Hyper-Growth Investor: Left Lane Capital’s Vinny Pujji

In this episode, we speak with Vinny Pujji, co-founder and managing partner at LeftLane Capital, a New York and London-based global venture capital and growth equity firm investing in hypergrowth consumer and technology businesses with enduring customer relationships. Founded in 2019, LeftLane manages approximately $2.5 billion in assets and operates with a lean, high-performance team focused on partnering with entrepreneurs building category-defining companies across high-growth sectors. As a founding partner, Vinny helps drive the firm's global investment strategy and portfolio development, and plays a key role overseeing LeftLane's investment team. Prior to LeftLane, he was an investment professional at Insight Partners, where he helped deploy approximately $1 billion across a portfolio of leading technology companies. Vinny was recently recognized as a Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investor of 2025 by GrowthCap. I'm your host, RJ Lumba. We hope you enjoy the show. If you like the episode, click to follow.

RJ Lumba is the managing partner of GrowthCap and the executive chairman of Market Insight Media. He is the host of Growth Investor, a podcast featuring today's best investors, executives, and founders. In the minutes ahead, we'll uncover insights and strategies for accelerating growth and succeeding in business.

Vinny, great to see you. Thanks for taking the time.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Yeah, me too. Really excited. Actually, Left Lane comes up a lot for me. I first learned about Left Lane somewhat randomly, and this was several years ago. I was in Nantucket. You won't find me there very often, but I happened to be in Nantucket.

Sounds lovely.

Uh, it's not my jam, but I go there because other people go there. Nothing against it. It's a nice place.

It seems like a nice place. I don't know.

Yeah. There, there was an LP from an endowment and he just mentioned Left Lane. You should look at Left Lane. So I did look at Left Lane and then I started following it, but then they've popped up. I go to the gym and one of the founders of one of your portfolio companies likes to talk about Left Lane and how much they've been helpful, insightful, 7th Street Burger. And so I see—

Oh, nice.

Vishal quite often. So there's a lot to talk about. I like your kind of what you're doing at the firm as well. You're doing different things that are unique. Maybe to kick off, tell us about how you got your start in investing and how that led to the founding of Left Lane.

Yeah, happy to. So I grew up a little bit more on the entrepreneur side of things. And I was very surprised after a couple years of investing that I liked it. But I basically was in a family of entrepreneurs. My brother Jesse, similar to me, went to Wharton undergrad. He was actually an investor before and then became an entrepreneur. I worked with him in a performance marketing business. I was actually at one point a Wharton dropout, so I was in something called the Huntsman Program at Penn, but I dropped out to start my first business. And then after a year of running it, it was doing super well and I got the death threats from my parents of like, if you don't get a degree, we're going to kill you. So then I went back to school, haphazardly sold my business, and got recruited right out of school into Insight Partners. And that was 12 years ago now. And Insight then was a very different firm than Insight today. So Insight then was 60 people. I think the firm had maybe $5 billion under management at the time, which was big, but Insight was such an entrepreneurial place. They still are entrepreneurial, but it was so small, so entrepreneurial that It didn't feel like a big shop at all. There wasn't some big investor relations team, like everybody did everything. And the culture was extremely, you know, hardworking, aggressive, outbound sourcing. As a young person, you got 3 things, 3 things that I really care about maintaining here at Left Lane today. But you had a culture of mentorship, so I could walk into any partner's office and they would happily talk to me about any deal. And that's not to be taken for granted, right? Maybe I was a little bit too overconfident as a young person that I, that I was doing that. But you learned a lot that way. You had tremendous deal velocity and volume. So at Insight, a young person is speaking to 600, 700, maybe even 800 unique companies per year. And then the firm was doing a good amount of deals. Now, at the time, that was probably 25 deals a year, but it meant that you were likely going to work on a couple of deals every year and you'd get really good exposure. And then the last thing they had was a promote-from-within culture. So they'd had partners at the firm who had started as analysts. And so as an analyst, you know, hey, if I work hard and don't screw up too much, I might be able to be a partner here one day. And funny enough, my class, my cohort that I started with, half of them are still there and they're all partners. And so that's a, that's a pretty special thing. And I just feel incredibly lucky and forever grateful to the folks at Insight that I did start my career then.

