Brian Halligan (3:06)

Okay, you're several hundred million in revenue. If you had started running out of school with your buddy and where would you be? Nowhere.

Matti from Eleven Labs (3:15)

You know the other thing I think we would have probably worked on a very different idea. I think it took of course the pleasure of having the co founder I know inside out. Then over the years got experience of working at other companies which helped us understand some of the dynamics at Google at Palantir so we understand how to build things at scale. But then the third thing which I think was the most important was the idea. And of course through the years we looked into different projects from draft trying to build a crypto risk analyzer during the crypto days which was really hard to recommendation system. But then when we stumbled on Voice we knew that A this is a good timing where the technology is going for the shift. We can be part of that shift of that technology. And then two, this is a huge problem. The problem that the users the world have and we can solve it. If I started something on 21, 22, I just don't think we would work on the same idea and probably I wouldn't understand the pain the same way we do now that we approach the Voice.

Brian Halligan (4:12)

Got it. Anton. Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right at school, what would it be like?

Anton Helmley (4:20)

I also think it might have not been as ambitious because I mean I had never done something entrepreneurial and the biggest disadvantage being that young would have been that I wouldn't know why to hire very senior engineers and what made what type of great senior engineers are out there because they will be very scared of working for me. But I think I would have a lot of other advantages maybe even being more naive. And already then I think I surrounded myself by super, super smart people. So I think I could have built something very different with a fast reiteration pace could have been successful.

Brian Halligan (4:59)

And I got a little bit of what you took from Palantir. You had some very interesting experiences before Lovable. Can you talk a little bit about them and what Kind of you took from those that you're leveraging at lovable.

Anton Helmley (5:11)

Yeah, sure. So if you go way back. I also studied like sciences and physics specifically when I was. I did this long internship at CERN where I studied CERN particle physics and where they discovered a lot of the recent physics. But there's a lot of smart people there. And I was like wait, they're all working on this impossible problems without any elasticity. So I'm not going to be here. I'm going to go applying great innovation to the real world. And then I was kind of inspired to start a company when I was in university, which I'm very happy about. But I ended up doing some finance actually unfortunately which was a bit too boring for me. But fortunately I started this community Stockholm AI when this was around when deep learning was like taking off in 201516 and I did the foundation models of training current small language models before it was cool and met great people there. And one was the founder at Sanad. So Joel, who recently sold Sona to Workstate for a billion dollars.

Brian Halligan (6:24)

Yes. Congratulations. Yes.

Anton Helmley (6:25)

Great job by the team there. I mean my contribution was bringing in some of those smart people that went on to grow it to what it became. And I was there for three years and it was like, oh AI, let's build. You all was super young, but we learned super fast and it became successful. Then I joined as a co founder at a company that just got into YC and that was in recommendation systems specifically for E Commerce. That could have been absolutely wildly successful. The company, it had a lot of things going for it. But after a bit of momentum loss and my co founder and me being I wanted the people to something more successful that I can say than E Commerce. But I decided to do the most possible ambitious thing. And all my life I've been approached by people who want to find a great engineer to help them realize their dreams or the ideas that the world is full of them. Like 0.5% of the world can even code and much fewer can build a great product like Matti and his co founder. Right. So I decided let's build something for the 99% and not this productivity boost for developers. And that's going to be a completely new type of of interface where you dream your idea of some technical AI product into existence.

Brian Halligan (7:54)

Yeah.

Anton Helmley (7:54)

And that's what we set out to build.

Brian Halligan (7:55)

Okay. So your first company you were the founding engineer. Your next company depict you were co founder cto. Now you're a CEO. Is it everything you ever hoped That's a good question.

Anton Helmley (8:10)

I think it's quite different. What I love about it is that I get to know myself and how to surround myself with the right complementary skill sets and be challenged in all the possible ways. Much more than being a co founder and cto. And I run the company on foundry mode I would mostly empathize with. But at this stage, I mean, there's a big shift in focusing on empowering, unblocking the leaders in the company. And I mean, I like that. And it's more analytical.

Brian Halligan (8:50)

Is being a CEO what you thought, like what surprised you about it?

Anton Helmley (8:55)

You have to do so many things, or I mean, unless you're very disciplined about what you delegate and how you delegate it, it's like there's so many, many different things thrown at you, especially as you start hyperscaling.

Brian Halligan (9:09)

Yes. How about for you, your CEO, your first time CEO, what's harder than you thought? What's easier than the thought? What's different than you thought?

Matti from Eleven Labs (9:20)

Yeah, I think the first one is definitely you want to hire people better than yourself in all those areas that you know for the first time, in our case, things like legal or finance or building the go to market motion and sales. Like all of these things which I've seen kind of results of that work, but never have actually done the work. So it was a very quick learning of like, how do you do that? So you actually understand it and you need to understand at least a little bit to then be able and assess the person that you want to bring in. So that was kind of the two things that they now repetitively try to do when we have a new area. I'm trying to first put myself in those shoes, understand the basics and then hire a person so I know that they are doing that work. And the delegation too was something that I think I hold on for too long to do myself rather than delegate. And then actually how to delegate was an interesting piece in itself where, and I think you do want to give a lot of, a lot of the work to other leaders that you hired, other people that you grow, but you still want to understand the detail that's happening. And then like, how do you let them own it, be the leaders they want to be, but still remain in the details in the funder mode to, to be able to jump in when needed. That balance of like, how do you interact for that is a tricky thing that, that is still, I think, a continuous learning for me.

Brian Halligan (10:39)

And like, I find that there's kind of three types of CEOs, there's people who are really in all the details, in everyone's shorts all the time. There are CEOs that are pretty high level and like I have an expression, keep your feet in the ground, your head in the head in the clouds or you're in the details and you're up high. Some people who stay very high. And then there's what I call spelunkers, people who kind of go down deep in one thing for a while. They come back out and go down into another thing. Have you got one of those models? What are you. It sounds like you're the first.

