20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski

25:08This is like the time you should really focus on getting the product and kind of all of that as a distraction to large extent. Like, you know, the first time we launched that that kind of happened, we started getting so much of that. And I'm sure I did the mistake then of like picking up a lot of those and doing more events than we should wear like the best course of action would have been to just spend even more time with users and then early enterprises started getting interested so more of enterprises. I think on the investor side, I think you want to line up investors. You do want to tell them like, okay, I'm not racing now.

25:38I'm going to reconsider whether we need more capital and Q3 or Q2, whatever is the time period of time. And then when you actually need the money, then it's the best time to actually reengage with them. But I would not, I think it's a waste of time to kind of be in this like continuous fundraising most. It's you know, destructive. You need to have conversation. It's not useful. Yeah. You choose three that you'd like to have that you engage with in between cycles. Or do you not even do that? You just say, Hey, I'm heads down on building. I'll come to you and I'm ready. Today less at the time we do have a few investors that we think would be valuable that we might not have today in the space.

26:15Through the time we would have few investors that we wouldn't try to proactively reach out. but if they reached out through any of the conversations, we would try to engage. But the engagement there wouldn't be like, hey, we might be racing. It would be much more of like, hey, can you help me with introduction to X? Hey, can you help me with this hiring problem? And this has worked tremendously well through the work where the investors are genuinely keen to help if you find the right person and you have a very clear problem and you don't try to like overuse their time too. Like you come with one, two things that are concrete, useful.

26:47and then they know as well that if you are growing as a company, it's good for them to show the help too. So we've done that. It's also a good litmus test to see if they genuinely are interested in being there, or if it's just platitudes of niceness. Oh yeah. 100 % totally agree with you. Before, it's kind of the second thing where you do get the interest from investors. I think this is the best time to actually test whether they can be helpful. And before you accept any time sheet and money, it's like, now can you help me with angels that you wonder on CUP table? Do you want the interaction there?

27:18That's the best time. Any advice on angel selection for founders in the early days? I think the way we approach this is like, do they have domain expertise that we don't have? That's one category. Second, can they help us validate ourselves in specific circles we might not have access to? So like if you are an AI founder, it's maybe valuable to have set of AI founders in there. So you are part of the same events, the same same same same conversations. And then of course the in our case it was can we have some of the go -to -market expertise where we we had a lot of self -serve Some parliamentary experience, but the sales led how can we bring that in place as well?

27:52You mentioned starting with the author suddenly it was going well And you were seeing this great grounds well and great adoption and this is kind of January to June 23 I believe and then in June 23 you raised like $19 million from Brian Kim and Andreessen and then that and Daniel from I can't remember what it's called, MDFG. Yeah, NFDG. It's not Friedman Daniel Gross. Yeah, I can FDG. Wonderful. And that was quite a shock, because it wasn't a London fund. It wasn't in Nice. It wasn't in Excel. How did that round come to be? Yeah, the NFDG. Now I feel like it's a good name, but I was pitching that on changing that to like a different name for a while.

28:29Maybe now it's not possible anymore, but the, so it was like the interest started around kind of March 2023. We had a lot of the investors that were in a close conversation in the past like we approached us. We effectively would be a little bit more in the waiting moment. Like let's see how we get through and let's optimize for the partners that we truly want. And what we truly wanted was a combination of making sure that people in globally NSF trust and know that we have arrived, like we are a company that can be trusted is building something ambitious. And then of course people that we would admire to be able to work with that created something special.

29:06And that was definitely in that category. In the latter category. And it was a very fun thing because he approached us. Does he just DM me? How does he just approach you? He emailed us. But then I met him here in London. He flew in. And it was like a weird setup where he emailed me, but it wasn't clear where it all happened. It happened another last time. And then I see him in London in one of the hotels where he was staying. And the first thing he was saying was, which is the only investor ever to do that was, so I tested your APIs. And this This thing doesn't work. This works. Voice here wasn't good.

29:37Stability wasn't very clear parameter. So he's the only person that tested our APIs, decided that it was actually valuable what we are doing, gave me feedback on what we should change, and then told me, like, and I'm keen to invest, which of course triggered a conversation of what's the vision, what we are after. And what's special about Natt is that you can tell him very little and he kind of has this beautiful ability of in filling all the context around it, comparing that to any of the past experiences and bringing any of those experiences that then might be relevant to you, but he gets it immediately.

30:07From the first conversation, he knew kind of exactly what we are after and challenged us with the right questions from the start. And then he moved very quickly. He has very keen to partner with us. We are keen to partner with him. We are trying not to show it too much, but we were. And then at the same time, we know that Nat was in Nat and Anja where more perceived as the angels while we admired them from their GitHub and Summer and Days. that was still like an angel category for many of the externals. So we knew this is our chance to bring a huge investor to actually position us as a top company.