And so the question I wanted to ask was, you obviously had this kind of innate desire to become an entrepreneur. You left school so much so that you left school to start your own thing. I'm curious, and now you're on the investor side and you said you were somewhat surprised that you liked the investing. I mean, it's not uncommon, right? Like as an entrepreneur, you want to build something.

Yeah.

So do you find that you're able to kind of scratch that itch with building Left Lane?

Yes, I think twofold. So are you familiar with the concept of zone of genius?

Yeah.

Okay. So for those who aren't, like, you've got 4 areas. You've got your zone of incompetence, your zone of competence, your zone of excellence, and your zone of genius. And funny enough, I just sent all the CEOs I work with a book about this called The Great Leap. And what I sort of realized after I went back to school, which is like Candyland after you've run a business and then you get to go to school again, right? You had no idea how fun it was, how easy it was. I didn't have this vocabulary, but I had the chance to understand what I actually liked about running a business. And there's the day-to-day of what I like. What I actually like is I love working with people. I love helping people specifically. I love seeing things exist that didn't exist before. And then I love seeing people achieve their full potential. And this is a little bit of revisionist history because, you know, now I can look back at it, but I think what I ended up loving so much about investing was that I actually got a pretty good feel of the entrepreneurial journey and helping solve real problems. And you're hiring people, you're firing people, co-founders are splitting up, you've lost product market fit, your biggest partner turns into your biggest enemy. Like these are real problems. And if you are an empathetic investor, the founders you work with will certainly lean on you and pull you into that stuff. Now, if you're like the standard finance guy, super cold, don't send your problems to me, they're not going to come to you. And that's okay. I don't say that to vilify that persona. That Soda also has its place in the market, but I am not that, right? I invest today and originally I think I fell in love with it because on one hand, I don't have all my eggs in one basket. And so that feeling, the pit in your stomach when you lose a customer and you're a founder, especially a young founder, I get that, but it's not as rough. So I can relate to it, but I'm not staying up all night from it, which selfishly makes my existence a little bit more pleasant. And the flip side is, I get to get my hands dirty alongside folks all the time. But ultimately that was not enough for me, right? Because I did want to leave Insight. I did want to start a firm. I had no idea though how much starting a firm was like starting any other business.

Mm-hmm.

I thought, oh, we're so good at investing, we'll just leave and then it'll all just magically happen. And I mean, it just didn't. And so we actually had to remind ourselves, wait a minute, we just decided to become entrepreneurs. And dig back in.

What was the hardest part? I mean, you were at Insight, you had infrastructure, you had a brand, then you found Left Lane, you know, with other folks.

Yeah.

What was the hardest part as you were getting started?

So we spun out of Insight 6 and a half years ago, and I think we've, we've done a decent job so far of building the brand of Left Lane. That said, when we first started, my biggest fear Was that nobody would reply to our emails because who the heck are we? But that wasn't the case because we had track records to reference. We of course could say, hey, we just spun out of Insight Partners. Sorry, that wasn't a secret and so forth. And importantly, we were specialists in internet, small business, consumer tech, and most of the industry was focused on enterprise software. And so we were able to keep getting our high response rates, keep getting our high win rates on term sheets that have always been around 85, 90%, which is because of a dearth of really quality competition in the sectors we play in, I would say, combined with the fact that we're really hungry and, you know, we work hard and we have the good references. But all that actually worked and I was worried about it. What I wasn't worried about was I wasn't worried about just finance compliance. Data comes in, quickly pull together a deck, like all that stuff on the process side, the real things that needed to get done. or the infrastructure that LPs expected of us being institutional fund managers. I didn't know that any of that even could be a problem because I grew up in water. I was a fish in water and I didn't even realize where I was. So I totally took it for granted. And so building all of that infrastructure, certainly not all or even mostly on me, right? We have a great team and I have great partners that have built out different sectors of the firm now. And today we're 35, 36 people. And it all runs really well, but I had no idea how hard it would be. And the hardest part was actually culture. Because culture in a firm like Insight, like culture just comes out of the ground, right? You walk in and you know how to act, you know how to talk. It doesn't matter if someone's 10 years older than you or 2 years younger than you. If their title's senior to you and they ask you to do something, it's going to get done and you're going to communicate well with them. None of that happened here. And so We suddenly had to say, and I learned from the CEOs I work with, okay, first of all, culture is what you tolerate. So if somebody is doing something you don't like and you're tolerating it, that is your culture.

