Venture with Grace
00:00:00 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:00:00] S0: Oh, when when we're done, just end stream. Okay. So we're already live. Okay. This is our first in person livestream. Oh, we're live. We're live. Hi, Ashley. Welcome to Venture with Grace. Thank you for having me. I'm excited for the conversation. I'm so excited about our conversation because you have done so many jobs. So in the other podcast, I was mentioning, I felt like the next time it like, if you ever do another job, I'll be the CEO, as you have done CTO, CMO, CPO, and now CRO. I want to start with, because you started your career in NASA, right? [00:00:37] S1: I did as an engineer at NASA. [00:00:39] S0: So I feel like I want to start with, from your engineering career to you talk about your first pivot at Amazon into program management or PM, and that eventually you have your career different category of things to prepare yourself in every different executive position. So I want to talk about what were some core lessons you've learned early on in your career kind of shape you into who we are today?
00:00:39 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:00:39] S0: So I feel like I want to start with, from your engineering career to you talk about your first pivot at Amazon into program management or PM, and that eventually you have your career different category of things to prepare yourself in every different executive position. So I want to talk about what were some core lessons you've learned early on in your career kind of shape you into who we are today? [00:01:03] S1: Yeah, so I'll say what I learned is I have just a genuine curiosity about everything in the world really, but particularly professionally is how my journey has evolved. So I got told by a guidance counselor when I was in high school, I was in their very first advanced placement computer science class. And it was taught by the physical education teacher who learned about programming via just a book and wanted to take on an expanded role. And so it was just becoming a thing in high school, but I was told by a guidance counselor, STEM wasn't even really a thing back then, but if I have a genuine curiosity about computer programming, computer science, I should consider that in college because that might be an advantage because there weren't a lot of women doing it at the time. I was the only one in my class of five people. So not a great sample size, but- 10%. [00:02:03] S0: Mean- What was other five? I mean,
00:02:04 · Ashley Kramer
[00:02:04] S1: it was okay, also five people were interested in computer science at the time. So that did lead me to doing a computer science major in college, which led to my first job, which was being a software development engineering manager at NASA Langley, where we were working on this really cool Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. What I then learned was I'm a little bit more of a people person than most engineers usually are. And so I wasn't super passionate, I was passionate about the project, but I kept getting put into these roles where I was going to the other NASA centers and talking about it. And it gave me actually a little bit of worry. And do they keep having me do this because I'm not good at my job or because I'm better at talking to people? Honestly, in the end, it was probably both. And that's where you start to see my pivot into more of the product side, the program management at Amazon, Kindle team member was super cool. Just trying to figure out what the best way was to get content off of a physical book onto a Kindle and preserve the quality. By the way, there's a lot of parallels into what I'm doing today at ElevenLabs with this, back then it was physical content, keeping the quality, making sure it's available in different languages, the translation held well, dictionaries were on there that could help in all of the different languages. And lesson number one is I don't like to sit behind a computer and just work on problems all day long. And I have massive respect, by the way, for everybody that does that. I really like the component of the product side of it and the business side of it. So that was kind of lesson one. Then I got this great opportunity to go to, at the time, a tiny company called Tableau Software, who was just about to IPO and try to figure out more of the business side, the go to market side of what it meant to bring analytics into the world. So stop having static data sit in a database and start bringing these insights to the world. Those founders were really inspirational and thinking big about this new movement, I'm myself so hard right now, but the cloud was The starting cloud. To Oh, the cloud. Later years down the road, Sid Sijbrandij, who is my awesome CEO at GitLab, actually in my interview laughed because my title on my LinkedIn was head of cloud. And he's like, did that actually exist as a title?
