ElevenLabs CEO on how badly-dubbed Polish movies spawned the voice AI company
a16z · x · 2026-09-10
In an a16z interview, ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski traces the company to the single-narrator dubbing of Polish movies that strips all emotional intonation. After Palantir (optimization models) and Google (knowledge graph models) stints, the founders set out to combine research and product deployment, starting with audio. A model released last week can now translate content across languages while preserving original voices and emotions.
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