30:42And we spoke with all the classic tier one funds and A16Z was just one of the more actual funds in London. We spoke with few funds in London, yes. And then Brian flew to London. And Brian flew to London. So Brian, I mean, A16Z was phenomenal. They did exactly what we spoke about, which was they've shown us that they cared before they invested. They introduced us to incredible people, to some celebrities to work on the voice licensing. So they were like on it for two weeks prior, or like week prior, already to help out in any way they could, and then Brian flew to London, met with us, and then we signed preliminary time sheet.

31:19It was interesting. You flew in, we're negotiating. I also my phone called to Piot, to co -found us like, hey, what about this terms? Can we accept this? And Piot would give guidance, So what do we, where is the hard lie? What do we can do? And then on speaker we would sign together and find less. Do you think speed really is a differentiator as an investor in winning? Oh yeah, speed is like for us, even from investor, from product perspective, it's like you need to, especially now, the speed of execution, speed of investing is the only thing you have. This is what pisses me off. I'm happy in that world.

31:49I can move supremely fast and invest a lot of money. But what I find more and more with founders is they want to run a road show and they want to do a 10 -day process meeting investors and then have another week to decide which time she'd say they want to take. I'm willing to give you a time sheet tonight, save 17 days, but it's more and more common that founders actually want to run road shows. How do you think about that? A lot of great companies get built on 11 laps so I get to be in the conversations now more frequently where they would race money from our investors. Recently we had a company race a Series A that has built a healthcare voice bot which would effectively help patients calm them through the conversations in an incredible, incredible way.

32:30Then there's another company building for healthcare customer support. So quite a few. And now I'm in the conversations of them racing the money, which is an interesting one. And then usually it's clear that some of the people don't know fully what they are actually optimizing for. And it's good to talk about it for our day optimizing for devaluation, our day optimizing for delusion, our day optimizing for the right. brand name to help them out? Is it the network of people that this band name has? Is it the specific partner? Is it something something different? And I think it's like pretty distributed.

32:58So when I speak usually with founders or our investors as me to speak with the founders, it's usually that question, like, what is it actually that you that you care about for the thing? What do you miss? And then it's, pronsifies pretty quickly whether, you know, they are going after just the road showed is there to bump it up because they think the value that the the time she they got is just not valuable. Or is it that they actually want someone else, but they don't want to, they want to keep the optionality of having the first one while while running the process. I'm a romantic. I hate this idea of a roadshow where it's like, I'm going to meet everyone and then I'm going to compare term sheets and then I'm going to decide it's like, what happened to the partnership?

33:31Well, but it's, you know, the truth is the other way is true where a lot of the investors want to give the term sheet, but that is before any show of partnerships. So how do you know that this is a good partner? How do you know what idea they are giving you good terms, especially your first time founder, you never run this, you don't know how much you are valued, you need to have some relative comparison and this can happen for conversations of other companies, other founders, or comparing yourself to other companies in the field or running some form of a process. Roadshow probably sounds pretty bad because it sounds like a lot.

34:01You probably, like the way we approach fundraising was always, especially in the early days, like Q, field investors we really care about and first speak with maybe one or two that maybe are into priority so we understand whether the messaging that we want to put across makes sense. If it does, move straight to the top ones. How do you feel about exploding term sheets? I don't like them, but we got a few. We had a few. Do you understand them? At the time I didn't, but I do. It's like, I don't like them still, but I won't name the people. But so one example was a, let's say, a smaller font. They felt that if they get us the term sheet, we'll use that to bump other term sheets.

34:39Very often happens. And that does happen. So I got it. It was like, you know, and they came from the approach of like it would go so high they won't be able to invest and they didn't want to be part of that. So that happened very often being an investor being the first time she's the worst because you're used as the stalking horse where they then go, hi, I've got a term sheet, I've got a term sheet from a great fund, they never name the fund and you get no credit for being the first and then you're just trampled on by everyone else's culture. That's what I don't like funders that are trying to do that too much.

35:07Like if they are trying to get the first time sheet to bomb the other ones, I think it's a wrong approach. Okay, if it's like order of magnitude it off, it's probably wrong. It's like 5x. Yes, but if it's like plus minus 20%, that's like a wrong optimization. There's just so much more value that investors, partners can give than the money itself that I think should be optimized for. You've got Andreessen introducing users to the laboratories and you've got Nathand Daniel to the brightest minds in AI who are querying APIs that no one else does. The Americans just playing a different game to the European VCs.

