Venture with Grace
00:28:37 · Ashley Kramer, Grace Gong
So long answer to it's industry specific, how we go in, but I also think regardless of how we go in, we have the opportunity to have that complete customer connection and three sixty experience because we also capture the emotions and the things that happen on the call and the intent behind the call as part of that. [00:28:56] S0: I love that. Especially, I feel like it's probably your favorite industry, the food and bath industry. [00:29:02] S1: I mean, whose isn't? Exactly. [00:29:06] S0: So I guess when you're at OpenAI, I have to ask these open questions because I feel like I'm sure a lot of the audience probably very curious about your journey there. So when you're thinking about, I guess, expand something into enterprise, I feel like a company always have some sort of core identity, which is you either is a consumer first company or you're enterprise first company compared to, I think, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI is more focused on consumer because it was, ChatGPT, everyone started using at home, right? So what would you say was the biggest challenge to scaling it to enterprise that people may not think of?
00:29:48 · Ashley Kramer
[00:29:48] S1: Yeah, I mean, I think that there is beauty to having a consumer side and an enterprise, ElevenLabs has that as well. We have the creative studio that individual influencers use and artists, which is phenomenal. It's just, it comes down to the perception that you have to manage. It's really brand and perception, not product, because even at OpenAI, when they launched ChatGPT for consumer, they also were selling enterprise, they had APIs exposed for enterprise. It's just the market took off, and that's kind of at ElevenLabs, same thing. A lot of people say, Oh, ElevenLabs is the voice company. We absolutely are at our core and we have the most world class researchers, not one that has left the company because they believe so much in what we're doing. And so we do own that and we are the best at it. However, we also have all these agentic capabilities that I just talked about. And so for me, it's less about, it's more about brand and perception and it almost becomes a marketing exercise. And to me, no matter what company I've been at, and ElevenLabs and my team certainly know it's my perspective here, being able to have these powerful enterprise customers become successful based on the value you're providing and even go speak on your behalf. We have our eleven eleven conference coming up in New York on 11/11, of course. And the speakers haven't been announced yet, so I think the comms seem to be very angry at me if I said who, but over the next few weeks, you'll start seeing who's speaking. That's the beauty of, okay, yeah, we have the creative side, that's great. And similar to where I was at OpenAI with ChatGPT, but now you have all of these powerful customer use cases and stories and the value you're extracting. And I think that's when the market perception starts to change is when you have these customers that are saying, this is the value that we're getting out of this, and this is what the AgenTeq platform is doing for us, and this is what we've built on top of your models. That's where you really start to see the change when you have these companies that maybe start as consumer or as consumer and enterprise, but one perception wise takes off more.
00:32:06 · Grace Gong
[00:32:06] S0: For sure. When I really agree with you on, essentially your customer product is doing the marketing for your B2B product. As for ElevenLabs, guess, when you enter the role, how do you think about setting up a quarterly goal? Maybe it sounds very vague, but I guess since you guys have product offering already, so I guess on the product side, it's less of a development needed to be done. But I guess in the sales department, guess, how do you think about building out your own team and what are things that you will allocate a budget to, like AI agent versus what would you allocate budget to, unassembling the human component? And what are things even so needed to be closed by the account executives versus... Obviously a lot of things could be self serve, but I guess ElevenLabs can also voice the agent to a degree, but... There's the product component, there's the vertical industry
00:33:11 · Ashley Kramer
[00:33:11] S1: component. Again, will a large healthcare company do an automated close process? Probably not, we probably need to look at a contract together and we probably need to have, that's where humans definitely come in. Although we do have an AI lawyer that we're building here that can help with some red lines and those types of things. So again, allowing them to move faster and get down to the where the humans really do need to communicate and negotiate versus just generic red lines that I'm no lawyer, but I'm sure happen in contracts. And then there's the global perspective. There's different regulations in different countries and different data residency laws and rules and those types of things. And so when it comes to how I think about it, I think about it from a, here's our product portfolio, we have 11 creative, which we do sell to enterprises and different territories and segments have adopted it differently. We have 11 agents, which we've been talking about, and we have the API largely for VARs and digital natives. And so we think about the product suite and mix and ideally where we wanna fuel more both in product and how we're taking it to market. We think about the perspective of the industries. And so we are seeing an uptick in certain industries right now. And so that means that we want to fuel that more, but that does not mean we don't want to make bets on other industries. And so figuring out what industries maybe remain underserved and the why behind that. Is it something we need to build for them? Is it just not been a focus for some of the other AI approaches and companies? And then there's the global component, and this is another one that I know we feel very passionately about. As of our V4 model, which was launched this morning, we now support 90 languages and some really big moves in Japanese, Mandarin, and Brazilian Portuguese. And so you can imagine that as part of the Q4 and beyond strategy, fueling some of that and making sure we're helping make customers successful because maybe they haven't had best in class models that they can leverage. And so there's probably a lot of untapped opportunity there. So being able to sort of follow the product signals we have and the market signals, but again, take big bets. What are maybe some countries and territories that have been underserved for one reason or another?
00:35:39 · Ashley Kramer
And how can we go help them evolve their AI strategies and how they interact with AI as an early to market partner. There is a world where we believe a lot of model commoditization is happening. Eventually there will be a lot of agents that can do a lot of things. And then to me, it becomes a who's the trusted partner as well. So who has the world class research with the products on top of it? I can credibly say we can claim both of those and who's the best partner that will help you understand how to scale. And it goes back to that AI native executive, understanding the right ways to scale, understanding how to sell you the value and not just the product and move to the next, being able to really help with that AI transformation that we know companies have been talking about for years now. How many of them have raised their hand and said, it's happened fully here yet? I'm not going to claim to know that, but I'm going to claim the number's probably pretty low. I don't think anybody thinks they are at where they want to be and they have hit the mark as far as their AI journey.
00:36:47 · Grace Gong
[00:36:47] S0: I totally agree with you. I feel like it's super... So like you mentioned, you should focus on the product, where the product leads, and then really doing the untapped market and then really following the market signal. So as a CRO, how do you schedule your time since obviously you can be traveling at 400 different conferences and then you could... There's 90 countries. You can just pick one every three days you're out. Yeah. So how do you think about your time? And as an executive, so obviously, like, I'm very grateful for this podcast. I hope you don't, like, copyright this out. But I'm just curious, like, in your day to day, like, what would be your... On your priority list? And how do you really make sure that you have the right team and the right resources to really go after whether it's revenue or just the company agenda in general?