The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:01:21 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:01:21] S0: Let's set some context with the fun facts. Where were you born and where do you live now? [00:01:25] S1: Sure. Born in a town called Coventry, Connecticut in Eastern CT, sort of like an hour and a half from Boston. It's the closest city. Live in London now, opening our European office. [00:01:36] S0: Yeah. And work? What was your first job and what do you do now? [00:01:40] S1: First job was I was an SAT tutor when I was, like, in eleventh grade or twelfth grade, and then now European and APAC expansion for Rogo. [00:01:49] S0: And why don't you give us a quick overview on Rogo for someone who may not have heard of it? [00:01:53] S1: Sure. Yeah. We are an AI partner for large global banks and institutional financial firms. You can kind of think of like Harvey or Legora, but much more tailored to finance and with a bit probably more of an emphasis on kind of the change management. Like, we have a big team of four deployed bankers who come in and help build out the custom agents and workflows and actually teach people how to use the product, etcetera. So we started the company about five years ago out of New York. Since then we've grown quite a bit, very lucky to be working with a lot of the top banks globally. [00:02:25] S0: Yeah. And your investors. I know most of the investors and I was joking to you the other day, it's like the Avengers. You've got all the tier one investors.
00:02:25 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:02:25] S0: Yeah. And your investors. I know most of the investors and I was joking to you the other day, it's like the Avengers. You've got all the tier one investors. [00:02:33] S1: Yeah. It's it's, kind of like the like... It seems like it would be sort of this like cigar smoke filled backroom just with all these guys across, you know, yes, Sequoia and Thrive and Kleiner and Kozlov. But actually, it's a very kind of, like, tame group when we're we're together. It's a very tactical squad. But, yeah, no. They're they're awesome. I mean, it took us, like, two, two and a half years between our pre seed and raising kind of our first more institutional capital from from Keith. So that was kind of a long ish product market fit journey. But, yeah, since then, we've been lucky to put together a pretty insane board. [00:03:05] S0: Totally. And I wanna talk about that in a moment. And, John, as you know, purpose of this show is to reimagine the concept of a high flyer, to go beyond people's shop titles. Is there a person you know who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve? [00:03:17] S1: I mean, hopefully, give her a lot of recognition internally, but maybe externally. Alyanna Virgie is a a woman on my team who started with us about two years ago, ex Goldman in 6th Street, did a lot of work with a lot of early clients, and then she actually moved over here to London with me and this helped helped build out the office. And she's a 15 out of 10. She's awesome. [00:03:38] S0: She must be killing it if you've called her out. Like, she must be absolutely smashing.
00:03:38 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:03:38] S0: She must be killing it if you've called her out. Like, she must be absolutely smashing. [00:03:42] S1: Yeah. She's she's the best. She's also my rock here. [00:03:45] S0: Back to the episode in a moment. Something I've heard a lot from business owners and leaders is that speed only matters if you still feel confident in the output. And it's particularly an important point in this world of AI. Answer to that is Accountable Intelligence. AI that shows you what it's doing and works from your own real data and is designed to keep you in control before anything happens. As Xero puts it, most AI asks you to trust it. Accountable intelligence shows you why you can. And that's how it works with JAX, Xero's in platform AI finance partner. So whether you're running a business, advising the client, working with your board, JAX ensures that you get the upside of automation without giving up any of the control. If you want to see this practice, head over to xero.comhighflyers for 90% off your plan for the first six months. Terms apply and go to the website. That's xeroxero.comhighflyers. Now back to the episode. That's great. That's so cool. Alright, let's wind back the clock and go to your sunrises at college childhood, and and I think this is particularly interesting because you've not... I mean, you've actually not done... Is this your first interview? I think you've done one more, like, mini interview? I think [00:05:05] S1: this is my first podcast
00:05:05 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
[00:05:05] S1: this is my first podcast [00:05:07] S0: that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we'll see how far we can get into this because I think people are curious about Yeah. [00:05:12] S1: Yeah. No. Think we should check on the... It's uncharted territory. [00:05:15] S0: Yeah. You're breaking up story. Is which is great. Which is which is great. So you you mentioned growing up. Tell me what what are your memories? What are your memories of the environment and family? [00:05:23] S1: Yeah. I mean, I I had a a great childhood, two great parents, two older siblings. Coventry is... It's a great town. It's one of these, like... I don't know if you've ever spent time in kind of New England and, the Tri State area. It's, like, half of it is, like, this very sort of, like, urban, suburban, affluent, like, hedge fund manager type vibe. And then the other half is like weirdly rural and kind of like agrarian and like all these towns in like Eastern Connecticut, Central Mass, Upstate New York that like... That was kind of my vibe growing up. [00:05:53] S0: And you were telling me the other day that you come from a family of engineers. Tell me about that.
00:05:53 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:05:53] S0: And you were telling me the other day that you come from a family of engineers. Tell me about that. [00:05:57] S1: Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I mean, my my... Luckily, my family was very, like, kinda well educated. My dad is a... Or was a professor at the local state college, Yukon, of computer and electrical engineering. My sister has her Ph. D. In chemical engineering from Columbia. My brother's an engineer at an army base in Alabama. So I was kind of a little black sheep to not like directly be an engineer even though I literally minored in engineering, machine learning, and and computer science. There definitely was a bit of, like, my dad impressed upon me from an early age that, like, the way to make money is to go do finance because he had... And he didn't know much about that world, but all of his friends from university who were with him in, like, electrical engineering, Half of them became, like, academics and, you know, didn't make all that much money, and then the other half went to go work at, like, Citadel and made, you know, a ton of money. And so from an early age, he was like, John, if you're really smart, you won't do engineering. You'll do something much more lucrative, which, like, looking back is a pretty hilarious perspective to have, but that was kinda what I was brought up with. [00:06:55] S0: When I spoke to Gabe, who's your cofounder at Vrogon the other day, he said to me at Princeton, you would finish three hour exams in thirty minutes. I don't know if he was joking. Like, is that true?
00:06:55 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:06:55] S0: When I spoke to Gabe, who's your cofounder at Vrogon the other day, he said to me at Princeton, you would finish three hour exams in thirty minutes. I don't know if he was joking. Like, is that true? [00:07:05] S1: That's a funny... That's an interesting perspective on it. No. I mean, I may be very... I would have to be very confident in it because there were two kind of competing forces. One is, like, my... I was good at school, like, almost everyone at Princeton, so that was one force. And then the other force is my sort of like Irish Catholic upbringing, which causes me to constantly be paranoid and the kind of second guess and things are gonna go wrong. And so like, feel like just as often as that would happen, I would, you know, maybe finish it in twenty minutes and then spend two hours and forty minutes, like, reading over every single answer to make sure it's right. And I probably have that conflicting Jekyll Hyde personality at Rogo at times as well. [00:07:43] S0: I mean, the exact quote he actually said is he said, John is one of the highest IQ people I've met and a standard deviation above people I've met. He was always that boy. [00:07:52] S1: Did he say always that boy? [00:07:55] S0: He literally gave me that... We had a call and he gave me that line and he said he can quote me and that was the exact line he said. [00:08:01] S1: That's so funny. That And [00:08:03] S0: I'm like, did that form... Like, clearly, he's a big fan of few, which is great. Like, that's