Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:36:54 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:36:54] S2: Put you in touch with someone from the revenue team that is closer to the enterprise customers. [00:36:59] S1: Maybe we'll have you both show up and maybe you can do a Q and A on the on the CEO side. So is there a tie in? I've got I've had these the Facebook Ray Ban glasses for about a year and they've just come out with the newest version of them. Is there a tie in with ElevenLabs and what is going to be happening with the AR glasses that if I'm looking at a sign like I just walked into my Airbnb in Mexico and there's a sign and I can't read it. And is there an opportunity to have that translated but then read to me? Are you working on that kind of technology or does that already exist? [00:37:31] S2: Not at the moment. So in a way, yes. Like if the company of those glasses would want to incorporate that, they could easily build on top of ElevenLabs. They wouldn't even have to get an enterprise account with any of our self serve accounts. You get access to our APIs and you can build your own wrapper in a way on top of ElevenLabs. So all that would be needed then is to input the translated text, shoot us an API call and you get back the audio and it could be read out loud through those glasses. So it is definitely a use case that ElevenLabs would support, but it is not one that we are working on in house explicitly. [00:38:15] S1: It's a conversion. I don't remember what this is called, but it's a conversion of all of these, like voice and audio and photo and video that is converging. What's that called in AI right now, the convergence of all this?
00:38:15 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:38:15] S1: It's a conversion. I don't remember what this is called, but it's a conversion of all of these, like voice and audio and photo and video that is converging. What's that called in AI right now, the convergence of all this? [00:38:25] S2: I'm actually not sure either. [00:38:28] S1: It's like multi something or [00:38:30] S2: Multimodal? Multimodal. [00:38:32] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And and I think that's what's really exciting is that I... Like, you... Three years ago, I I wore a pair of contact lenses. And by moving my eyeball around, I was able to play a song off my iPhone. I was in the lab using it. I'm like, this is crazy that using my eye, I can turn on a song on my phone. Like, what the fuck? I think that's gonna be really cool with your technology as well, the ability to have that multimodal kind of interface. [00:38:57] S2: You... You've experienced some cool gadgets, AR gadgets. [00:39:01] S1: I'm a geek. I don't know. I like this stuff. So I need to know from from your perspective and from your experience, what is the chief of staff title and where is it now fitting into... Because it's a title that used to be only in government and now is really aggressively migrated into the business world in the last probably ten years.
00:39:20 · Victoria Weller
[00:39:20] S2: Yeah. I think that the Chief of Staff title, at least in the sense that I've experienced it and now that is at ElevenLabs, is that I get to fill all the gaps that exist at a small company where the certain functions and projects haven't been set up sufficiently with their own role or even department. So I joined ElevenLabs and the first thing I did was compliance. And I'd never thought about compliance before, but I ramped up to understanding what is SOC two compliance? What do we need? How do we get there? And how do we get there as fast as possible? And by adding this last factor of as fast as possible, I was able to make compliance something that's fun for myself, someone who isn't naturally drawn to compliance and got through the entire SOC two process within seven weeks. And now we have our SOC two compliance, but that's like one example of the gaps. The next one was hiring. There are a bunch of internal operations, even taxes, entity set up, all these different things that it takes to run a company that are a little bit falling through the cracks. If you're only 10 to 20 people, chief of staff gets to pick those up and carry those across the line. And those are a lot of tasks that would naturally fall on the CEO. And by picking them up, it makes more space for the CEO to focus on the expansion and focus on outward things or focus on the bigger topics that need more of, in this case, his attention and kind of make room for that and more peace mind as well. By being really strong operationally, and I think that's one of the core things you need as a chief of staff, you also alleviate not only by picking up those things, but by tracking them and making sure that they never have to think about this again. They know that it's in good hands and it's going to be done, executed fast and well.
00:41:21 · Cameron Herold
[00:41:21] S1: So I think to be a really good chief of staff, you have to be very entrepreneurial, like kind of problem solve, think on your feet, because nobody has the system for you. You need to be very good at project management, very good at time management, probably a quick start that you say yes, and I'll figure it out as we go. Do you end up putting yourself out of a job over the next few years? Because as you said that it almost seems like it's kind of like a jack of all trades, master of none, that you're just freaking good at everything, but sooner or later, you're going to have an expert running each domain area. Do you then migrate into a COO's kind of role where you're leading all those people, which you already are doing? Because you said something that was really intriguing, which was it almost seems like a chief of staff is an early stage company role. And then as you get to a mid sized enterprise level, that role doesn't exist anymore because now you have functional heads. Is that accurate?
00:42:14 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:42:14] S2: That's a really good question. I think for me, it's an early stage role because that's where ElevenLabs is at the moment. But I think even at the mid stage company, there are always ad hoc projects or almost as if you a chief of staff is like a SWAT team. So you can throw them at a specific thing that isn't going well and they will figure it out. At Palantir before I was functioning kind of as a chief of staff and Palantir is at 3,000 people, but it's still possible like within the sub organizations to have a need for that type of role. But I do think that the growth path of someone that joins early as a chief of staff can be to a COO role? And definitely for most of the things that I am setting up at the moment, the plan is to hire someone for finance, hire someone for talent and hire someone for compliance. [00:43:06] S1: It's very similar to my days at one eight hundred GOT JUNK when I was the chief operating officer. My my first two or three years, I was probably more chief of staff because none of the business areas even existed. I had to build out every single business area. I came in as employee number 14. I left with 3,100. And then by the time I was at that third, then I was COO, but it was a very different role than the early days. It's why it's super intriguing to me. So, all right, What was it like going from a big organization like a Palantir to an Eleven? Why did you make that jump? And what did the CEO see in you that made him realize that you weren't gonna be this corporate bureaucratic, you know, research researcher?
00:43:49 · Victoria Weller
[00:43:49] S2: Yeah. The reason I wanted to leave Palantir is because I wanted a faster pace. I think out of big tech corporations, Palantir is probably the fastest. But after being there for almost four years, I feel like I had figured out the system and I kind of knew where the bar was and how to just slightly exceed it with limited, more limited speed. Yeah. And so I was looking for something that's that's just quicker and maybe even higher pressure. And I'm still at a point in my life where I want to put my career first rather than comfort first. And so I realized that an early stage startup is where I can both operate faster, but also do this thing that I love where I get thrown at something that I have no idea about and then figure it out and operationalize it. And then it's fixed quickly. And then I found ElevenLabs because the CEO is actually also a Palantirian. He had left almost a year before me to start ElevenLabs. So I knew about its inception from even before it was incorporated. I knew Matti from Palantir days and had been following ElevenLabs. And then when ElevenLabs launched in February and it was a huge success, we caught up and spoke about the needs, the operational needs of the company at that moment. And I came with some ideas for each of those. And we had a few conversations around that. And I think both that plus knowing many of the people that I worked with and speaking to them about it was what convinced him that I'm not bureaucratic corporate worker. And I think that has proven successful as well. I think one of the best consequences of it is that there's a lot of trust between the CEO and me from knowing each other from the previous workplace as well, knowing each other outside of this role. And I think that is something that really helps or accelerated the ability for the two of us to work together productively from the very beginning.