35:39We love our partners. I mean, we have, I'm, I'm facing teams so, so incredible. The network, I mean, now, Sekhaya with Andrew is just another level to iconic team. It also crazy help. NEA 2 is just like bringing it all to us. They are all US. So I think they are playing a different game. I think the, you know, they, they are all from our experience so far. A lot more keen to take the risk. You know, even our conversations are always like, how do we bet bigger, rather than like optimize for the negatives? The one check I always try to do with Piotr for any of the partners that we bring beyond the capital network brand is always for the person you partner with or the person you partner with how will they behave if it's not going well.

36:20So we usually try to get any of the back references for how the they behave the company was was failing. All of the ones that we had are in a very positive like they actually were really on the on the side of the funder helpful when it was not going well even more so than when it was going well. And I was doing the same check with some of the checks with other companies and maybe just as I'm getting used to that, they can know a new kind of the set of companies that went up and down the so high. But in some of the investors we spoke in Europe, that checker didn't yell at the good results. I have one with Brian Kim that didn't go well and I have to say Brian was the best.

36:55He was the lead investor in the round and he got the money back for everyone and that's right. And he really put in the work to do it well and to it quickly. I was really impressed with him in that way. No, exactly. It's, it's, it's, Brian, yeah, Brian, we also won an hour checks, came up strongly, Jennifer too. It's sick. All of them, it's just a crazy hoe. Okay. $19 million, Dush in the account. Most people suddenly then go on a hiring spree and not two people hiring spree, but like a proper hiring spree. But you favor very small teams. You've said this to me before, but Luke said it to me. Why do you favor really small teams?

37:33I think the first piece is that more people frequently doesn't fix the problem. It's like, you don't need that many people to do something special. That's the first thing. Second is by keeping an asset organization today, we are 250 people, but really, it's more like 20 teams going to market of like five to 10 people that are just executing on specific project where they have higher ownership. They can move extremely quickly. They see the result in iterative reality the out quicker to improve that. And I think this just works in such a beautiful, beautiful way. Of course, there are other challenges with this, but those 20 teams organized by function or by project a little bit depends in the product by like a product area.

38:12So we have a team working on our studio interface team that will be responsible for all the core experience when you log in. Team responsible for the entire voice agent suite and with Tendout there's a team working on some of the more enterprise components and other team working on some of the self -serve elements. So all of the teams will be organized there on the product area. And then the other parts, we try to chart it pretty quickly. So we will have a separate team for talent, of course, the team for people. And they will have a high degree of independence when they actually execute which helps.

38:44You mentioned 250 that. It's small given the size of company in many ways, but it's also still 250 people. When was the company culture the worst? And what did you learn from that. You know, there was like moments where I could feel this kind of tension between the Goat to Market research engineering. And this is like a specific story where in 2023, late 2023, so we did a text to speech, we then did voices, we could recreate a voice, then we create like a basic way for speech to text internally. So we had all the components that we originally were speaking about to create dubbing. And we haven't done dubbing yet publicly.

39:19And we gave all the components to some of our customers. So they could use text to speech, devices. And there was like a lot of pressure that like, it's a valuable technology we can give to two our enterprise clients. One of the enterprise clients, we told them that we are planning to launch our dabbing solution combining those components later in that month. And they took the components and released dabbing two weeks before we did. And that was one of like the low moments for me, for my co -founder, for the entire team. because dubbing was our story. We told that to everyone, we knew that this is the thing.

39:53We want to solve first. We had all the components to be able to do it. We're just waiting to optimize it to make it perfect. And then suddenly this partner released it and got all the attention. All the media, Twitter, all the users were like, well, this is the most incredible thing that has happened. How amazing that you can speak in another language and still sound the same. You could feel the morale in the company. was slow. People were like, we spoke about this. We knew for like almost two years that this is something we want to solve. And how did it happen? That the customer had this and solved this first.

40:26So research engineering wasn't happy. Like how did they do it before with the components we gave them? The go to market wasn't happy because like how did we sell this to the customer? Now we are like all the potential clients we could have had isn't good. And of course me and Piotr were like, hey, this was our idea. Like, why would you do any of the partnerships if all of that is like kind of given to another company, who was the problem? I don't know if I can mention it. To their credit, I don't think that we told them it was actually a factor. I think they were just trying to do something quick.

40:57And we had a lot of calls with them those days because we were thinking, what do we do? Is the contract give us flexibility to not continue? So we spoke through with them of like, hey, why did you launch? I don't think it was dictated by our timeline, but the timeline was very close to each other. And they told us that they thought it's a good, hack -weekend idea, so they gave it to their intern, their intern has built that project and then it exploded. But it was, it did, it did give them like intense of millions of revenue over that period of time. So it was significant. Fuck is what's your biggest piece of advice to a founder who has a moment like that where you just feel the air come out of the company?

