The Trillion-Dollar Industries AI Is Disrupting: Voice, Law & the End of the Billable Hour

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0:41Airwallex, built for the future. 350 million in what, two or three years? And I'm hearing numbers five or 600 million now. Tell us about the revenue ramp of the company from the moment you released the software to today, The product's been in market for 40 months, 50 months? You tell me. Spot on. We started company 2022. First year was all about building the research and the product to really kickstart the work. We built the first text-to-speech model that finally could sound human. Released it in 2023, beginning of 2023. Then it took us roughly 20 months to get to the first 100 million in ARR.

1:20Roughly 10 months to get to 200. Five months to get to 300. and that's how we closed end of the last year and now we are at$600. You're at$600 million in revenue. This is just extraordinary. How many employees now? Because the company has obviously hit incredible valuations but you have to fill in that valuation and you're competing at a very high level for talent. So tell us about how many employees you have now and how you maintain the culture of the company when revenue is ripping, investors are throwing money at you, showing up at your doorstep, I mean, quite literally. But you've got to run the company.

2:03You've got to build a culture. So how many employees now and how are you dealing with these competing priorities? Yeah, that's the key element of how you all, for us, the element of like how we can maintain the culture despite the quick growth is kind of critical and how we optimize both the interview cycle, how we are bringing people on board, how we onboard them. We have 600 people today. So also very quick growth on that people side. And as a company, we combine research and product. So we are building a communication platform for AI. On the research side, this includes everything across audio, generating speech, transcribing speech, orchestrating speech for interactions.

2:43on the product, this is how we can complete the entirety of the customer journey. From marketing and creating assets and localizing them internationally through customer support with voice agents to proactive enablement of how voice agents can help in operations, training, and sales. So this requires a lot of different talent. And a part of that revenue growth is actually a reflection of the functions we've grown over time. So from the original team, very research, very engineering heavy. from the first 10 people, we had zero attrition. Everybody is still at the company from those core research and engineering talent building together with us.

3:19So, so far, we've been able to outcompete. And I think that common thread, and credit to my co-founder, who is an incredible researcher himself, we've been able to assemble the team that is truly excited about solving audio, solving interaction, and building that research. And if they are looking for an opportunity out there and looking for a company to join and solve that, we are one of the leading, if not the leading place to do that. And you started before AI was so impactful at making software. Right. So when you were starting four years ago, five years ago, and working on this, building software was limited to low percentage of the population of planet Earth.

4:03You know, the number of people could write code. And now here we are, you know, went from Vibe. We had a no-code moment, then vibe coding, and now we actually have people building production code who are not developers. You have developers going 10x and token maxing. How has building software changed internally, and how do you deal with making sure that the code is really high quality? Because people are paying you this money, but they're going to demand really high quality product since they're spending so much money with you. Yeah, it's also true that 2022 was still the year where topics of the day were crypto and metaverse.

4:42So the building there was also the best time to start because we could actually take a bit of time to focus on what we thought is the future. But the way we are structured is a lot of small teams, especially across the product engineering, but also in how we think about go to market optimized for specific industries, telco, financial services, healthcare. So every unit is very tightly knit together. and we do that across the company. So it's usually five to 10 people teams that run ahead. And inside of each of those teams, the decision we took, which is slightly different than how it's usually structured, we embedded engineers in every place and even in the places which aren't engineering.

5:22So our talent team will have an engineer. Our legal team will have an engineer. Our revenue engineering or go-to-market engineering have engineers embedded all across. And those people have two roles. One is, of course, creating automations and bringing the software inside of that team. But second is actually helping everybody else do what you said, which is make sure that people are adopting AI, but also there's a security check for everything they deploy. Because ultimately, if you're not using a lot of the coding software, a lot of the co-working software, then you're probably in the wrong spot.