Matti from Eleven Labs (11:12)

I do like the details. I think similar like I think to how Anton mentioned that you operate is like you do on the funder model. You want to understand the product, you want to actually work with the product all the time so you know how to actually use the product better than most. I'm trying to stay extremely detailed and like what is that we are shipping, how we are shipping it, how it works behind the scenes. So that's probably the key thing. I like your analogy of head in the clouds, the feet on the ground. I think the thing that I'm trying and I think where the magic happens, if you do it well, is being able to zoom out and zoom in extremely quickly before those contexts so you're able to understand the problem, zoom into the detail. You understand the detail and. And then the next second you need to go to another problem which requires the same activity.

Brian Halligan (12:05)

There's a lot of context switching being a CEO.

Matti from Eleven Labs (12:07)

Exactly. And you kind of need to be immediate in that. My co founder who is the smartest person I know and is kind of leading the research work in his case he needs to go extremely deep for very long time. So we like have very. We frequently speak about this very different way of approaching the work where one is like all about context switching, the other one is all about going as deep as possible.

Brian Halligan (12:31)

And how about. What are you thinking on how are you feeling about delegation? Is it natural, just delegate all this stuff or is it like I want to be in the details? I had a heart. I had a very hard time delegating.

Anton Helmley (12:42)

I think it's often the ah. When I'm, I'm very impatient generally and like there is some friction when I. When there's many things that are. Feel very urgent and I know one thing but maybe not all the other ones.

Brian Halligan (12:59)

Are you driving people crazy?

Anton Helmley (13:01)

No, mostly no. Most of they like me. They feel where I'm coming from and like actually this, this is coming from a Good place.

Brian Halligan (13:08)

Okay, let's talk about team. You just hired a friend of mine to run sales. Yeah. You're building out your team. How are you thinking about building out your team? Your senior team in particular? And then are you looking, are you looking for people with high slope or high experience?

Anton Helmley (13:23)

Oh, that's a good question. I think at this stage there's many things we just need to be done very predictably and because of all the opportunities that are out there and hiring people who have done it before and maybe wouldn't be as effective early stage, because they're set in their ways. That is very effective. It's very effective.

Brian Halligan (13:51)

Oh, wait, so you lean towards experience?

Anton Helmley (13:53)

Not necessarily for the things that have to get done. We know like what those things are. It is effective to buy, like what? So for sales, everything that goes down to sales, a lot of fun. Some functions of marketing that has like all of this.

Brian Halligan (14:05)

You're looking for experience there.

Anton Helmley (14:07)

I'm looking for experience and then so at least to run them. And then if you have capacity to also hire people, people with high slopes and who are like generalists and you also find a good way able to move them around in the company, that's something that has worked really well for us. I cannot predict how it's going to work when there's more structure in the company, but I'm committed to finding a good experiment.

Brian Halligan (14:34)

These high slope generalists who you're moving around on your senior team, direct reports, Senior Team 2 Senior Team. Are any of your direct reports any of these currently no high slope people moving around?

Anton Helmley (14:47)

Not on my actual leadership team, but many of the ones I work with day to day who feel like they're reporting directly to me on many things are more of the highest. How about you?

Brian Halligan (14:57)

On the team you're building, you've got a few hundred employees, you're less than 100. What are you thinking about the senior team? What are you looking for? Have you had any misfires?

Matti from Eleven Labs (15:08)

In our case, we have over 300 people. But inside of the company it's effectively a lot of small teams as 30 teams of five to 10 people. And it usually is a combination of depending on the space, either few with the experience with the past work in that space and then usually infused with some of the high slope. And we like that because A, you get the generalists that can adopt a lot of the new tooling and kind of do new work. And second, we try to bring all the engineers across in some of those teams. So even in a traditional growth team, we have Growth engineers and the ops team will have operations engineering to help automate a lot of the process. Sometimes use lovable in the process to help with that work. And that has helped tremendously to kind of get the experience, the domain expertise while creating the new process across the leadership. So then all those team roll up to each effective lead. So we have a go to market leads, then the engineering leads.

Brian Halligan (16:08)

How many direct reports do you have?

Matti from Eleven Labs (16:10)

I have 15 direct reports.

Brian Halligan (16:12)

That's a lot. Okay. And that crew of 15, are they kind of young, hungry, grew up at the company high slope, or are they kind of been there, done that?

Matti from Eleven Labs (16:23)

Almost exactly. Half.

Brian Halligan (16:24)

Half.

Matti from Eleven Labs (16:24)

I see half, half. Half have done it before. Usually are growing with their role. Of course, we are growing extremely quickly. So we grew from. We started 2022 from zero to now over 200 million in revenue. So that growth has been quick for everybody. So everybody's learning at the same time, but half of them have seen that before and the other half. Do you think that's right, the 50,

Brian Halligan (16:46)

50, like at HubSpot, we were kind of the same. I was. I'd look around the table. About half grew up with the company, very high slope and half had a lot of experience. That felt right to me. Does that feel right to you?

Matti from Eleven Labs (16:59)

It does. It's so, it's. It's. In many ways the people that are there have grown with the company incredibly. Victoria, who leads our ops team, has never done anything like this before.

Brian Halligan (17:10)

Right.

Matti from Eleven Labs (17:10)

And also from Palantir background, so also physics background. So trying to like create a process as we go across and has grown incredibly with the company and then others kind of are still super important for the company, but will stay in more of the product teams or on the IC roles in other parts.

Brian Halligan (17:27)

How about you? On the, on the, you know, what's your mix of kind of homegrown and been there, done that. You're probably just starting to hire execs, I guess, from the outside.

Matti from Eleven Labs (17:36)

Yeah.

Anton Helmley (17:37)

So I built out this, this leadership team which is like seven people with my co founder.

Brian Halligan (17:41)

Okay, so you have seven direct reports.

