ElevenLabs grew from 10 people to 400 in 3 years : Victoria Weller, Operations at ElevenLabs

0:00Victoria Weller:Hello and welcome to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. This episode is sponsored by SurrealDB, the multimodal database for AI agents. Omni, the AI analytics platform trusted by growing companies like Perplexity and Cibesia and VentureComet, the platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Thank you for joining me. Please like, comment and subscribe.

0:33Victoria Weller:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal, Anastasia Johnson. Today I'm joined by Victoria. Victoria is at Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs famously got rid of job titles. So you are in operations. But can you tell me exactly what it is that you do? I can. And in fact, everyone at the company can tell you exactly what they do. This is one of the misconceptions that has come out as part of this. when people hear that we got rid of titles, sometimes they think we got rid of roles altogether. There were many jokes around the CEO is now also the janitor. But that's not, in fact, what happened.

1:09So we have very clear structure around this is the role and each person has their responsibilities that they're jumping into. We also have levels. We have a reporting structure. Each person has a manager. There are managers. So it's not chaos that broke out as a result of it. And the freedom that we got as part of getting rid of job titles is a lot of flexibility around changing lanes of roles, going to where the need of the business is at this current point. And given the growth and trajectory of 11 Labs, that changes a lot. As for your question of what my role is, I oversee operations, which includes talent acquisition.

1:51It includes HR, which we call people. It includes customer support and a team called company operations. And the company operations team is heavily involved in defining the operating infrastructure of Eleven Labs. So things like how do we do planning? How do we do our reviews? What do our offsites look like? And seeing the operating system of what makes a remote first hybrid in office global scale to the hyperscaling company work well amazing you've been at 11 labs for nearly three years right which is like three years yeah almost as long as it's existed uh you started

2:31Victoria Weller:as chief of staff and you've been doing kind of operations for two years given that you know you the idea of the dropping of the drop titles was to allow you to be flexible and to go where the demand has has been the most how has your job changed over the last two years as the company has gone from 10 and 20 people to hundreds. I joined almost three years ago. We were 10 people at the time. Now we're at 400 and haven't stopped scaling. We want to be at 900 and above by the end of the year, not just by projecting the headcount growth and saying this is how fast we're scaling, but actually looking at what are the products we want to build, what are the markets we want to conquer, and who do we need to make that happen as lean and performant as possible.

3:13and we have so much on the agenda that we need 900 plus people by the end of 2026 to make that happen. So on the talent acquisition side of operations there will be a lot going on. The role that has changed for me is vastly different. It's almost like I have a different role every week or month. It depends a lot on what the burning fires are at the company. I spend a lot of time parachuting in to try and figure out like what are our growth pains right now and how do we make those go away. A continuous example is hiring just by the fact that we were doubling headcount every six months for the first three years.

3:57There's so much to figure out in terms of how do we identify that talent, bring that in and ensure that they are at the top level that we want to hire. and even in the talent realm it's changed a lot. When I first joined, 11labs was a very niche name or it wasn't a very well-known name and people, AI evangelists knew about 11labs and got excited about the product and those were the few inbounds that we had. We had to rely a lot on the network, our networks sourcing, reaching out and convincing people to join this tiny startup and over time with 11lab success it became a bigger name in the industry there was less time spent on convincing people that we were onto something great and more time spent on actually sifting through inbound applications and at this point now also having announced our 11 billion dollar round we keep scaling up the inbound requests our employer brand and from that perspective the hiring side has changed tremendously over the last three years.

5:08Victoria Weller:And what attracted you about the company? You know your background was Palantir, you were there for a number of years before that you were like a research assistant and you kind of come from what you'd call like a high pedigree. At the time you said there were like 10 people, it was very early in terms of both 11 labs but also the AI wave. What about the company attracted you to it? I really wanted to join a company with high velocity and high pressure. I felt parts of that at Palantir and that's what excited me most about my time there but it was going in ebbs and flows and as I reflected I thought that joining a very early stage company that's where the velocity and way of working is most aligned with how I like to operate and someone that gets bored quite easily and so I was very keen to join something that's at early stages with a path to success.

6:01I knew Matty from Palantir and knew that he was leaving to start Eleven Labs. And so they were on my radar very early on. And I also could see that with the initial launch of the product, the adoption was just on a different scale. And so I was very lucky enough to be aware of Eleven Labs and was able to reach out to Matty and say, hey, I'll come on board and help with whatever it takes. and my goal of landing somewhere with high pressure and high velocity has definitely come true even three years later. I haven't gotten close to being bored on any of the projects. It's still operating super quickly and we're growing the company super fast.

6:45Our product scope is increasing and so it's really the most high velocity, high impact place that I can imagine.

