An interview with Luke Harries, Growth / Engineering at ElevenLabs

0:00Luke Harries:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling New Retreat presented by DLATO. Today I'm joined by Luke Harries of Eleven Labs Growth. Tell us, where are we? Why are we here? What's going on? Yes, we're at the Eleven Labs Summit here in East London. It's a fantastic event with over a thousand people here, top tech execs, startups, people across the ecosystem, investors. So yeah, really lucky time you're here. I'm thrilled to be here. It's been amazing. Everybody is here, which is amazing. the first thing I want to ask about is your role what is it? it's growth of course got with a job title got a year and a half, two years ago so you are growth, what does that mean?

0:40yeah so I lead two main things the first is Brooklyn Marketing the Acroftware Company and the second is the product and engineering for the creative platform and ultimately I'm responsible for two new methods which is self-serve revenue and enterprise boat Amazing.

0:58Luke Harries:That's super interesting because it's like, just to buy information to Z. Eleven Labs sort of has two businesses inside one business. After creating a business, that was like a dust big thing. That was like, oh, your revenue was coming from. And then you've got this enterprise piece, which is just absolutely fly. Yeah. And you're still somehow scattering both. Now, we actually view it as there's three businesses. So we have 11 API, which is just exposing incredible models of research that are researchally built for developers. The second one is 11 Creative, which is our platform for creators and marketers to make content with our own speech models, but also the best image and video models.

1:41And the third is 11 Agents. And what's really interesting is the company started research first, and we just put models out into the world and we started to see where this pool was. And we really initially saw it first in creators, but where we now really are looking and doubling now is 11 agents. And that very quickly has been pulled up into the enterprise. So we just had the CEO of Poana speaking about it earlier, the Deutsche Telefon. So yeah, self-serve enterprise across three businesses.

2:10Luke Harries:It's amazing. And when you look at the exponential growth of enterprise, where's that growth coming? And what kind of channels are you utilizing to grow the revenue as quick as you are? Yeah, so on the enterprise growth, and this is a bit where we literally went from zero at the start of last year of any enterprise marketing. And then Sam, he leads all our enterprise marketing to put the role of trying to build this business. And we went from zero in spend at the start of last year to about 10 billion at the end of last year. And if we do it right, we'd be probably about over 100 million in spend at the end of this year.

2:50All are ROI positive. But the other big bit for Enterprise is there's the marketing side. But we have incredible go-to-market hosts who are also doing our own outbound and meeting few past events like this. So, yeah. And then the other big thing is just like Enterprises know each other. The execs will know each other. When you get to a successful deployment, we plan it. Then you get introduced to others and so forth.

3:14Luke Harries:and you're you're in there like it feels like planner level you're you're in the circle very very quickly it seems to be doing really well yeah it's been a lot fun i think we had an early ride to win because we were the ones who actually made the voice models for examiner research but then there's been so much hard work by joseph on or see he leads 11 agents to make this into like a full enterprise platform which is reliable with the integrations your frustration and how how's that journey or transition been because the gtm for creator business vastly different and a whole different world to the enterprise how did you get that set up i was a process i can say right we're going to run it a b2b enterprise detail monster and get that set up nothing to scanning to millions of people yeah so we always view it that each of those three businesses aki agents creative yeah that we want to really help these self-serving creating.

4:11And so it started with just 11 agents just putting the model and the product and the platform out into the world, enabling users to sign up, seeing what they're using, seeing what ResNet. We then do something called PQL and MQL scoring. So when you sign up, we work out who are the companies who are likely to fit may want to work with our FTE deployment team. But then really we go, and this was led by the Enterprise and B2B marketing team, like channel by channel, how do we get every channel fantastic and perfect? Whether it's incredible events like this, whether it's even something as similar as webinars, like how do you make world-rest webinars which are getting incredible people to turn off, how to engage and show with the platform.