41:34How do you inflate the company again after such a damaging blow? I don't think the first reaction should be that like, hey, everything is fine. I think you should be authentic and tell the team what you are feeling like how has this happened go through like what have we done wrong and You know that frustration was clear. I don't think we I think it was valuable for us to talk to like we are angry at ourselves This is wrong and then as we move from that stage like yes, we are angry What are we actually going to do about this and move to that second stage very quickly? But I think I've done a mistake something so just going to the second stage It's not a problem.

42:08Let's just go through and solve it I think it's actually super valuable to talk through what has happened. But then you need to go into the second thing and then in the long term that will work out. It's then you can, the relentless execution will prove itself out and show it to the world. And the worst if you repeat them a mistake then someone needs to feel the repercussions. But if you've learned from that and haven't repeated them a mistake, it's fine. Given the commoditization of a lot of technology stage, you feel speed of execution is the cool differentiated between those that all win versus those that won't, or is it quality of research access to GPUs?

42:43How do you think about that? I think it's both. I think it's, you know, the way we approach it in the companies, we have research product and the ecosystem that we built, which is a combination of distribution and brand. But research for us is a head start. We are investing in research. We'll continue investing in research. We want to be the best across the voice technologies, but all this gives to us is advantage of our the competition for the next year to maybe free. How far ahead are you compared to the competition, do you think? I think depends on the use case, but six to 12 months. I would say it's depending on the space that we are in.

43:16Do you think that's a lot or not? I think that's a lot. So that research piece of six to 12 months is enough for us to then do the second thing well, which we do in part of the start is build phenomenal product experience. What percent of your revenue do you think you spend on compute? So we've built our own data centers. Why build your own data centers? Most people would just use a cool weave, weave, and Nvidia or whatever that is. Why build your own data centers? So we did the math. In our case, it was if we assume we continue training the models that the way we want to. So very continuously a lot of those models.

43:47Then second, for the data transfer centers, we think about continuously bringing more data. We will likely on a two -year horizon, break even for our having our own and not renting. Assuming, of course, you know, you need to assume some improvement in the GPU infrastructure, but assuming that it wasn't too high of an improvement, we would have been successful. And we were, I think it kind of the ROI made sense there. And now it's paying dividends because we can just do more experiments quicker. And this can still be wrong at some point. There might be innovation that kind of breaks that equation, but for the current time, it just makes more sense, more control.

44:20A lot of investors are talking about the poor unity economics of a lot of companies that we see today, whether it's your rap plits or your lovable, so you're any companies like this, but any kind of application eye companies period really, they generally have pretty tough unity economics generally speaking. Do you think that is a fair criticism or do you think it is simply short -sighted given the changes we will likely see in the cost structure? The Unilogomics in most of those cases that you mentioned is pretty poor, but I think the strategy is that yes, one, the models will optimize in cost and then two, they will be the brands that customers trust and then they can actually use a lot of the signal back.

44:55And I think to 11 laps example two, I think our unit economics is much healthier than most of those companies. We control our research, our product and distribution, but it's still if we had a new model that we need to release ourselves, we would optimize less for the cost structure so we can get that magic out quicker than other competitions even can think about creating their own model. but to be clear, you think the concerns around margin are over -expelled and not justified. Well, it's a risky business where there will be a winner. I love what Lovable is doing with Anton, but Rapid, VZero, Bolt are all incredible companies too, or Products too, that are doing some great work.

45:36I do think at least one, maybe more than one, will create something special. The market is so big that all of them can create something special, but yes, there will be and the margins that they are carrying does just not make long -term sense and probably the same for coding apps. But I think it's a cool bet. I think it's not even like cool from the sense of like it's you know it's a nice application but it's like it's an ambitious bet that they are trying to win with the biggest companies in the world to that are trying well try or are trying and they're lovable of the world are winning. Anton is phenomenal marketing person too like the founder let where he's doing it so it's amazing.

46:13One thing customer from day one, which respectfully I would advise you very much not to be. I think if Philippe was telling me he was advising you the same, be much more targeted in your ICP and have a clear mind of who that customer and user is, and you are much more broad and horizontal. And if your advising found us, how do you tell them when they're launching from day one, whether to be horizontal versus whether to be vertically specific? The thing if you're launching something very new, very different and you've done yet fully know a subset of customer base, but you know that there is a bigger one.

46:44I think horizontal is completely fine. If you know when you have the main expertise and this is the category that I'm trying to win, I think go vertical. You say go vertical there. Normally when you have verticals, you have kind of a maturing of organization, you have titles. Titles is something that you decided to get rid of. This is very counter -traditional all structures. Why is it better to not have titles. There are some incredible companies that of course did similar Stripe being one example. But in our case, it was especially then, super small teams. So we have team of five. A lot of people people join and what we wanted to optimize for is like one, the main thing that matters is the impact you can join and you can be the most impactful person from day zero in in any of those teams.