Anton Helmley (17:43)

Yeah. So with. Without me and my coffee is five there. And officially everyone else like reports into them.

Brian Halligan (17:51)

Yeah. And you feel like you got that right. Or over time it's going to get much bigger or. Where are you at? Like I think of JENSEN Huang has 45 direct reports. And you had a lot too. No, no, I didn't. I had like 10. No. Yeah. And it's amazing to me that they get people with 45 or 50 and people with three. There's such a range anyway. Was the five intentional or it just kind of happened?

Anton Helmley (18:15)

It was intentional. Very intentional. To add a lot more structure. And then I think generally if you say, okay, let's try to have a lot of structure and then it's easier to add more chaotic things on top of that and see how that works.

Brian Halligan (18:30)

Okay, so you're hiring. We kind of worked together on that head of sales search. How are you thinking about these senior searches? How are you deciding? You know, you never run a sales org. It's a. It's a hard thing. Like lots of people are in your shoes. Like, how are you making those calls?

Anton Helmley (18:47)

Yeah. So with the head of sales, I worked. I worked closely with Jeannie at Excel, who had done this before many times.

Brian Halligan (18:54)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (18:54)

Danny Herzberg from Jenny Alexa. And they coached you? They got. They got. Gave me a lot of impact input on it. And I mean, in the end it was me spending a lot of time with these candidates and them spending time with the team and presenting how they would do things. And that felt like that gave a lot of. Instilled a lot of confidence for me.

Brian Halligan (19:19)

So you had a bunch of help and spoke to many people on your side. Same thing. You hadn't run a sale. None of us have done what we did. But you hadn't run a sales org. You had to make a decision on a sales leader. You had a lot of qualified candidates. How did you go about it?

Matti from Eleven Labs (19:35)

Yeah, it's a tricky one and especially I think for sales. The salespeople know how to sell themselves. They need to be able. So they are. So you kind of need to filter through, like, do they actually know how to sell? But they are all like good at it. So we are in a good setup where one of the salespeople was our investor. So we've seen him actually help us advise before he became a salesperson. So when we started the company, we started getting enterprise inbound. We realized, okay, we can and start something very quickly. And he already has spent so much time with us. Then it became natural. Okay, we want to bring that person in. And then as we've hired other roles, we have of course amazing investors across like Sequoia who are on Driessen team who are helping us on that hunt. So we would partner very closely with the domain experts to help us through the network, through the back references to make sure that they are right ones. I think the back references really helps across that beyond the spending time with the team, which. Which I think is crucial. And then the Other part, which. Which I haven't realized until later is that for sales specifically, is that you are hiring of course, a great individual for creating the sales playbook, helping you sell into the enterprises. But then ultimately the person you hire, they will set the culture for the sales team too. Like a lot of the people they will hire will be so similar in their approach to that work, which. Which I didn't appreciate until after the fact. So I was happy that the culture was very aligned. But. But then you can see much similar. And we have Europe and US sales team. They're slightly different.

Brian Halligan (21:08)

Okay.

Matti from Eleven Labs (21:09)

The Europe is a lot more confident. Like they're a little bit like a lot. The European versus US upbringing. So a lot more confident than our European counterparts that take more of like partner sales approach.

Brian Halligan (21:20)

Yeah.

Matti from Eleven Labs (21:21)

But they have core similar values which, which helps.

Brian Halligan (21:24)

Okay. One of the things that confuses me about life today as a CEO is like from HubSpot, from, let's call it. We went public in 2012. Till I stepped down 2020, we had an annual planning cycle and the world just didn't change a whole lot every year. How the hell do you guys plan with the changes going on underneath? Like, what's your cycle? How do you do it?

Anton Helmley (21:48)

We've done very little planning.

Brian Halligan (21:50)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (21:51)

And I think that's pretty smart because you can like. Everything is changing very rapidly, at least for our. I mean our B2B offerings, enterprises are huge ones. Are using our products to a huge extent. We are just like trying to give them the time they can get, as much time as you can get and not being like, okay, this is our icp. This is exactly the sales process, at least so far. But there's tens of thousands and people in a hackathon, many of the world's like largest healthcare companies using us. And we will, I think, start taking a step back and being. Okay, where are we seeing like from much better data and analytics as well. Where are we going to focus?

Brian Halligan (22:43)

Okay. And let me push back a little bit. You just had a big release that looks amazing. You must have planned for that. You just didn't pull that out of a hackathon last week. Yeah.

Anton Helmley (22:51)

So on the far side, I mean we do have a launch roadmap and like it goes out six now. It goes out like six months. It's just that I, I'm sure it's going to change.

Brian Halligan (23:03)

Okay. So there's a, there's a lightweight six month product roadmap.

Anton Helmley (23:07)

Yeah.

Brian Halligan (23:07)

Okay, got it. And it's pretty flexible. Like within that six months. Deep pivot.

Anton Helmley (23:11)

Yeah, I do now at this site of the company, we are, of course, going into longer time horizons.

Brian Halligan (23:20)

I think it's just hard to plan more than six months right now with all the underlying platform changes. Yeah, it's an interesting time to be a CEO. How about over at 11 Labs? What's the cycle?

Matti from Eleven Labs (23:31)

The cycle. So the teams have a pretty high flexibility in how they operate week to week. So they can kind of take different directions, but on a quarterly basis, we'll get the teams together. They'll spend up to a day effectively outlining what are the initiatives they want to run for the next quarter. And then it's even less for the team itself. Sometimes it helps formalize a lot of the ideas, but it's more valuable for the teams around so they know what to expect so they can learn from. From that process. And we just came back from an offsite with the entire team where we are looking like where we would like to be as a company in 2026 and the next three years. The thing that's probably the hardest is research. So we do also the foundational part for Voice have a lot of research teams that crank up some of the best models out there. And that's, of course, so hard to predict. So here we don't give any timelines. We do the research initiatives we want to plan. So that's the one that goes out of the cycle.

