Business podcast host David Senra conducted a deep interview lasting about 71 minutes with ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski. In the interview, Mati detailed how the company draws on its former employer Palantir's "Frontline Deployment Engineer" (FDE) approach, transforming the customer service process into a free product development lab.

Mati previously worked at Palantir, and he has brought his old employer's core strategy to ElevenLabs: instead of relying on traditional sales teams to market software, they directly deploy "Frontline Deployment Engineers" to large enterprise clients in sectors like banking and telecommunications, collaborating with client teams to solve practical business issues such as voice customer service and system integration.

The key design is that these FDEs belong to the product team rather than the sales team — after solving specific problems on-site, they bring back reusable industry experience to the company, which is incorporated into ElevenLabs' general product capabilities, allowing the next similar client to avoid starting from scratch. The client site thus continuously becomes a source of real feedback that exposes product gaps and drives product iteration.

For example, with Deutsche Telekom, ElevenLabs' FDE team stationed at its Bonn headquarters deeply integrated with the client's CRM and phone systems, progressing from marketing podcast generation and customer service scenarios to real-time translation services at the network level. Each phase of advancement requires proof of quantifiable results, rather than remaining at the concept validation level.

The company's growth trajectory is remarkable — ElevenLabs originated from a "hackathon weekend" side project by Mati and co-founder Piotr Dąbkowski (who also worked at Palantir and Google) in early 2023, initially securing $2 million in seed funding at a $9 million valuation. Subsequently, annual revenue grew from $0 to $100 million in 20 months, then surpassed $200 million in just 10 months, with an expected year-end revenue of $300 million. The company's latest valuation has risen to $22 billion.

In terms of market mechanisms, Mati emphasized that the core metric for assessing the health of the FDE model is the gross margin of that business line rather than the number of clients. If the focus remains solely on "order fulfillment" without feeding back on-site experience into general products, the company essentially remains a service outsourcing firm; only by systematically transforming the industry knowledge accumulated on-site into product capabilities can a truly scalable software business flywheel be established.

Source: Public Information