Venture with Grace
00:51:08 · Grace Gong
[00:51:08] S0: I guess when you're thinking about your own day to day, so you mentioned about you would do a lot of thinking during the weekends. What's your... I guess, how do you think about what is the biggest things that you have to accomplish that week? How do you kind of mentally scheduling out your own personal milestone as well? Because sometimes it's really difficult to actually create some sort of KPI for yourself, especially at a place that ElevenLabs, which grows really fast. Maybe after a month or so, you already hit the goal that you set a few weeks ago. How do you reset yourself on, Oh, what is our new mission? Obviously, I guess, what would be... What is the, you mentioned about the culture's low ego, how do people really collaborate with each other as well to achieving these of
00:52:06 · Ashley Kramer
[00:52:06] S1: Yes, I think for me, particularly, like I'm only a little over a month in this role. And so like the number one most important thing for me was understanding what are the business priorities, right? Like what from our founders and from the business, the board, the executive team, where do we wanna be in a quarter? Where do we wanna be in a year? I think in AI, it's pretty hard to go beyond like a year. I got asked on stage once where we're gonna be with AI in five years. And I laughed and said, If anybody answers that for you, they're wrong. You've got a question that... Nobody knows this. But you can look out a year, you can look out a quarter and understanding, okay, these are the goals that we have as a business and as a company to better serve our customers, then I back into them. And so, being new in the role, it was a lot of like understanding where the team is and where they think our priorities need to be. I just asked all of them in a survey directly, Give me advice, what should I focus on? And then of course I used AI to collaborate and all the I got my nice bar chart of what everybody thinks. And so that gives me like internal intent and signal. Then there's the data analysis. It's easy for me to look at our revenue and know where we are tracking to target, but you have to really dig deep to understand where the growth is coming from. And if there are any issues, where that's coming from and which different parts of the world are performing and which different verticals. And so there's the data exercise of it. And then there's, we've talked about this a lot, but the customer side of it too, like how are they feeling as far as us being a partner? And then I bring that all together. I actually, it's a timely time to, or it's timely for this question on, I think it was yesterday or maybe it was on Friday, I sent out the Q4 revenue strategy to the team and it had three top level things that we're gonna focus on together, I, and then three KRs under each. I was the owner of several of them. This is experiment. So for some of them, I think they're important enough, I'll roll up my sleeves, I'll take them on as the KR owner. I was informed by those based on all three of those, and of course, Mati and his company goals, and we'll track progress against those.
00:54:23 · Ashley Kramer, Grace Gong
And each of my leaders will have their own of how their individual team will achieve those as well. We won't be perfect, but it'll at least help everybody align a little bit more about the why of what we're doing and where we're going and make sure that we're achieving the goals that are gonna be set for us. And my hope is they get more and more ambitious over time because that means we're performing both as a team, but our ultimate goal as a company for customers. [00:54:51] S0: I love that. I wanna be mindful of the time, maybe we wrap with like a [00:54:55] S1: one minute firearm for you. Sure. Okay, what's your favorite book? This one, it feels like it's gonna keep getting dated. I've said it in other podcasts, but I still really fundamentally love Innovator's Dilemma because I think it's so relevant to every era that we go into. It's really quite fascinating, but I feel like I need a different answer because I keep using that one, but I read it every single year. I go [00:55:19] S0: back Now to I will read it this year, but who would you invite [00:55:23] S1: to your dinner party? Who would I invite to my dinner party? Oh man, that is a tough one. [00:55:30] S0: You're like, who have I not made? But it's heckling. I feel like you probably meet everyone. [00:55:35] S1: Who have I not met? I mean, I've definitely not met everyone, by the way. Are you sure? [00:55:43] S0: I'm just kidding. [00:55:44] S1: Can I invite several people? Yeah. [00:55:46] S0: That's your part.
00:55:46 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:55:46] S0: That's your part. [00:55:46] S1: I would love for all of the, what you would consider AI greats, the CEOs including Mati, I would like to be at dinner with all of them at once. I would love to see that dinner and the interactions because I think lots of them philosophically have the same mindset, but different approaches about it. And so I would love to see, let's call it the frontier labs, the AI innovative companies like ElevenLabs. Might have [00:56:14] S0: come to our, like the summit executive dinner, it was a lot [00:56:19] S1: of them, but... I would have loved that. [00:56:21] S0: I'll invite you next time. [00:56:22] S1: Okay, So [00:56:23] S0: who make the biggest impact in your career?
00:56:23 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:56:23] S0: who make the biggest impact in your career? [00:56:27] S1: You know, it's interesting, this answer has changed recently. I used to, and it still is by the way, say that the CEO of, the original CEO of Tableau, Christian Chabot, he took a lot of chances on me when I was like pretty early in my career and really helped me understand, it's okay to fail and you can keep going and this is how you mentor and coach. And he was such an inspirational leader. I see a lot of that in Mati at this company. And I've told Mati that, I think I told the entire team that at our last All Hands as well. But just recently, my father decided to retire after fifty five years with the same company. Fifty five years with the same company, which is like, if you go look at my LinkedIn, I think my average is three to four, right? But the thing I've been thinking about is we're going in to him, you know, going to celebrate his retirement actually this week, he never once complained about his job once. And like, maybe my mom would say like, maybe it's not in front of me and my brother, but like, we're old enough now, like I cannot remember a day, he gets up at 4AM every day and goes to work. [00:57:38] S0: Crazy, what a two He thousand doesn't, four
00:57:38 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:57:38] S0: Crazy, what a two He thousand doesn't, four [00:57:40] S1: you know, he became the president of a company in Pittsburgh, a small town in Pittsburgh, his dad's company, and he has been getting up at 4AM, going to work, working till 6PM, Every day still was my soccer coach growing up and was at all of my brother's events. As I started to think about it, I'm like, I had never heard dad complain about his job once. And it's like a very good lesson for me that like, that means to him it wasn't work. It was something he enjoyed doing. And I think that there's something really special about that that I haven't thought about till recently. [00:58:17] S0: That's crazy. [00:58:18] S1: Isn't that nuts? [00:58:19] S0: Fifty five years. Fifty five years. [00:58:21] S1: That's really admirable. I feel [00:58:23] S0: like he probably have a very fulfilling life because of his enjoying the day to day so much. I could do fifty five years, but not at four. So not from 4AM to... [00:58:34] S1: Crazy. Maybe he just doesn't have to function on that much sleep either, but yeah, no, it's been wild like this last few weeks reflecting on it since he's, I think Wednesday is his last official day to think like, gosh, I never heard dad say one bad word about the company. [00:58:48] S0: That's crazy. [00:58:49] S1: It's a lesson for all of us, like do what you love. [00:58:52] S0: I love that. Where can we find you outside of work?