6:54Victoria Weller:And it's interesting that a lot of the team is ex-Palantir. Palantir, I think, has got a reputation for being high intensity, very high talent bar. But I've met a lot of people from Palantir. I've met a lot of people from Eleven Labs. Everybody from Eleven Labs is so nice. There's something about the culture of Eleven Labs, which is super interesting, that you don't often get, I would say, at these crazy growth startups. What about the culture of Eleven Labs? What about Eleven Labs has developed this really unique culture, which is like very kind, collaborative, but also incredibly intense? I'm super happy you picked up on that.

7:31And so it's something that I'm really proud of. It's been the case since before I joined. So I joined, my first week was at our company Offsite. We went to Barcelona. I knew about the stats of the product, that the launch in Beta was taking off. how incredible it was what the early team had built with such few hands and such high impact and from that perspective I was expecting and from that perspective I was expecting to come in and meet a bunch of sharky very like ambitious quick but like optimized individuals yeah and the thing that surprised me most at that offside was the humility and kindness of the individuals almost detached or unassociated with that huge success always saying oh there's more to build and that is something that's prevailed the reason we are able to balance that super high ambition and impact with individuals that are also kind and humble is that we have that as one of our core values at the company and screen very heavily for ego in the interview processes.

8:47And in the recruiter prescreen, one of the main criteria to check for is being humble and hands-on. Any flags of ego are immediately sifted out and filtered out. And we want to hire only the people that care about getting the thing done, being all in, running towards the fire, letting the outcome shine, making sure that the product is at its best, much more than making the individual shine or getting the glory for the work that you've done. And the way that that comes up in the day to day is that when someone gets a shout out, the first thing that they do, no matter who gets the glory, is that they pass that on to everyone else that they've worked with.

9:33And when there's something that goes wrong, there are multiple people that put their hands up and say, I could have done a better job here. And that is exactly the environment in which I love to operate. It's also the environment in which politics don't take overhand and where the best outcomes really are produced, because that's the part that we all care about, the outcomes.

10:01Victoria Weller:That's interesting. So I guess it's the lack of ego, the humility, the teamwork, that good kindness is ultimately rooted in outcomes. And you think that's the best way to build a high performing team is not hyper competitive cutthroat, but actually humble and collaborative. Yes, I think we are hyper competitive and cutthroat externally. We really want to win. We are an ambitious bunch and want to be the best, ship the best product, have excellence everywhere, when the markets do it all. But when it comes to collaboration and working in a team, we are very humble, open minded, want to make sure that we hear the best perspectives to land on the best possible solution, knowing that that could come from anyone.

10:46And keeping that in mind is also somewhere where the no titles helps because there's no hierarchy and no necessary person that will overrule someone else or is right. But anyone can come up with the best ideas and we want the best ideas to win.

11:05Victoria Weller:Is it hard to find people who are both incredibly capable, execution focused and driven, who are not also high ego or overly competitive internally? Yes, it's really hard to find the combination of highly ambitious and low ego and it's hard enough finding the top performers and then we need to unfortunately filter out the high performers that come with a high ego. The way that we do this more productively is trying to allow for self-filtering and so are very explicit on our company values and the way that we operate even on the careers page and those that apply for a role without a title almost self-filter as that type of person that wants to come in for the specific role for the impact rather than overseeing a team and having power so to speak and that spares us a lot of the candidates that wouldn't fit in perfectly very much at the top of funnel and then we need to do a lot of work throughout the funnel to to filter them out and sometimes it's heartbreaking to say like this person would be perfect but culturally they shift something that we don't want to absorb.

12:20That's really interesting and I guess that's like an outcome

12:23Victoria Weller:of the decision that you made to get rid of job titles. I think you did that about a year and a half ago. What other outcomes kind of arose as a result of getting rid of job titles? What impacts did you see? It's a decision that to date I do not regret. I think it's unlocked so much in terms of agility, growth, clarity that has been absolutely worth it, even though at the time of rolling it out, it was one of the more polarizing decisions. The downside I've seen is that it's hard to explain or kind of represent the tenure or responsibility level of a role that we're hiring for and there are cases in which we are looking for someone to oversee a whole area of responsibility and without putting the word head of in there it's just harder to make that stand out and immediately clear and the way that we have to do a lot of work to overcome that so rather than posting a head of xyz role we need to make that clear in the job description we need to make that clear at the outreach in the way that in the sourcing that we do the types of candidates that we reach out to and the shortcut would definitely be adding the job title back in there to attract the right talent do you think that you'll get to a size or a scale where you'll think about bringing it back i could see that happening at some point um it is not something that is on the agenda for the moment but as we are working towards doubling more and more there could be a few cases made for this.

14:04Victoria Weller:Lee, you've been on this absolutely amazing journey from 10 people to 400 and you're going to be at 900 by the end of the year. In the same time period, you've gone from a small scrappy startup valued in the millions now being valued at 11 billion. I'm curious to hear what's been your personal journey. What has been maybe the highest moment of your own career at 11 Labs so far? Something that I have to repeatedly learn is how to scale myself. I came in as a purely IC role, picking up and executing on things that fell off of Mattie's plate. The first example of that was our SOC 2 compliance. There was no one that had time for it, but it was blocking enterprise deals.

