4. Oscar Lanzendorf, GTM at ElevenLabs - Sales at one of the World's Top AI Companies

Welcome to episode four of Inside the Pipeline. I realized up until this point I haven't actually introduced myself nor has my co-host Ben who's not here right now but I can introduce him a bit. I'm Tres Tusa, I work in growth at Throxy and presenting and putting together a podcast is one of my jobs. Ben is on the product team here at Throxy so he's helping our clients book meetings with prospects and he also presents on the podcast with me so I'm very lucky to have him. Now both of us are very very excited about today's guest who is Oscar Lantendorf who works in GoToMarket at one of the biggest AI companies in the world right now 11 Labs. For those of you who don't know 11 Labs they specialize in voice AI. So for example imagine if you could just write a sentence on your laptop and it speaks back to you. Imagine if you could clone your voice so that you can text on your laptop and then it speaks out in your exact tone of voice. That is what 11 Labs does. They're currently valued at $6.6 billion and they have high profile partnerships with the likes of Michael Cain and Matthew McConaughey, some of the most famous voices in the world. I could feel Oscar's energy from as soon as he came into the room and it's clear that he resonates exactly the message that 11 Labs are trying to put out there. We also found it very interesting to talk to him about how he approaches sales. He definitely has more of an old-school way of looking at things. Anyway enough of the introduction of hand is straight over to our chat with Oscar which took place in our office in the middle of December. Enjoy. Welcome Oscar Lansendorf. We were just clarifying before exactly how to pronounce your name but I'm glad that I didn't butcher it. Welcome to our office. Welcome to London. What have you been up to this morning? Well thank you. Thank you for having me. First of all it's great to be here. This morning has been the start-up with the walk actually and then went to the office with a lot of meetings already of calls and now I'm here. And you guys have just got I think you were telling us before a new office in Soho. That's how many people have you got in London at the moment? At the moment I think it's over 100. Wow. Yeah. And 11 Labs obviously you are working and go to market. One of the fastest growing AI companies in the world and there's been a lot of publication I think over the last few months a recent partnership with Meta. I think you'd also agree that the Matthew McConaughey announcement. Yes. Got a lot of traction. How has it been over the last six months? How has it been since you joined? Well when I joined we were already very successful and growing super fast. Until now I think a lot has changed. It's a complete different company to be honest. We've grown in size like we doubled in headcount. When I was joining we were less than 200 people. No we're more than 400 people. We've doubled in revenue. We actually went and increments when I started we were close to over a hundred million in revenue and less than 10 months we went to 200 and now we're close to breaking the 300. All of that actually and less than a 10 to 14 month period of time. It's been really growing extremely fast and we also doubled in valuation from 3.3 to 6.6 billion and that's just all been happening in nine months. So that revenue growth first of all extraordinary. How many different lines of revenue are there within that number? Talk to me like I'm an idiot that doesn't understand 11 Labs at all. What are the different ways you guys are delivering fuel customers and therefore maybe maybe even go right back to the start. What does 11 Labs do for someone who doesn't know what 11 Labs is? Maybe I'll just start with this. So at the first layer how I like to explain the 11 Labs to people is on the first instance we are a research company. So similar to like OpenAI and Anthropic we have a deep belief that everything starts within the research of our own models. So every time you use a product from 11 Labs you will use our own proprietary models. And when we feel that these models are at a level that they're great, they're really excellent in the field and they're breaking all the benchmarks then we feel comfortable to bring out products on this right. So we can just say all right we want to do now text-to-speech, we want to do speech-to-text and we want to have these own building blocks that people can use in their own systems and orchestrations. And out of that then and you know a couple of these products that you've seen are things like our dubbing functionality which allows you to dub into over 70 languages you know things like voice cloning and voice changers up to things like music which allow you to create songs from written text to things that are more agentic such as our agents right which combine these different building blocks. So on the first layer we're a model company on the second layer we're a products company. And to put it into very simple terms we automate a lot of the things that currently humans are doing in the loop. We do these via AI and most of the times we do them like 10x better because our AI's basically are available 24/7. We speak more than 32 languages this is now talking on the agentic side and we're pretty much connected to all of your systems. So our AI's are always up to date they can reference data that is back to your system they can handle a different variety of queries and this is basically what we do. We try to give the internet a voice so everything before that was communicated with machines via writing or coding can now be done via voice. Am I right in saying that the initial idea for the company came from your founders who are Polish who had watched TV programs with terrible terrible dubbing. That's right that's right that was the original story right so back in Poland I'm not Polish but that is the story that we were told and every time we tell the story there's a post-production they attested they did not have dubbing they I don't know how it's currently done probably we're we're solving most of these problems but they didn't have dubbing and it was only one narrator with the same voice with the same tonality speaking for every