Scaling AI Rocketships: ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski & Lovable’s Anton Osika

0.5% of the world can even code and much fewer can build a great product like Mati 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 interface.

So here we don't give any timelines, we do research initiatives we want to plan. You need to stay nimble that like the moment it comes out, you have 24 hours to start integrating that into your product. That's like the most important time to really be ahead.

Okay. This is a real treat. I interviewed two friends of mine, Matti from Eleven Labs and Anton from Lovable. Two terrific CEOs and companies that are absolutely ripping and they're both doing it from ye olde Europe. So we're going to get into it on the Europe thing. But there's some topics that are just terrific. These two are kind of blossoming before our eyes. They're right in the heart of hypergrowth. And we get to see like, how they think about co founders, how they're thinking about delegation and letting go, how they think about building their exec teams, managing all the chaos coming in at them. When you're in hyper growth, there's just a lot of chaos and really just pushing to keep the speed up. It's a really good episode. I hope you enjoy it and I'll be back at the end with my takes. Okay. You two are in your early 30s, similar ages. You've got some very good experience under your belt. A lot of founders I'm meeting and a lot of founders are getting funded, are right in school, right out of school, 21, 22. What would your companies be like if you had started them when you were 21 or 22? I'll let you go.

Well, I think it would have been hard. I think it still would have the pleasure of working with my co founder. I know him since high school, so we always were best friends. We did everything together.

This is Mati from eleven Labs.

Exactly. I'm working across voice, AI research and product deployment. We are on a mission to create a voice of technology. So I think I still would have started that with my co founder, which would have been the advantage. The disadvantage is I don't know how I would approach the first customers, how the world. Like, at the time, I didn't even know the world of entrepreneurship existed. So I studied mathematics. When you study mathematics, the clear career paths you take is either finance or consulting. I chose finance. I joined BlackRock and then only after BlackRock I learned about Palantir and decided to join them. Where it turned out you can actually be deployed with the customer, learn about the problems, try to understand those problems and bring them back and build the product. Which was like the first glimpse into how to build something from scratch. But before that that was still something further out of I didn't know how to approach. So I don't think I would be able to understand the first early dynamics of starting something in the same way.

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

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 known inside out. Then over the years got experience of working at other companies which helped us understand some of the dynamics here also 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 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 that 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 wouldn't understand the pain the same way we do now that we approach Voice.

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

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 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 faster iteration pace could have been successful.

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.

Yeah, sure. So if you go way back, I also studied sciences and physics specifically. And when I was I did this long internship at CERN where I 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 these 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 taking off in 201516 and I did the foundation models almost training current small language models before it was cool and met great people there. And one was the founder at Sonod. So Joel, who recently sold Sonod to Workstate for a billion dollars.

Yes. Congratulations.

Yes, 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 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 do 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 wanted to find a great engineer to help them realize their dreams or their ideas. The world is full of them. 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 interface where you dream your idea of some technical AI product into existence and that's what we set out to build.

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. 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 founder 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.

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

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 all so many, many different things thrown at you, especially as you start hyperscaling.

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?

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 business, building the go to market motion in 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 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 persons. I know that they are doing that work. And the delegation too was, was something that I think I hold on for for too long like, like to do myself rather than, than delegate. And then actually how to delegate was an interesting piece in itself where I think you, you do want to give a lot of, a lot of the, 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 founder mode to be able to jump in when needed. That balance of how do you interact through that is a tricky thing that is still, I think, a continuous learning for me.

And 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 are pretty high level and like I have an expression, keep your feet in the ground, your 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? Like what are you. It sounds like you're the first.

I do like the details. I think similar like the I think to how Anton mentioned that you operate is like you do want the funder model, you want to understand 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 in 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 they're 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 then the next second you need to go to another problem which requires the same activity.

There's a lot of context for cheating being a CEO.

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 a very long time. So we like have very. We frequently speak about this very different way of approaching the work where one is all about context switching, the other one is all about going as deep as possible.

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 very hard time delegating.

I think it's often the ah. When 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 no one thing but maybe not all the other ones.

Are you driving people crazy?

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

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?

Oh, that's a good question. I think like at this stage there's some. There's many things we just like 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 are maybe wouldn't be as effective early stage because they're like set in their ways. That is very effective. It's very effective.

