Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:02:35 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:02:35] S1: Thank you for having me. [00:02:36] S3: Yeah. Very much looking forward to doing this episode with you. Really looking forward to learning from you. I loved just before we went live you explaining that you've lived in London, you've lived in Berlin, you've lived in Edinburgh, you lived in New York. What an amazing opportunity as a human to be able to live in some of the best cities in the world. Yeah. Tell us how that all happened.
00:02:56 · Victoria Weller
[00:02:56] S1: Yeah. I've been very lucky to be able to move around that much, and I think there is something that I was able to take from each of the places I lived in. But to go chronologically, it happened that I went to an international school in Munich where I grew up. So it was always tailored... My education was tailored towards going abroad to study. And I never even considered staying in in Munich or even staying in Germany for my education, but only looked across at The US or in The UK for universities and then got accepted into Edinburgh. I had applied for architecture and then last minute pivoted to astrophysics. And Edinburgh was open enough to, as they mentioned, as they called it, open an experiment to see whether I would be successful at studying astrophysics even though I hadn't done physics higher level in my IB, and it was successful in the end. Loved my four years there, and then had an opportunity for a role at the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin. It's part of the Charite, which is one of the biggest hospitals slash medicine universities in Germany. And I was a research assistant there for a year, both teaching the medicine students in some of their modules, but also doing a literature review of every piece of research that had been done on how the body changes and more specifically, how the cardiovascular system changes in microgravity. So what is different about the blood system of an astronaut versus the blood system of everyone else, like, every one of us down on Earth, and what are the complications that this can lead to both when going to space, but also when coming back to Earth. That was really exciting. We ended up publishing a Springer Brief, a small book about this at the end of the year. I loved my time there. I would have really liked to continue thinking about astronauts or maybe even becoming one. But for a career at the Center for Space Medicine, as the name says, it would have been crucial to study medicine or at least physiology. And so I also realized that I really miss physics and the rationality behind that and the formulae and the Greek alphabet. So I started looking into doing a masters, master's degree in in physics again, started applying for that. And while I was going through the applications, did an internship at a microsatellite startup in Berlin, which was also really exciting.
00:05:34 · Victoria Weller
And spent three months simulating their sun baffles. So thinking about when you wanna take a picture of stars from a satellite in space, you want it to be as dark as possible. You wanna get only the light from the star. And to get as much light as possible from the star and little interference from everything else around, all the other stars and galaxies, they put baffles on top of the cameras on the satellites. And you can have different shapes and steps and different colorings and coatings, and we were running simulations often, like, overnight of all the different genomical positions we could have of the sunlight baffles to find the best one to construct and then put on these microsatellites to send to space. And after I'd gone, I've been done with... It was called Brilliant Space Technologies, got accepted to Columbia University and went to New York for a master's in applied physics. So less extraterrestrial, more down down on earth physics. And did my master's in New York, which was an incredible experience both from the education at Columbia, but also from living in New York in my early twenties. That was an incredible opportunity. I loved every day of it, and I loved it so much that it went so fast. I felt like I blinked twice, and I had finished my master's. And so I decided to take the opportunity that you get after getting a degree in The US. If you're a foreigner or German, at least, you have an OPT, so you're allowed to stay for three years from... With a STEM subject to work. And I got a job at a startup which was in hindsight a perfect segue for me into the data tech world. And the startup is called Crypt, and they do quantum secure data encryption. And they had both hardware components and software components. And this was a perfect combination because I could speak to the hardware components on which lasers were split, phase shifted, and interfered to create quantum random numbers that were then used for the encryption of data. But was also working on the software pieces in a sort of project management role and moved closer to tech and understood the importance of data and the use of data and then found out about Palantir and applied there as a reliability engineer and joined Palantir in 2019, which was actually my most recent position before ElevenLabs.
00:08:09 · Victoria Weller
So I was at Palantir in in New York for the first couple of months until the pandemic hit, relocated with them to London, stayed for another couple of years, and now in May switched to a startup called ElevenLabs, which does text to speech AI. And I'm working there as chief of staff and own all the internal operations as well as compliance and hiring and HR and a big hodgepodge of things that are super fast moving and really exciting and exactly what I want to do at the time being. I think you can tell that there's, like, so many different things that I that I did. But now in one role, I get to do so many different things, which I really enjoy.
00:08:53 · Cameron Herold
[00:08:53] S3: I'm I'm kinda dumbfounded. I mean, anyone who's watching this on our YouTube channel, we have the Second in Command Podcast YouTube channel, will see why I'm dumbfounded. You don't look old enough to have done all this stuff. But even when you said you got your masters in your early twenties or you started your masters in your early twenties, you've really done a lot at quite a young age. Know, clearly, I mean anyone clearly to work in astrophysics is clearly smart. And I'm glad you gave us a bit of a glimpse as to what astrophysics is. I've heard of it. Physics was really one of the only courses in high school that I loved and I was never like fantastic at but it made sense to me. I think it appealed to the logic side of my world. So I'm curious how you go from all of this real science, real kind of esoteric, real kind of, you know, mathematical and then into the business world. How do you make that leap? It doesn't seem like a very logical leap, but I know that you've done it and many engineers are running, you know, tech companies. So Yeah. How how do you learn business and how have you made that leap?
00:09:51 · Victoria Weller
[00:09:51] S1: Yeah. For me, it was in the end. Mostly, it came down to logic for that leap. And the more time I spent with astrophysics or with physics and research, I realized the time frames over which huge changes and impact happens. Before going to Edinburgh during my studies, I also did an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. And for my entire summer, I was analyzing the gamma ray burst and the spectral catalog of these explosions that had been seen over the last two years. And I... Since six weeks just selecting the background and the foreground, and this was a tiny part of a huge spectral catalog, which in turn was a tiny part of a bigger piece of of research, which might take someone a a lifetime to find something that is truly life changing or in their world life changing, and then ends up being not really life changing to the rest of the civilization. So I realized that you are very much in a niche that not many others care about, but you also operate on terrestrial or extraterrestrial time frames where it's taken the light millions of years to reach you, and it might take you many years as well to have an moment from it. And so I realized that wasn't the the speed that I want to operate at as well as the locations usually where these things happen, especially astrophysics research happens. We'll briefly about the light interference of satellite observatories. But for observatories on Earth, that's an even bigger consideration. You can't be close to city because the city lights and the pollution and the scattering of light makes all of your extraterrestrial observations worse. And so you end up being in the Atacama Desert or anywhere by design that is dark and is far away from civilization, but is also, like, in need of a lot of space and therefore cheap. And I like Berlin and New York and London. Yeah. And so there was a contradiction there as well. And then there's a financial aspect, and then there's... For me, it's really important to get along with colleagues and and love who I work with. And at some point, I also realized that those people are more in the business world rather than in in the research world.