How Elevenlabs is Leading the AI Industry | Chief of Staff, Victoria Weller

The first aha moment I had with 11 labs was when I heard about it. And then I took the bus home and every station there's a voice that announces the next stop. And my mind just went to the operational costs of creating these recordings for me to know which bus stop is next. And then there's a diversion and suddenly the bus driver has to tell me what the next stop is and it's almost impossible to understand them. And so for me, I was like, okay, transportation, huge use case. Probably a smaller. If you look at our enterprise suite now, but even there, like in day to day life, there's so much text to speech that could be leveraged.

All right, you're going to love this episode that we have today. You're going to want to watch this one on our Second in Command podcast YouTube channel as well. We've got Victoria Weller, who is the chief of staff from 11 labs. She's going to talk about her background in astrophysics, around the safety of artificial Intelligence, about why Eleven Labs is one of the fastest growing companies in the AI space in 2023, having raised $20 million at $100 million valuation. Because they'd already had millions of customers. Yeah, millions. Her background in space medicine. And also going to talk about the leverage and what their company, eleven Labs, does in the AI space of text to voice technology. We even talk a little bit about extraterrestrials. You're going to love this episode. We'll see you on the inside. So, Victoria, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, very much looking forward to doing this episode with you. Really looking forward to learning from you. I love, just before we went live, you explaining that you've lived in London, you've lived in Berlin, you've lived in Edinburgh, you lived in New York. What an amazing opportunity as a human to be able to live in some of the best cities in the world. Tell us how that all happened.

I've been very lucky to be able to move around that much. And I think there's something that I was able to take from each of the places I lived in. But to go chronologically, it happened that I, I went to an international school in Munich where I grew up. So it was always tailored. My education was tailored towards going abroad to study. And I never even considered staying in Munich or even staying in Germany for my education, but only looked across at the US or in the UK and then got accepted into Edinburgh. I had applied for architecture and then last minute pivoted to astrophysics and Edinburgh was open enough to, as they mentioned, as they called it, open an experiment, experiment to see whether I would be successful at studying astrophysics, even though I hadn't done physics higher level in my ib. It was successful in the end. Loved my four years there. And then had an opportunity for a role at the center for Space Medicine in Berlin. It's part of the Charite, which is one of the biggest hospital medicine universities in Germany. And I was a research assistant there for a year, both teaching the medicine students in some of their modules, but also doing a literature review of every piece of research that had been done on how the body changes and more specifically, how the cardiovascular system changes in microgravity. So what is different about the blood system of an astronaut versus the blood system of everyone else? Like every one of us down. And what are the complications that this can lead to both when going to space, but also when coming back to Earth? And that was really exciting. We ended up publishing a Springer brief small book about this at the end of the year. I love my time there. I would have really liked to continue thinking about astronauts and maybe even even becoming one, but for a career at the center for Space Medicine, as the name says, it would have been crucial to study medicine or at least physiology. I also realized that I really miss physics and the rationality behind that and the formulae and the Greek Alphabet. I started looking into doing a master's master's degree in physics again, started applying for that. And while I going through the applications, did an internship at a micro satellite startup in Berlin, which was also really exciting. Spent three months simulating their sun baffles. So thinking about when you want to take a picture of stars from a satellite in space, you want it to be as dark as possible. You want to get only the light from the star and to get as much light as possible from the star and little interference from everything else around all the other stars and galaxies. They put baffles on top of the. On the satellites you can have different shapes and steps and different colorings and coatings. And we were running simulations, often like overnight, of all the different genomical positions we could have of the sunlight baffles. To find the best one to construct and then put on on these microsatellites to send to space. After I had gone, I'd been done with it was called Berlin Space Technologies. I got accepted to Columbia University and went to New York for a master's in applied physics. So less extraterrestrial, more down on Earth physics and did my master's in New York, which was an incredible experience, both from the education at Columbia, but also from living in New York in my early 20s. That was an incredible opportunity. I loved every day of it and I loved it so much that it went so fast. I felt like I blinked twice and I had finished my master's. And so I decided to take the opportunity that you get after getting a degree in the US if you're a foreigner, German, at least you have an opt so you're allowed to stay for three years with a STEM subject to work. And I got a job at a startup which was in hindsight, a perfect segue for me into the data tech world. The startup is called Crypt and they do quantum secure data encryption and they had both hardware components and software components. This was a perfect combination because I could speak to the hardware components on which lasers were split, phase shifted and interfered to create quantum random numbers that were then used for the encryption of data, but was also working on the software pieces in a sort of project management role and moved closer to tech and understood the importance of data and the use of data, and then found out about Palantir and applied there as a reliability engineer and joined Palantir in 2019, which was actually my most recent position. Before 11 labs. I was at Palantir in New York for the first couple of months until the pandemic hit, relocated with the them to London, stayed for another couple of years and now in May switched to startup called 11Labs, which does text to speech AI and I'm working there as chief of staff and own all the internal operations as well as compliance and hiring and HR and a big hodgepodge of things that are super fast moving and really exciting and exactly what I want to do at the time being. I think you can tell that there's like so many different things that I did that now in one role I get to do so many different things which I really enjoy.

