I'm Luke Harries

I lead growth at ElevenLabs, one of the fastest growing startups in the world. I do a mix of engineering, marketing and data.

Alongside, I do small angel investments in startups.

Previously, I was interim head of product at PostHog and, before that, co-founder of Fella Health, a YC backed HealthTech company that treats thousands of patients per month. I started my career at Microsoft Research working on reinforcement learning.

Luke Harries
Writing

SEO for startups — a guide for founders and engineers

guide

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November 24, 2024

The guide I wish I had when learning about SEO. We cover understanding the user's intent, solving the user's intent, and getting your pages ranking.

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10x engineers talk to users

blog

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March 6, 2023

Engineers should speak directly to users. Having a PM separating engineers from users is an anti-pattern.

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GPT Automator, LangChain and Tool Engineering - EA London Hackathon

blog

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February 12, 2023

Building a voice-controlled AI assistant that can control your computer — what could go wrong?

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YC - My experience and advice for the application and interview

note

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January 1, 2021

If you are an early-stage company, I think YC has incredible value and should still be the default for most founders.

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Building credit - why it matters and how to do it? (UK)

guide

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April 12, 2020

Learn how to build your credit score from scratch and avoid the catch-22 of needing credit to get credit.

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Launching a HIPAA compliant MVP

guide

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April 3, 2020

This is a guide for early-stage HealthTech startups who want to launch an MVP quickly and cheaply while following HIPAA regulation. It's the guide that I wish I had when setting up infrastructure for COVID-19 drive-through testing.

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What's the God mode?

blog

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March 31, 2020

Working backwards from the theoretical optimum to unlock better product design.

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Useful resources for learning programming and machine learning

guide

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January 1, 2020

A collection of tools, guides, and courses that I found useful or wish I had found earlier.

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The hidden power of HackerNews search

blog

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July 29, 2018

Hacker News is a treasure trove of information. Here's how to use it properly.

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Projects
VideoToSoundEffects.com

VideoToSoundEffects.com

Demo project

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June 17, 2024

For the launch of the ElevenLabs Sound Effects API, Austin Malerba and I built VideoToSoundEffects.com. It allows you to upload any video and generate a sound effect for it. We built it using ElevenLabs, OpenAI's GPT-4o, and WASM.

We cranked it out in 1 day. The launch video was seen by 100k+ people, 25k+ people visited the site, and it was feature in Tom's guide.

You can see the demo video here and the code here.

Computer control with OpenAI's GPT-3

Computer control with OpenAI's GPT-3

Hackathon

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February 12, 2023

Chidi Williams and I built a tool to physically control your computer through your voice using Whisper, LangChain, and GPT3. It can open and interact with applications, click around in chrome, and synthesize information. You can see the video and read more here.

Reinforcement learning for functional software testing

Reinforcement learning for functional software testing

Research paper

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July 16, 2020

We built a reinforcement learning system for testing software, specifically the Windows operating system. It combined Graph Neural Networks with Reinforcement Learning to trigger desired software functionality for testing. I co-led the development while at Microsoft Research. The paper was accepted as a workshop paper at ICML 2019 and is available here.

3D environment for evaluating AI agent generalization

3D environment for evaluating AI agent generalization

Open-source

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June 22, 2019

MazeExplorer is a customisable 3D benchmark for assessing generalisation in Reinforcement Learning. It is based on the 3D first-person game Doom and the open-source environment VizDoom. I co-led the development while at Microsoft Research.

We presented MazeExplorer as a poster presentation at NeurIPS 2023 and it was published in the IEEE Conference on Games. The code is on GitHub.

On-device pose classification for physiotherapy

On-device pose classification for physiotherapy

Hackathon

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January 19, 2019

We developed a tool to gamify physiotherapy workouts by using machine learning to classify poses. The aim is to increase adherence of at home workouts. All training and prediction is done in-browser using Tensorflow.js, reducing any reliance on servers and meaning your images never leave the computer - maintaining privacy. Winner of HackCambridge 2019.

Deep learning for detecting cancer mutations

Deep learning for detecting cancer mutations

Research paper

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November 26, 2018

I completed my master's thesis with Cambridge Cancer Genomics (YC S17), leading the development of SomaticNet - a novel method for detecting cancer mutations. The resulting paper was accepted at the Machine Learning for Health workshop at NeurIPS 2018.

AI caption generation for visually impaired people through a chrome extension

AI caption generation for visually impaired people through a chrome extension

Hackathon

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February 1, 2018

For the millions of people with Visual Impairments, images online are inaccessible. We created a chrome extension which uses machine learning to automatically generate the missing image captions. The captions describe what's in the photo, who they are, and what any text says. Winner of HackCambridge's Microsoft Prize 2018.

Google Cardboard to screen for Macular Degeneration (proof-of-concept)

Google Cardboard to screen for Macular Degeneration (proof-of-concept)

Hackathon

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December 4, 2017

We created a proof of concept for faster and cheaper screening of Macular Degeneration. It is built for Google Cardboard which turns any phone into a VR headset.

The solution has two parts: mapping the functional visual field; and simulating what it's like living with MD by warping a real-time camera feed. Winner of Allia's Serious Impact Hackathon 2017. The code is on GitHub.

Platform for university sports

Platform for university sports

Side project

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April 1, 2017

During my final year at Cambridge we built Proteam. The iOS and Android apps allowed students to follow teams, get notified of upcoming games, create team-sheets and much more.

We grew the platform to 9,000+ users across 6 Universities.