$6.6B AI CEO: How to Make Your First $10,000 with AI — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Mati Staniszewski October 4, 2025 44 MIN

About the Guest

Mati Staniszewski

CEO & Co-Founder, ElevenLabs

Mati Staniszewski is the CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs, an AI voice technology company valued at $6.6 billion. ElevenLabs is best known for its industry-leading voice cloning, text-to-speech, and voice agent platform used by millions of creators and businesses worldwide. Before founding ElevenLabs, Staniszewski worked at Google and McKinsey.

In this episode of the Silicon Valley Girl Podcast, Marina Mogilko interviews Mati Staniszewski, CEO & Co-Founder, ElevenLabs. Marina Mogilko interviews ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski about the practical and future applications of voice AI, including how solo operators and small businesses can deploy voice agents for sales and support. They cover ElevenLabs' voice marketplace that is already paying creators millions, the risks of deepfakes, and where the next $10,000-per-month opportunities are emerging for entrepreneurs. Staniszewski also addresses which jobs are at risk from voice AI and how individuals can adapt.

Key Takeaways

Voice AI agents can handle real sales and customer support calls in any language using a cloned version of your own voice, lowering the barrier for small businesses to scale globally.
ElevenLabs' voice marketplace is already paying out millions of dollars to creators who license their voices, creating a passive income stream for individuals willing to sell their voice.
Staniszewski outlines a 3-layer safeguard model to combat deepfakes, combining watermarking, detection tools, and platform-level policy enforcement.
A concrete $10,000/month opportunity exists for solo operators who build and resell custom voice agent solutions to SMBs, particularly in industries like real estate, healthcare, and hospitality.
Despite fears around job displacement, Staniszewski argues that adapting means learning to orchestrate AI tools rather than compete with them — positioning yourself as the human layer on top of AI workflows.

00:00 In this video 01:23 Role of voice in AI 02:28 Can AI Voice agent generate and convert leads 05:22 Get the best domain for your business 07:14 How to set up voice agents in your business 12:00 How to make money by selling your voice 15:18 How to clone your voice 17:37 The future of Voice AI 21:37 Deepfakes & the 3-layer safeguard model 25:10 Main fears of an AI founder 27:35 Jobs at risk and how to adapt 31:23 Tops 3 AI tools 33:50 The $10k/mo voice-agent opportunity 36:49 Advice for everyone who’s starting out 41:53 Will we still learn languages?

Transcript not available for this episode.