single character in the movie or serious whatever so that's a terrible experience right very strange to watch yeah and that is basically the thesis on which it started. Surely there were two genders or was there just one person one person one person and speaking in the same tonality of voice yeah you know on that note and just sort of how extraordinary these voice agents have gone my sort of first and most visceral experience of not using your product directly but was I think you guys are sort of powering what they're doing is Jack and Jill and I was blown away by how human and intelligent the conversation was with this AI recruiter effectively how much of what that ends up being and obviously you really only know about the 11 labs side of it is 11 labs proprietary product and how much is the layer on top that people like Jack and Jill sort of will build on top of so they my interaction with that product was overwhelmingly positive and what I want to know because I obviously they they asked me for feedback after I interact with the product is how much is 11 labs and how much is your customers building on top of 11 labs. I can't talk too much about the Jack and Jill so I will definitely yeah but I will definitely go into how the agents work yeah so basically the agents what you have to think of is we provide the voices and would provide the orchestration for the agents right so we try to build on the one side we build a good product which allows you to choose an element of your choice to give it a system prompt to add in and connect your data points and build these workflows and obviously the voices and on the second side then all the contextualization in which you give the agent is done by Jack and Jill in this example so this is like always the thing that makes a difference we're like selling the tool however you use the tool is kind of your competitive advantage and your secret sauce yeah that makes a lot of sense I mean yeah I just reiterate it was extraordinary like I'm late the party the the the the thing that really blew me away was not not just like the intelligence so at the end of the conversation I asked her the recruiter that I was speaking to to sort of sum up everything that we discussed which she did incredibly well but just how human she sounded yeah and are you seeing so since you've joined are you seeing the rate of improvement just go is it hockey sticking or Jay Kerbing it may be a single time and you're you're finding that that is driven by what more data better engineering more time what is driving that improvement it's a mix of all of them to be honest we're very gifted to have some of the best researchers engineers in honor of you know working on this technology and this mixed with also as you said data and experience that we're getting it's just like compounding over time what I mean obviously there's a lot that people talk about when it comes to music and AI I actually come from a music background so so have have sort of watched AI come into the music industry and seen the number of songs get added to Spotify each week and what I think is quite difficult for artists these days human artists is that there is so much content out there now it's quite difficult to get yourself heard now I know that the counter to that is Wow, something like 11 Labs gives you incredible access to someone who doesn't have a studio, doesn't have the money or the instruments or the skill maybe for music. What's your personal view on that? To music, I mean specifically, I come from a background where I love to DJ and produce music and I was always using Logic and you know these kind of systems and I personally felt that I was very limited because in order to get a song right, you need to be really good. Like the last 20% is what makes you actually be able to produce a banger. We are kind of like unlocking this layer. I think in like 12 months, 18 months time, the models are going to be so far that everyone is going to have the skill level of like a Skrillex or like a Swedish house mafia. And this is going to create a complete new layer of artists because it's going to be about the idea and about the style. And the marketing, I guess. And the marketing and the marketing. But the marketing you're very much in control of because music is just going to become another form of content. You know? Like when you said like film and series, all right, technically an influencer who's posting every day is like a series, you know? It's a series. So music is going to become more of a content and the person behind it is going to become like the person that makes it magical. And I think Dixon, DJ, you said it the other day, you said it in interview, you said DJing is not an art form. Like everyone can DJ press a button do whatever. But having the magic, having the right to do it. Exactly. I think we will see more people that have this skill but we're limited by the execution of it, be able to do that. And that's just, I mean, you can think of it whatever you want but that's just like part of a technological evolution and making things more accessible. So does 11 of them see that as quite a big sort of market that you really want to tap into? Is that a big chunk of it? I mean, we are going into music because it's another product within our product landscape, right? And it comes without a question that if you're doing audio, you have to do music, right? And everything, I don't know if you guys have seen it. We've now included image and video. So obviously music also has to be a part of that. In terms of the market, I think there's still a lot of question marks to, because the question is like, what do people want? Does everyone want to produce their own songs or do people just want to have more variety of music, right? So I think the person within music is always going to remain very relevant. Yeah. I think for us, we want to give people the tools. We'll see what people come up with it and then we'll probably decide on the go. But for now, I mean, it's about like getting, first of all, you know, things like licenses really in order and getting the best quality up, but possible. I know you probably can't tell me necessarily the complete specifics, but are you able to give us an idea as to some of the use cases which people