Brian Halligan (24:28)

You don't know what's going to come out. It's very different than you don't know.

Matti from Eleven Labs (24:32)

You need to stay nimble that like the moment it comes out. That's why the small teams, I think, helps so much as well, because the moment something comes out, either internally from our research team or from other teams, you know that this is like you have 24 hours to start integrating that into your product. That's like the most important time to really. To really be ahead.

Brian Halligan (24:50)

Okay. Speaking of planning, I remember in the early days of HubSpot, before we were CRM, we were a marketing app. And every year I would go to the salesforce.com conference called Dreamforce and I'd sit in the audience. And our pitch, by the way, at that time was salesforce.com is to sales as HubSpot is to marketing. And we would always think in the back of our head until salesforce.com wants to become salesforce.com of marketing. And so it'd sit in the audience every year hoping they didn't announce a marketing product. And sure enough, 2012 was their. That was the marketing year. They bought four marketing companies and they really went for it. We ended up pivoting and going to CRM. I would imagine you have a similar feeling when Anthropic's doing a big announcement or OpenAI's having a big announcement. Even HubSpot is like, we don't know. Is OpenAI going to be a platform company like Google was? Are they going to go build vertical apps? Are you as paranoid as I was or you not that worried?

Anton Helmley (25:48)

Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of distribution out of the box, so that's. It would hurt.

Brian Halligan (25:56)

Are you? Or do you sit there like worried when they're doing their announcements? Are they gonna.

Anton Helmley (26:00)

Not really, no. Like, I have so many things to think about. I catch up on the recent announcement and I'm sure they will announce something.

Brian Halligan (26:08)

I would imagine that you build something

Anton Helmley (26:10)

in your space, it will be inferior.

Brian Halligan (26:12)

You've got a head start, but you kind of like. I kind of think it would be an obvious thing for them to build.

Anton Helmley (26:18)

Yeah. Something. What we're building is this full platform where you serving most of the product needs for entire product engineering organization. And that takes a lot of iteration steps to get to the full thing. And unless they're like building that out completely in the dark and then launching it, I don't think it's going to be a threat from the first launch.

Brian Halligan (26:42)

Okay. I'm very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you par. I would imagine. Anyway. Are you like. I was paranoid, nervous about what's going on?

Matti from Eleven Labs (26:49)

Definitely a little. Always nervous and watching closely. I mean, they have great, great research teams, so we know that they will be pushing into the voice space.

Brian Halligan (26:58)

Yes.

Matti from Eleven Labs (27:00)

At the same time, given like the spread of work that you just mentioned. The corollary is they lack focus and we are fully focused on voice or whether that's creating the research or products for creating voice Agent or creating creative workflows, which does take a lot of iterations to actually bring that to the user to make the best experience that they require to solve their problems, solve their integrations. So I do think it's going to become increasingly competitive, especially on the research side. But that's where the product, platform, brand, the design, the taste will matter a lot more. Something we speak a little bit with Anton every so often and that will be the big piece where companies going deep into that space will win.

Brian Halligan (27:42)

Okay. Speaking of taste, one thing I really like about both of you is I think you have taste, particularly in your marketing. Like you guys do some interesting stuff. You are fantastic on Twitter. Fantastic. On Twitter, you're one of my favorite follows. How much time are you spending doing it? Do you do it all yourself? You're, you're, you're out there on stuff like just talk about your Twitter strategy.

Anton Helmley (28:09)

Yeah, sure.

Brian Halligan (28:11)

Like, did you tweet just before we got in here? Like, what's the deal?

Anton Helmley (28:14)

No, but I, I do spend quite some time on it and it feels like, oh my God, I'm doing so many. There is. I'm a CEO, I'm doing so many things and then I have to sit down every weekend and get some of this, some of the posts. Right. But I do have a team that comes to me with ideas. Like every Monday we go through. It's 15 minutes in the calendar.

Brian Halligan (28:34)

Okay.

Matti from Eleven Labs (28:35)

Usually it takes more time.

Brian Halligan (28:36)

They bring you. Here's the tweet. That would be good.

Anton Helmley (28:37)

No, they bring me ideas like okay, should we do something on this? And I drop a lot of ideas as well in the Slack channel. But this is not their full time job either. So it's not the proper function in the company.

Brian Halligan (28:53)

It's very, very effective in my opinion. Like your brand is very strong. It is working really well. Are you actually pressing the button when the tweet goes out or somebody doing it for you?

Anton Helmley (29:05)

It's usually me.

Brian Halligan (29:06)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (29:07)

So there's actually a very good company called the Typefully that you can draft them in and then you can like collaborate on them.

Brian Halligan (29:15)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (29:16)

And I usually the one who schedule them in that I do the final.

Brian Halligan (29:20)

I would keep going and get even wackier if I were you. Thank you. I think. You're welcome. You guys are busy. I remember when I was your size. I get. I got asked to do so much shit speak at my conference. Can you interview my daughter? Can you talk to this venture capitalist, this candidate? It's just an endless like of asks and it's chaotic and the firm is asking you to do all that kind of stuff. How do you guys manage just like kind of tactically manage the chaos, manage your schedule, get shit done in the. In the hurricane of requests, inputs, chaos. Any tricks?

Matti from Eleven Labs (30:07)

A few, few tricks. Few tricks for sure. The, the I think that we, we run a lot of the company on Slack. So the Slack is one part and of course the email is especially the external piece for email. Now it's a combination of two. My brilliant assistant Hannah is helping and the script is helping to auto classify a lot of emails to effectively P0P1, P2P0 is we need to.

Brian Halligan (30:29)

Somebody else is reading your emails and

Matti from Eleven Labs (30:31)

p0 someone else is reading and now we have a script as well to auto classify them.

Brian Halligan (30:35)

Okay.

Matti from Eleven Labs (30:36)

And then P0 is like, that is interesting. It is super helpful.

Brian Halligan (30:39)

Okay.

