Venture with Grace
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
00:10:35 · Ashley Kramer, Grace Gong
[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 [00:10:48] S0: a super good friend. I feel like the whole GitLab, it's surprisingly have so many women leaders, which I feel like I'm so impressed by the And culture so I guess one of the things I'm curious about since I feel like you've also done a very successful, I want to say call it pivot, but into AI, right? Because GitLab is a great software company. Then now when you are thinking about AI, people think about OpenAI, people think about ElevenLabs. And as an executive, as a person with amazing career, I want to talk about maybe the transition for yourself. How do you actively becoming an AI native exec? And what does that basically in that journey kind of look like for you?
00:11:34 · Ashley Kramer
[00:11:34] S1: So the number one way to do that is you have to deeply be leveraging it Like all the time, in every way possible. And I'll talk about this in a second, but that's one of the things we do here at ElevenLabs is we're customer zero of everything we do. And then we understand how to make it better, how to leverage it and take it to the world. And so I think that's really awesome. So I do think number one is making sure you're leveraging it on your own. That can be in your personal life, doesn't necessarily have to be in business, although that's helpful. For me to really deeply understand and be an AI native executive, you probably have to get several levels deeper on the technical side. Like I would argue when I was in data and analytics, like I had a decent understanding of like data services and databases and the analytics tools on top, but I didn't necessarily deeply understand things about like the servers they were running on and those And types of that's a big thing in AI, like GPU capacity. How many times have we heard that and understanding the nuances of data centers and different components around that? So again, particularly in a CRO role, do I need to get as deep as our infrastructure team? Absolutely not. But understanding that because those are going to have impact on customers and beyond customers' minds. And so I think to really become AI native outside of using it and understanding it, you just have to fundamentally believe in the future of what this will bring to businesses, to individuals. It's in the news every day, and my parents were the first to tell me that, particularly at my last company where it's literally in the news every day. And so I think you have to just have a fundamental belief that this is our future, those that leverage it are gonna be the best positioned, and then help bring everybody along by really being the one that's using it the most. And using it the most has a bunch of different... This is something that I think a bunch of companies have tried to navigate is how do you understand how AI is being used within? You can look at tokens, but the token maxing world has taught us that that might not be the best approach, but also maybe the outcomes and the value. Like what, because I'm using this as a core part of my job, what is the personal ROI I'm getting from it?
00:14:06 · Ashley Kramer, Grace Gong
Who's other time am I saving or what cost am I saving because I'm using it? And so I think being able to lead by example is incredibly, incredibly useful and impactful when you think about how to become an AI native executive. [00:14:21] S0: I have so many questions there too. So I wanna first start with, in your organization right now, so how do you leverage AI agents? So obviously, feel like everyone's agent maxing this year, building their own stuff. Especially in sales right now, obviously, there's so many people are trying to do AI SDR or AI CRM. Are you a big fan of those or they're just gonna be replaced by codecs? No, I'm