might not immediately think about that are growing? Well, the thing is, these are pretty big issues that you just mentioned that are actually still not being heard by enough people. So the truth is, like, I think for a consumer, anything in the support space is something where we're very actively going into because, as I mentioned before, it's not a job that humans like to do. No one wakes up in the morning and says, I want to be a support agent. But the truth is, with a rising number of customers, with more, you know, internationalization, we need more support agents for so many systems. So it's not a question of like, should we do it? It's a question of why are we not doing it yet. So this is very important that we get it in there. I think more when it comes to personalized messaging in different audio forms, that is something we will see more. And second and thirdly, we're going to create new experiences via voice. So things like, I say, hands-free shopping, meaning in e-commerce that you're going to have like an agent that is going to be able to advise you and you're not touching the screen anymore because you're going to say, show me why T-shirts. And I want to see black hoodies as well. And, you know, what we match with that. Exactly. And it would just like guide you through a website without you touching the product at all until checkout. So there's a variety of different things that we can do. But I would honestly say the first layer where we're at right now with agents, it's anything in the support space that needs more. And then secondly, in the training space, I think that is still something that companies are not building on sufficiently because, man, we're like updating so much information. We're still sending around pitch decks. It's not working because people are not having the time to read long pitch decks. It's anything if you build an agent that trains or employees based on their skill level, super valuable. Yeah. And you've got all these sort of different product lines. And the company, as you said at the beginning of the conversation, is growing rapidly. How do the founders and the leadership team make sure that everyone has a sort of not singular focus, but very narrow focus as to what you guys are trying to achieve as a company? How do you guys grow? How do you go about doing that? I think we have an exceptional team of early employees and people that have been building and shaping this. You mentioned one before, Luke, Carlos is another one, Forson Nature. I think it's a mix of having a higher ownership. Everyone that is joining has massively higher ownership and has an extreme drive. So we work crazy hours. We really are experimenting a lot until things work. And I think that makes with a good synchronization between every different department. It's people aligned and this alignment is what kind of like allowed for this growth. And how do you align yourselves? I know there's been a lot made of the fact that you guys are pretty much a fully remote team. I know you have hubs in different locations, but how do you create that alignment remotely? Yeah. We reflect that on every single hire that we do. So we have an extremely high bar. We really suddenly, I think we shared this. It's harder to get into Harvard except by YC then to get a job at 11 laps. And why do we do that? Actually, because we believe that adding not so good players into the equation is going to dilute our team immediately. And everyone that is joining is at the highest level possible and wants to be even better. So everyone in the team wants to be a bar raiser amongst bar raisers by default. This is one thing. The second thing is ownership. You don't need to tell people to wake up early or to do a certain thing. And you know that, listen, you've got your KPIs, you have to just deliver on time. You don't have to tell them things. They will do it. They will figure it out. And this is amazing. I mean, we're really a company that is built with the people around it because there's so many builders within us. They're a very founder driven or very operational. They just improve the processes. So if you really invest a lot into the hiring moment and you don't hire everyone and you're just very selective, you're going to bring in people that are going to build the company for you. What are the big goals for 11 labs over the next five to 10 years? It's very simple. We want to be either directly or indirectly be put into the hands of everyone in the world. Be it through our own products or be it indirectly through another product that someone is using. And it's so interesting because actually when we, about a couple of minutes ago, when we were talking about like the use cases and actually the quite unsexy thing of, you know, assistant basically for voice agents. But what I think you've got guys have done really cleverly is have the sexy people like Matthew McConaughey, who has one of the most famous voices in the whole world, to create 11 labs into this sort of like beautiful thing. Who was behind Matthew McConaughey and how did that come about? So Matthew McConaughey was an early investor. We just recently disclosed this. It's the network that 11 labs basically brings with us and it's the amazing technology. And I think if you have a great technology and you have a good network, people will automatically want to be talking to you. We have a very strong partnerships team behind this as well and obviously very charismatic founders that are very good at pitching the product and building their relationships. So it's a mix of both and you know how it is in life and in the start of the world when you're doing something great, doors just automatically open. If you had to choose one other voice globally to have like Matthew McConaughey as part of 11 labs, who would you choose? Me personally. I have a great voice as well. Thank you. It's available on 11 labs actually. Is it? Yeah it is. It's called Oscar. Yeah. You personally know who would you choose? I would probably choose Christian Bill but in the Batman voice. Yes. Because it's complimentary also to Michael King. So yeah. And how does it feel for you guys obviously another European company who's making waves in the AI space? I know obviously your founders from Poland, very old school