Matti from Eleven Labs (30:40)

Same day Reply on a P0. P1 can wait for the week. P2 not important, I can take out. And then I have like unblock piece.

Brian Halligan (30:48)

So somebody's reading your emails and it's like, hey, you need to respond to this as P0 labels.

Matti from Eleven Labs (30:53)

So every email gets a label by a homo sapien, by a homo sapiens and a script. So now it's a combination of both. So script does the first pass and then the homo sapiens does the second pass.

Brian Halligan (31:05)

Fascinating.

Matti from Eleven Labs (31:06)

Hannah, who is great at it too.

Brian Halligan (31:08)

Okay.

Matti from Eleven Labs (31:09)

And then you know exactly. Okay, this is, I need to reply this day. This is an important customer partner.

Brian Halligan (31:14)

How does she know what's important? Like I send you an email, she must be like, that's so important. You got to respond. How does she know what's important?

Matti from Eleven Labs (31:24)

Well, the first thing is sometimes there's of course new where you don't, but usually she knows me inside out. And the second thing is for a lot of the people, a lot of the clients, you, Brian, you will be in my contact list. You will have a P0 inbound. So the first moment you hit me with the email, it will auto classify that as a P0. So I know that it's at the top and that I should reply on the same day. So that has worked tremendously across email. I think I'm very good on getting up.

Brian Halligan (31:53)

How about slack? The slack must be a firestorm.

Matti from Eleven Labs (31:55)

Slack is a firestorm. Slack is a firestorm. So it's usually a combination. If I think it's taking more than five minutes, then I will remind myself later. So I'm big on the remind function. And then if it's less than five minutes, I usually try to reply straight away.

Brian Halligan (32:10)

Yep, kind of. Inbox zero on your slack.

Matti from Eleven Labs (32:13)

Inbox zero on the slack.

Brian Halligan (32:14)

Okay. What about your calendar?

Matti from Eleven Labs (32:17)

Calendar is at least week in advance clean in terms of like what I want to do. And then if there's like an urgent thing that comes up, then things get reshuffled.

Brian Halligan (32:27)

Yeah.

Matti from Eleven Labs (32:29)

And then I think the biggest piece that I've done over the last six months and you mentioned the conferences, the events, is planning at least a quarter ahead which continents I will be in. And I'm trying to never be switching the continent in the same month. So within a month I'm trying to stay in one place.

Brian Halligan (32:46)

Oh, so you go to the US for a month.

Matti from Eleven Labs (32:48)

I usually try to be in the US for close to a month.

Brian Halligan (32:52)

I see.

Matti from Eleven Labs (32:52)

And that helps a lot with getting on the ground. Working with the team, but also working with the customers. I think it's going to decrease to two weeks now, given how. How distributed we are. Yeah, but. But before that, I used to go for like a few days sometimes to us. And that has. That has been not. Not ideal.

Brian Halligan (33:10)

Yeah.

Anton Helmley (33:11)

Before.

Brian Halligan (33:12)

Okay, Your calendar must be nuts. What does it look like? And where do you build in time to, like, actually think That's a good question.

Anton Helmley (33:26)

I kind of. I think. I think best by talking together with someone else.

Brian Halligan (33:30)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (33:31)

So it naturally, like, happens.

Brian Halligan (33:33)

I see.

Anton Helmley (33:34)

Maybe late in the office or something one time. Yeah. I think I'm like, I'm still in this, like, firestorm and I'm going set on innovating on what works best. Like, there's a certain. A type of creativity that you also only get, like, when you're bored or, like, you get some downtime. And I don't. I think there's some way to program myself with the, like, this environment to get more of that.

Brian Halligan (34:01)

I did a Wednesday. Every Wednesday. I work from home and no meaning it was no meeting Wednesday that helped. I'm also a little introverted, so I needed a little time to recharge. Are you guys introverted or extroverted? Are you introverted?

Anton Helmley (34:14)

I say that, but people around me are like, no, no, you're faking. I mean, if I. If I'm alone full day, I'm like, oh, God, people human.

Brian Halligan (34:24)

I'm not like that. I'm like, well, I need another alone day. Okay, interesting.

Matti from Eleven Labs (34:29)

The no meetings day helps. I also have no meetings day. It usually gets meetings, but they are meetings I actually want to do rather than. Are kind of proactive for the future rather than in the moment in this given week.

Brian Halligan (34:42)

One of the things that really helped me was like, once a month I made a to do list of like, here's the eight things I want to get done. And I would publish that on our. We had a wiki at the time, and so everyone in the company to see what I was working on. And I would look at it every couple days and be like, does my calendar match my to do list? Because all the slacks and emails are everybody else's priorities imposed on you. And by putting it on there, it sort of allowed me to say no. It's just so much stuff. And it was hard to say no. And so it gave me license to say, you know, it's not on my to do list. I'M not going to do it. And then I got a hat with a big no on it. A no hat. And I walk around the office and people call me Dr. No because I just wanted to keep it focused on a couple things that I was trying to get done and the company was trying to get done and I would lose focus and then it'd be a firestorm and then back. So I didn't nail it. But that was a small hack that helped a little. Okay. You two are do an amazing job building amazing companies in Europe. My two favorite entrepreneurs. What's it like building an amazing AI company in Europe and what are the pluses and minuses of building in Europe?

Anton Helmley (35:58)

I think the network around you is not as mature compared to especially Silicon Valley. That makes it more difficult with the distribution. I mean like sophisticated investors are like just one coffee away can be valuable. And then once you're staffing, especially on like not the high slope generalists are distributed across the world. Right. But as you're staffing with people who have done it before, it's trickier to find it in Europe I would say.

Brian Halligan (36:36)

But I heard you refer to building in Europe as hard mode.