I'm kind of dumbfounded. I mean, anyone who's watching this on our YouTube channel, we have a second command podcast YouTube channel will see why I'm dumbfounded. You don't look old enough to have done all this stuff. But even when you said you got your master's in your early 20s or you started your master's in your early 20s, you've really done a lot at quite a young age, clearly. I mean anyone clearly to work in astrophysics is clearly smart. And I'm glad you gave us a bit of a glimpse as to what astrophysics is. I've heard of it. Physics was really one of the only courses in high school that I loved and I was never like, fantastic at, but it made sense to me. I think it appealed to the logic side of my world. I'm curious how you go from all of this real science, real kind of esoteric, real kind of mathematical, and then into the business world. How do you make that leap? It doesn't seem like a very logical leap, but I know that you've done it and many engineers are running, you know, tech companies. So how do you learn business and how have you made that leap?

It was, in the end, mostly it came down to logic for that leap. The more time I spent with astrophysics or with physics and research, I realized the time frames over which huge changes and impact happens. Before going to Edinburgh during my studies, I also did an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. And for my entire summer, I was analyzing the gamma ray burst and the spectral catalog of these explosions that had been seen over the last two years. And I spent six weeks just selecting the background and the foreground. And this was a tiny part of a huge spectral catalog, which in turn was a tiny part of a bigger piece of research, which might take someone a lifetime to find something that is truly life changing or in their world, life changing then ends up being not really life changing to the rest of the civilization. So I realized that you are very much in a niche that not many others care about, but you also operate on terrestrial or extraterrestrial time frames where it's taken the light millions of years to reach you, and it might take you many years as well to aha moment from it. And so that I realized that wasn't the speed that I want to operate at, as well as the locations usually where these things happen, especially astrophysics research happens. We spoke briefly about the light interference of satellite observatories, but for observatories on Earth, that's an even bigger consideration. You can't be close to city because the city lights and the pollution and the scattering of light makes all of your extraterrestrial observations worse. So you end up being in the Atacama Desert or anywhere by design that is dark and is far away from civilization, but is also like, in need of a lot of space and therefore cheap. And I like Berlin and New York and London. And so there was a contradiction there as well. And then there's a financial aspect, and then there is. For me, it's really important to, to get along with colleagues and love who I work with at some point, I also realized that those people are more in the business world rather than in the research world.

So I got to ask you one one final question around physics, and then we'll. We'll kind of dive into 11 in the IT. So are there extraterrestrials, and are we living in a simulation?

Both amazing questions. I don't know how you expect me to answer them really quickly before talking about the Lemon Labs. I don't know. It would be really fun if either of these were true. For the first one, I would say, like, what gives us the right to think that we're the only civilization out there? The universe is so vast, surely. But I don't have better insight there to other people. But I think for that one, if I had to choose, I would like to believe that, yes. And for the latter, I think not. I think this is. This is real. Who knows?

I think for the latter, it's a fun Burning man conversation, but it's not necessarily. It's not necessarily one that really makes sense, but it just doesn't make any sense how we can be the only species in the entire solar universe. It just makes no sense. And that will probably be the one regret that I would have before I die that we don't find something that's kind of the one unanswered thing that would be kind of cool, other than, like, why are we here? Which we'll never figure that one out.

That's another really frustrating thing about physics is you. You spend so much time trying to find the answer to these unsolved problems, and you might die before the answer is found. And it's just so frustrating to think that you might never know. Like, we will never know. We won't be there for the answer of these things. And that's maybe another thing that deterred me from physics.

