Venture with Grace
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?
00:37:41 · Ashley Kramer
[00:37:41] S1: Yeah, mean, think this is a split. Obviously, particularly in my beginning time here, I took a lot of time with the team listening and learning just how it's going, perspectives on what we can be doing better. Most importantly, what makes the company really special, because culture is everything. And I believe that Maddie and Piotr have built an amazing one at ElevenLabs, and so that was top of mind. Understanding what the team needs, that takes up a portion of the day or the week, however you wanna answer the question. To me, customers, my team knows this, if I could spend 90% of my time with customers, I would, I can't in my role. Maybe someday when AI is automating a lot of those other I'll be able to do that. But understanding the customer perspective and being able to feed that back into how we support them, how we're building for them and what most importantly we're doing next. So we have a North Star together that we're building together, us and the customer is really, really important. Partners are a big piece of this understanding, we can only scale our teams so fast. So having partners and the right distribution is really important. And then I would say my weekend work is where I really look into what's happening in the market. So I try to keep up during the week, but it becomes incredibly hard to follow the news and follow the happenings. And so I have an agent that helps me with like the news I need to know right, there's probably something happening as we're speaking right now. Mhmm. Like, somebody is probably on the news, something's probably happening in the AI world. And so I have something that shows me this is what you need to know today, sort of like a daily pulse. And then the weekend is where I have that focus time where I don't necessarily have back to back meetings to continue to understand what's happening in the different parts of the market. And I'm still learning our product. I started prior to here, I started building my own ElevenLabs agents and understanding it, but I had this moment this weekend where I thought, I've spent a lot of time with the team, starting to meet with a lot of customers, I need to be much more hands on with the product still.
00:39:45 · Ashley Kramer, Grace Gong
And so I actually, as my husband watched football yesterday, I do like football, but not as much as him, I actually was building more agents and trying to understand a little bit more about our stack, just so you can bring that all together with a core perspective of how do you approach next quarter and the next quarter and the next quarter. [00:40:05] S0: I love that. You're like your own mini CEO that you're working on the product, talking to the customer, as well as being able to think about the partnerships as well. I want to start with the customer and the partnership side of things. So I think I hear the cohesive thing from every executive across the board is talking to their customer at all times. I guess I understand the sentiment of people trying to be able to understand what the customer want and need. I think sometimes it's really difficult to really provide the exact same thing that the customer needs, especially when you're building a product that's for, let's say, 99% of people in the world can use. It's like, what if so and so asks you, Hey, can you add this function? Can you add that thing? And then cumulatively, it will add up a pile of work on your end or on the team's end to think about these things. What would you say is the one thing that you would focus on when you're actually chatting with a customer? Well, for me, there's two things. Can I give
00:41:09 · Ashley Kramer
[00:41:09] S1: you two? All right. First one is definitely any customer I've talked to will tell you, I ask this first, how have we been supporting you? Like, what can we be doing better? From like a, do you feel supported? You're investing in us. We wanna make sure we're investing in you. And that's more of like the go to market team and the product team and how we're supporting them. I would say the number one thing, because you're right, you can build features and functions and capabilities. And I used to say this as a product leader, seek out the customer's problems, not their solutions, because as long as you understand the problem, you're probably gonna build the solution in a different way and it might actually serve them better. Maybe not, but it might not. And it might serve more than just that one customer. But what I will say in this evolving age of AI, as we're moving more into how you interact with AI, where I think ElevenLabs really got it right was our open, flexible, designed architecture. So every organization, particularly the big enterprises, gonna have different nuances of systems they use or different ways that they connect with their customers or they're getting information within their organization. So being able to have that flexible approach where we're not just bringing them in a solution or we're not just putting what we're building in a black box that they can't really understand or they can't iterate on. Being able to have this and send our FDE team in to help them and understand the solutions that's right, and then allow them to take it and scale from there is what I think becomes really powerful. So they understand the problems they have and mostly the solution they need, but we're able to go in and customize it for them, but then make it so they can maintain it and scale it from there versus having to, we'll continue to partner with them, but always having to come back to us. And then based on what we learn, we're able to take that and serve other customers, but it's still customized to what they need so they still have that deep competitive advantage.
00:43:12 · Grace Gong
[00:43:12] S0: So I really like that. Basically, essentially it's one, you really go in to understand the problem and then basically you can multiply the solution to a different set of group of people by maybe leveraging the FD squad. But I'm curious when you're thinking about partnerships, how do you think about who to partner? Because obviously I'm sure 90% of people probably want to partner with ElevenLabs on something. How do you justify Sometimes when you're selling something, have to give out a freemium solution. I guess the question is maybe two part. One part is about how do you decide on which type of partnership would you take? Because I think in the AI land, the partnership is very different than the SaaS level because there is channel, there's different things. I feel like in the AI world, I constantly seeing people doing very interesting partnerships. For example, Quirky, Saria Cafe, I don't think it's a partnership, it's people are doing very interesting GTM solutions. And then on the other hand, it'd have to translate into the revenues. I personally felt like, for example, at the very beginning, when you're talking to especially a really large enterprise customer, you probably have to give them, like, enough benefit for them to, like, care and then, like, maybe invest more resources into it. But how do you make sure that, like, they eventually would purchase, like, a large amount of product or, I guess becoming, the outcome would kind of justify the cost of acquiring the customer as well.