke with few funds in London, yes. - And then Brian flew to London. And Brian flew to London. So Brian, I mean, A16z was phenomenal. They did exactly what we spoke about, which was they've shown us that they cared before they invested. They introduced us to incredible people, to some celebrities to work on the voice licensing. So they were like on it for two weeks prior or like week prior already to help out in any way they could. And then Brian flew to London, met with us and then we signed preliminary time sheet. We were so interesting. We flew in, we're negotiating. I also have my phone called to Piotr to co-found us like, "Hey, what about this term? Can we accept this?" And Piotr would give guidance on what we, what is the hard line, what we can do. And then on speaker we would sign together and finalize. - Do you think speed really is a differentiator as an investor in winning? - Oh yeah, speed is like for us, even from investor, from product perspective, it's like you need to, especially now, the speed of execution, speed of investing is the only thing you have. And this is what pisses me off. I'm happy in that world. I can move supremely fast and invest a lot of money. But what I find more and more with founders is they want to run a roadshow and they want to do a 10-day process meeting investors and then have another week to decide which term sheets they want to take. I'm willing to give you a time sheet tonight, save 17 days. But it's more and more common that founders actually want to run road shows. How do you think about that? - A lot of great companies get built on 11 laps. So I get to be in the conversations now more frequently where they would raise money from our investors. Recently we had a company raise a series A that has built a healthcare voice bot which would effectively help patients calm them through the conversations in an incredible, incredible way. Then there's another company building for healthcare, customer support. So quite a few. And now I'm in the conversations of them racing the money, which is an interesting one. And then usually it's clear that some of the people don't know fully what they are actually optimizing for. And it's good to talk about for our day optimizing for the valuation, our day optimizing for the solution, our day optimizing for the right brand name to help them out. Is it the network of people that this brand name has? Is it the specific partner? Is it something something different? And I think it's like pretty distributed. So when I speak usually with founders or our investors ask me to speak with the founders, it's usually that question. Like what is it actually that you that you care about for the thing? What do you miss? And then it's, pronsifies pretty quickly whether they are going after just the road showed is there to bump it out because they think the value that the time she they got is just not valuable. Or is it that they actually want someone else, but they don't want to they want to keep the option out of having the first one while while running the process. I'm a romantic. I hate this idea of a road show where it's like I'm going to meet everyone and then I'm going to compare terms sheets and then I'm going to decide it's like what happened to the partnership. Well, but it's you know the truth is the other way is true where a lot of the investors want to give the term sheet, but that is before any show of partnerships. So how do you know that this is a good partner? How do you know whether they are giving you good terms, especially your first time founder, you never run this. You don't know how much you are valued. You need to have some relative compires and this can happen for conversations of other companies, other founders or comparing yourself to other companies in the field or running sound form of the process. Roadshow probably sounds pretty bad because it sounds like a lot. You probably like the way we approach fundraising was always, especially in the early days, like Q field investors we really care about and first speak with maybe one or two that maybe our into priority. So we understand whether the messaging that we want to put across make sense. If it does move straight to the top ones. How do you feel about exploding terms? She's I don't like them, but we got a few we had a few for you understand at the time I didn't that I do. It's like I don't like them still, but I want to name the people, but so one example was a let's say a smaller fund. They felt that if they get us the term sheet will use that to bump other time sheets very often happens. And that does happen. So I got it. It was like, you know, and they came from the approach of like it would go so high they won't be able to invest and they didn't want to be part of that. So that happened very often being an investor being the first time she's the worst. Because you're used to stalking horse where they then go, hi, I've got a term sheet. I've got a term sheet from a great fund. They never name the fund. And you get no credit for being the first and then you're just trampled on by everyone else. That's what I don't like funders that are trying to do that too much like that if they are trying to get the first time she to bomb the other ones. I think it's a wrong approach. OK, if it's like order of magnitude off, it's probably wrong. It's like 5x. Yes. But if it's like plus minus 20% that's like a wrong optimization. There's just so much more value that investors partners can give