Anton Helmley (36:40)

I mean those parts are hard mode. But at the same time I think, I don't know, maybe we would have been more successful building from the valley or something. I could see that. But I think it has been very helpful for us to be the go to number one talent destination is Stockholm. Totally. And that's the reason I decided no, we're going to stay here. We're going to stay here and bet on, on the. That there's much more available talent that doesn't jump around and like they aren't entitled and spoiled and they, they're cheaper. They're cheaper. They're yearning for a possibility to literally change the world.

Brian Halligan (37:17)

Yeah.

Anton Helmley (37:18)

And there's not many companies that have done it from Europe. There has not been a trillion dollar company from Europe. And being at 11 labs or building at Lovable is one of those very, very rare opportunities here.

Brian Halligan (37:30)

I agree with that. I'm going to ask you this. You've got employees in the US and Europe. Any difference?

Matti from Eleven Labs (37:39)

Definitely differences and similar. I will quickly add that I think the talent in Europe can be incredible.

Brian Halligan (37:45)

Okay.

Matti from Eleven Labs (37:46)

You need to find a talent and

Brian Halligan (37:49)

where you're building in London mostly or all over?

Matti from Eleven Labs (37:51)

All over. But London and Poland are our biggest hubs.

Brian Halligan (37:54)

Yeah. And Poland must be terrific.

Matti from Eleven Labs (37:56)

Poland is incredible. Like some of the best central Eastern Europe, like some of the.

Brian Halligan (37:59)

Everybody must want to work for you. In Poland, it's like, it's like, Anton,

Matti from Eleven Labs (38:02)

we are, we are heavily building the brand across, across Eastern Europe and we, we think those engineers are just so incredible. They are yearning for something. I think they're yearning for a company that actually wants to build something generational, something big.

Brian Halligan (38:13)

Yeah.

Matti from Eleven Labs (38:14)

And there's just so few of those opportunities. At the same time, the companies of Silicon Valley frequently don't give that opportunity.

Brian Halligan (38:20)

So it's like perfect to build new stuff.

Matti from Eleven Labs (38:22)

They give like it stuff and on. So I think one of the differences, which is on a lot of Europeans, especially Eastern Europe, are very straightforward, straight to the point, very direct sometimes, sometimes too direct, which we actually really enjoy as a company. It helped share a lot of ideas, criticism, feedback in a much better way. On the other hand, what I think us is going for them is that confidence of things are going to be amazing, are great, are very ambitious across the entirety of the people. And that's something that we are continuously trying to instill in some of the people across Europe too. And maybe the other thing that helps across Europe is that if you're building in Europe, you of course need to build for the global market. You cannot build just for European market. But then when you do that, then the time zone is actually perfect for catering to us, to South America, to Europe and to Asia as well, which helped in our case as well.

Brian Halligan (39:21)

And the difference between American employees and

Matti from Eleven Labs (39:23)

European, it would be that I think the main one is also beyond being direct and confident. I think the entrepreneurship kind of aspiration is very different in us, Everybody knows value of equity. Everybody is treating that as part of a good career. In Europe, you kind of need to convince the employees and they seem to come convince the families that this is the right thing. In Poland, we need to frequently explain that equity is worth something, almost force the employees to take the equity, which. Which is always an interesting surprise of like, how does it work? But now we've went through this cycle a few times and the equity is worth something with the tender offers. So people started educating other people that this is actually the right choice, which we hope will like in places like Poland and wider Europe, will become more, more normalized and then something that people will want to do across entrepreneurship.

Brian Halligan (40:17)

When I was in my late 20s, I spent early 30s, seven years in Asia and I worked for this company, PTC, a very good company in the US and I had to convince Japanese people and Chinese people and Korean people that this thing called equity is going to be worth a lot. And man, it was a dogfight Convincing them, like, what? You're just trying to pay me less money. I remember those days and people made a lot of money on that stock. Okay, on this topic, like 996. Are you guys in office 996 hardcore. Like one interesting thing, like my generation of CEOs we kind of followed Steve Jobs was sort of on our Mount Rushmore and the current generations. It feels like it's a lot more Elon and companies are working much more like Elon's companies. Who's your Mount Rushmore? Are you 996? Like Elon plus like where. Where are you guys at?

Matti from Eleven Labs (41:14)

Steve Jobs is great. Yeah.

Brian Halligan (41:15)

Yeah, I think it's a good one.

Anton Helmley (41:16)

I mean, what I like about him is he really understands that like a team working better and better and better over time and like really obsessing and caring about what you're doing is.

Brian Halligan (41:26)

Who are you talking about?

Anton Helmley (41:27)

Steve Jobs? Yes.

Brian Halligan (41:28)

Yes. But who.

Anton Helmley (41:29)

Who.

Brian Halligan (41:30)

If I'm Steve Jobs, who are you? Elon, who's your.

Anton Helmley (41:34)

I mean, my style can be a bit long. I'm like, this has to get done now. What does to do this faster.

Brian Halligan (41:40)

But is it Daniel?

Anton Helmley (41:42)

No, I don't know him that well. Unfortunately he operated. But. So based on reading about Elon, I have a bit of that, but I think you lose a lot of the, like the autonomy and teams feeling, ownership of doing. Doing it too much the Elon way. So I. I might get back to

Brian Halligan (42:01)

you on with a RU996 plus me.

Anton Helmley (42:06)

Many people around the company are 996 plus your company. Many people in the company. But people have family as well. So it's just. We have very, very, very high expectations of everyone to have to drive impact. And then if you're not working many hours, you need to clearly have impact in other ways.

Brian Halligan (42:27)

You think that scales. Like one of the problems with scale is that that drive sort of wanes and that, you know, do you think that fades and is there ideas in your head how you keep that, that motivation going?

Anton Helmley (42:44)

I think it's about setting very, very ambitious goals every week.

Brian Halligan (42:47)

And that's one of your things. Every week you put out goals. Yeah.

Anton Helmley (42:53)

And then it's very. Being very clear before someone joins on what the expectations are. And it's about evaluating impact.