friends, how does that route itself throughout the culture? Well obviously we're very proud to be such a successful company in that space and coming from Europe. And I think yeah, no it's a thing we're very bullish about. We like that very much and we want to be one of the names when you think about startups and unicorns coming from Europe and we hope that we inspire the ecosystem with that. I really hope that we've sorted ourselves out enough whereby when you IPO you do it here but obviously we can't get into that. So I think one thing I wanted to know about you specifically was obviously we just touched on the fact that it's incredibly difficult to get a job at 11 labs. What was your motivation for joining and what was the process like when trying to get a job there? Yeah. I was making a switch basically I was more in the VC side of things and I personally was like all right I either want to found a company or I want to join a company that is super great. And I was speaking with a couple of startups and I remember one of them that was very well backed by a good and reputable VCs was telling me Oscar I think your skills are very good. You're just not a good fit for what we are doing and I was thinking to myself you're absolutely spot on. I have no association with your product at all and I wouldn't have even been happy if I would have gotten the term sheet. And I was like re-evaluating and I was like thinking all right what was the most happiest time in my life? It was when I was a founder. I founded a self-dead. basically like an Afro-Meral voice messaging service like Snapchat but for voice that was super interesting. I loved creating music. I think music is such an interesting space. I loved hearing books rather than reading books and I always like to communicate and then I was like wow what company is doing AI audio? 11 laps is doing that. I need to get into 11 laps. Yeah and that was then like the moment where I was like all right this is the only company I'm gonna apply and I want to get into it and yeah here we are. So and what did that application process look like from the point that you sent them your CV or connect to someone? Yeah I connected so I connected with Carlos just to show you how we work at 11 laps. I sent the email on I had the Pithini on a Friday afternoon and I sent him an email and I think was 6.30 p.m. on a Friday. I got applied it two minutes. I got a reply at 7.30 a.m. on Saturday and he was like hey Oscar great to hear from you great to be connected. Kesha here shout out to Kesha is gonna take care and then I was like wow immediately hey Kesha can we set up a call first at a second no reply it was again can we have a call? Yes let's have a call and we had a call and it was a little bit skeptical because I don't come from a sales background I come from a VC background. Yeah but he was like yeah but you seem to have hustle so let's let's give you a try and then it took forever because everyone is so damn busy there's other priorities and I was just like pushing and I was like getting back to him and he was like yeah sorry let's have another call and another call is like all right you know it's gonna be tough but like I'll connect you with one person so I spoke with with who go then and then I went through the interview process and I was like every after every single interview because I had the odds pretty much against me I was like I'm gonna destroy I'm gonna destroy and I did I prepared so much for every interview and I killed it and yeah that's pretty much what I recommend everyone to do as well if they're applying to your point. Yeah I'm killing it how can one kill it? Yes. Then 11 labs interview. Understand the company very well understand your reason for applying very well be able to quick fire you have to like at 11 labs we're gonna test your RAM not your memory your RAM what is accessible right now and do more than the average person you know come in with no ego like if I'm telling you listen I think I'm the best to go to market may I show you a presentation you didn't ask me for a presentation but I brought one with me and I also brought a case study and also I have a slide showing you why I'm better than all the competitors showcasing you rather than telling you giving you an example of my portfolio it's really like going the extra mile and going into detail for that so that you actually show me listen I can close you as a customer versus other people that are just like coming in there and be like yeah but I work for Google back then like you got enough and that is the thing like we don't hire these kind of profiles because we want to hire people that are really serious and that show us their execution yeah that's also like the different way of thinking about approaching go to market and having different strategies to get to the decision makers quickly so you got the job you're now working in go-to-market 11 labs seems like this incredible company that works at such a fast pace obviously we know at Throxie there are a lot of different ways that you can sell something how are you selling 11 labs at the moment what are the tips and tricks and what are your methods so at the beginning you obviously ramp up right like if you join a company like 11 labs you're you're just quiet and you just like first listen and try to understand the digest what is going on as soon as possible and the second tier when you feel like you've got the grip of it that's when you start to become creative for me personally I realize and this is a thing that everyone can do for themselves is if you're playing with probably and potentially the best players with like in the world you have to be very good at understanding what am I exceptionally well I realized I'm exceptionally well at presenting I can pitch I can talk I'm good with people I'm good at events and organizing an ownership I'm gonna excel in this other people are really good I'm also good in messaging like I can share some stories of how I approach sea levels are like important people but these are the things that you double down on and then you make this your own strategy so this is the major thing that you do you just like find the things you're really good in and for me it's those ones it's very interpersonal because I also believe