47:29So the title shouldn't define what is your level of decisions. Second thing with the small teams that happens is that you have a lot of those small teams. So if you start looking at who gets the title or not, it just becomes a distraction given that teams are like small units that just keep, keep, keep executing. So that's the second thing. And the third thing we wanted to like also make it very clear in that mix and still do. If you are joining 11 Lubs today, you can transition to being a leader of any team of any function super quickly. And titles felt limiting to that. We felt like people joining in and seeing the kind of the wider set of organization already having set of roles defined for them Would make this a little bit harder.

48:12You can have a lower tenure and be a manager of people with much longer tenure If you are the right person titles we felt were taking away from that while the same time We have a good structure internally within the SAP teams like who is the current Lead of that team that will make the decision if people cannot agree on what's the right path But that person can, and it's not guaranteed that the person will remain elite forever. And the titles in a way, when you give a title, it stays usually forever in the other company. Speaking of titles, and a common criticism of European tack and scaling, is that we don't have these titled people who've seen scale significantly, your VPs of sales who've seen a bit in an ARR, you name it.

48:51How did you think about broaching that? Do you want to get to the top US talent here? What do you want to grow talent here? We want to grow talent here. We match a lot of our current talent with the advisers from our network of US investors and The goal is to grow people. We love growing people like our approaches almost if we can We want to take a bet on the person growing rather than then bring them externally and to onset on a show with me recently from Loveable that building in Europe is building on hard mode. You agree with that. I think it is a thing It is building on hard mode, but there is some great advantages too.

49:25What are the advantages? The first one is the talent here is incredible and I think you just need to know how to get it. What do people get wrong? There is a good subset of people that really want to work hard and create something special and they just don't have that opportunity because there is no ambitious European companies trying to do that. So the only way they can do that is work for US companies and I think now you mentioned loveable. I think they are showing that ambition too and There's just so many more lagora recently and Sweden that rates around. We spoke about Sintisia. So there's quite a few companies that are ambitious.

50:01They want to show. And I think that the people joining want to be part of the ambitious company that is competing on a global scale. And then maybe in the early days I was even worried to large extent. I think you want to be able to build from Europe, but not build only for Europe. And I think those two get conflated where sometimes building from Europe you are building for European ecosystem, which isn't the right thing. You still want the global aspiration. So even now, when I think about describing 11 laps, I think about us as a global company. We are a global company, we want to win in the US, we want to win in Europe, we want to build in Asia.

50:35We have the best team and most of the team in Europe because the talent is incredible. So you think it is wrong when our American friends say, hey, the Europeans just don't walk as hard as we do. I think you can find people that want to work harder. And we've had it actually at some point in the team where we hired some people from West Coast, US and other people where we have quite a few from central east and Europe where like, oh yeah, they don't work actually that hard as we do. I mean, we have such a, you know, to credit to the team, it's like the true missionaries that are there on the weekend, all the time and really care.

51:08They really care about the success of the company. Beyond just working hard, I think they are and they feel part of the company, which is true. So I do think you can find people in Europe that are phenomenal. Is it bad to hire people who come because you're a glossy name? It's an interesting one because in the early days we didn't have much inbound. So all of that was outbound. And it was easier in a way to find people that we felt were right because you didn't have to filter through the noise. And now we have just so much. Where so many people are going because they are a buzzword or we know our scale that makes sense.

51:40But no, I think it's fine. like not everybody is the risk -take care at the same amount so I'm not in any way discarding them. What's been your biggest hiring mistake and what did you learn from it? I think this is probably a traditional one but as I think about bringing people in and growing them into the company, it's like the full hiring process. You hire a person, you of course have very little time frequently to assess how they are but then as they are in the company you have a little bit more of the signal. I would have taken some decisions quicker than I would have with separating with people.

52:11If you are not unsure in the interview, but let's say you are bringing them, giving them a chance and you are not sure in the first weeks or months you should separate straight away rather than keep giving the chance. I think that's the few times I've figured on that. What's the hardest role to hire for researchers? Easy. When should a founder no longer be involved in every hire? So we interview everyone and I help a little. He's still doing that at G50. Yes, we do. We hope to interview that as long as possible because it's a good signal of who we bring into the company. We get to meet them, but of course we still think that company is still shifting in terms of how we are approaching that.

52:46One is now even more we are optimizing for engineering technical skillset in all parts of the company than we would have six to 12 months ago. So it's even increasing in some aspects, but I hope we'll interview to like a thousand people. The thing isn't so much hard, you know, when to be involved in the review. It's more how many people you are trying to hire with a specific period of time. So if I try to hire a thousand people in a month, it's impossible, because it would be more than the time we have. In a year, how many people will you have? We'll have 400 by end of the year. By the end of this year.