than the money itself that I think should be optimized for. You've got Andreessen introducing users celebrities and you've got not Daniel to the brightest minds in AI who are querying APIs that no one else does. The Americans just playing a different games the European VCs. We love our partners. I mean, we have an unfeasant team is so so incredible. The network. I mean, now, Sekhaya with Andrew is just another level to iconic team. It's also crazy help. Any A2 is just like bringing it to the US. They are all US. So I think they are playing a different game. I think they are all from our experience so far. A lot more keen to take the risk. Even our conversations are always like how do we bet bigger rather than like optimize for the negatives. The one check I always try to do with Piotr for any of the partners that we bring beyond the capital network brand is always for the person you partner with or the person you partner with. How will they behave if it's not going well. We usually try to get any of the back references for how did they behave and the company was failing. All of the ones that we had are in a very positive way where we're really on the side of the funder helpful when it was not going well even more so than when it was going well. I was doing the same check with some of the checks with other companies and maybe just as I'm getting used to that, when you ask the kind of the set of companies that went up and down the so high. But in some of the investors we spoke in Europe, that checker didn't yield the good results. I have one with Brian Kim that didn't go well and I have to say Brian was the best. He was the lead investor in the round and he got the money back for everyone. That's right and he really put in the work to do it well and do it quickly. I was really impressed with him in that way. Exactly. Brian was one of our checks came up strongly. Jennifer too. All of them it's just a crazy hoe. 19 million dollars in the account most people suddenly then go on a hiring spree and not two people hiring spree but like a proper hiring spree but you favor very small teams you said this to me before but Luke said it to me. Why do you favor really small teams? I think the first piece is that more people frequently doesn't fix the problem. It's like you don't need that many people to do something special. The first thing second is by keeping an awesome organization today we are you know we're 250 people but really it's more like 20 teams going to market of like five to 10 people that are just executing on specific project where they have higher ownership. They can move extremely quickly. They see the result in the territory to reality out quicker to improve that and I think this just works in such a beautiful way. Of course there are other challenges with this but those 20 teams organized by function or by project. So it depends in the product by like a product area so we have a team working on our studio interface team that will be responsible for all the core experience when you log in team responsible for the entire voice agent suite and we tend out there's a team working on some of the more enterprise components and other team working on some of the self serve elements so all of the teams will be organized there on the product area. So the other parts we try to chart it pretty quickly so we will have a separate team for talent of course the team for people and they will have a high degree of independence when they actually execute which helps you mentioned 250 that it's small given the size of company in many ways but it's also still 250 people. When was the company culture the worst and what did you learn from that you know there was like moments where I could feel this kind of tension between the gold market research engineering. So we did a specific story where in 2023 late 2023 so we did a text to speech we then did voices we could recreate a voice then we create like a basic way for speech to text internally so we had all the components that we originally were speaking about to create dabbing and we haven't done dabbing yet publicly and we gave all the components to some of our customers so they could use text to speech devices and we could have a better technology that we could use to make sure that it's a valuable technology we can give to two our enterprise clients. One of the enterprise clients we told them that we are planning to launch our dabbing solution combining those components later in that month and they took the components and released dabbing two weeks before we did. And that was one of like the low moments for me for my co-founder for the entire team because dabbing was our story. So the thing we want to solve first we had all the components to be able to do it we're just waiting to optimize it to make it perfect. suddenly this partner released it and got all the attention. All the media, Twitter, all the users were like, "Wow, this is the most incredible thing that has happened. How amazing that you can speak in another language and still sound the same." You could feel the morale in the company. It was slow. People were like, "We spoke about this. We knew for almost two years that this is something we wanted to solve." And how did it happen? That the customer had this and solved this first. So research engineering wasn't happy. How did they do it before with the components we gave them? They go to market, wasn't happy. How did we sell this to the customer? Now we are all the potential