00:04:36 · Ashley Kramer
And I was like, back then the cloud was just the thing. Like data was moving there. And at Tableau, were like, do we need just servers on the cloud? It ended up we needed a SaaS product. And so this is where you see my career pivot out of just product into more of the product go to market. How do you market a company that used to be a server desktop, but now has this SaaS product? You sell it differently, the sales cycles are different. So it became more of this whole well rounded role of having to understand the customer, the business and the technology. And that's where you continue to see me take roles like CMO at GitLab, Sid told me, and I'll never say this in an interview again, when he was interviewing me, he said, I'd love to offer you this role as chief marketing and strategy officer. And I said, Yeah, that's great. I'm afraid I'll get bored, which I never was for a day in my life at GitLab. So six months in, when we were having a CTO changeover, he called and said, Well, I want you to be CTO as well. So I was CMO, CSO, and CTO at the same time, very weird, very weird role. And helped me again see like the full scope of the business is that's sort of lesson two there is like everybody's job is really hard. It was really easy as a CMO to be like, Why is engineering not delivering more? Now you're CTO and you see exactly why that's the case. It is actually very hard to deal with a legacy database and we're pivoting toward more AI and all of these different And so fast forward, I ended up being CRO and CMO, the same thing, CRO change happened and had the opportunity to do both, which those ones together made a little bit more sense to me. It was more of just the whole well rounded go to market type role. And then of course I went to OpenAI. OpenAI at the time was looking to make sure that they can scale more in the enterprise. They were known very well back then when I started as the chat cheap tea consumer company, and they knew that there was a bunch of opportunity in enterprise. And so I was very fortunate to be part of that early enterprise shift along with, of course, many others. And I would say in my time at OpenAI, I probably learned ten years worth of new learnings in curiosity, learnings, all of that came all into play there. And it wasn't just a sales role, everybody was building, they were selling, they were marketing.
00:07:08 · Ashley Kramer
We were just trying to figure out together at massive scale how to move GenAI forward and achieve their mission, which was AGI to benefit all of humanity. And I loved the opportunity at OpenAI, but what really has always intrigued me is tying all of those roles that I just described together. So I've been an engineer, I've been in marketing, I've been in products and I've been in sales. And where I really feel that I personally thrive is being able to contribute to all pieces of that. And I don't think you need to be a CEO to do that. Obviously the CEO will do that at a company and does do that at a company, but I think it's just being able to have a focused approach to what you're doing. And what we're doing at ElevenLabs is we're trying to figure out the future of how people interact with AI. Obviously our base in voice is a big piece of that. And we have world class researchers, we were first to market with best in class voice models, now audio, translation, everything else, but now we're able to build AgenTic AI and more products on top of that. But the beauty of my role now as CRO here is, as I go and speak to customers, which I just spoke to three this morning, now I'm able to have that very tight feedback loop and go back to product or even the research team and say, this is what I'm hearing, they're the experts and they'll do what they need, but I can bring those themes back and we have that tight feedback loop. And I think that's going to be really important for the future of how businesses transform and how they're interacting with AI. And I'm super excited. And so for me, that was my third learning is I loved all of these different individual roles, but where I really thrive is being able to not just execute, but be part of a holistic company strategy and approach. And again, I think you can do that no matter what role you're in, as long as the company is at the right size and stage and scale. And of course, that it's part of the culture and mission, which I would argue all of the companies I've worked at have had that kind of culture.
00:09:21 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:09:21] S0: For sure. I have so many questions. First of all, I really agree with you on, you don't have to be the CEO to understand different parts of the business. Actually, believe it or not, I feel like it's kind of popular to have multiple title in your resume. So Amit from ServiceNow, who is president as well as COO, CVO. [00:09:40] S1: I like Amit. A great leader. [00:09:43] S0: Love that. I feel like it's so interesting to see that becoming a trend, taking on multiple roles. Then the VP of Google actually spoke on our show as well. When he benefited from having a roommate who was a finance person, he learned about the P and L before... During his early marketing career, which actually contributed to him becoming the VP of Google. So a lot of people have basically voiced that having knowledge from different departments that helps you to build up your own career. So when I was looking at your resume as well, was like, Oh, I saw we have some overlap as Damon from Tableau was on our podcast. Oh really? [00:10:24] S1: I haven't talked to him in a while. [00:10:25] S0: And then Sabrina from GitLab was on [00:10:28] S1: Oh, the she's a good, good friend. [00:10:30] S0: Sabrina, when was she on? She was on last year, I believe. Okay, yeah. [00:10:35] S1: She on last year. She replaced me, I was interim CTO at GitLab and we needed her so desperately, she did such a nice job and she's off to another role right now. Yeah, she's