53:18By end of this year. That's a lot. You're almost doubling. You're adding 40%. That's almost up. It's 3 to 4 months. 50 officers are joining. So 250 now, roughly 30 to 50 people that are already scheduled to join. And I think we'll get to additional 100. Respectfully small and mighty, that's no. 150 and three to four months. Still small and still mighty, but we have a pretty global team now where we are trying to bring a lot of our go -to -market and engineering in every location we are at. So we think we can parallelize that. Building in Brazil, in Japan, in India, in Mexico. So we are really going to that local nuance too, where we are building small outposts everywhere.

53:59And I think we can make it work. Do you care about revenue per head? In the long term, yes, like we want to be an efficient company. I think now we have a very good metric for a new per head. It's a good show, like, are you an efficient company? But if we think there is a path for us to get there over time, we take easily the new hires that can help us. You know it extremely well. It's an investor. But of course, one of the key metrics is retention or how you think about NRR for any of the clients. So me bringing people now helping us get the distribution before competition does might It decrees my set of revenue I get, but if the NRR keeps growing and I don't hire more people in the next five years, that metric of course will change.

54:38Can I ask what revenues you add now? So we crossed to 100 million now. Whoa, that's a good number. That's amazing. Yeah, that is a great, what per 250 if you've got that now. Yeah, that's pretty good. Fucking A. Thanks. What was the aim of scratching? What was the end of 23? I think we were between 35, 35? 35 million. 35 million. You went from beta launch in January to 35. We did so in the 20 months to 100 and then 20 months to 100 million. Yes. I think so. And then around 10 months to 200. A bit longer. 15 months. Just crying. Oh, sorry. Depressed. I mean, you know, that's so happy. Well, the thing is that of course, you know, it goes quickly.

55:25It can also go quickly down. What bit is your revenue relatively sticky? I think it's relatively sticky. You think launch enterprise is the most important. Our biggest part of the business now and we're obsessing is building effectively conversational agent platform. Like the biggest customers are the biggest customers, not name but like size. Our biggest contract is around 2 million and they are mostly in call center, customer support, personal assistance base, all of those companies are orchestrating combination of the research, those speech to text, the analytics speech, and then bringing a lot of those integrations that we now we create.

56:04So that's on the enterprise side, whether it's Cisco, these are not the contracts there, but Cisco, Twilio, recently working with Epic Games. These are some of our biggest deployments of the work. And then of course on And we are in a lucky position that we still have a huge self -serve distribution of creators and developers building up the time 10 months to 200 million. Yep. What's that to 300 million then? Because you have, you did 20 months to 110 to 200. Well, we are ambitious companies, so we hope to, can we do five months to 300? We would love to break, break if it's a healthy revenue and we are creating good work, we would love to break the record.

56:41What was the price of the last round? 3 .3. 3 .3. All the rounds divisible by 11. 3 .3 and then you did that when you were 150 million in revenue? No, lower. We were somewhere between 120, I think. Okay, 120 and 20. But I'm just looking at that guy and you did that Jan 25. We announced the Jan 25 and then we did that twice, I ended up 20 and 84. I'm just looking at it thinking, okay, so they're doing end of year revenues for 25 at 250, 300. It's quite a cheap deal. 1112, I sent a beer revenues. So we did the round in October of 24. So we are probably at 80 when we got the docs and then it was signed then.

57:23Did you need the money? So the way we approached any of the fundraisers, it's can we bring some of the bets forward? In that case, it was even more, spend on models, expand into multi -model. Can we bring our work internationally, So expand into other regions and then double down on an agent platform. So start building even more of the true enterprise functionality, whether it's the reliability you need, whether it's integration with sales for service now sift ranking. So like investing in those, those was the most important. But at the time it was for the ex -current revenue, so pretty good. How do you balance between focus and executing according to plan versus being able to do more?

58:06I understand the benefits of being able to do more, but you can probably always do more with more money. It doesn't mean it's the right thing. I think that the kind of the variation of this is like, can you paralyze a new effort without distracting the core work? And that's roughly why we are trying to approach this. Like, can we bring our work to a new place? Can we create a new product experience without affecting the core thing that's actually important for our users? If we can, then we'll likely invest, bring it up people into it. If it's distracting, then it becomes a question of like, is it worth the upside?

58:39When we think about kind of doing more, the question that I think we forgot earlier was what was the biggest line of business in the future. That is not a very big line or nonexistent today. It's interesting because on the relative basis, I think our agent's work is so ready, huge. But I think it's just scratching the surface. I think it's going to, if we play it right, it's like a multi -billion dollar revenue generating business just from huge, of course, creating voice agents and going deeper. So I think this one is on the relative of my voice agents that you sell to companies to manage their customers.