It makes sense that it would deter you, because I think all of a sudden your intelligence and logic would kick in and say, like, what's the point of doing all this work if it just isn't going to be used or pay off? Or if no one's really going to care? Like that one solar burst, and great, three people care. Like, really? I just spent a year doing something no one. I get it. So it makes sense.

I think it really depends what motivates you. Some people are excited by seeing those solar bursts, and that's all they care about. They would do it even if no one read the papers, or they wouldn't even get to write the papers. They just want to Think about solar bursts all day. But I'm personally someone that's also motivated by the recognition and therefore want to do something where I see the impact, either directly or indirectly, on the way that we live our lives.

I wanted to ask you about that. You mentioned when you were working in space medicine, which also is super intriguing. Like, holy, by the way, Just like a quick question. How different is the physiology and the needs of the human body in space versus on Earth? Like, is it drastically different or is it kind of similar?

I mean, it's still a human body, and you still have to eat and digest. The impact of gravity on the human body, though, is so much more profound than you will think. We're so used to, like, standing up from a chair and like, when we're in a headstand, it just feels different. And in space, that is taken away. And there are many things that happen as a consequence that you wouldn't think of right away. The impact that I spent most time thinking about was on the cardiovascular system, where probably the hardest impact apart from muscle dystrophy. So astronauts have to work out for several hours per day to keep up their muscle, but also their bone mass as a result, so that they're not completely weakened and stable when returning to Earth. But other than that, the cardiovascular system takes a huge hit as a result of gravity not pulling down all liquids to your lower extremities, but rather, everything kind of moves up a little bit, like you're in a handstand, but maybe somewhere in between. The human body has baroreceptors. So ways of measuring the pressure in the upper part, like, of. Of your body around your chest area. And if all the liquid is pushed up, the baroreceptors are like, oh, pressure is higher. It must mean that there's too much liquid. And then astronauts that just arrive in space, there, the body's like, okay, signal too much liquid. Let's start reducing our blood volume. Everything's back to normal. They have a great time while they're up there. And everything's like, transferred. The blood is transferred up. Then when they go back to Earth and everything's pulled to their feet, they often, like, they can't walk or they would faint when they walk. And there are many things that you can do to. To prevent that. In a couple chapters in that book were also about, like, what you can do to one, like, study it on Earth without having to go to. To see what happens. But also, what can you do, like, drink a bunch of salt water before returning to Earth. To make sure that once you arrive, you are actually more okay than you would be if you didn't have any anti precautionary measures.

Okay, so like that science seems to be extraordinarily fascinating and also extraordinarily useful considering that we're working towards this being an interplanetary species where we are doing more in space, we are looking at potentially colonizing Mars. Like, these are answers that are not only intriguing, but also we need to understand this soon.

I think AI is more relevant to the average.

All right, so. So better left for a dinner party conversation than still.

So then for another Burning man conversation.

Yeah, another Burning man conversation. So then, then you get to work in AI. Clearly it is the hottest, you know, industry and business area that's being talked about today. And you're in the, in the kind of text to speech side of things, which is also super intriguing. So, so talk to us a little bit about what 11 Labs is working on.

On 11 Labs, as you mentioned, is a text to speech company. Our mission is to make content universally accessible in any language and voice. So you could dub a podcast that is still spoken in your voice into another language. That's like the goal. The more immediate use cases are inputting text and outputting audio. For example, if you want to create an audiobook, you can upload the epub file that is the format in which audiobooks come, and then you can immediately, instantly create the spoken version of that. You can even go as far as instead of having one voice read the entire audiobook, you can give each character their own voice and then have the dialogues with different characters, which I think is such a fun improvement to how we know audiobooks at the moment. So those are two examples of how text to speech can be used. And ElevenLabs is one of the leading AI companies in that space with the best models that are really great at creating emotionality in the voices and having contextual awareness as well. And this contextual awareness is where AI really, really feeds in and where AI has allowed a breakthrough for text to speech compared to how, you know, Alexa speaks or Siri speaks, where the model understands what it is saying and therefore can say it in exactly the right way. So you could say a sentence. It's like, hi, my is Victoria. I'm really sad. And that will come out sounding a lot sadder than if you would say, hi, I'm Victoria. I'm so happy. That would come out like more excited because of the context of that sentence. And you could also clone voices so you could have that sentence spoken by me without me having to sit and record it in the first place. In the happy and the sad version, potentially.