Brian Halligan (43:03)

And if you lost candidates, like VP candidates, because like, you know what? Yeah, I love the mission. I love you. But I can only do 50 hours a week. And I got to. I've got a. I've got a life, I've got Four kids I lost.

Anton Helmley (43:18)

I think we lost some kind of like that.

Brian Halligan (43:21)

But that's maybe good life in the big city. Okay, who's your Mount Rushmore?

Matti from Eleven Labs (43:28)

It's very closer to Steve Jobs between those two. But he was always so caring about the design, about making it, kind of hiding any complexity from the user, making it easy to use. He does have this obsessive piece, which is maybe slightly different to how I would try to run it or work in a company. But I love what he created as his legacy. But there are amazing other CEOs there. You know, there's like more pockets from different people that, that they are incredible. I like Jamie Dimon and how his clarity and, and his like across so many things that he runs. And I think it's like half a million people under him. He feels very calm and under control. I think this is admirable, Satya. I think the way he kind of turned it around and he is like a very caring person around, around how he runs the company. I think this, this is, this is another great, great leader. But from the996, I think in our. You guys, nine, nine, six, not in the office. I think everybody is online chronically. And all the time we definitely make it very explicit before you join. It's. We think it's like once in a, in a lifetime change with AI across the world. We can be the voice of the change, the voice of the technology. And everybody understands the opportunity ahead is rare. And we do those candidates across. But then you filter. We do frequently. I mean, they frequently, I think even apply. We are like very vocal in the process. That, yeah, that, that it's, it's. It's a. It's a lot of time commitment. We never impose it or ask anyone for doing that, but they do. It's usually seven days a week. But you are not maybe working all the seven days a week, but you are online and ready to jump in, especially on the weekends on any questions. And I think people enjoy working next to passionate people. So you kind of get that bar higher, you run together. And then when you see results, it's also motivating.

Brian Halligan (45:30)

In the last 50 employees, from employee 250 to 550 to 100, is there a difference in your mind and commitment and zeal and whatever?

Matti from Eleven Labs (45:43)

You know, it's definitely some, but the current employees are also on it. And I think the small teams helped where you have like, you know, you effectively joined a unit of 10 people or less. So you are seeing that everybody's running in that unit and everybody else is running too. So you are going after that too. Of course we also have people with families, people that will have other things and that can work and it does. But usually those people are thinking about work and how to improve at all times.

Brian Halligan (46:16)

What do you guys think? European. Like what needs to happen in Europe to. To have like a lot more of you guys?

Anton Helmley (46:24)

I think they're coming. You do?

Matti from Eleven Labs (46:26)

Yeah. It truly is 100%.

Brian Halligan (46:27)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (46:28)

There's like engineering schools now. You ask them would you consider starting a startup or being part of the founding team? Yeah, 80%. Yes.

Brian Halligan (46:36)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (46:36)

It went up the 10x recently.

Brian Halligan (46:39)

Okay, interesting.

Matti from Eleven Labs (46:40)

And that first generation will help. I think like few of the companies, if we do a good job, get some people to start another set of companies. I think the second thing of what's I think missing in the European ecosystem is people that have done it before have seen that scale and then of course have got a good outcome to then make clear of. Like this is actually a really cool thing to do. Hopefully those people can infuse additional set of startups across, across Europe.

Brian Halligan (47:07)

We started HubSpot in Boston and it's got a lot of the same benefits. Europe, like so much talent. MIT's there just we were a magnet for it. The area fell down is as we scaled and we need to hire, you know, a head of marketing who had seen the movie before, someone who had really operated at scale. So we started hiring more people in the valley. That started to happen around a thousand employees. But it feels similar. Boston feels similar to Europe in that way. Boston's conservative. It's kind of similar. Any advice for all? There's lots of young smart entrepreneurs listening to this pod that want to build the next level, the next 11 labs. Any, any, any advice?

Matti from Eleven Labs (47:51)

First of all, I think go for it. It's. It's amazing to, to, to build a company and you know, of course maybe I was in a lucky position where I had savings and I didn't have the dependencies, but if you are in that similar situation, I think it's go for it. The learning experience you get across building a company, even if it doesn't go the way you expect, I think is so much more valuable than frequently joining other companies and being a smaller coggle in a big machine. And then I think obsess about the problem. Try to deeply understand what you are actually solving for. Talk with customers. And the simplest advice I think is the most valuable here, which is actually working with the user and iterating very, very deeply. And then I think it's all about the team and hiring. So the people you bring across and, and who you build with will be, will be defining for the company. So pick your co founders carefully and well and know them ideally for a longer time before you decide to start something and as assemble the team, you really want the trusted individuals that, that you want to go for the next decades together.

Anton Helmley (48:55)

Anton, I think you want to learn things very, very fast if you're getting started and you want to learn a lot of things. You want to learn how to hire, I mean you don't have to be so good at managing but having high expectations of people and giving them clear feedback and you want to know, learn how to sell. You want to sell to your customers or sell to them or under market to your the people you want to hire. And if you want to investors, you're always selling. You should do that all the time and fail and ask someone who you respect to give it to you hard on like how bad you are. Because if you're just getting first. Yeah, of course.

Brian Halligan (49:37)

Okay.

Anton Helmley (49:38)

Yeah. Just go out there and. And I try to find joy probably by having a co founder as you're talking about in the failings and the learnings.

Brian Halligan (49:49)

Yes.

Matti from Eleven Labs (49:49)

Yeah. That's the other thing which I was thinking about your earlier question. What you don't expect as a CEO's role, you don't expect that you don't have anyone to complain to effectively.

Brian Halligan (49:59)

Right.

Matti from Eleven Labs (50:00)

So your co founder is your soulmate that you can speak through and then there are some sometimes amazing people in the team you can iterate through. But not to the same. Not to the same.