59:14That's right. Got you. And then you can go deeper. You can, of course, expand from voice into conversational agents. And by that I mean you start building omnichandal solution with email integration, what's up integration? We're just kind of that more classic customer support. Which you sell then to an intcom and a decogon. Today, so we are have a public partnership with Decagon, so we do. But of course, as you start going deeper, it depends a little bit where Decagon goes and where we go. Are they going to verticalize or they will continue horizontal and go down? Well, we verticalize more. So there might be some areas where we overlap a little bit more.

59:49But today, we, given we have very partner horizontal approach that we treat all of them as good partners. Speaking of kind of good partners. Right now we're doing the human plus agent. We're so friendly and we make each other better. And there's a time when human plus agent just becomes agent. Do you think we are seeing a lot of resistance from employees within companies towards agents coming in? We do, but the way we've seen this kind of transition happen now is where you will have more specialized humans, where the agents are taking more of the manual parts that nobody really wanted to do or didn't require the main expertise.

1:00:28So like a good example is like, if you're taking appointment scheduling, if you are doing a refund, all of those, of course, assuming of the safeguards and authentication place, are pretty easily done with AI. But then suddenly, if you need to help that patient navigate the outbound flow after going from hospital or understand analysis, that cannot be done with AI, there's too much at stake and you need to deep the main expertise. So we've seen like kind of the transition where that side of people, helping in the last mile is even more valuable. Well, of course, I can help with those easier tasks across.

1:01:01And I think this will continue. Of course, the percentages will shift to where you will have even more automation as it goes deeper. And then even more value assigned to the people doing at the main expertise because ultimately it will help automate the task at hand. Does taking money from secure meaningfully moves the needle in a way that it doesn't from other funds. You know, like, I think, so our first round was with A16Z and it did meaningfully move the yield for us. Like it was very clear that people respected you in a way that they did the full. And then Sequoia came in and CWB and that kind of doubled down that perception where it's like, okay, A16Z and Sequoia are part of the, of the company.

1:01:38It's also very rare to have both of these investors and any of the companies. So it did help like where a lot of kinds would be respecting that and now I connect on top of that is just incredible mix. And NFDG2, I think NFDG2 is like, clients will usually not have that perception, but they're - Investors do. But investors do. And some of our engineers or users really, really admire and trust that and I do too. So, he's great. You're a very strategic asset when you look at what you have and what you've built. Have you had acquisition offers? We did have acquisition offers. Did you contemplate any of them honestly?

1:02:15We always will do the basic diligence and let our investors know that we had this. And you were the largest one. Well, the largest one didn't have money. But the ones that we went, it was an interesting conversation because we would frequently try to go into the strategic partnership. And then they would be like, oh, can we consider are we open to M &A activity? Was it tempting? It was tiny bit tempting, but in a way we're in the first one or two examples. So the first one was when we were doing series A, it was going really well. And then of course we were unclear how this will continue. It was like a very beginning of the curve.

1:02:56And that the first one was like, okay, this is the first time we ever are doing this. Let's understand what they are offering. But we were more interested into like seeing whether more about the process itself, like how it happens rather than actually giving the company. Then it was clear, okay, they want to acquire us. This is what we understand and we need to be part of the company. So we were we were we were a flat now and since then for any of the conversation now that we know that this is even approaching this M &A, TGG segments with the secondary and that helps. So we do almost every round we can we do secondary and attend their offer for all employees that have vested stock so they can sell the stock.

1:03:35So they all feel that there's actually liquidity to the company. And I think it's valuable because we are betting for some and huge. And you want to know that you you you can take the risk to bet on some big outcome, which of course, you know, like I think it's very easy to say financial parity. It's not important. And I think it isn't, but there's like this basic layer that people want to I think it is paying for child care and paying for house. No, of course, exactly. That's what I mean. But it's like, it's not the goal in itself, but you want to have like this bottom set of good life that's covered, which we are extremely like he has a company to have and to be able to offer.

1:04:09But then like now the kind of the aspiration is much bigger, especially now that this basic layer is covered. The thing I often think is how many great European companies of the last 20 years would have not sold, we had secondary and liquidity options available at the time because so many did sell because we didn't have that. It was so meaningful. I think it does help with the perception where you know there's like you can to some extent, I think you can put away like any of the greediness that comes with money just by taking some of the risk, risk equation away. Dude, we're going to do a quick fire round.

1:04:41So I'm going to say a short statement. You're going to give me an immediate thought. That sounds okay. Sounds great. So what do you believe that most around you disbelieve that you're going to build a company from Europe at the global scale? You don't think people still think like you don't think we're moving the needle a little bit. I think you are helping and I think many of the people in our ecosystem are but I don't think most people do. Maybe another one which is not that specific to company building, but I do think voice will be the interface to the technology around us. It will be the primary interface for all of technology around us.

