Employee Spotlight: Sam Hoffman

Meet Sam, Violet Labs’ first Technical Program Manager!

Sam has an Aerospace Engineering background and began his career as a propulsion engineer designing and building hardware at SpaceX and Busek. Sam then received his MBA and spent time in consulting, advising Big Tech companies on competition, market research and operations before joining Violet.

Today, he’s excited to contribute to the mission of ending engineering headaches across industries.

Read Sam's story below:

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Welcome to Violet Labs, Sam! How did you find yourself here?

I heard about it on a podcast! Everybody thinks that's not true, but I was listening to the  Space Capital podcast and Lucy (CEO, Founder Violet Labs) was on it talking about what she was working on. That was a couple of years ago, but it stuck in my head. It seemed like Violet was solving a problem that I know, in my experience, a lot of companies have. I wasn't looking for a job at that point, but when the time came I reached out.  

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You mentioned running into “the problem that Violet is trying to solve.” Can you elaborate?

Essentially - the ability to get information across the company. I know that for me, I liked to know what's going on across many different areas when I was an engineer. I had my own little world, but I was always curious about what was going on with other components in my system, other systems in the vehicle, and how different engineers were solving problems. Being able to understand what's going on in other parts of the company was really important to me. SpaceX had a really great internal system for tracking all the hardware build information, but most companies don’t have something like that.

At a lot of companies there’s just no way to see what was going on around you. There’s no way to tell how other engineers are designing their components, or how far along they are. Being able to see all of that in one place and as an engineer, being able to look around and see what's going on around you, I thought that was really important when I was an engineer. Especially if you are able to do it without bothering someone or slowing them down.

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Besides work, what about hobbies? What do you do in your free time?

I try to get outside a little bit. I like riding bikes and going skiing, but I live in Chicago, so there isn't a ton of skiing nearby. There are some neat bookstores near me that I like to go to.

I've been watching a lot of Dungeons and Dragons podcasts. I also started learning guitar. I’ve been taking guitar classes a couple years ago, which has been great. 

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What job would you be terrible at?

I think I would have a hard time being a teacher. My wife is a professor and she is very clearly very good at it. I've seen her give lectures and keep an entire room full of 19 year-olds paying attention for the entire class. I don't think I'm cut out for that.

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What is your most used emoji?

I like the exclamation points. It's sort of my way of agreeing and adding emphasis. It's not necessarily good or bad, but I feel like it's a very versatile emoji that can draw attention to something in a bunch of different contexts. 

Actually now that I’m saying all this, it's really ambiguous and maybe no one knows what I mean...

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We should probably look into that... Ok, what's the most used (non-work related) app on your phone?

I delete Instagram every week so that I don't have it and then I download it again on the weekends. Just too much doom scrolling.

So during the week, probably the most used is my news app or the New York Times app because that's the only thing that I've still got.

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What do you tell your friends and family that you do for work?

That I work at this cool software company. 

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Valid answer. 

This is my first experience working at a start-up, so I’m really loving wearing different hats and contributing in different ways. I mostly spend the day trying to be helpful, looking for things that are annoying either for us at Violet or for our customers, and trying to make things easier and smoother. I spend a lot of time talking with our customers and prospects about their pain points, and working on new features to make our platform as useful as possible for all the folks who need it.

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Sounds like fun! Thank you Sam!

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Interested in joining the Violet team? We're hiring! Check out our open listings at jobs.violetlabs.com.