Brian Halligan (50:09)

I totally, totally agree with that. I want to congratulate you guys on all your success. I admire what you guys are doing. I sure hope you guys build trillion dollar companies in Europe. That'd be amazing. Good luck to you. Thanks for doing the pod.

Matti from Eleven Labs (50:23)

Thank you so much.

Anton Helmley (50:23)

Thank you very much.

Brian Halligan (50:24)

Appreciate you.

Matti from Eleven Labs (50:25)

Thank you.

Brian Halligan (50:25)

Yeah.

Anton Helmley (50:26)

Okay.

Brian Halligan (50:27)

Those two are terrific and it's nice to see them kind of blossoming before our eyes. What they have in common is they both had like seven or eight years of experience with like one good company in there. And I know it's fashionable to drop out of Harvard and start a company like Zuck did, but at least for me, I did two startups before HubSpot. One was very successful, went public and got very large. Man, did I learn a lot from that. And man, are there a lot of lessons inside of HubSpot about scaling. But you do you. But I don't Think it hurts a founder to be in a really good startup to learn before they start a company. They talked a lot about their co founders and one of the things about being a CEO is you're. You're a shit umbrella. Like all the shit rains on you and you've got an umbrella for your whole organization. It's hard. The other thing about being a CEO is like, no one is coming to save you. In my startups, my boss would come and save me, another team would come and save me. There was a lot of resources around. You're pretty alone and it's on you. As a founder, the one person you can complain to is your co founder. And so my advice for you would be to really get to know your co founder because it's an incredibly important relationship for you going forward. We got into the mechanics of the job and we talked about delegation and they're kind of starting to. It's interesting. They're starting to delegate. They're like, oh, we're kind of founder mode. We're not sure how to do this, but they're starting to do it and it's impressive to see what they're doing. My experience, the way that worked as HubSpot scaled, I was very founder mode in sales and in product and man the rest of the organization. I was very manager mode. And I drove both constituencies crazy. The, the sales and product folks, I was in their shorts and they always complained I was too much in the details. All the rest of them complained that they didn't respond to their emails. So that was sort of the blend for me. I wasn't all manager mode, I wasn't all founder mode and that kind of worked for me and maybe that would work for you running your company. I like the way they were thinking about their teams. I asked all the CEOs on these episodes now, what's their span of control? And it's all over the map. By the way, I thought everyone was copying Jensen huang and having 60 direct reports. That is definitely not true. He is an n of one on that. And like Anton Helmley has five direct reports, I had 10. Matias 15. So it's a little bit all over the map. If I were you, I would think about that. What do you want your span of control to be? And I would have it as wide as you can tolerate as you scale from a hundred to a thousand employees. All those layers in there really will slow you down. So you want to keep it as flat as you can. The other thing I liked about that, we're thinking about teams is they were definitely starting to bring in some been there done that people. The whole team wasn't bend there done that. The way HubSpot ended up is we had about half been there done that and a half homegrown and VCs try to jam you full of been there done that. I like that balance, having a little bit of both. The homegrown talent is underrated on your teams, most likely. We also talked about just managing the chaos. Like they're growing crazy. They have so much opportunity. It's just a hurricane of input coming into them. And a couple things, couple hacks.

Matti from Eleven Labs (53:48)

I liked.

Brian Halligan (53:48)

Anton is really good on Twitter, by the way. If you don't follow him. He's really good. I like that every Monday morning he has a 15 minute meeting with a couple of his staff members and they brainstorm on tweets. So he's not just coming up with that extemporaneously. He's thought about it a little bit and he's very good at it. Most of them, or at least I had a no meaning day where I could actually think and get some room and work on projects. I think that's a good hack. I had it on Fridays for a while. Everyone thought it was taking a long weekend. I moved it to Wednesdays. And they're gonna have to get good at saying no. Like I. I was working on saying no. So I made myself this hat, my no hat. And I had a no shirt too. And I think startups are much, much more likely to die of overeating and starvation. That's probably true of yours. You might need your own no hat. You know, speaking of chaos, I asked them, are they 996? And they are both 996 plus. And I think that's interesting. I've asked all the CEOs I've been interviewing, there's been 10 so far. And the early stage startups are all doing996 and the bigger ones aren't. And I think that's probably life in the fast lane as your employees start having families and you're hiring people to families. It's just hard to get people in the office six days a week working nine to nine. But I think keep it going as long as you can. If you're doing 996, I think it's good. I was 996, but I didn't ask my team to be 996. We talked a lot about Europe. These are two amazing companies in Europe. In Europe's A we started in Boston, and Boston's a little bit out, like Europe. You're like outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley. And there's some real pluses and minuses to being outside of the valley. The pluses are you end up being a very large fish in a very small pond, which can help, and you have really good access to talent and not a lot of competition for that talent. So real pluses, the minuses we found out at HubSpot and they're going to find out, is inside of Boston, there's just not a lot of scale tech companies. So we had a hard time finding executives who had seen that movie on that next level of scale. Like, we took a couple people from Akamai and that worked out, but it was pretty lean. And so we started hiring execs out in San Francisco. So real pluses and minuses to being in a big city. If I had to do HubSpot over again, by the way, you didn't ask, but I would have. We were in Boston. I'd have a big office in Boston, big office in San Francisco, then another big office in, I don't know, Nashville or Denver. Toronto would be pretty good, where you can hire lots and lots of people for less money and have them be a little bit more. More loyal than, let's say, in your San Francisco office. I wouldn't let everybody work from home. I'd have three big hubs.

Anton Helmley (56:34)

Okay.

Brian Halligan (56:34)

We wound up obviously talking about Europe. They're both in Europe. Really encouraging for Europe. The world could use more Silicon Valleys and the world could use, you know, a vibrant European entrepreneurial scene. I love to hear from them that the engineering schools are chock full of kids that want to start companies. I think that's going to be good for the world and good for Europe. So I'm excited about that. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I really liked it. These two are great. I will see you on the next episode of Long Strange Trip.