1:05:12I'm not going to let you wiggle on this one. You can buy OpenAI at 300, Anthropic at 170 or GROC at 120, which one do you buy in which one do you sell? Well, I don't know if I like this question. The answer that. Anton, Anton for context answered he'd buy GROC and he'd sell OpenAI. Okay, let's keep it out of the positive. I would buy OpenAI, but I love anthropic, like, you know, if I was on the coding side, I think I would be buying D -Manday cursor. And now we don't mandate. It's like you use what you think is most valuable to. What do most people use? Most people do use cursor. Some people use cloud code, but still more cursor.

1:05:49I think it's shifting a little bit. I'm also like, you know, to your other question, they're, I don't remember who was the investor, but they did say, which I think I would also like, as I think about that decision is, I would be happily investing in a lot of the products I use and I do use Chaggitv very often. Every so often I will use Antropic for like testing where we are of the space, but I think they are investing more in coding rather than cloud the consumer and OpenAI is clearly investing a lot in Chaggitv to consumer solution. What if you change your mind almost in the last 12 months that we previously would not do any of the product innovation if we knew that we are doing any research initiative ourselves.

1:06:27And I think now it's shifted that we We will sometimes explore product with outside research, even if we don't have, we don't build it internally. Is speed of air or growth a bullshit metric? Depends on time horizon, but in general, yes, I think speed of aircraft doesn't matter. What's your favorite consumer brand day and why? I really like 8 sleep. I know it's consumer brand, but they do like 8 sleep recently as it's like a changed quite significantly. I am a huge user of Google Maps and love Google Maps. Lovable, I really like, from consumer -ish applications. You can be CEO of any company for a day.

1:07:08What company would you be CEO of? I'll choose Google or OpenAI. I would know the know -how of some of the incredible models. I think more Google. I'll say Google. Genie, via free models, incredible innovations. And then at the same time, just the scale of operation would be interesting. So, but a strong Google people question them with the golden I didn't give me Google in the previous question. No. Yeah, I would invest in 300. That was a Google. But that's not enough. But you're super bullish on Google, even with the ads model being potentially out. No, no, it's super bullish. It's definitely not super bullish.

1:07:39But I think Google is, I would still put a lot that the Google has a good future. And especially recently, they're catching up in many places. They are definitely in the race. I'm creating a title for you. You're going to be the president of Europe. I'm aware for all of our American listeners Europe is not a country even though you like to collectivize and make it one President of Europe. What would you do? One thing to make the European ecosystem have a higher chance of success? My word goes into into law immediately. Yeah, I would proxy a lot of AI law to US law I know this is it's a huge set of repercussions, but I would try to follow exactly how US is approaching a lot of AI related regulation and just implement the same or let like create another state in European Union and Europe that people can opt in that follows that law to not like make it too hard given even all the repercussions.

1:08:31How important is founder brand? My answer here would be I don't know because in many ways as we thought about the 11 laps especially in early days it's the people that build the company are the people that build the company and in some ways we they kind of could still don't know to what extent like having some people that are very much out there, like let's say I'm now in this podcast, takes away from that. And we want to make it complimentary because the reason we are successful, I think, is to large extent because we've created incredible research. The engineers are just grinding and creating the best product experience.

1:09:04Go to market team is inventing new ways to combine self -serve and say it's like all those parts and then supplemented by operations scaling the company from less than 100 to not 250 in a span of seven months while keeping culture intact. You know, these are like all so hard things and with hyper growth There's less time to be able to appreciate all those individuals than then you would otherwise and I sometimes worry by Having that kind of you know too much of the thunderbrand kind of takes away from that But my mind is changing a little bit. I think like maybe you can elevate that by having a Thunderbrand other final one and it may be a little bit of a sort But what's the single best piece of advice you've been given that you think too most often?

1:09:44Well, it's not most often. So in recent times, I like what Peter Tiel said about the biggest risk is not taking the risk and kind of not taking a decision or staying in the risk. What risk did you not take that won't you most? It's shifting because if you ask me that, I should have taken that risk. So I don't usually help try to take a quick action on top of that. But one that we are considering is an acquisition of another company now, which is a big company. and that company, you know, is in hundreds of millions of dollars, it will be a huge risk for bringing them in. And if we think we can do better internally, so I think we won't take that risk.

1:10:23Mattie, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for putting up with Miami -andering and you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you, Harry. It's a pleasure. Pleasure to be finally able to speak together. So great to make that happen with Mattie live in the studio. You can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 2 -0VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platform's products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50 ,000 teams all over the world get on the same page, offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity.

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