that a lot of the tasks that people are gonna do especially in sales behind a computer are gonna get automated so what are you gonna do when you have your leads being found automatically reach out done automatically like proxy exactly what are you gonna do what are you gonna do then you have to think above that and you have to build a relationship and you have to go back to these older tactics that are more interpersonal and this is what I'm betting into it and we actually it's funny because are now and and I were at the same conference and we're hearing a couple of the major like influencers on LinkedIn from Spain talk about the importance of a personal brand and it was like yeah that's the next frontier like that's what I have to do and yeah I recommend everyone to do that our bet is human and loop sales yeah yeah apply AI to everything but selling yeah tell us about tell us about your messaging you you hinted at it just that I want to hear some of these tactics yeah it kind of came down so I read this one McKinsey book once and I was taught about this like top-down communication which I think is amazing because I have very little patience and I like when people come to the point quickly and then I remember that just being in VCE seeing exceptional founders communicate and seeing the not so exceptional founders communicate the exceptional ones write you a black and white email that is very short with an update and very much you know the there was a funny quote said once we're not poets so I love that we're executing and it's like keep it extremely short I always approach messaging like content if you look at content the first three seconds get the most watch time right if a video is a hundred seconds long you got 3% watch time that's not a good metric if your video is let's say 10 seconds long you got 30% watch that's a much better metric so you have to hack that so the thing is if I know a human can read maximum 150 words in a minute how much time are they gonna give me 10 seconds try to do it in 15 words you know more or less and so I like to keep it extremely short I like to just get to the point and also have a little bit of a I mean and that is very specific to me I get along with this maybe someone else doesn't just have a very specific ask you know and have it have it be a little pushy because most of the images are like hi hello how are you you know I'm writing you today because I get out of here like this is the thing you want to evoke with people is you have two signals that you can provoke number one is the BS radar which is that's the sales email that's the sales call done that's already understood or a question mark who is this person that is calling me is this person writing me should I give it more time this is the hook essentially in social media right you have to apply the same principles and it works quite well so you're actually doing any co-calling I am yeah how do you find that I mean look to be honest it's great you just have to be alone because you can't do it when there's a lot of people around it's also not a thing that I like to do in front of people you know like you see that and because it's it's gonna be different from time to time you have to just said but yeah you do that mostly yes I honestly think that if I were to give any very unsolicited advice to anyone that wants to get in sales just start co-calling because there is no quicker way to learn it's magic sell anything yeah then co-calling and turn up to conferences which I think I want to talk about a little bit more how because I think you're absolutely right you know go back to the older techniques of selling as AI and and and and technology is doing a lot of the sort of quote unquote grunt work of finding the right persona finding the right lead making sure that you're set up in the right realm or the right call with them and how do you run your conferences and what what do you think is going to change about how people do conferences as AI becomes a sort of I suppose you're assistant that is running the the boring stuff in the background so I think conferences haven't really changed too much unfortunately I feel they're still stuck in like 2000 2005 era I mean definitely their apps and their systems it's it's really not it sucks and you have to rely like actually without using other like scraping tools it doesn't it doesn't work really well yeah how are they gonna change I think the idea of like a booth is not the biggest fan because I genuinely like to do things differently think maybe I don't know lounge could be interesting like a drinking lounge or something like that something that I always think of one thing at a conference who want to capture attention and you want to be relevant at the same time right so you have to also get rid of all the people that come to the conference to get free swag I think the biggest value driver right now conferences is if you have pitch slots so if there's like a topic related stage and you get to pitch that really does make the difference because I feel no tech company has it easy at describing what they're actually doing it's like every sauce company you go on to the website I had it as a VC because you were scanning many SaaS companies and I literally built a GPT to explain to me what this URL does and like this is the Airbnb for XYZ right so I think pitching a conference is really good if they share the leads before this is great if they have a bad app does not make the experience good I think if you have a booth you have to have people on the ground to speak with all the different people and you have to have a process you have to book in the meetings right there you have to you know qualify the leads quite quickly and you have to know with whom you're spending times very easy to suddenly talk for 40 minutes with a person yeah that is not going to buy and you just have to be careful because at the end of the month someone's gonna come to you and it's gonna say what is the ROI yeah oh but I spoke to so many people you didn't speak to the right people so in terms of like brand awareness I went to quite a few of the conferences in the web to borent mewn coedd yn y na, neu gyda'r gydyn. ac y bo ignore anbynt哈wydw e Leonardo. 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