Yeah. What I. What I love about 11 and I've heard about 11 now over the last few months. Almost weekly someone is mentioning for a few reasons. For a few reasons. And I'll. And I'll talk about why I'm excited and I'm going to become a client quite quickly. I love also that it can also add the inflection and the intonation into the speech as well. So that it literally does take the written word and it doesn't sound robotic. It really does sound like we would speak. So the reason I'm excited about it, I went into studio a year ago today to record my sixth book. It's called the Second In Command. And I spent two and a half days in studio in Dubai recording my audiobook. And I literally felt like poking my effing eyes out with my pen. Like, I was just like. Like, someone kill me. This was eight hours a day standing, trying to actually be excited when my content's really good. But it's hard for me to be excited reading it. I'm also not that great at reading. I'd rather stand in front of a thousand people than stand and read to someone. And then to try to throw the inflection and the intonation in and without having to, like, read it. And then also go on these little hyperlinks because I wanted to add more information that was probably coming in the next chapter anyway. And then all of a sudden, I find out that I could literally, now that I've read that entire book. Book, I can upload it. I can take a few of my speaking events and upload that content. That will train your system AI. And then I could upload my other five books and your system could literally punch out the audio recording for me without me having to spend what would now be 14 more days in studio.

Exactly. You could be done today.

It's amazing. It also. When I had to pay the authors to read my other five books, I paid them $6,000 each. I don't love their voice. They do sound a little bit kind of robotic. And strangely, people still want. Because I've done so many paid speaking events. I've been paid to speak in 28 countries. I have this audience of people that want to read my content, but they want to hear me reading it for some reason. Like, we want to hear.

And they want your voice.

Yeah. And they just don't like Fred, who's reading it. Even though Fred sounds fine. Right, so how the does the system work? How does 11 work?

Another use case. Also, quickly, before we dive in a bit more into the tech. The other day when you lost your voice voice, you potentially could have continued recording podcasts if you would have implemented some text to speech there as an idea. So both saving time in the studio but also saving time at home.

I did actually also write down that I'm going to take a look at using 11 to also transcribe our podcast into a number of the best languages. There's no reason why we shouldn't do Mandarin, Spanish, French, German. That's probably enough. I mean like what would the big five or six be?

Those are definitely on the top of the list. Definitely some that we, that we. That 11 Labs offers as well. 11 Labs has 28 languages that you can choose from many, many more voices, but you can also upload your own voice and Mandarin, Spanish, German, French are all in there. You could even do English to English from your voice to Fred's voice, or vice versa.

Yeah, I was at the, I've gone to the main five day TED conference for 11 years. And at TED, I think it was last year, they had this guy on stage singing and then all of a sudden his voice changes and it's this woman's voice and you see his mouth moving, you see him singing into a microphone and AI literally changed it to this woman's voice in a different language. We're like, what the. This is like, it's really cool. Like this isn't. And, and what I'm really frustrated around people speaking about AI right now is they're all talking about AI and they're talking about one software, they're talking about ChatGPT. That's one tool. I have a dashboard called there's an AI for that. And there's something like 8,000 different AI tools that exist and everybody's talking about one of them. So how do we get people to understand what 11 does and to play with the tool? Who would you want playing with the tool to see the opportunities?

I do think that OpenAI has like a. Was a pioneer in creating that, that fundamental shift. We're creating that mind blowing moment for people first interacting with ChatGPT and understanding like AI is here to change the world. I think from the text space where ChatGPT operates to the visual space where dall e or midjourney operate, and then the voice space where ElevenLabs is dominating at the moment. I think the people to your question of who should be Using it. I think there's also almost no no limit to this. The immediate thought is content creators for example you with podcasts or audiobooks, but also with a shorter narration of videos or shorts even like the voiceovers for any length length of video, movie or film can be done with 11 labs. But then you can continue thinking about it and if you have awareness. Just going through your day, you can see almost infinite use cases for text to speech. One of the most unique ones I found within our customer base is a hospital that uses 11 labs to read out before a surgery all the possible side effects and consequences and everything that has to be read out to the patient before the surgery. And for that also you understand why you wouldn't want it to be too robotic. And maybe even a doctor that reads this has to like rush through it to robotics. So so a really good use case for that, but not one that I would have thought of in a dark room coming up with use cases. One that I'm also really excited about is for accessibility. So we found that on the B2C side there are many users that use elevenlabs for text to speech be it because they're visually impaired and they have a hard time reading. And it's so much nicer to have human voice voice reading things to you rather than a robotic one. Especially if you spend the majority of your day with text readers, et cetera or people that have lost their voice as a result of throat cancer or similar and or have trouble like with stutters or finishing their sentences. There's so many physical things that can impede your speech where 11 lab unlocks the option to speak again and even to speak again in your original voice. For those that have changed their voice over the course of time, they can have their old voices back or even their their voice back period. So I think in the accessibility space it's also super exciting. That's on the B2C side and we also serve to enterprise customers. And there it's another new Pandora's box. So much in there like from automotive to like that hospital use case to gaming studios to production companies everywhere. The the first aha moment I had with 11 labs was when I heard about it. And then I took the bus home and every station there's a voice that announces the next stop. And my mind just went to the operational costs of creating these recordings for me to know which bus stop is next. And then there's a diversion and suddenly the bus driver has to tell me what the next stop is and it's Almost impossible to understand them. And so for me I was like, okay, transportation, huge use case, probably a smaller one if you look at our enterprise suite now. But even there, like in day to day life, there's so much text to speech that could be.