clients we could have had isn't good. Of course, me and Piotr were like, "Hey, this was our idea. Why would you do any of the partnerships if all of that is given to another company?" Who was the partner? I don't know if I can mention it. To their credit, I don't think that we told them it was actually a factor. I think they were just trying to do something quick and we had a lot of calls with them those days because we were thinking, "What do we do? Is the contract give us flexibility to not continue?" So we spoke through of them of like, "Hey, why did you launch? I don't think it was dictated by our timeline, but the timeline was very close to each other." And they told us that they thought it's a good, how quick and idea. So they gave it to their intern. The intern has built that project and then it exploded. But it gave them like, intense of millions of revenue over that period of time. So it was significant. Fuck us. What's your biggest piece of advice to a founder who has a moment like that where you just feel the air come out of the company? How do you inflate the company again after such a damaging blow? I don't think the first reaction should be that like, "Hey, everything is fine. I think you should be authentic and tell the team what you are feeling like, how has this happened? Go through like, what have we done wrong?" And the frustration was clear. I don't think it was valuable for us to talk to like, "We are angry at ourselves. This is wrong." And then as we move from that stage like, "Yes, we are angry. What are we actually going to do about this?" And move to that second stage very quickly. But I think I've done a mistake. Something's just going to the second stage. It's not a problem. Let's just go through and solve it. I think it's actually super valuable to talk through what has happened. But then you need to go into the second thing and then in the long term that will work out. It's then a relentless execution will prove itself out and show it to the world. And there was, if you repeat the mistake, then someone needs to feel the repercussions. But if you've learned from that and have not repeated the mistake, it's fine. Given the commoditization of a lot of technology to stage, you feel speed of execution is the core differentiator between those that all win versus those that won't. Or is it quality of research access to GPs? I think it's both. I think it's the way we approach it in the companies. We have research product and the ecosystem that we built, which is a combination of distribution and brand. But research for us is a head start. We are investing in research. We'll continue investing in research. We want to be the best across the voice technologies. But all this gives to us is advantage over the competition for the next year, too, maybe free. How far ahead are you compared to the competition, do you think? I think depends on the use case, but six to 12 months, I would say it's depending on the space that we are in. Do you think that's a lot or not? I think that's a lot. So that research piece of six to 12 months is enough for us to then do the second thing, well, which we do in part of the start is build phenomenal product experience. What percent of your revenue do you think you spend on compute? So we've built our own data centers. Why build your own data centers? Most people will just use a cool weave, we use an embedded or whatever that is. So we did the math. In our case, it was if we assume we continue training the models that the way we want to. So very continuously a lot of those models. Then second, for the data transfer is as we think about continuously bringing more data, we will likely on a two-year horizon break even for our having our own and not renting assuming, of course, you know, you need to assume some improvement in the GPU infrastructure, but assuming that it wasn't too high of an improvement, we would have been successful. And we were, I think it kind of the ROI made sense there. And now it's paying dividends because we can just do more experiments quicker. And this can still be wrong at some point. There might be innovation that kind of breaks that equation, but for the current time, it just makes more sense more control. A lot of investors are talking about the poor unity economics of a lot of companies that we see today, whether it's your repliz, or your loveables, or your any of companies like this, but any kind of application like companies, period, really, they generally have pretty tough unity economics, generally speaking. Do you think that is a fair criticism, or do you think it is simply short-sighted, given the changes we will likely see in the cost structure? The Unise of Economics in most of those cases that you mentioned is pretty poor, but I think the strategy is that yes, one, the models will optimize in cost, and then two, they will be the brands that customers trust, and then they can actually use a lot of the signal back. And I think to 11 laps example two, I think our Unise of Economics is much healthier than most of those companies. We control our research, our product and distribution, but it's still, if we had a new model that we need to release ourselves, we would optimize less for the cost structure, so we can get that magic out quicker than other competitions even can think about creating their own model. But to be clear, you think the concerns around margin are over-expelled and not justified. Well, it's a risky business where there will