5:55If you're using too much of it, that is also a flag because you maybe are not doing that in the right way. and of course as you start bringing that into the sites of the organizations that never were exposed, they frequently can create but not necessarily review whether that's actually doing behind the scenes all the secure ways or whatever. So that's an essential role in the company. Yeah, it's fantastic that everyone can build software until you put it into production and you have a leak. Yeah. Or that person leaves the company and people forget they built that software and it's just deprecating on its own.

6:32The other thing that seems to have changed is management. When you had 10 developers in your pod or six, you had a UX designer, you might have a pure graphic designer, you'd have a product manager, they rolled up. And then suddenly, we watched over the past three years, oh, hey, this is pretty good at summarizing what happened on the call. Oh, it is actually creating action items and it's telling us what to do next. Oh, and it's doing all the different stories in our Kanban board. Now, how do you think about product managers and management as the CEO and as the co-founder? Yeah, we... You fired them all, right?

7:13We don't have any PMs. Right. Did you ever or did you have... Never. You never did. Never did. It's a little bit of what you mentioned also before the True AI Impact started, which was ideal person in that role, can code, can understand the customer, can understand design. Of course, that's very hard to find. There's no truly that many people that are experts in all of those fields at the same time. So we optimize for profiles that are experts in at least one of those fields, but understand at least one other field really well. To your point, what we are seeing now, if you can do a little bit of all with AI, You can maybe step change from being an amateur to being an advanced level, maybe not an expert level.

7:56So suddenly you are not bottlenecked on all the other functions to do your work. In growth, phenomenal part. With growth engineering, a person can design experiments, ship an experiment. It's working and bringing it back. We also have the privilege where we are using a lot of our product ourselves. So to be able to do that, ultimately to help everybody else create voice agents, we ourselves need to create voice agents too. So we are seeing that also in the non-traditional functions, even in go-to-market. You need to be able to create a version of that if we are offering that to the customers too.

8:29And we do. We created our inbound AI SDR agent. In addition to the form that you fill on the website, you have an agent that you can call. And people, of course, can give all the information in a much easier and quicker way. But the second thing that happened is people also leave a lot more information so you can get connected to the right problem and right person a lot quicker. So we are seeing that kind of phenomenon all the time where actually using a lot of tooling makes you yourself better in your job overall and in 11 labs in our specific tooling that we are solving for customers. Yeah, it seems like the use case of calling on the phone and talking to a computer or previously going through voice jail, and it was incredibly arduous and painful and annoying.

9:17It made you just say operator and hit the zero button like as fast as possible. But now it seems to have turned a corner where talking to a human, I almost feel bad talking to a human where I'm like, I am so sorry, I'm wasting your time with this. And the AI is just so much more precise and the fidelity is so great that when you tell them what you're looking to do and you cut them off, you don't feel bad. You don't have to make small talk. Is that what you're seeing in your customer base in terms of the ability in real time to interrupt the agent, to interrupt the conversation and just move faster has made consumers and companies basically embrace the technology?

9:58Yeah, it's slowly becoming that you will be asking for a give me an AI agent effectively on the call. like AI operator. But we are seeing a transition where suddenly, and that's the biggest fuel of the recent growth for us is enterprises, sales team just doing incredible work. But then finally the product combines the reliability that's core with the orchestration for a lot of the AI models, but also the knowledge and the integrations to provide you the right experience. And yeah, I think it was a step change in the last 12 months and especially in the last six of how good that experience became where it's like this golden era for the consumers out there, customers and other customers is coming where you can actually open a website and call an agent and have the agent have information from your past interactions and deliver that help.

10:49And I think we'll see this kind of interesting phenomena combining your previous question and this where now, of course, you are reaching frequently when you have a problem and you're asking for help, but ultimately, A, the whole interface will change and morph depending on how you are operating with that interface, with voice helping you in the background find that information. It will shift from reactive to proactive to help you get that help before you potentially ask for it. And we are seeing those examples too. Seemed to me that speech to text had a major blocker. Again, in fidelity, 10 years ago, lawyers would put on Dragon Dictate, if you remember that terrible software, they get a headset.

