This interview features Camila Victoriano, Co-Founder and Head of Partnerships at Sonoro.  We discuss how fan fiction taught her to see nerds as heroes, being in the room when Dirty John was pitched to become a podcast, her crash course to figure out the business of podcasting, becoming a first time founder during COVID, why the Mexico audio market is like the US four years ago, Sonoro's growth to a global entertainment company, and why there are no limits to Latino stories.

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Interview Transcript

The interview was lightly edited for clarity.

Chris Erwin:

Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders.

Camila Victoriano:

So in 2017, we had a meeting with the editor in chief at the time, and he was like, let me sit you guys down and read you this out loud. And it was what would become Dirty John. That's when we realized there's something here that I think could be our first big swing in audio and in podcasting. And we got to talking and at that point we were like, I think we can do something here. And I think there's a story here to be told in audio. When it launched, it took us all by surprise with how well it did. Obviously we knew it was a good story, but I think you never know when something's going to be that much of a hit. Today, it probably has over 80 million downloads.

Chris Erwin:

This week's episode features Camila Victoriano, co-founder and head of partnerships at Sonoro. So Camila grew up in Miami as a self-described nerd with a passion for books and fan fiction. She then went to Harvard to study English, literature and history, which led to her early career, starting at the LA Times. While there, she became a founding member of their studios division and a “audio champion”. Then in 2020, she went on to co-found Sonoro, a global entertainment company focused on creating premium, culturally relevant content that starts in audio and comes alive in TV, film and beyond.

Sonoro collaborates with leading and emerging Latinx storytellers from over a dozen countries to develop original franchises in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Some highlights of our chat include how fan fiction taught her to see nerds as heroes being in the room when Dirty John was pitched to become a podcast, her crash course to figure out the business of podcasting, becoming a first time founder during COVID, why the Mexico audio market is like the US four years ago and why there are no limits to Latino stories. All right, let's get to it. Camila, thanks for being on the podcast.

Camila Victoriano:

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Chris Erwin:

For sure. So let's rewind a bit and I think it'd be helpful to hear about where you grew up in Miami and what your household was like. Tell us about that.

Camila Victoriano:

Yeah. So I grew up in Miami, Florida, very proud and loud Latino community, which I was very lucky to be a part of, in the Coral Gables Pinecrest area for those that know Miami and my household was great. My dad, he worked in shipping with South America. My mom was a stay at home mom. And so really as most kids of immigrants, I had obviously parents I loved and looked up to, but it was very different than folks that maybe have parents that grew up in America and knew the ins and outs of the job market and schools and things like that. But really great household, really always pushing me to be ambitious and to reach for the stars. So I was, yeah, just lucky to have parents always that were super supportive. Questioned a little bit, the English major, that path that I chose to go on, but we're generally really happy and really supportive with everything that I pursued.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. And where did your parents immigrate from?

Camila Victoriano:

My mom is Peruvian and my dad was Chilean.

Chris Erwin:

I have been to both countries to surf. I was in Lobitos in I think Northern Peru and I was also in Pichilemu in Chile and yeah, just absolutely beautiful countries. Great food, great culture. So do you visit those countries often?

Camila Victoriano:

I visited Chile once, much to the chagrin of my father, but Peru, I visited so many times and yeah, they both have incredible food, incredible wine. So you can't really go wrong. I did Machu Picchu and Cusco, and that sort of trip with my mom once I graduated college, which is really great just to go back and be a tourist in our country, but they're both beautiful and yeah, I love going back.

Chris Erwin:

Oh, that's awesome. All right. So growing up in your household, what were some of your early passions and interests? I know yesterday we talked about that you had an early interest in storytelling, but in some more traditional forms dating back to the ‘90s, but yeah. Tell us about that. What were you into?

Camila Victoriano:

I was always a huge reader. It's funny because my parents read, but not super frequently. My grandparents were big readers, but I always, always gravitated towards books. I remember, like many people of my generation when I was six, I read the first Harry Potter book and that was just mind blowing for me and I think...

Chris Erwin:

At six years old? Because I think I learned to read at like five.

Camila Victoriano:

Yeah. I had help with my mom a little bit but I remember we read it together and we would just mark with a crayon every time where we ended on the page. But I remember that book was like, I think when I first really understood how detailed and how enveloping worlds could be. And I think starting from that point, I just went full on into fantasy, YA, all sorts of books. I was just reading obsessively. It also helped that I was a classic nerd in middle school and high school and all throughout childhood, really. So I think for me, books, literature stories were just a way to see the world, see people like me, a lot of times in fantasy books or in sci-fi books in particular, you have the nerds as heroes.

And so I think for me, that was a big part of why I gravitated to those genres in particular. But yeah, I just read all the time and then I did light gaming. So I played the Sims, again, similar idea though. You're world building. You're living vicariously through these avatars, but that was really how I spent most of my time, I obviously played outside a little bit too, but I was a big indoor reader always.

Chris Erwin:

Got it. This is interesting because the last interview I just did was with Adam Reimer, the CEO of Optic Gaming, and we talked a lot, he was born in the late ‘70s. So he was like a 1980s self described internet nerd as he says, before being a nerd was cool. So he was going to web meetups at bowling alleys when he was just a young teenager. Over through line with you because he was in Fort Lauderdale and you grew up in Miami. So two Florida nerds.

Camila Victoriano:

Yeah. Nerds unite. I love it.

Chris Erwin:

Nerds unite. You also mentioned that you also got into fan fiction. Were you writing fan fiction? Were you consuming it? Was it a mix of both?

Camila Victoriano:

A mix of both. So that's really in middle school in particular, how I really bonded with my small group of friends. I remember my best friend and I, we connected, we were on the bus reading a Harry Potter fanfiction on at that point it was fanfiction.net. And that is also again, similarly because in person with people, it was just like, we weren't really connecting that much. And so that community online was huge for me and my friend. We read all the time, people had comments, you had editors that you worked with and we wrote them ourselves too. And I think, looking back in the retrospective for me, that's where I think I first started to realize the potential of world building really in storytelling and in media and entertainment. It’s like, it didn't stop with the canon text. You could really expand beyond that.

We loved telling stories about Harry Potter's parents and how they would go to Hogwarts, like super in the weeds, deep fandom. I don't know. I think for me that was just a real eye opener too, of like, oh, there's a whole online community. And I don't think at that point I was really thinking business. But I think for me, that's where I started to redirect my focus much more seriously too of, oh, this isn't just like, oh, I like books for fun. There's people all around the world that are incredibly passionate and spending hours upon hours of time, oftentimes after hours of school to just write and to really immerse themselves in these universes. And I remember writing them and reading them, just realizing how badly I wanted to be a part of creating things that caused the same feeling. And so for me, that was huge in that respect too.

Chris Erwin:

Well, thinking about fanfiction, literally there are now companies and platforms that are worth hundreds of