be a winner. I love what Lovable is doing with Anton, but Replayd, VZero, Bolt are all incredible companies too, or products too, that are doing some great work. I do think at least one, maybe more than one, will create something special. The market is so big that all of them can create something special, but yes, there will be definitely a loser in that mix too, in that company and the margins that they are carrying does just not make long-term, long-term sense, and probably the same for coding apps. But I think it's a cool bet. I think it's not even cool from the sense of like it's nice application, but it's like it's an ambitious bet that they are trying to win with the biggest companies in the world, that are trying, will try or are trying, and they're lovable of the world, are winning. Anton is a phenomenal marketing person too, like the founder let where he's doing his business is amazing. One thing that's also really interesting is you are very horizontal in your customer from day one, which respectfully I would advise you very much not to be. I think if Philippe was telling me he was advising you the same, be much more targeted in your ICP and have a clear mind of who that customer and user is, and you are much more broad and horizontal. And if you're advising founders, how do you tell them when they're launching from day one, whether to be horizontal versus whether to be vertically specific? The thing if you're launching something very new, very different, and you've done yet fully know a subset of customer base, but you know that there is a bigger one. I think horizontal is completely fine. If you know when you have the main expertise and this is the category that are trying to win, I think go go vertical. You say go vertical that normally when you have verticals, you have kind of a maturing of organization, you have titles. Titles is something that you decided to get rid of. This is very counter traditional all structures. Why is it better to not have titles? There are some incredible companies that of course that similar stripe being one example. But in our case, it was especially then super small teams. So we have team of five. A lot of people, people join and what we wanted to optimize for is like one, the main thing that matters is the impact you can join and you can be the most impactful person from day zero in any of those teams. So the title shouldn't define what is your level of decisions. Second thing with the small teams that happens is that you have a lot of those small teams. So if you start looking at who gets the title or not, it just becomes a distraction given that teams are like small units that just keep keep keep executing. So the second thing and the third thing we wanted to like also make it very clear in that mix and still do if you are joining 11 laps today, you can transition to being a leader of any team of any function super quickly. And titles felt limiting to that. We felt like people joining in and seeing that that kind of the wider set of organization already having set of roles defined for them would make this a little bit harder. You can have a lower tenure and be a manager of people with much longer tenure if you are the right person titles. We felt we're taking away from that while the same time we have a good structure internally within the sub teams like who is the current lead of that team that will make the decision if people cannot agree on what's the right path. But that person can and it's not guaranteed that the person will remain a lead forever. And the titles in a way when you give a title, it stays, stays usually forever in the other company. Speaking of titles and a common criticism of European tack and scaling is that we don't have these titled people who've seen scale significantly your VPs of sales who've seen a bit in an error. You name it. How did you think about broaching that do you want to get top US talent here or do you want to grow talent here? We want to grow talent here. We match a lot of our current talent with the advisors from our network of US investors and the goal is to grow people. We love growing people like our approaches almost if we can we want to take a bet on the person growing rather than then bring them externally. Antone said on a show with me recently from Loveable that building in Europe is building on hard mode. Do you agree with that? I think it is. I think it is building on hard mode. But there is some great advantages too. What are the advantages? The first one is the talent here is incredible and I think you just need to know how to get it. What do people get wrong? There is a good subset of people that really want to work hard and create something special and they just don't have that opportunity because there is no ambitious European companies trying to do that. So the only way they can do that is work for US companies. I think now there's like you mentioned Loveable. I think they are showing that ambition too and there's just so many more lagora recently in Sweden that that that rates around if we spoke about stentisia so there's quite a few companies that are ambitious, they want to show. And I think that the people joining want to be part of the ambitious company that is competing on a global scale. And then maybe in the early days, I was like even worried to large extent. I think you want to be able to build from Europe, but not build only for Europe. And I think those two get conflated where sometimes building from