11:28and it seemed like the big blocker was you felt like an idiot talking to a computer in an office right and so people who did it quietly in their office you know they kind of got away with it but now we see something very different the whisper in the office people very quietly talking to their computer giving it a prompt you know and talking to their agents and now there's a ring out you can press it. And I use a really cool product called Whisperflow. I don't know if they use 11 labs on the back end. They use us and a few others as well. And they are doing phenomenal work too. Whisperflow is just a tremendous product.

12:07And then I got a pedal. Does anybody here use a pedal on their computer? Raise your hand if you're a, there's one dork, two dorks. any others raise it high oh she's half dork okay so there's about three and a half dorks here next year this is going to be do you have a pedal i don't i have you considered a pedal i i should consider a pedal i love the devices that you can wear and i have the plod it's incredible pocket phenomenal like so good and especially in events like this i feel if you pre-preempted that you are recording, of course. But how incredible would it be that all the signal and the conversations that otherwise disappear, you maybe tap a few notes here and there to try to get signal afterwards.

12:53If you can just have that automatically fill your specific notes and make sure you do your follow-ups, phenomenal. All right, so let me make the case for the pedal. Okay. I have three pedals under the desk, and I think I'm trying to figure out what the company is. But with Whisperflow, you press down, it turns on, and you talk, and then you let it go. And one of the annoying parts of working with an LLM is typing, and you're kind of like exhausted when you're giving it the prompt, so you stop prompting. But if you're a professional bulls**t artist like me and a talker, this is like incredible because when I press the pedal down, I just give a stream of consciousness now.

13:35And it turns out what these LLMs actually do really well with is taking a massive stream of consciousness where you just keep talking and talking and talking. So I'll give it a one to two minute prompt. Then I let go. And it has changed everything. Everything. It's, you know, like the whole experience is changing so much. a similar version of what we see happen is, you know how you have a, you want to say a thought and then you're like, okay, I actually want to change and say something else. Now you have those two contexts combined and the experience you get us in answer is so much better. So we already see that as an experience, but even the previous example of like people are adjusting how they speak to AI versus how they speak to human.

14:20People are - How so? Yeah. How should you speak to the LLM? We saw Sergey Brin say, threaten it with bodily harm. It's a very effective technique if you haven't tried it. But what are the things that are different when you're talking to the LLM? A specific emotional example. We work with a lot of financial services companies, Revolut, Klarna, PagBank. And some of the frequent case, not in all of them, is, of course, how you remind people about payment or that you collect that from the people that aren't answering. And frequently people would naturally feel ashamed of telling the real situation.

15:00With AI, people are much more open to share what actually happened, give the information. And suddenly this emotional block of like in front of other human, I don't want to be able to say all of that, is very different. So that's different. Usually people are more snappy with AI voice agent. It's like quick responses. Yeah, you don't mind cutting it off. Exactly. So you can kind of go through to the point you want much quicker, which you needed to change a little bit of the interaction model too, which is working. But we'll work on the pedal and whether we should do an integration there. Let's talk a little bit about celebrities on the platform.

15:37You have some celebrities who are on there. You also have an issue with impersonation. I know this because somebody was like, oh my God, I love your bulldog videos. Many people know I'm a big fan of bulldogs. I currently have three. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. And they sent me a channel where somebody had created a bunch of dogs telling jokes and they made one. And I guess they were looking for a podcaster. So they used the This Week in Startups archive and Eleven Lab to create my voice and do this huge channel. And I contacted them and I said, oh my God, it's very flattering.

16:18How did you do this? This is like a year or two ago. And they said, oh, I used 11 labs. So I think I emailed you about it. I'm like, how do you protect against this? In advertising, in the law in the United States, I'm not sure about here in France. I'm sure they have 17 laws for this. We have one. You guys are great at regulations and laws. No offense. The French guy over here is like, oh, mon dieu, je cal. And the, that's my French angry developer. I cannot smoke in the Louvre. This is crazy.

