Ashley Kramer, ElevenLabs CRO on AI, Enterprise Growth and Voice

Grace Gong (0:00)

Oh, when we're done, just end stream. Okay, so we're already live. Okay, this is our first in-person live stream.

Ashley Kramer (0:07)

Oh, we're live.

Grace Gong (0:08)

We're live. Hi, Ashley. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

Ashley Kramer (0:12)

Thank you for having me. I'm excited for the conversation.

Grace Gong (0:15)

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 is like, if you ever do another job, it will be like the CEO as you have done CTO, CMO, CPO, and now CRO. I want to start with, because of you have, you started your career in NASA, right?

Ashley Kramer (0:37)

I did as an engineer at NASA.

Grace Gong (0:38)

Exactly. 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 then eventually you have your career span in 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 shaping into who we are today?

Ashley Kramer (1:03)

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. 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.

Yeah.

I mean, it was OK, but 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, early 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 was available in different languages. The translation held well. Dictionaries were on there that could help in all of the different languages. And so, 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. And those founders were really inspirational. And thinking big about this new movement, I'm going to date myself so hard right now, but the cloud was starting to be, oh, the cloud. So later, years down the road, Sid C. Brandi, 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? And I was like, back then, the cloud was just the thing. The data was moving there and at Tableau, we 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.