Mm-hmm.

So I think we had to become more explicit ourselves. And in becoming more explicit, I sort of saw the second thing, which is culture is communication, right? When you're trying to create a culture and to a certain extent McDonald's-ify things so that you can just bring someone in and But by the end of the day, they're working. It just takes constant communication. Like, hey, we stand for this. This is our goal. And just repeat, repeat, repeat, even though it sounds fake or corny at first, it ends up working. So we got there, but it took us some stumbling and fumbling around for a year.

I'm curious, obviously it was intentional how you assembled your founding team and the first set of folks you brought in. How easy was it to get on the same page on how you wanted to design the culture?

That's a good question. We got an exec coach and did a lot of offsites, especially in the early years to figure that out. And keep in mind one thing, our firm was started at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020. So after a couple months, we were remote.

Okay.

And that was an interesting curveball. But we started doing daily standups on Zoom and like fun facts and silly questions and stuff like that. So that people could still get closer because at, at the core of any relationship or organization, whatever, is just like trust, quality time, stuff like that. So we were starting from a little bit of a disadvantageous point with the COVID curveball right as we were starting. But I actually think it made us stronger there. And, and to be fair, I don't think there's a right way to do it. I know plenty of firms that the culture is one of almost like a non-culture. The culture is like, hey, we're a bunch of free agents, independent hunters, and we just happen to get paid by the same company. But, you know, I've got my P&L, you've got yours, and we're perfectly friendly and cordial to each other, but there's no culture that we don't like that. We don't want that, right? We want everybody in the same office team changing deals between people, leaning on each other and learning from each other. And so that I think requires a lot of time spent, a lot of communication. And by the way, I still don't think we've figured it out. I think there's a lot of room for us to improve, and I don't think any of my partners or I are particularly the types of persona to be satisfied.

You mentioned as when you spun out of Insight, you had a very unique kind of niche you were filling. So maybe when you were going to your LPs, it was clear like, this is different. I would think that that is still an edge for Left Lane, meaning like, yeah, there's not a million investment firms you can go to that do Exactly what you do. That said, how competitive is it to win deals?

And listen, it's always competitive to win deals. We spend millions of dollars on data and infrastructure for our team. We pipe a bunch of different data sources into a Snowflake backend. We build custom apps on top of that, but that is not why we win deals. That's how we stay on top of things. That's how we prioritize which company to email, certainly. But we get eyes on 20,000+ companies a year in the sectors we care about. So we think that's give or take like 90% market coverage. We speak to about a third of those companies and ultimately we only invest in about 15 a year, 14, 15 a year. Last year we lost one deal. And if you don't lose a deal every now and then, like you're, you're probably way overpaying for deals. But the reason why our win rate's so high on term sheets is because the vast majority of our deals are actually preemptive. So there's no competition. And if we're seeing competition all the time in all of our deals, we're doing something wrong. We've built a small army of people here. Maybe it's not an army, maybe it's more like a SEAL Team 6, but every year we hire new analyst classes. Those analyst classes are managed with pretty high expectations. We expect people to hustle hard, call a lot of companies, use the data and infrastructure we've built for them, but we also work for them. So if they don't get a reply to 2 emails, they're going to copy me or one of the other partners on an email. If we don't get a reply, we're going to pull the investor list and start pinging the investors for introductions. If that doesn't work, we're going to fly down to that city together and crack the company. And if they find an interesting company, we meet twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. If they find an interesting company on a Thursday, whatever my weekend plans were, they're probably not going to happen. I need to get on a flight Thursday night so that I can go meet that company and win that deal. Because if we don't win the vast majority of companies we're interested in, The wheel will stop turning. They won't hunt as hard. So again, it comes back to culture. The tools are great. The tools are, relatively speaking, easy, and I think will increasingly become table stakes. I'm sure they basically already are, but the culture is not because most of these firms who build all this interesting AI sourcing tools and this and that, they don't have the culture of hunger. They don't have the culture of get on a plane today and go see that company. They have the culture of Come visit me in San Francisco, or I'm on vacation. Would you like to join me? Or whatever it is. It's just, I think hunger is what we both look for in the founders we back, but it's also what we try to build here, and it's key to the culture.