My mom passed away 20 years ago and there's an email that she wrote me that I reread frequently and it would be wonderful to be able to hear it in her voice. And that would be something that if we ever had her voice that could easily. If I had videos of her speaking, I could train AI to be able to speak and then have her read the email to me.

Yeah, that is actually a use case that comes up a lot for mothers, but also other family members. And we've just implemented a workflow specifically for that, for the compliance parts of it. There are two ways on 11 labs to clone a voice. The first is instant voice cloning where you upload 30 seconds of audio and then you get a voice clone and you can read any text out loud in this specific voice. And then there's professional voice cloning which is a higher quality voice clone for which you need 30 minutes of input data and ensure that the people cloning those voices have the rights to the voice that it's their voice. We have a voice captcha as part of the flow. So you upload your samples and then there's flow in which you are confronted with a random sentence and you have to read it out loud. And then we manually go through to ensure that those voices are the same and only if that proof exists that it's your voice, you can go. We allow the model to train on the uploaded data. If you wanted to do that for your mother, there would be no way to pass that voice captcha. We've implemented a workaround where if you provide sufficient information to prove that you are like the next of kin or have permissions over your mother's voice voice we allow to professionally train, professionally clone those voices as well.

That's incredible. So one of the questions I had written down was around the legality of it and the prevention of the deep fake videos and audio. One of the big scary, I don't think it's a meme. I think it is actually happening. Are these audio messages like voice messages that someone is getting from their mom, I'm in trouble, don't call me, don't email me, send money to this number or they're going to kill me. And it's a fake.

Fake.

How are we preventing those kinds of things from happening? Is that from the training there's so.

Many aspects to this and definitely something also that's really important to think about and to continue thinking about as AI gets better in all the different facets that exist. And I think a huge component of this is education. Being aware or creating that awareness in, in the public that AI can now be almost anywhere. And to have a critical eye when being confronted with a, a piece of content. And the first pieces of this, I think I remember when Photoshop was being used more and like you would see posters of photographs and you would think like, oh my God, these people are flawless. And then I think the next shift of hearing content should be to think like is this real or is this generated? So I think there's a huge educational component. But of course a single company like it would be lazy to say the public just has to be aware and then we solve it. There are also safeguards that we can roll as part of developing the tech. And I think every AI company that is innovating at the moment has an ethical responsibility to develop safeguards. For example watermarks we have as an example what I just mentioned with the voice captures implemented that. But we also have a service called AI Speech Classifier where you can upload audio snippet and it will tell you whether it was generated with 11 labs. So if you were targeted and got a voice memo saying I'm in trouble, email me, don't text me, you could upload it to the AI voice classifier. You don't even need an ElevenLabs account for that. And then it will tell you with 90% certainty whether or not it was created. And that's a really handy tool to have for certainty around audio content.

Is there a, is there a person on your team who could do a 20 or 30 minute demo of and Q&A of what ElevenLabs could do? We have members from 17 countries in our COO alone. I would love to get them some exposure to what eleven Labs is doing. Is there somebody that I can reach out to you later and get them to do a demo via Zoom to Our team of 3 to 5, B2C, a few B2B, et cetera, use cases.

I wouldn't even be able to do that.

That would be amazing.

Put you in touch with someone from the revenue team that is closer to the enterprise customers.

