Adyen N.V.

Disso, 9%.

Adyen, 8.5%.

So it's given us a...

Must have had a review of those earnings, Steve, and decided to give it all back.

What good is AI video slop without a realistic AI-generated voice track? Who doesn't love that? The information reported this week that Eleven Labs hired Ethan Tandowski.

He's the former CFO of Adyen, the Dutch fintech.

He was in a lead finance seat through Adyen's 2018 IPO and had been their CFO since 2023.

The information says Eleven Labs is aiming for a 2028 IPO, reiterating a March report that came from Bloomberg saying that Eleven Labs would be IPO ready within three years.

Now, there are plenty of companies that say they're IPO ready, but still find excuses to stay private.

While this regulatory wave has not yet fully hit the payment sector, the market is already grappling with a rising volume of complaints about increasing regulatory scrutiny of algorithmic transparency in financial services and a broader trend toward stricter requirements for AI explainability within critical infrastructure.

Who is directly affected? For investors holding positions in PayPal, Block, or Adyen, or eyeing Razorpay's future IPO, this implies a cost item not yet factored into margin models.

Companies currently investing in such a transparency gateway will gain a structural advantage in terms of customer trust and will likely be less vulnerable to future regulatory demands.

Conversely, those optimizing solely for accuracy and success rates risk a delayed hit to their reputation and a regulatory-driven capital expenditure spike 12 to 18 months down the line, precisely when the market expects margin growth acceleration rather than new compliance costs.

Eleven Labs has also hired a chief financial officer to help the startup head for a public listing.

On Tuesday, Eleven Labs announced that Ethan Tandowski had joined the executive team, having most recently served as the CFO of Adyen, a Dutch fintech firm that went public in 2018.

Eleven Labs co-founder Mati Staniszewski said in a press release, "Ethan brings a strong track record of scaling financial operations in high growth environments and valuable experience as CFO of a public company." And that appears to be Eleven Labs ambition as well.

The Information reports that they are beginning to explore a possible IPO.

Oh my gosh, we're getting old.

That's now one of the most successful early stage funds around with early bets in Shopify, Notion, Canva, Adyen, and more.

They've got over $4 billion under management.

Before that, he was Google's very first product manager.

You're like super early of like Shopify, Notion, Canva, all these like amazing companies.

They look obvious now, but was there like some sort of pattern there or they're all like an N of 1? Yeah.

Out of the four companies, Shopify, Canva, and Adyen have some similarities in the sense that all four of them were platform companies.

But the three out of the four, the three that I mentioned, started outside of Silicon Valley, actually even outside of US.

You know, like I don't want to, to...

You know, you know, like, um, you know, like, we've done many announcements and, and, uh, and, um, you know, like, um, and partner with a number of players, you know, um, uh, Brain3, Microsoft, IBM, Checkout, PayPal, Adyen, uh, um, i-i-- Worldpay, Getnet.

You know, like I, I can go across these, like both on the acceptance side, on the FI side, on the, on the, um, you know, digital side, uh, smaller companies, bigger companies.

Across the board, the level of interest on this is, is, uh, incredible and the level of participation is incredible.