14:44I had never dealt with compliance before and loved just jumping in, figuring it out, and individually, completely by myself, running our SOC 2 compliance program. as time continues and that's something that I also really enjoy that I see hands-on execution work it's somewhere that I thrive it's something that still is a very big part of my day-to-day but over the years I needed to figure out a way to not do that for everything to hire what there's a repeat process that just needs to be run or build functions and to scale up our talent acquisition which in no way could be done by a single person so that is that was my biggest challenge and it continues to be my biggest challenge of architecting how operations can continue scaling with the way that we um are growing my biggest did you mean like also my

15:39Victoria Weller:biggest highlights yeah i guess i you know is there a moment that stands out over the last three years where it's like a real personal high maybe it was you know getting the compliance over the line and maybe it was you know maybe it was like evaluation whatever it was but a moment where you felt like wow this is it I'm crushing it I love this I've had so many of those moments the challenge is almost to lean into them when they happen and say like let's take a step back and see how big this thing is that we've achieved and something that we all need to practice because we're so focused on the next thing so whenever we achieve a milestone our eyes immediately go to the next milestone that we start sprinting towards together as a part of getting better at that my my biggest examples are more recent and we hosted the 11 labs summit in london last week and walking into that space seeing the stage set up um it was a goosebumps moment for me where i like saw and felt how much success we've had while still keeping of course the eyes on on the future knowing that there's so much more to build yeah i mean that was an amazing event and it felt i don't know how companies like yours like transform a space into that it felt like an 11 labs space right in a way that it didn't feel like you were at a venue it was a it was amazing um what about low point like at what point have you felt in the last three years like oh my goodness this is not working i can't get through this this is terrible also very many very many points like that um let's see at the at the risk of always going to the hiring as my prime example but it's just so top of mind throughout this process there have been times where it's like repeatedly difficult to find enough talent um at the level and as you say in the combination with low ego where it is um just a really high pressure on the talent team to find those individuals and something that we need to put so much emphasis on and being behind on hiring targets is one of the hardest things to grapple with because of the impact that it has for the scaling of the business every person that we hire too late means that we put our goals in jeopardy and our biggest goal is winning the market and establishing ourselves as a generational company and we acknowledge that the time window for that is limited and so we need to um do everything as soon as possible and for that we need to bring in the people before that that time yeah i can imagine it's almost like a it's like a much more intense version like a sales target because it's you still got that target you've still got to hit it but if you don't hit it you become the bottleneck of the business which um yeah i imagine that's a lot of pressure on your shoulders definitely and the sales targets are made based on the hiring targets or vice versa.

18:31And so it's all interconnected. And if you don't hire enough of the supporting functions, if there are not enough commercial counsel to support the account executives that you bring in, the entire system is at jeopardy. So the talent acquisition is really like the absolute core part of the scaling company.

18:49Victoria Weller:And how do you balance that then? How do you balance, you know, trying to move quickly, scale fast with trying to maintain that sort of like cultural integrity that you spent so so long building it's a matter of reinventing ourselves repeatedly where we've set up our systems and processes for to be in line with the current maturity but keeping in mind that that won't necessarily be what is appropriate in the next time around a good example here is our end of year reviews it was a super scrappy process the first time around just the Google Docs set up for each individual and you dropped some notes in there and then spoke about it.

19:26Last December, we had to run this for 300 employees and so needed a more complex infrastructure. But at the end of the day, I still had a Google sheet with everyone's names and their compensation. And that's something that we won't be able to do at a thousand employees. So a core piece is staying honest about what is the scale that we're at and what is appropriate for this level of maturity and striking the balance between we are still scrappy and we want to find a solution that fits exactly the problem that we have. We don't want to be ahead and over-engineer the solutions and processes. We don't want to become corporate, but we also need to be honest about what it takes to support 900 employees.

20:09Victoria Weller:Yeah, it's going to be amazing when you get to that point and you can look back on the year and you can just see the hundreds and hundreds of people that you've kind of brought on and on board. And it's going to be phenomenal. I want to finish on your favorite thing about 11labs. You have built already a generational company, probably the fastest decacorn in Europe of all time, scaling to hundreds of millions of revenue, building amazing technology. What's your personal favorite thing about 11labs? You make it sound like we're done. Well, you've got it. It's actually really nice to hear. the easy answer but the most obvious and still most true one is the people I love the people at Eleven Labs I love the fact that we were able to hire so many high impact and low ego people that make it really fun to work with each other because it feels like a unity around a shared goal and a goal that we're continuously crushing so that in combination is just highly rewarding Amazing, how big do you think 11love can get in terms of valuation valuation revenue what do you think whatever our next goal is 11 squared so 121 billion valuation is what we have our eyes on now amazing i love it oh look victoria thank you so much you guys are absolutely crushing i love speaking to the 11 loves team because it's uh yeah they're always just like yeah so focused such great executors so um thank you for taking the time thank you seb

21:41Thank you.