Advisor, Customer Advocates
Andrew Epstein
Legal at ElevenLabs
Andrew Epstein is a Sandstone advisor on the Customer Advocates panel. Legal at ElevenLabs.
Who Is Andrew Epstein
Andrew Epstein leads Global Commercial and Corporate legal for ElevenLabs, the AI audio research and software company behind some of the most realistic text-to-speech, voice cloning, and AI dubbing technology on the market. Before ElevenLabs, he was the founding General Counsel of Demandbase, building the legal function from scratch at one of B2B's leading Pipeline AI and Account-Based Marketing platforms. Over more than a decade at high-growth startups and public companies, Andrew has built a specialty in doing exactly what the fastest-moving companies need most: standing up legal from the ground up, and then keeping it standing as the business scales past whatever it looked like on day one. He's based in San Francisco.
What's one accomplishment you're proud of?
Ask Andrew what he's most proud of, and the answer isn't a title or a transaction. It's staying power and staying present. "Building a career over the last 10+ years at high-growth start-ups and public cos while being able to consistently be there for my family, friends, and inner circle," he says. Then, without missing a beat: "Either that or in 5th grade I won the school's pie eating contest...." It's a fitting split answer for someone who has spent a career inside companies defined by speed. The real accomplishment isn't the résumé — founding GC roles, high-growth scale-ups, public company experience. It's building that résumé without the rest of life becoming collateral damage. Everything else, including the pie-eating contest, is just proof he's never taken himself too seriously along the way.
Who has influenced or helped you on your journey?
Andrew doesn't point to a single mentor so much as a network, the kind that gets built by working alongside good people at every stage. Damon Jones, GC at the Washington Nationals during their time together; Mike Schiavone and David Ni, partners at O'Melveny & Myers; Vanessa Wu, GC at Rippling; and Alex Haskell, his GC counterpart at ElevenLabs, all make the list. But he's quick to note the list doesn't end there: "And many many GC advisors and friends, some of whom are fellow Sandstone advisors." It's a small detail that says something bigger. Andrew treats the GC community less like a rolodex and more like a standing peer group, one that keeps showing up in unexpected places, including on Sandstone's own advisor panel.
Why advise for Sandstone?
For Andrew, it comes down to two things: the size of the problem, and the caliber of the people solving it. "I believe solving the context layer is key and the PMF here is massive. I really love how the Sandstone team is approaching this problem," he says. Having built legal functions from zero at two high-growth companies, Andrew has lived the exact failure mode Sandstone is built to fix — legal work that starts from scratch instead of starting from context. The second reason is more personal. "Work Ethic. From my first convos with Nick and Oliver, the team's hustle and work ethic were second to none. I love being able to support that hustle," he says. It's the kind of endorsement that only means something coming from someone who's spent a decade inside companies that live or die by how hard the team is willing to work.
