ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said he’s found some of his best talent by ignoring traditional hiring practices.
“We started initially in Europe, and we realized that if we wanted the best people to solve what was a research problem at the time, we need to hire wherever they are, and we couldn’t lock ourselves to just San Francisco or look at the West Coast,” Staniszewski told Jennifer Li, a general partner at A16z, during a recent episode of the firm’s podcast.
Both of ElevenLabs’ cofounders have their roots in Poland, and Staniszewski said it’s unlikely that the startup would have even been created in the US. Their initial inspiration, he said, came from observing the cheap way foreign movies were dubbed for the Polish market. He said it’s why they continue to focus on the European talent pool.
“We knew that we need to find them across Europe, across Asia and bring them into the company,” he said.
Part of that nontraditional approach includes being “very against” looking at LinkedIn. It’s paid off in “very interesting hires,” Staniszewski said. The AI audio startup continues to surge in value. It recently announced that employees could sell shares at a $6.6 billion valuation.
“We hired a person that had incredible open source text-to-speech model, and was working in the call center at the same time as a recipient of the calls to make money,” Staniszewski said, “and he’s now on the team, one of the most brilliant researchers we have doing all the data processing.”
As ElevenLabs has scaled up, Staniszewski said the company realized that people from more traditional backgrounds can help train other employees. They tried to couple their remote work offerings with in-person offices around the world in New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Bangalore, Tokyo, and London.
“We realized that the new people joining, there’s a benefit of them having a space to be next to others, to get deeper into the culture, understand what are all the products that are happening in the company,” he said.
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ElevenLabs’ culture goes beyond initial hiring. Last year, the company eliminated titles. Staniszewski said this flat approach makes it clear “that the moment you join, you can have any impact on the company.”
“If you are smart and quick and passionate, you can elevate yourself very quickly, which this really helped,” he said. “
Customers, Staniszewski said, also get the sense they are dealing with the best talent. Internally, he said, employees can focus solely on their responsibilities. Staniszewski said he learned that this can be helped by limiting the amount of insight workers have into areas beyond their small team.
“If you put a person into all the Slack channels and give them transparency, they actually get frequently distracted because then they read all the messages,” he said. “You can still choose not to read them, but they still do. So, you kind of need to cut the access to a lot of those pieces to force the attention, and that kind of works.”