16:57And it's super like interesting with this right to privacy. And I think you've got a quick education on this because you've had a couple people, I'm sure, write you a legal letter. What it basically means is you can't take somebody's voice and use it to, you know, do commerce in the world. You can use it for parity. There is fair use. I can do a Donald Trump impersonation up here if I like. We're going to take about 5 % of 11 lab stock. Is it okay with you to put them in Trump accounts? Sounds good. Okay. And for that, you have to come to the White House. Okay, thank you. Nasty guy. Wouldn't give 5%.

17:37Loves socialism, but not America. That's the problem with the Nordics. nasty, nasty socialism. Then I noticed when my guys wanted to clone my voice so that they could fix the ads where I mispronounce something or I do the wrong promo code, use the code JCal20. They were like, it's 25, dummy. And I'm like, okay, I have dyslexia. And then they redid it. And it was like, I'm sorry, you cannot clone Jason's voice. And then it's like, I have to go in there and do it. And you put a bunch of protections in there. So explain what's happening in that regard in terms of people's, you know, concerns around this.

18:15And then the other side, which is the opportunity, because I think you got Jamie Foxx and some other folks actually that you paid for their voices. Yeah. No, the voice is identity and IP. It's like, you know, when you speak a certain way, people recognize it, can feel that emotion. And, you know, to some extent, it could be a problem, could be opportunity before. I mean, as you did impersonation of the President Trump, it's, of course, similarly something that is possible even for human, not specifically AI. But for us, on the safeguard side, over last years, we took the role as we are leading another development, we also need to lead another of the safeguards.

19:01So that's a critical element, we do three things. One, trace everything that's generated so we can take action when needed. Two, now we moderate both on the voice and text level. So if you were to input something that would be commercial in nature or would try to scam someone that gets flagged, we can block it. And now three, because over the last years we've seen the development of those models more broadly, how can we create systems for the wider world so people can upload a sample and get information, whether it's AI or not, immediately. And we do it for 11 Labs, but we also do it for other open source models.

19:34The interesting part, given that it's such a good IP and part of your element, it opens up new opportunities. So we partnered with Matthew McConaughey on creating a world cap. All right, all right, all right. And across languages. And it's the first... I haven't gotten paid a lot of money for these independent films, but, oh, 11 Labs stock is juicy. Yum, yum. Could you do it in Spanish? It's a fugazia, fugazi. But the crazy thing with AI technology open is that now the voice can be carried not only in English, but also in Spanish and Italian and Portuguese. And you can still have exactly that element of emotions coming through.

20:14So that's kind of a good example there. But we've seen that with Masterclass. What do you pay these guys? What does it cost to get Matthew McConaughey? Is this like an eight-figure deal, seven-figure deal? You give them a little equity? Always depends. So like, you know, the masterclass, for example, is a good example where they worked with talent directly. And here you have previously a static content that you would learn from. Now you have interactive content. So you have Gordon Ramsay teaching you how to cook in the kitchen. He can scream at you if you're not doing - F***ing raw! Scallops are raw!

20:45So that is definitely - So they're doing characters now, or AI instances using 11 Labs so you can interact with them as part of your subscription. Exactly. But as a company, what we now do and this from the beginning, we created the marketplace where people can create their voice. We authenticate it, you can share it and you earn money. Today we paid back over$22 million back to the community of talent. Really? So those voiceover actors now who got paid as hourly workers, sometimes they get a little back end if they were doing a commercial or something. Now they can spend an hour reading, create an 11 Labs voice and then license it out?

21:25100%. Do they get to pick their price or you pick the price? Depends on the model. We do both. So you can either give it a default that lets us distribute that slightly more optimally or you can pick yours and the use case is going to be different. And like you said, opens up a set of incredible opportunities in a dynamic context in other languages. But maybe a last one on that, like voice is such a big part of identity and probably our most important work was actually working with people that lost their voice. due to ALS, due to throat cancer, and working on bringing that voice back. So he worked with congresswoman in the US, Jennifer Wexton, who lost it and wanted to continue to inspire others that you can do incredible work despite that and was the first speech delivered in Congress.