Oh, wait, so you lean towards experience?

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 under sales, a lot of fun sub functions of marketing that has like all of this.

You're looking for experience there.

I'm looking for experience and then so at least to run them.

And then.

If you have capacity to also hire people with high slopes and who are like generalists and you also find a good way to be 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 is more structure in the company, but I'm committed to finding a good experiment.

High slope generalists who you're moving around on your senior team, Direct reports, senior team to Synergy or any. Are any of your direct reports any of these currently, you know, high slope people moving around?

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

How about you on the team you're building, you're get a little. You've got a few hundred employees, you're less than 100.

Yeah.

What do you think about the senior team? What are you looking for? Have you had any misfires?

In our case, we are over 300 people. But inside of the company it's effectively a lot of small teams, 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 generalist 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.

How many direct reports do you have?

I have 15 direct reports.

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?

Almost exactly. Half. Half. So half. Half. Half have done it before. Usually are growing with the role. Of course, we are going extremely quickly. So we grew from. From we started 2022 from zero to now over 200 million in revenue. So that growth has been quick for. For everybody. So everybody's learning at the same time, but half of them have seen that before and the other half are.

You think that's right, the 50, 50. Like at HubSpot, we were kind of the same. I was, I 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?

It does. So 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. And also from Palantir background, so also physics background, so trying to create the 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.

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.

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

So you have seven direct reports. Yeah.

Without me in my coffin, it's five there, five direct reports.

Yeah.

And officially everyone else like reports into them.

Yeah. And do 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 got people with 45 or 50 and people with 3. There's such a range. Anyway, was the 5 intentional or. It Just kind of happened.

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.

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

Yeah. So with the head of sales, I worked closely with Jeanne Adexel, who had done this before many times.

Okay, Danny Herzberg from Jeanne, Exactly. They coached you.

They gave me a lot of 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.

So you had a bunch of help.

And spoke to many people.

And 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?

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 you kind of need to filter through. Do they actually know how to sell? But they are all 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 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 recent 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 bug references to make sure that they are right ones. I think the bug references really helps across that beyond the spending time with the team, which I think is crucial. And then the other part, 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 I didn't appreciate until after the fact. So I was happy that the culture was very aligned. But then you can see they are very much similar. Europe and US Sales team, they're slightly different. The Europe is a lot more confident. 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. But they have core similar values which. Which helps.

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, so I sat 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?

We've done very little planning.

Okay.

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 like tens of thousand people in a hackathon. Many of the world's like largest healthcare companies using us. And we, we will I think start taking a step back and being. Okay, where are we seeing like from much better data analytics as well. Where are we going to focus?

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. So on the first 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'm sure it's going to change.

So there's a lightweight six month product road now.

Yeah.

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

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

I think it's just hard to plan more than six months right now with all the underlying platform changes. I can't. Yeah, it's interesting Time to be a CEO. How about over at 11 Labs? Like, what's the cycle?

The cycle. So we do. 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 those 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 in the next few 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.

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

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.

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 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 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 is 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 are you not that worried?

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

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

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

I would imagine that he built something in your space.

It will be inferior.

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.

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.

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 to happen?

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.

Yes.

But 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, 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.

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 out there on stuff like, just talk about your Twitter strategy. Yeah, sure. Did you tweet just before we got in here. What's the deal?

No. But 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 the post. 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, usually takes five days.

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

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.

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?

It's usually me.

Okay.

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.

Okay.

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

I would keep going and getting even wackier if I were you. Thank you. I think you're killing this. You guys are busy. I remember when I was your size 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?

A few, few tricks. Few tricks for sure. The, the I think the 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 P0, P1, P2 P0 is we need to.

Somebody else is reading your emails and.

P0 someone else is reading and now we have a script as well to auto classify them.

Okay.

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

Okay.

Same day Reply On a P0P one can wait for the week. P2 not important. I can take out and then I have like Unblock piece.

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

So every email gets a label by a homo sapien, by 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.

Fascinating.

Hannah, who is great at it too.

Okay.

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

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?

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.

How about slack? The slack must be a firestorm.

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.

Yeah, kind of inbox zero on your slack.

Inbox zero on the slack.

Okay. What about your calendar?

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

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

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

I see.

