How A Tiny Polish Startup Became The Multi-Billion-Dollar Voice Of AI
Forbes Daily Briefing
Forbes
4.6 • 12 Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2025
⏱️ 5 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
ElevenLabs’ computer voices are so convincing they could fool your mother. That’s both a blessing—its 30 Under 30 alumni founders are now both billionaires—and a curse for the four-year-old company.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, December 7th. |
| 0:05.1 | Today on Forbes, how a tiny Polish startup became the multi-billion dollar voice of AI. |
| 0:13.4 | Dubbed films in Poland are horrible. |
| 0:16.0 | A lone lector delivers all the dialogue in an ennerved Slavic monotone. |
| 0:21.5 | There is no cast, no variation between speakers. |
| 0:25.1 | Young audiences hate it. |
| 0:27.1 | Mateos, or Mati, Stanisuski, the co-founder of AI Speech Outfit Eleven Labs, says, quote, |
| 0:34.6 | Ask any Polish person and they will tell you it's terrible. |
| 0:38.6 | I guess it was a communist thing that stuck as a cheap way to produce content. While working at Palantir, Stanisuski |
| 0:45.5 | teamed up with high school friend and Google engineer, Piotr Dabkowski, to experiment with artificial |
| 0:51.7 | intelligence. The pair realized that one project, a particularly promising AI public speaking coach, |
| 0:57.9 | could solve the uniquely Polish horror of Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson |
| 1:02.8 | being drowned out by a lector star like Macyage Gudowski. |
| 1:07.8 | The pair pulled their savings and by May 22 had quit their jobs to work full-time on 11 Labs. |
| 1:14.9 | Out of the gate, their new AI text-to-speech generator was leagues better than the robotic voices of |
| 1:20.6 | Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. |
| 1:23.7 | Eleven Labs' AI voices were capable of happiness, excitement, and even laughter. |
| 1:30.0 | In January 2023, 11 Labs launched its first model. It could take any piece of text and use |
| 1:36.8 | AI to read it aloud in any voice, including a clone of your own, or worryingly someone else's. |
| 1:43.9 | There was immediate demand. |
| 1:46.0 | Authors could instantly spawn audio books with the software. |
| 1:49.0 | Pro rates now start from $99 a month for higher quality and more time. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Forbes, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Forbes and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.