Europe and you're okay, you are building for your PN ecosystem, which isn't the right thing. You still want the global aspiration. So even now, when I think about describing 11 labs, I think about us as a global company. We are a global company with, we want to win in US, we're going to win in Europe, we're going to build in Asia. We have the best team and most of the team in Europe because the talent is incredible. So you think it is wrong when our American friends say, hey, the Europeans just don't walk as hard as we do. I think you can find people that want to work harder. And we've had it actually at some point in the team where we hired some people from West Coast, of US and in our people where we have quite a few from central least in Europe where like, oh yeah, they don't work actually that hard as we do. I mean, we have such a, to credit to the team, it's like the true missionaries that are there on the weekend, all the time and really care. They really care about the success of the company. Beyond just working hard, I think they are and they feel part of the company, which is true. So I do think you can find people in Europe that are phenomenal. Is it bad to hire people who come because you're a glossy name? It's an interesting one because we, you know, in the early days we didn't have much inbound. So all of that was hard one. And it was easier in a way to find people that we felt were right because you didn't have to filter through the noise. And now we have just so much where so many people are going because they are a buzzword or, you know, we know our scale that makes sense. But no, I think it's, you know, it's fine. Like not everybody is the risk they care at the same amount. So I'm not in any way discarding them. What's been your biggest hiring mistake? And what did you learn from it? Think the, you know, this is, this is the probably a traditional one, but as I think about kind of bringing people in and growing them into the company as like the full hiring process, you hire a person, you of course have very little time frequently to assess how they are. But then as they are in the company, you have a little bit more of the signal. I would have taken some decisions quicker than I would have with separating with people. If you are not unsure in the interview, but let's say you are bringing them giving them a chance and you are not sure in the first weeks or months you should separate straight away rather than keep giving the chance. I think that's the, the few times I've, I think you've done that. What's the hardest role to hire for researchers? Easy. When should a founder no longer be involved in every hire? So we interview everyone and I help you. You still do now at 250. Yes, we do. We hope to interview that as long as possible because it's a good signal of who we bring into the company. We get to meet them. But of course we, we still think the company is like still shifting in terms of how we are approaching that. One is now even more we are optimizing for like engineering technical skills set in all parts of the company then we would have six to 12 months ago. So it's even increasing in some aspects. But I hope we'll interview to like a thousand people. The thing isn't so much hard, you know, when to be involved in the review, it's more how many people you are trying to hire within a specific period of time. So if I try to hire a thousand people in a month, it's impossible because it would be more than the time we have. In a year, how many people will you have? We'll have 400 by end of the year. By the end of this year. By end of this year. That's a lot. You're almost doubling. You're adding 40%. And it's almost out three to four months. 50 officers are out or like joining. So 250 now, roughly 30 to 50 people that are already scheduled to join and I think we'll get to the 100. Respectfully small and mighty. That's no. 150 in three to four months. Still small and still mighty, but we have a pretty global team now where we are trying to bring a lot of our go to market and engineering in every location we are at. So we think we can parallelize that building in Brazil, Japan and India and Mexico. So we are really going to that local nuance too where we are building small outposts everywhere. And I think we can make it work. Do you care about revenue per head? In the long term, yes, like we want to be an efficient company. I think now we are, we have a very good metric for a new per head. You know, it's a good show like, are you an efficient company? But if we think there is a path for us to get there over time, we take easily the new hires that can help us. You know it extremely well as an investor. But of course, one of the key metrics is retention or how you think about NRR for any of the clients. So me bringing people now helping us get the distribution before competition does might decrease my set of revenue I get. But if the NRR keeps growing and I don't hire more people in the next five years, not metric, of course, will change. Can I ask what revenues you have now? So we cross to 100 million. Whoa, that's a good number. That's amazing. Yeah, that is a great part to 50 if you've got that now. Yeah, that's pretty good. Fucking A. Thanks. What was the end of 23? I think we were between 35, 35. 35 million. 35 million. You went from beta launch in January to 35. We did so in the 20 months to 100. And then 20 months to 100 million. Yes, I think so. And then around 10 months to 200, a bit longer. 