I imagine that given your experience and time investing, as well as the time and experience of your partners, that you can quickly discern if an opportunity is a good one. And so there's this spectrum where it's kind of like no-brainer, This one, we gotta go after it all the way down to, yeah, you know, I don't know, this could be interesting, but not quite sure yet. How would you characterize to folks, you know, either internally or externally, how you know something is a good deal?

Yeah. Well, so with a great company, I think we all have our biases, and what makes our team work well is not only different sectors, but different entrepreneur personas click with different partners. I mentioned we speak with, give or take, 6,000 unique companies per year. We will do deep dives on 1 in 10 of those. That means we get data and look at them pretty closely. And maybe when we get down to the top 100, I would say that the vast majority of those 100 companies are actually probably good companies. Now, what makes the 15 out of 100 that we invest in A lot of that is personal preference and something clicking with us as a firm. So sometimes we do meet great companies and the deal's just not going to work, right? I'd say actually half the time we don't invest in those 100 companies. Great company, love the founder. This is not a deal that's going to work for us either. Slightly out of scope, too expensive, whatever it might be. The other half of the time is where it gets really hard and we agonize over this stuff and we spend so much time on it. You drive yourself crazy just like talking in circles on certain things. And that's why it's really helpful to have a team and have partners to help focus things because On the founder side, personally, what I care about, and I know what some of my partners care about, is a chip on shoulder. If I could pick, I'd pick a founder who built a billion valuation company and they got this close to an exit and somehow it all came crumbling down because they tasted it. They were this close and man, are they mad that it didn't happen. And the vengeance with which they come back and they build it twice as fast and twice as big and don't make all the same mistakes. I've had an amazing experience with those folks. Other times it's maybe they're an immigrant who had a more challenging upbringing, or they were a pro athlete and this is the only way they know how to go. Chips on shoulder comes in all different shapes and sizes, but for me, I look for that in the entrepreneur. And then I look for a product or service that probably feels the way that Uber feels to me. When I land in a new country and they don't have Uber, I go, oh crap. am I going to get to my hotel? It's raining late at night and somehow my Uber app is freezing. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm stranded. Something that can give you that feeling that, oh crap, I don't even know how to do my job. I don't like, if people are using Salesforce on a day-to-day basis and Salesforce crashes, what are they actually going to do if their email crashes? Something like that. These relationships, if you can find the companies that tap into relationships like that, and you see a company growing because all the companies we back are growing Very fast, 200%, 300% on average. And half the companies we back are profitable, by the way. So if you have a company with great unit economics growing that fast, and it has that customer relationship, it tells you not only that the company's going to have great retention, it also tells you that it's either creating a new category or so much better than the incumbents that even though this is a really high-importance utility, people are switching to a brand new company. So that's kind of my framework. Hey, is this really important to someone? And it's growing fast because if it is, they're a category creator or they're way better than the incumbent.

It'd be helpful for the benefit of our audience to tell more specifically what you focus on, because I know there's probably like maybe a few different broader categories, but like, what do you focus on? Where do you spend most of your time?

Me personally or the firm?

We'll go you first and then the firm.