4:55Luke Harries:Amazing. And you seem to be doing more and more interesting things in the growth and marketing world with review on the Audi F1 stuff. As you look forward, you have 330 million ARR today, looking towards 500 million ARR. What new or exciting channels or things are you going to be doing to try and get you there? Yeah, I think that I mentioned, you mentioned the Aldi-Revelu-F1T partnership, which we were really excited by. And the really cool thing as well, which we've been learning recently about in-scries marketing is it takes longer and it's often multi-channel. and so what you have to do is we have to zoom out we choose a certain percentage of our enterprise marketing budget so say 20 and we're like how can we spend this in the smartest way which can reach these like executive buyers and it enables you to do really cool stuff like the uh audi revoluted f1 in varnish here there's maybe more sports teams on the horizon would be really cool to double down on just the other big thing though is yes it's enterprise yes it's executives yes you need to build trust but how can we still do that in a way which is interesting and build that bottom-up awareness and so uh one explicit thing we're going to do this year is stunts we're still ideating them i think rap does this really well with their kevin from the office which like you build a cultural moment maybe you're piggybacking on something like super bowl but uh yeah we want to get better at stuff that's super exciting i will keep an eye out for that um i want to talk about your own personal career you studied by pre-meds yes you then went you're a yc batch founder you're now doing growth at 11 ads how's the journey and transition been from all of those from like very you know you know academic almost a research and stuff yeah to finally finally your own business greatly wise to now joining a proper sheet of 11 labs yeah yeah it's been a lot of fun my parents are still very confused what's going on there's uh i think my mom's just about stopped asking me to go back to be a doctor.

7:01And I would say probably a pivotal thing I did was when I was 21, I did an hackathon. And this was with a friend who's Polish. And we turned up and we had been holding since I was a kid. And we won this like tiny prize, the Microsoft Prize at this gay rich hackathon. And I just got to know the Microsoft team through that. And then that went to my job at Microsoft. And the other person who I did this hackathon with was Massey. and so Massey and I stayed in touch this was now eight years ago and then he phoned me up early into the 11 hour journey and said do you want to join and work out this growth stuff so I think the meta thing is just like go to the events where the best people are, build and tinder and do your own projects and then yeah I just really like to find a engineering mindset whether it's growth or building products

7:53Luke Harries:and what will even make that engineering mindset powerful or different than the traditional mindset being brought? Yeah, the big difference is it's about building growth systems. So the question and the litmus test I always use is if you take a week off, are you still getting new users and new leads? If the answer is no, you're not able to grow systems. And so what a growth system is, is you have the actual assistant. This could be code, could be NASM flows, it could be checklist, it could even be the other four contractors. you then have the model of it of like how you think it actually works and then the instrumentation into a dashboard and then you have a goal and what we constantly think about as level lads is you build the systems let's say webinars and and then you're like okay currently we're only getting are you greeting this book to month for the webinars let's set a ridiculous gap let's go to 500 readings books and then you're like well okay what's our model okay it's number of webinars number of attendees, quality.

8:55That's our first guess. And the test is there to go. But then you're like, okay, how can I like really push towards this goal? How can I get, well, first of all, we don't even have 500 people showing up. So we need more attendees. Then you're like, okay, now we're kind of maybe reached out to English, people in England. Let's do webinars in here and in the US. So that's just an example, but it's always how do you push against the goal as quick as possible? Then what are the bottlenecks you need to build through to scale that up? And if you want a funky side though, to be, I actually ran this experiment with webinars.

9:29And I was like, well, at some point, there's probably just not enough people in the company to actually do these webinars. So do you still have having like AI avatars doing these webinars?

9:38Luke Harries:You're a great customer. They use our horses. We were just talking about how good for the first time is building the category leaders in AR. and like 11 labs is one it's a business another back there i started some journey uh it's amazing and i want to ask one more question everyone i meet at 11 labs has a certain something about them where it's like amazing executors incredibly hard working they're like really a nice normal kind people it's like it's quite unusual feels like an unusual culture for 10 i think it really comes from maxi he was like i literally loves him he's a lovely guy i want to get that in the inside scoop like what is the culture like and how do you ban ex this insane ability to execute with giku while being what seems like nice and like not kathar and i guess and then what's the culture like inside yeah i think it ultimately comes down to iraq and so there's two or probably three really big cultural tenets for a little girl the first is um what we call like excellence everywhere and the sign of this we look for is like do they have really great through for work have they shipped their own product on mobile have they done the newsletter have they done that it could be something at work it could be something outside but we want to dive into that work asset and be like wow this is incredible the second one is low ego and so actually we have a culture stage in the interview where we're explicitly looking like is this person willing to adapt are they willing to recognize where they're wrong will they work great in the team and and then the third one is just like hard work which is we say to everyone at the start like we want to be like an olympic style team we want the very best you know if you don't want to do the olympics that's fine and you want to do casual tennis that's fine but we want people who are like full in we want to push you want to be good at this real push and then yeah this lab is right out to natty be why make sure at the final stage of firing of us i think that's yeah when you said low e-day.

11:39Luke Harries:I was like, that is the thing that everyone I've met from 11 labs. That's the thing. They're at it, how successful and amazing they are. There's like no ego there. So I didn't, that's super interesting. Well, Luke, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. You guys are killing it and keep doing it.