15 months, maybe. Trying to start writing these stuff. So depressed. I mean, you know, that's so happy. Wow, the thing is that of price is now it goes quickly. It can also go quickly down. What bit is your revenue relatively sticky? I think it's relatively sticky. I think launch enterprises is the biggest part of the business now. And we were obsessing is building effectively corporate conversational agent platform. Like the biggest customers are building your biggest customer, not name, but like size. And they are mostly in a call center, customer support, personal assistance base. All of those companies are orchestrating combination of the research, those speech to text, the analytics speech, and then bringing a lot of those integrations that we now we create. So that's on the enterprise side, whether it's Cisco, these are not the contracts there, but Cisco, Twilio, recently working with Epic Games. These are some of our biggest deployments of the work. And then of course, on the, we are in a lucky position that we still have a huge self-serve distribution of creators and developers building all the time, 10 months to 200 million. Yep. What's that to 300 million then? Because you have, you did 20 months to 110 to 200. Well, we are ambitious companies, so we hope to, can we do five months to 300? We would love to break, break if it's a healthy revenue and we are creating good work. We would love to break the record. What was the price of the loss around three, 3.3, 3.3? All around the visible by 11, 3.3, and then you did that when you were 150 million in revenue? No, lower. We were somewhere between 120, I think. Okay, 120, 120. But I'm just looking at that guy and you did that Jan 25. We announced the Jan 20 to 5 and then we did that twice, I ended up 20 to 4. I'm just looking at it thinking, okay, so they're doing end of year revenues for 25 at 250, 300. It's quite a cheap deal. 11, 12, I sent a few revenues. So we did the round in October of 24, so we are probably at 80 when we got the docs and then it was signed then. Did you need the money? So the way we approached any of the fundraisers, it's, can we bring some of the bets forward? In that case, it was even more, spend on models, expand into multi-model. Can we bring our work internationally, so expand into other regions? And then double down on an agent platform, so start building even more of the true enterprise, functionality, whether it's the reliability you need, whether it's integration with sales for service, now, sift ranking. So investing in those, those was the most important. But at the time it was for the ex-current revenue, so pretty good done. How do you balance between focus and executing according to plan versus being able to do more? I understand the benefits of being able to do more, but you can probably always do more with more money. It doesn't mean it's the right thing. I think that the kind of the variation of this is like, can you paralyze a new effort without distracting the core work? And that's roughly why we are trying to approach this. Like, can we bring our work to a new place? Can we create a new product experience without affecting the core thing that's actually important for our users? If we can, then we'll likely invest, bring it up people into it. If it's distracting, then it becomes a question of like, is it worth the upside? When we think about kind of doing more, the question that I think we forgot earlier was what's the biggest line of business in the future. That is not a very big line or nonexistent today. It's interesting because on the relative basis, I think our agent's work is already huge, but I think it's just scratching the surface. I think it's going to, if we play it right, it's like a multi-billion dollar revenue generating business just from huge, of course, creating voice agents and going deeper. So I think this one is on the relative basis of voice agents that you sell to companies to manage their customers. That's right. Gotcha. And then you can go deeper. You can, of course, expand from voice into conversational agents. And by that, I mean, you start building omnichandal solution with email integration, what's up integration? We're just kind of that more classic customer support. Which you sell then to an income and a decade on. Today, so we are have a public partnership with Decagon, so we do. But of course, as you start going deeper, it depends a little bit where Decagon goes and where we go. Are they going to verticalize or they will continue horizontal and go down? Well, we verticalize more. So there might be some areas where we overlap a little bit more. But today, we, given we have very partner horizontal approach that we treat all of them as good partners. Speaking of kind of good partners. right now we're doing the human plight. agent with so friendly and we make each other better and as a time when human plus agent just becomes agent. Do you think we are seeing a lot of resistance from employees within companies towards agents coming in? We do but the the way we've seen this like kind of transition happen now is where you will have more specialized humans where the agents are taking more of the manual parts that nobody really wanted to do or didn't require domain expertise. So like a good example is like if you're taking appointment scheduling if you are doing a refund all of those of course assuming of the safeguards and authentication place are pretty easily done with with AI but then suddenly if you