Okay. So on my end, I touch A lot of our, let's say, high retention digital consumer products and our prosumer and small business products and services. So my mantra is I want things that acquire like consumer and retain like enterprise, right? I want short or instant sales cycles in big markets, but I don't want super churning businesses. And within Left Lane, retention is religion anyway. So if you, if you zoom out and you say, hey, what does Left Lane do? Well, we commit to RLPs is, hey, we want total economy coverage. So my LP pitch for a long time has been, hey, you want growth and you want tech, but what you've actually gotten is just enterprise software because that was the easiest asset class to invest in. And why reinvent the wheel if it's doing well? That chapter has largely ended and the asset class has been saturated for over a decade. It's a large reason why we even exist and created a separate strategy inspired by enterprise software, but distinct from it. We want those enterprise software principles in the rest of the economy. Well, as you know from your Spotify and your Netflix and your Uber and your this and that, like there are high margin, high retention businesses all over the real world that were driven by the same trends, the SaaS-ification of our economy, the tech-ification of our economy. They're a little bit harder to find and they're not as clear and they're not as easy to model, by the way. So that's what we invest in. That means that we invest in everything from Blank Street Coffee and a 7th Street Burger, as you referenced earlier, to companies like GlossGenius, which is a spa and salon booking and payment platform, or WeTravel, which does the same thing for travel and tour operators and everything in between. So I want to be in healthcare, in financial services, in food, in travel, in sports, because I want total economy coverage. So we're actually trying to be a very diversified strategy that is largely within the consumer side of the economy. And then within that, I'm thinking more about business models. or relationships that lend themselves to high retention. So I'll give you an example. I have a company in the portfolio that I'm on the board of called Ownwell down in Austin, Texas. We just announced a fundraise there, but we actually invested 3.5 years ago. So Ownwell started off by doing tech-enabled property tax appeals. Now, this is the most boring market in the world. This is a services market. It is a sneakily very large market, And it's a market that's been skewed towards higher income folks because higher income folks with very expensive homes, when they get their tax bill, they send it to their lawyer and their accountant and they say, fix this for me. And they file an appeal and they go through a long process and there's lots of back and forth. Now, what Ownwell did is it said, I'm, I'm pretty sure we can use software and AI to pull together one of these appeal reports. And in fact, I think we can do it in real time. So when they see that a consumer Just got their home assessed at a certain value and they, they're going to owe 10 grand in property taxes this year, but their internal appraisal system says, no, no, we can, we can see a world where this home should have more like $8,000 a year in property taxes. They're going to send me a notice and say, hey, we don't know if you saw yet, but your property taxes are 10 grand this year. We think they should be 8. Sign up with us and we'll handle it. And they become what's called an agent of record with power of attorney. So it's a very powerful relationship. You just got a homeowner the most valuable consumer there is to choose you for a financial product at a very low cost to acquire because they've got this down to a science. But more importantly, they built all the automation and the pipes into local counties to make it easy to automate the back and forth, back and forth such that they're actually operating at a software gross margin. And that company will serve, give or take a million homes this year. They were able to scale unlike any services company like a property tax consultant could, and they've added additional products. So they've added on insurance, they've added on utility optimization. So now it's all the finances related to your home, which is of course people's biggest investment, their biggest cost. And so that's very high trust.

It's a great example because it uncovers a business that no one thinks about.

Exactly.

You have so many cool businesses in your portfolio. I'm wondering if you could give us Maybe another example of a company. It could either be a recent investment or something that you had done in the past, but one that you have a particular affinity for.

Oh my gosh. Just debating if I pick one that I'm on the board of or one that, to be fair, I spread the love a little bit. I'll pick one that I'm not on the board of.

Okay.