Maybe we'll have you both show up and maybe you can do a Q and A on the CEO side. So is there a tie in? I've had these Facebook Ray Ban glasses for about a year and they've just come out with the newest vers of them. Is there a tie in with 11 labs and what is going to be happening with the AR glasses? So that if I'm looking at a sign, like I just walked into my Airbnb in Mexico and there's a sign and I can't read it, is there an opportunity to have that translated but then read to me? Are you working on that kind of technology or does that already exist?

In a way, yes. Like if a company of those glasses would want to incorporate that, they could easily build on top of 11 labs. They wouldn't even have to get an enterprise account with any of our self serve accounts you get access to to our APIs and you can build your own wrapper in a way on top of elevenlabs. So all that would be needed then is to input the translated text, shoot us an API call and you get back the audio and it could be read out loud through those glasses. So it is definitely a use case that ElevenLabs would support, but it is not one that we are working on in house explicitly.

It's a conversion. I don't remember what this is called, but it's a conversion of all of these like voice and audio and photo and video that is converging. What's that called in AI right now? The convergence of all this multimodal. Multimodal. And I think that's what's really exciting is that I like 3 years ago I wore a pair of contact lenses and by moving my eyeball around I was able to play a song off my iPhone. I was in a lab using it. I'm like, this is crazy that using my eye I can turn on a song on my phone. Like what the. I think that's going to be really cool with your technology as well. The ability to have that multimobile kind of interactive. So I need to know from your perspective and from your experience, what is the chief of staff title and where is it now fitting into? Because it's a title that used to be only in government and now is really aggressively migrated into the business world in the last 10 years.

I think that the chief of staff title, at least in the sense that I've experienced it and now that it is at 11 labs is that I get to fill all the gaps that exist at a small company where the certain functions and projects haven't been set up sufficiently with their own role or even department. I joined 11 labs and the first thing I did was compliance. And I'd never thought about compliance before. But I ramped up to understanding what is SOC 2 compliance, what do we need, how do we get there and how do we get there as fast as possible. And by adding this last factor of as fast as possible, I was able to make compliance something that's fun for myself. Someone who isn't naturally drawn to compliance and got through the entire SOC 2 process within seven weeks. And now we have our SOC 2 compliance. But that's like one example of, of the gaps. The next one was hiring. There are a bunch of internal operations, even taxes, entity setup. All these different things that it takes to run a company that are a little bit falling through the cracks. If you're only 10 to 20 people, the chief of staff gets to pick those up and carry those across the line. And those are a lot of tasks that would naturally fall on the CEO. And by picking them up makes more space for the CEO to focus on the expansion and focus on outward things or focus on the bigger topics that need more of in this case his attention and kind of make make room for that and more peace of mind as well by being really strong operationally. And I think that's one of the core things you need as a chief of staff. You also alleviate not only by picking up those things, but by tracking them them and making sure that they never have to think about this again. They know that it's in good hands and it's going to be done, executed fast and well.

So I think to be a really good chief of staff you have to be very entrepreneurial, like kind of problem solve, think on your feet because nobody has the system for you. You need to be very good at project management, very good at time management. Probably a quick start that you say yes, and I'll figure it out as we go. Do you end up putting yourself out of a job over the next few years because. Because as you said that it almost seems like it's kind of like a jack of all trades, master of none, that you're just freaking good at everything. But sooner or later you're going to have an expert running each domain, expert area. Do you then migrate into a COO kind of role where you're leading all those people, which you already are doing. You said something that was really intriguing, which was it almost seems like a chief of staff is an early stage company role and then as you get to a mid size enterprise level, that role doesn't exist anymore because now you, you have functional heads. Is that accurate?

That's a really good question. I think for Me, it's an early stage role because that's where 11 Labs is at the moment. But I think even at the mid stage company there are always like ad hoc projects. Almost as if you, a chief of staff is like a SWAT team so you can throw them at a specific thing that isn't going well and they will figure it out. At Palantir, before I was functioning kind of as a chief of staff and Palantir is at 3,000 people. But it's still possible like within the sub organization to have a need for that type of role. But I do think that the growth path or someone that joins early as a chief of staff can be to a COO role. And definitely for most of the things that I am setting up at the moment, the plan is to hire someone for finance, hire someone for talent and hire someone for compliance.