22:11Or more recently, I think this was my, the most heartwarming story. There was this woman that wanted to get married, lost her voice before she could get married. Oh, wow. And then they decided to redo the marriage together. Do the vows again? Do the vows. And you could see the whole family just for the first time hearing the vows. It was just, you could feel the emotions that you can see in any other way because the voice is such a connecting thing. Yeah, and you've done it for some iconic voices. My understanding is the estate of James Earl Jones. I'm not sure if they, did he pass? Is James Earl Jones alive?

22:50Can somebody ask? He passed, right? Yes. But before he passed, I think he did a deal with Disney. And he said, listen, for my family, I would like to license the Darth Vader voice for all time to Disney. They gave him some incredible deal. And then they were left with, well, how do we actually do this? Do we get a voice impersonator? But instead they went to you. Talk a little bit about that deal and how it went down and is that what they used recently you know in in some of the new films with darth vader there's a new darth maul series um where they have darth vader and did you power that i don't know what i can say about the new things but definitely the big use case that that big big completely new experience uh was in the gaming space where ah yes uh fortnite so epic games game fortnite launched darth vader which people and players could interact with live in partnership with the estate in partnership with disney so every player after reaching a certain stage could have a darth vader interact and help you solve the missions and we are seeing that kind of mode coming up more and more often of how you can effectively extend extend your likeness, your, like you said, publicity into interactive use cases, bring it across the world together.

24:10So that was exactly that model. And now we are working on, one of the public ones is Headspace. So Headspace has a great meditation. Yes, this is the second greatest meditation app right behind Calm. Which you are an investor of. Oh, I am? I didn't realize. You're right. I did invest in Calm. And it was a$4 million company. But Calm is incredible. I think their team... But anyway, you were working with the second place. Exactly. Not exactly the second place, but exactly to the working part. So they localized a lot of the content. And Cal, my thing is trying some of the interactive elements. Could you have a meditation lesson that's personalized to you, which we would love to bring to Mark.

24:51That would be amazing. And imagine just so many voices. David Sachs is defending Trump. Take a deep breath in. breathe out breathe in breathe out maybe you should license the voice to come I mean that would be interesting let's talk a little bit about being up against some of the greatest entrepreneurs ever who want to take your business from you specifically Dario and a propic Sam from open AI they want your business They've been pretty clear about it. And I think you have used the frontier models in your product, but you must be thinking, my Lord, am I enabling my own demise by partnering with them?

25:39And there's all these open source models. So how do you think about your partnerships with those type of frontier models and the fact that they want to kill your company? So on the first part, given we create a platform, we try to provide all our lamps out there so our customers can pick. Entropic, OpenAI, Open Source, Google Models. And being agnostic to a specific model is actually helpful because customers can make sure that they build a harness, build their agent orchestration, create a voice element of how that agent interacts with the world, how the marketing way interacts with the world, but they are not dependent on any model.

26:20So for us, that part is actually good because we can provide that to the customers. On the kind of the second big part of like, of course, the space is overlapping. Increasingly, models are platform, platform are application. Everything is becoming a little bit more fuzzy. For us, there's still a defining piece was focusing on that one layer of like, how does interaction look like? How does communication look like? And we've been able to out-compete them on voice models. both on text to speech, speech to text, on the turn-taking, on music. And here our research team is a set of magicians that are able to continuously do it time and time again.

27:03And I think part of the reason is it's on the research side. It's the architecture that matters, not the scale. You really need to change how the model operates. Two, you need very specific data that there's, of course, There's a wide set of data out there, but it's unlabeled data and where we spend a lot of time. So we build an internal team of over 1 ,000 contractors that label all those audio assets to make them good. So that's on the research side. And then as we think about the rest of product stack, we want to create a fully verticalized solution for that communication angle. The product understanding the right workflow in financial services is very different to healthcare, very different to telcos.