Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:34:20 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:34:20] S1: Put you in touch with someone from the revenue team that is closer to the enterprise customers. [00:34:24] S3: Maybe we'll have you both show up and maybe you can do a q and a on the on the COO side. So is there a tie in? I've got... I've had these... The Facebook Ray Ban glasses for about a year and they've just come out with the newest version of them. Is there a tie in with ElevenLabs and what is going to be happening with the AR glasses? So that if I'm looking at a sign, like I just walked into my Airbnb in Mexico and there's a sign and I can't read it. And is there an opportunity to have that translated but then read to me? Are you working on that kind of technology or does that already exist? [00:34:57] S1: Not at the moment. So in a way, yes. Like, if if the company of those glasses would want to incorporate that, they could easily build on top of ElevenLabs. They wouldn't even have to get an enterprise account with any of our self serve accounts. You get access to our APIs and you can build your own wrapper in a way on top of ElevenLabs. So all that would be needed then is to input the translated text, shoot us an API call, you get back the audio, and it could be read out loud through through those glasses. So it is definitely a use case that ElevenLabs would support, but it is not one that we are working on in house explicitly.
00:34:57 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:34:57] S1: Not at the moment. So in a way, yes. Like, if if the company of those glasses would want to incorporate that, they could easily build on top of ElevenLabs. They wouldn't even have to get an enterprise account with any of our self serve accounts. You get access to our APIs and you can build your own wrapper in a way on top of ElevenLabs. So all that would be needed then is to input the translated text, shoot us an API call, you get back the audio, and it could be read out loud through through those glasses. So it is definitely a use case that ElevenLabs would support, but it is not one that we are working on in house explicitly. [00:35:38] S3: It's a conversion. I don't remember what this is called, but it's a conversion of all of these, like, voice and audio and photo and video that is converging. What's that called in AI right now, the convergence of all this? I'm actually not sure either. It's like multi something or? [00:35:53] S1: Multimodal? [00:35:54] S3: Multimodal. Yeah. Yeah. And and I think that's what's really exciting is that I like... Three years ago, I I wore a pair of contact lenses and by moving my eyeball around, I was able to play a song off my iPhone. I was in the lab using it. I'm like, this is crazy that using my eye, can turn on a song on my phone. Like, what the fuck? I think that's gonna be really cool with your technology as well, the ability to have that multimodal kind of interface. [00:36:20] S1: You... You've experienced some cool gadgets, AR gadgets.
00:36:20 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:36:20] S1: You... You've experienced some cool gadgets, AR gadgets. [00:36:24] S3: I'm a geek. I don't know. I like this stuff. So I need to know from from your perspective and from your experience, what is the chief of staff title and where is it now fitting into... Because it's a title that used to be only in government and now is really aggressively migrated into the business world in the last probably ten years.
00:36:43 · Victoria Weller
[00:36:43] S1: Yeah. I think that the chief of staff title, at least in the sense that I've experienced it and now that it is at ElevenLabs, is that I get to fill all the gaps that exist at a small company where the the certain functions and projects haven't been set up sufficiently with their own role or even department. So I joined ElevenLabs, and the first thing I did was compliance. And I'd never thought about compliance before, but I ramped up to understanding what is SOC two compliance, what do we need, how do we get there, and how do we get there as fast as possible. And by adding this last factor of as fast as possible, I was able to make compliance something that's fun for myself, someone who isn't naturally drawn to compliance, and got through the entire SOC two process within seven weeks. And now we have our our SOC two compliance. But that's like one example of of the gaps. The next one was hiring. There are a bunch of internal operations, even taxes, entity setup. All these different things that it takes to to run a company that are a little bit falling through the cracks if you're only 10 to 20 people. Chief of staff gets to pick those up and and carry those across the line. And those are a lot of tasks that would naturally fall on the CEO. And by picking them up, it makes more space for the CEO to focus on the expansion and focus on outward things or focus on the bigger topics that need more of, in this case, his attention and and kind of make room for that and more piece of peace of mind as well. By being really strong operationally, and I think that's one of the core things you need as a chief of staff, You also alleviate not only by picking up those things, but by tracking them and making sure that they never have to think about this again. They know that it's in good hands and it's gonna be done, executed fast and and well.
00:38:39 · Cameron Herold
[00:38:39] S3: So I think to be a really good chief of staff, you have to be very entrepreneurial, like kind of, you know, problem solve, think on your feet because nobody has the system for you. You need to be very good at project management, very good at time management, probably a quick start that you say yes and I'll figure it out as we go. Do you end up putting yourself out of a job over the next few years because as you said that it almost seems like it's kind of like a jack of all trades, master of none that you're just freaking good at everything but sooner or later you're going to have an expert running each domain area. Do you then migrate into a COO kind of role where you're leading all those people which you already are doing? Because you said something that was really intriguing which was it almost seems like a chief of staff is an early stage company role. And then as you get to a mid sized enterprise level, that role doesn't exist anymore because now you have functional heads. Is that accurate?
00:39:33 · Victoria Weller
[00:39:33] S1: That's a a really good question. I think for me, it's an early stage role because that's where ElevenLabs is at the moment. But I think even at the mid stage company, there are always, like, ad hoc projects or, like, almost as if you... A chief of staff is like a SWAT team. So Yeah. You can throw them at a specific thing that isn't going well, and they will figure it out. At Palantir before, I was functioning kind of as a chief of staff, and Palantir is at 3,000 people, but it's still possible, like, within the suborganizations to have a need for that type of role. But I do think that the growth path of someone that joins early as a chief of staff can be to a COO role? And and definitely for most of the things that I am setting up at the moment, the plan is to hire someone for finance, hire someone for talent, and hire someone for compliance.