It's very similar to my days at 1, 800 got junk. When I was the chief operating officer my first two or three years I was probably more chief of staff staff because none of the business areas even existed. I had to build out every single business area. I came in as employee number 14. I left, we had 3100 and then by the time I was at that third then I was COO. But you know, it was a very different role than the early days. It's why it's super intriguing to me. So what was it like going from a big organization like a palantir to an 11? Why did you make that jump and what did the CEO see in you that made him realize that you weren't going to be this corporate bureaucratic researcher?

The reason I wanted to leave Palantir is because I, I wanted a faster pace. I think out of big tech corporations Palantir is probably the fastest. But after being there for almost four years, I feel like I had figured out the system and I kind of knew where the bar was and how to just slightly exceed it with more limited speed. I was looking for something that's quicker and maybe even higher pressure. And I am still at a point in my life where I want to put my career forward first rather than comfort first. And so I realized that an early stage startup is where I can both operate faster but also do this thing that I love where I get thrown at something that I have no idea about and then figure it out and operationalize it and then it's fixed quickly. And then I found 11 labs because the CEO is actually also Palantirian. He had left almost a year before me to start 11 labs. So I knew about its inception from even before it was incorporated. I knew Matti from Palantir days and had been following 11 Labs. And then when 11 Labs launched in February and it was a huge success, we caught up and spoke about the needs, the operational needs of the company at that moment. And I came with some ideas for each of those. And we had a few conversations around that. And I think both that plus knowing many of the people that I worked with and speaking to them about it was what. What convinced him that I'm not a bureaucratic corporate worker. And I think that has proven successful as well. I think one of the best consequences of it is that there's a lot of trust between the CEO and me from knowing each other from the previous workplace as well or knowing each other outside of this role. And I think that is something that really helps or accelerates, created the ability for the two of us to work together productively from the very beginning.

That's incredible. Did I hear you right though, that 11 only started in February? Was that February of this year or February of last year?

February of this year. We launched the product publicly in beta.

Okay.

But it was incorporated a year earlier. The CTO and the CEO started it in 2022 and we're developing the model until it was released in February of this year. Year and then launched super successfully and now has over millions of users on the B2C side. And we exited beta in August of this year.

Yeah. It's a ridiculously fast start. You've raised money. I think you raised 20 million at $100 million valuation. When you're raising 20, it doesn't even matter if that's pre or post money valuation. It's still, It's. That's a hell of a raise. What do the investors see and how are you using the money? And then how did it change the company? Company?

It did happen super fast. In fact, there was a pre seed round when they started the company and then skipped the seed round straight to Series A of this year. I think what the investors saw, to put it bluntly, they saw the numbers, they saw how much users were loving this and how much it could uptake in just a few months. Like it was probably the fastest growing company in the world for a while of this year. And so that is already something that's convincing to the investor investors. But I think there's also an atmosphere shift from when eleven Labs was first incorporated and it was maybe a little bit harder to raise money in the pre seed round to the world we are in in 2023 where the potential upside of AI is so much more prevalent and something that investors are seeking out and realizing as well.

This could go on for days because I'm so intrigued with the space with you as a leader. We've got a wrap. I'll ask you kind of my one standard question question. What advice would you give to the 21 or 22 year old Victoria? You know, maybe she's just heading off to do her or just, just finishing your undergraduate degree. What advice would you give yourself that you know to be true today but you wish you'd known back then?

I think it would be that no one else knows better. I think often you think that, okay, I'm confronted with this question. I need to find someone that knows the answer to this question. And in the workplace that's often like escalating to your lead and being like I, we need to file our end year report in hmrc. What do we do? As like a recent example and the answer is so frequently I don't know. So if you start with the assumption that no one else knows better or knows the answer immediately and allows you to go and seek it out yourself and find a way to get it done yourself. And I think for me that is one of the pieces that are like core to the way I work now and what has made me valuable to the places I work at as well is because I just go and figure out how to do the things thing.

I love it. This is going to be a really fun ride to watch. I think you and 11 are going to be doing some incredible stuff. I definitely need you to let me know when you're going public, please. I've missed out. I told the founder of Uber it was the stupidest idea I've ever heard. I missed out on the founders round of a couple other companies. I'm not missing out on this one. Victoria Weller, the chief of staff for 11 labs. Thanks so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast. Don't be so focused on on making good decisions about your career, but rather make the decisions that you took good ones by your effort and your application of your disciplines and your excellence and just make it happen. Leave everything that you approached bit better than when you found it.