Ben Horowitz: how ElevenLabs doubled to $22B despite big-lab competition
LadyAshBorg · x · 2026-10-06
- ElevenLabs looked like the startup most likely to be crushed by big labs, yet doubled its valuation to $22 billion last week
- Ben Horowitz's four-step moat: (1) best developer product → built-in customers; (2) data feedback loop from real voice use cases on proprietary data; (3) subtle details like Spanish with English intonation and laughing in the right place; (4) those details win big media deals, feeding more data back
- His take: you can throw more GPUs at a voice model and still not match one tuned to valuable use cases
- Broader market view: AI is a new computer bigger than the internet; pockets of excess but not 1999; money now buys leads that took a decade; customers can rebuild their own software; AI infrastructure will be rebuilt
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