Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
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.
00:12:21 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller, S2
[00:12:21] S3: K. So I gotta ask you one final question around physics and then we'll we'll kinda dive into 11 in the business world. Are there extraterrestrials, and are we living in a simulation? [00:12:31] S1: Both amazing questions. I don't know how you expect me to answer them really quickly before talking about the ElevenLabs. I don't know. It would be really fun if either of these were true. For the first one, I would say, like, what gives us the right to think that we're the only civilization out there? The universe is so vast. Like Yeah. Surely. But I don't have better insight there to to other people. But I think for that one, I... If you... If I had to choose, I would like to believe that yes. Yep. And for the latter, I think I think not. [00:13:04] S3: I think this [00:13:04] S1: is this is real. I think [00:13:06] S2: I think for the Who knows? [00:13:07] S3: I think for the latter, it's a fun Burning Man conversation, but it's not fairly... That's not necessarily one that really makes sense. But, you know, for for the ex Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense how we can be the only species in the entire solar universe. It it it just makes no sense. And and that will probably be the one regret that I would have before I die that we don't find something. Like it would just... That's kind of the one unanswered thing that would be kinda cool other than like why are we here which [00:13:33] S1: Yeah. [00:13:33] S3: We'll never figure that one out.
00:13:33 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:13:33] S3: We'll never figure that one out. [00:13:34] S1: That's another really frustrating thing about physics is you spend so much time trying to find the answer to these unsolved problems and you might die before the answer is found and it's just so frustrating to think that you might never know. We will never know. We won't be there for the answer of these things. And that's maybe another thing that deterred me from physics. [00:13:55] S3: It makes sense that it would deter you because I think all of a sudden your intelligence and logic would kick in and say like, what's the fucking point of doing all this work if it just isn't going to be used or pay off or if no one's really going to care? Like I see that one solar burst and great, three people care. Like really? Just spent a year doing something and no one... I get it. So it makes sense. [00:14:14] S1: I think it really depends what motivates you. Some people are excited by seeing those solar bursts and that's all they care about. They would do it even if no one read the papers or they wouldn't even get to write the papers. They just wanna think about solar bursts all day. But I'm personally someone that's also motivated by the recognition and therefore wanna do something where I see the impact either directly or indirectly on the way that we live our lives.