By pairing portfolio company ElevenLabs with Mexican media company Televisa Univision to solve accent and language localization, a16z helped a culturally local Spanish-language product become globally distributable, leading to a major Netflix deal.
Ben Horowitz gives a concrete example of a16z connecting a Mexican media company with ElevenLabs' voice AI to dub content authentically across Spanish dialects, unlocking global expansion and a Netflix deal. ✦ AI generated
Ben Horowitz · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-03 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 11:10
we've got this great company, 11 Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together in a couple of months. He was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world with this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as they normally do with their right kind of intonations, their right laugh, everything but in different languages.
verbatim transcript · starts at 11:10
11:10we were in uh Mexico recently um we were meeting with uh the CEO of Tel Ava Univision which uh Alonso Angua who is a great friend of the firms who one of our global partners and we were asking about gee you know what are your struggles and one of his challenges is you know he's really faces uh you know heavy competition from some of the kind of
11:35global streamers like you know a Netflix or Disney or so forth. who have this US technology that's very powerful. Um, but he has, you know, this unbelievable Spanish-sp speakaking content. Uh, but it was hard for him to get to play on a global basis because it's in Spanish. It's a Mexican Spanish accent, which is different than a an Argentinian Spanish or Colombian Spanish accent. Uh, and you
12:01know, he's like, you know, how should we solve this? And we're like, well, we've got this great company, 11 Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together in a couple of months. He was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world with uh this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as they normal do with their right kind of intonations, their
12:24right laugh, everything but in different languages. And he recently um based on that success got a big deal with Netflix. Yeah. Uh and so here we have um something where we can bring our partners who you know have a great product uh that's culturally local but really really interesting and make it a global product by you know not competing uh with their allies but partnering with their allies and and I think that's a
12:55lot of what the program is about >> and I want to tie what Benja said back to the values point because people often ask us you know Chinese open source models, how do you compare and contrast? So in that case, they didn't have to worry that when the content was dubbed into different languages that if the speaker said something sensit sensitive about tanaman square or sensitive regarding the Chinese government that