need to help that patient navigate the outbound flow after going from hospital or understanding analysis that that cannot be done with AI there's too much at stake and you need a deep domain expertise. So we've seen like kind of the transition where that side of people helping in that kind of last mile is even more valuable. Well of course AI can help with those easier tasks across and I think this will continue of course the percentages will shift where you will have even more automation as it goes deeper and then even more value assigned to the people doing that domain expertise because ultimately it will help automate the task at hand. Does taking money from secure meaningfully moves the needle in a way that it doesn't from other funds? You know like I think so our first round was with a 16z and it did meaningfully move the yield for us like it was very clear that people respected you in a way that they did yes and then Sequoia came in and series B and that kind of double downed out perception where it's like okay a 16z and Sequoia are part of the of the company it's also very rare to have both of these investors and any of the companies so it did help like where a lot of kinds would be respecting that and now I connect on top of that is just incredible mix and and of the G2 I think and if the G2 is like clients will usually not have that perception but their investors do but investors do and some of our engineers or users really really admire and trust not and I did too so he's great. You're a very strategic asset when you look at what you have and what you've built. Have you had acquisition offers? We did have acquisition offers. Did you contemplate any of them honestly? We always will do like the basic diligence and let our investors know that it's you know that we had this and and you what was the largest one? Well the largest one didn't have a money so but the the the ones that we went it was like an interesting conversation because we would frequently try to like go into is the strategic partnership and then they would be like oh can we consider are we open to M&A activity? Was it tempting? It was tiny bit tempting but in a way we're in the first one or two examples so the first one was when we were doing series A was going really well and then of course we like we're unclear how this will continue like a very beginning of the curve and that the first one was like okay this is first time we ever are doing this let's understand what they are what they are offering but we were more interested into into like seeing whether more about the process itself like how it happens rather than actually giving the company then it was clear okay they want to acquire us this is what we understand and we need to be part of the company so we were we were we were flat-now and since then for any of the conversation now that we know that this is even approaching this M&A TGG segments with a secondary and that helps so we do almost every round we can we do secondary and attend their offer for all employees that have vested stock so they can sell the stock so they all feel that there's actually liquidity to the company and I think it's valuable because we are betting for some in huge and you want to know that you you you can take the risk to bet on some big outcome which of course you know like I think it's very easy to say financial parity it's not important and I think it isn't but there's like this basic layer that people want to I think it is paying for child care and paying for house of course exactly that's what I mean but it's like it's not the goal in itself but you want to have like this bottom set of good life that's covered which we are extremely lucky as a company to have and to be able to offer but then like now the kind of the aspiration is much bigger especially now that this basic layer is covered the thing I often think is how many great European companies of the last 20 years would have not sold have we had secondary and liquidity options available at the time because so many did sell because we didn't have that and it was so meaningful I think it does it does help with like the perception where where you know there's like you can to some extent I think you can put away like any of the greediness that comes with money just by taking some of the risk risk equation away do we're going to do a quick fire on so I'm going to say a short statement you're going to give me an immediate thought that sounds okay sounds great so what do you believe that most around you disbelief that you can build a company from Europe at the global scale you don't think people still think like you don't think we're moving the needle a little bit I think you're helping and I think many of the people in our ecosystem are but I don't think most people do maybe another one which is not that specific to company building but I do think voice will be the interface to the technology around us it will be the primary interface for a lot of technology around us I'm not going to let you wiggle on this one you can buy open AI at 300 and drop pick at 170 or croc at 120 which one do you buy in which one do you sell well I don't know if I like this question the answer answer that and on and on for context answer to your buy Grock and his sell open AI okay let's keep it out of the positive I will buy open AI but a lot of anthropic like you know if I was on the coding side I think I would be buying demand a cursor and now we don't mandate it's like you use