I'll pick a company called LendFi in the portfolio. LendFi, which used to be called Lemonade Finance, Is a cross-border remittance banking and credit company. Here's another really high trust use case. I live in Canada, my family lives in Nigeria, and I am their primary source or a very important source of income for them. They need this money to survive. You're not messing around with tools there. You're not switching tools every week there. This is essential. We invested in this business, LEMFI, when it was doing 4, maybe 5 million in revenue. It was growing super fast, great unit economics, and it was maybe the 20th company in remittances that we had spoken to. And the big companies in the space, the classic is Western Union, and then you have TransferWise and so on and so forth. But we invested in this company in summer of '22 when the company was doing 4 or 5 million in revenue. Today the company's doing about 200, so it's grown quite a bit. And what was really interesting about that company is that they were predominantly in one corridor, if I recall correctly, Canada to Nigeria. So immigrant populations living in Canada, sending money back home to Nigeria. And what we saw is they were opening new corridors and it wasn't a one-off. So they didn't just figure out how to get this small but really high-growth community in Canada. They figured out how to get into the UK. In Europe and then in the US, and then they were able to tap into the corridors going to Ghana and to India and to Pakistan and to China. And so the playbook was actually working. The cost to acquire a customer, even though they're acquiring new corridors, new countries, more customers, stayed really stable throughout all of this. The retention, the early signs of retention also stayed stable. And the way we underwrite these companies is fairly differentiated. So typical investors looking at a P&L and then they're going to wait for the company to pull together some reports around retention. And maybe if they're sophisticated, they'll look at the cohorts, the retention cohorts or something. What we're actually doing is we're pulling the raw demographics, the raw usage. So I'm looking at every single customer. Did they get referred in or did they download this via TikTok or Instagram or some community event? Historically speaking, the referrals are our best customers. So we want to see those staying as a high percent and We don't want to see TikTok shoot up too high because that means retention might take a hit. Are they putting in the same amount of money into the platform every week or that amount going down? Are we getting lower quality from a revenue perspective, lower quality users as we're expanding, or are we actually still getting the same valuable users we were getting before? And then how many receivers are they adding and how frequently are they sending? These are usage stats that aren't going to show up in the P&L in the first few months of launching a new corridor. But we now know within just a few months if a corridor is going to scale, if it's going to retain, etc. So before it was obvious to the market, we doubled and we tripled down and we today own maybe a hair below 30% of the company. And it's become one of our main position builders. 1 in 4 companies we double and triple down in. We do that quickly, we do it quietly, we do it before talking about the company in the market. And that's something that we absolutely learned from our time at Insight Partners. But I love businesses like this because they've innovated across so many vectors and they're making people's lives better, right? They're giving them access to credit and to banking and of course taking care of their families overseas. They're not dropping the ball. They're giving them the best possible rates. But it's also, you know, it's grown 50x since we invested just a few years ago. So, so we can't complain about that and they're not slowing down.

And correct me if I'm wrong, you mentioned 2 of their competitors, but there's many more out there, so they must be doing something really well.

There are absolutely other companies. Yeah, I'd say the closest company and what they do is another upstart similar size company called TapTapSend. But this is a real problem. So it's not alone in the ocean there. There's, there's plenty of fish in the water.

I want to switch gears because I like to touch on the personal side and learn a little bit more about you. We talked about your kind of the early part of your career. We talked about this before we hit record. Where are you from? Tell us a little bit about where you grew up.

So 0 to 11, St. Louis, Missouri, 11 to 17, San Diego, and then all over after that.

We were talking a little bit about athletics. Curious if you were involved in athletics as a grown-up.

Yeah, definitely. My dad was very focused on— it was an assumption from both my parents that we would be straight-A students. My dad's extracurricular was he wanted us to be good tennis players, and then he wanted me to be a runner. So I ran cross-country. And, you know, was able to compete at a state level, not at a national level there. And then tennis, which I'm so glad that I learned tennis because I continue to enjoy it to this day. And, you know, he's 66 years old and we still play tennis together every time we see each other. So that was great. Awesome.

Now Left Lane throws these or puts on summits.

Yes.

And it looks like you're really focused on, it's like an area that you really like to spend time in. Tell us about that thought process. I mean, there are kind of some benefits I can think of off the top of my head, but tell us about your vision for these summits.