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 few Days sometimes to us. And that has. That has been not. Not ideal. Yeah. Before.

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. I kind of.

I think.

I think best by talking with. Together with someone else.

Okay.

So it naturally, like, happens.

I see.

Maybe late in the office or something. One. 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.

I did a Wednesday. Every Wednesday. I work from home and no meeting. It was no meeting Wednesday. That helped. I'm also a little introverted, so I needed a little time to read a chart. Are you guys introverted or extroverted? Are you introverted?

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

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

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, like, are like, kind of proactive for the future rather than like, in the moment in this given week.

So 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?

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 sophisticated investors are like just one coffee away can be valuable. And then once you're staffing, especially on not the high slope generalists are distributed across the world. Right. But as you're staffing with people who have done it and seen it before, it's trickier to find it in Europe I would say.

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

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 like the go to number one talent destination in 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 is much more available talent that doesn't jump around and like they are, 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.

Yeah.

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.

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

Definitely differences in similar. I will quickly add that I think the talent in Europe can be incredible. You just need to. You need to find. You need to find a talent.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah. And Poland must be terrific.

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

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

We are, we are heavily building the brand across Eastern Europe and 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. And there's just so few of those opportunities. At the same time, the companies of Silicon Valley frequently don't give that opportunity.

So it's like perfect to build new stuff.

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 to help 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.

And the difference between American employees and.

European it will 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 sometimes you need to 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 always had an interesting surprise of how does it work? But now we've went through this cycle a few times and the equity is worth something. We do 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 normalized and then something that people will want to do across entrepreneurship.

When I was in my late 20s, I spent or in early 37 years in Asia, and I work 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 dog fight convincing them. I was 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 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?

Steve Jobs is great. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it was a good one.

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. What are you talking about Steve Jobs? Yes.

Yes.

But who.

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

I mean, my style can be a bit like, this has to get done now. What does it take to do this faster?

Is it Daniel?

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 it too much the Elon way. So I might get back to you with a teamwork.

Are you 996/ me?

Many people are in the company. Are 996/ 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, clearly have impact in other ways.

You think that scales, like one of the problems with scale is 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?

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

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

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

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 gotta. I've got a. I've got a life. I've got four kids.

I lost. I think we lost some kind of stuff. But that's maybe good life in the big city.

Okay, who's your Mount Rushmore?

It's very closer to Steve Jobs between those two. But it's his. He was always like, so caring about the design, about making it, kind of hiding complexity from the user making it easy to use. He does, he does have this obsessive piece, which is maybe a 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. There's like more pockets from different people that are incredible. I like Jamie Dimon and how his clarity and his across so many things that he runs. And I think he has 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 is another great, great leader. But from the996, I think in our case. Are you guys996 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 that we think it's like once 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 lose candidates across. But then you filter. We do frequently. I mean, they frequently won't, I think, even apply. We are like very vocal in the process. 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 like get that bar higher, you run together. And then when you see results, it's.

It's also motivating in like the last 50 employees. Like, you're from employee 250 to 500 versus 50 to 100. Is there a difference in your mind and commitment, in zeal and whatever?

You know, it's definitely some. But. But the current employees are also on it. Like, 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.

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

I think they're coming.

You do?

Yeah. Truly?

Yes.

100%.

Okay.

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.

Okay.

It went up 10x.

Okay. Okay.

Interesting that first generation will help, I think like few of the companies if we, 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 had 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 Europe.

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 it fell down is as we scaled and we need to hire a head of marketing who had seen the movie before, someone who had really operated 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 lovable next 11 labs. Any advice?

First of all, I think go for it. It's amazing to build a company and 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 who you build with 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 you assemble the team, you really want the trusted individuals that you want to go for the next decades together.

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 excels 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 started. Yeah, of course.

Okay.

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

Yes.

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

Right.

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

I totally, totally agree with that. I want to congratulate you guys and 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 podcast.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate you.

Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. 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, you're a shit umbrella. Like all the 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 were 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 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, you know, what's their span of control? And it's all over the map. I thought, by the way, I thought everyone was copying Justin 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 been 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. I liked. 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. So we started in Boston and Boston's a little bit 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 loyal than, let's say, in your San Francisco office. I wouldn't let everybody work from home. I'd have three big hubs. Okay. 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 unit, 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.