what you what you think is most valuable to most people use most people do use cursor some people is cloud code but still more cursor I think it's shifting a little bit I'm also like you know to your other question there I'm a who was the investor but they did say which I think I would also like as I think about that decision is I would be happily investing in a lot of the products I use and I do use judgey beauty very often every so often I will use on topic for like testing where we are of the space but I think they are investing more in coding rather than cloud the consumer and open AI is clearly investing a lot in judgey beauty the consumer solution what if you change your mind almost in the last 12 months that we previously would not do any of the product innovation if we knew that we are doing any research initiative ourselves and I think now it's shifted that we will sometimes explore product with outside research even if we don't have we don't build internally is speed of error growth a bullshit metric depends on time horizon but but in general yes I think speed of aircraft doesn't doesn't matter what's your favorite consumer brand day and why I really like eight sleep I know it's consumer brand but they do like eight sleep recently as it's like a changed quite significantly I am a huge user of Google Google maps and love Google maps love a bolt I really like from consumer-ish applications you can be CEO of any company for a day what company would you be CEO of I'll choose Google or open AI I would know the know how some of the incredible model I think more Google I'll say Google Genie via free models incredible innovations and then at the same time just there you know the scale of operation would be a sees the British on Google people question them with the golden and give me Google and previous question no yeah I would invest in about 300 that was a Google that's not enough but you're super British on Google even with the ads model being potentially no no it's super bullish is not definitely not super bullish but I think Google is I would still put a lot that the Google has a good future and especially recently they're catching up in many places they are definitely in the race I'm creating a title for you you're going to be the president of Europe okay I'm aware for all of our American listeners Europe is not a country even though you like to collectivize and make it one president of Europe what would you do one thing to make the European ecosystem have a higher chance of success my word goes into into law immediately yeah I would proxy a lot of AI law to us law I know this is it's a huge set of repercussions but I would try to follow exactly how U.S. is approaching a lot of AI related regulation and just implement the same or let's like create another state in European Union and Europe that people can opt in that follows that law to not like make it too hard given even all the repercussions how important is found a brand my answer here would be I don't know because in many ways as we thought about the 11 laps especially in early days it's the people that build the company are the people that build the company and in some ways we they kind of could still don't know to what extent like having some people that are very much out there like let's say I'm now in this podcast takes away from that and and and we want to make it complimentary because the reason we are successful I think is to large extent because we've created incredible research the engineers are just grinding and creating the best product experience go to market team is inventing new ways to combine self-serving say so it's like all those parts and then supplemented by operations scaling the company from less than 100 to not 250 in the span of seven months while keeping culture intact you know these these are like all so hard things and with hyper growth there's less time to be able to appreciate all those individuals than than you would otherwise and I sometimes worry by having that kind of you know too much of the founder brand kind of takes away from that but my mind is changing a little bit I think like maybe you can elevate that by having a the founder brand other final one and it may be a little bit of a sort but what's the single best piece of advice you've been given that you think too most often well the rest I don't it's not most often so in the recent times I like what Peter Tiel said about the biggest risk is not taking the risk and like kind of staying kind of not taking a decision or staying what risk did you not take that won't you most. It's shifting because if you ask me that I should have taken that risk. So I don't usually, I usually hope try to take a quick action on top of that. But one that is we are considering is an acquisition of another company now, which is a big company. And that company, you know, is in hundreds of millions of dollars, it will be a huge risk for bringing them in. And if we think we can do better internally, so I think we want to take that risk. Matt, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for putting up with my meandering. And you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you, Harry. It's a pleasure. Pleasure to be finally able to speak together. So great to make that happen with Mattie Live in the studio. You can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 2.0VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. 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