So I end up going to a lot of conferences just to speak, and I speak because it's marketing, and hopefully it's interesting to someone in the audience. And I always try to think of like, okay, am I speaking to students here who either want to start companies or eventually become an investor? Am I speaking to potential talent for our portfolio companies? Am I speaking to a crowd of investors or am I speaking to a crowd of founders? And if I can help someone with a little tidbit, I would love to. Same reason why we're talking right now. But ultimately it is marketing, right? The summits for us are at the highest level marketing for the firm, but the vision for them is very different. The vision for them was when I would go to these conferences, I would never watch the sessions ever, and I was just there for the networking when I was rising the ranks. And nothing wrong with that. They were getting great people together. But what if instead of just standard talking points, what if there was stuff that was maybe a little bit more secretive or controversial at these conferences? So our conferences are big. I mean, there are hundreds of people, but what people are talking about is, let me open up this black box and talk to you about how we do user attribution across TV and out of home and direct mail and this and that. Or let me talk to you about how I scaled TikTok as a channel from $10,000 a month to $1 million a month, right? People are giving real insight. Let me talk to you about how I got this license in the UK to be a money transfer company. So it's, it's actually really opening things up for predominantly founders and C-level executives as the audience with some of the best operators that we know and friends in our network who are willing to be really open. So it's a much more open and candid conversation. Now, it is still marketing, it is still networking, but the biggest thing is I want this to be extremely, extremely useful so that people know we're not generalists. We're not just here for the check, right? Like, of course, if that's all you want from us, that's fine. But if you want people who are actually bringing the absolute most curated network to bear for the portfolio companies and helping push companies further and further and further, That's going to be us. And this is a way to showcase what we do every day, just for a couple of days during the year out there to the world.

Excellent. 2 final questions. We could do this in rapid fire.

Sure.

One is, can you tell us about a person who has had a profound influence on you?

So many people. Probably my brother Jesse has had the biggest influence on me. I have 2 older brothers. They're both amazing. They're like my built-in friends, parents, counselors, good cop, bad cop, all that stuff. My brother Jesse's super similar to me. Also went to Wharton undergrad, worked at McKinsey, worked at a hedge fund, and then became an entrepreneur. But he's an oversharer and just doesn't shut up when he likes something or believes something. But I appreciate people like that because I always know what he's thinking and I know he has the best of intentions. And because I can trust him so much when he sends me a book or calls me on something he thinks I'm doing wrong or makes a connection for whatever it might be, I just know that I can fully trust him. You know, with my life, with my best intentions in mind. And so having someone who I can trust so much, but who's so steeped and educated in exactly my world, but 8 years ahead of me, I mean, it's something that I wish every person could have because it's incredibly useful to me.

I'm going to swap out my last question for this one. What ultimately drives you?

So for a long time, I would answer that question as, hey, I'm just trying to make my parents proud. And I think to a certain extent, I still am. Because I think this stuff gets ingrained in you very, very early. And people make up fake reasons why they're doing things. Oh, I need to make $100 million, or, oh, I want to buy this team, or maybe a great philanthropic cause, which is all great, but those are all window dressing. None of that is actually the reason that people are doing something. People are doing something because they feel like they need to prove something most of the time. Most of the time, their source of that is something underneath the ego, which is most likely fear. And fear-based motivation is both the most common and the most powerful motivator. It's also the most corrosive. Ideally, and increasingly in my case, I'm trying to tap into the other fuel source, which is joy. Joy has many faces. It's curiosity and this and that, but I'm increasingly training my body to say, hey, wow, I loved doing that. I'm going to do more of that and I'm not going to focus on the outcome because I've had such a lucky life that the outcomes, they've all been great. So you know what? I'm actually going to trust that they're going to stay great and I'm just going to keep leaning into, this is great. I felt good when I did this. I helped someone when I did this, whatever it was. And I'm not saying that this is easy to do by any means, and I'm very much on the journey with it, but I'm on the journey of actually changing my motivation from fear to joy. But I still want to make my parents proud, not from a fear Of disappointing them. I think I'm way past that point, luckily, and, and they're super happy with their kids. And I more so want to say to them, I appreciate everything you did moving across the world when you were 17 years old and going broke and starting businesses and all that stuff. And I'm going to take the baton from you and I'm going to run this race, not because I'm afraid to lose, but because I'm going to enjoy winning.

It's a wonderful answer. Vinny, thank you so much for taking It's been a great conversation.

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me.