The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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
00:08:03 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[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 [00:08:08] S1: I think he's... He's being very generous and very kind. Gabe is Gabe is an extremely smart guy. Yeah. I mean, I mean, yeah, again, growing up I was a huge nerd. I mean, I like... But I wasn't publicly so. Like I always... I didn't really like like it about myself, would say. Like I literally... I remember in, I think it was sixth grade or something. So I was like 12 years old, 11, 12 years old. [00:08:28] S0: I mean, how did that shape your aspirations when you were just about to finish high school? So if I met you at age 18, what would I have assumed you'd do with your life? I think like this [00:08:39] S1: generic sort of like business or finance. Like I was so... Maybe I was book smart, but I was not good at the kind of extra mile, like getting to know the career paths ahead of me or or like networking or, you know, really knowing the topography of these different areas within finance. So I'm probably generic would have been would have been like, yeah, I'll be like a CFO or maybe a CEO of some company and having zero idea what that meant, zero concept of, like, the path towards that zero concept of, like, what industry that would be. So, like, generically, was like, okay. Economics is probably a reasonable first step towards towards that. So that was kind of the random walk that I was on at that time. [00:09:19] S0: And it sounds like engineering was not a family influence.
00:09:19 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:09:19] S0: And it sounds like engineering was not a family influence. [00:09:22] S1: No. I mean, I took my first coding class. I only took sophomore my second year of university at the... Right at the end. I was late to the game, and I quickly realized I'm like, prefer this by a lot to economics and wish that I had done it the whole time. [00:09:34] S0: I know you met Gabe at Princeton. Was that pretty early on? Like, maybe tell us the story of how you met him at Princeton. [00:09:39] S1: Yeah. I mean, we... Princeton's not that big, so we definitely knew each other a bit just from the first few months. We started getting closer kind of maybe halfway through halfway through college, and it was just a bit like... I mean Gabe's also a big nerd and so we would just take some of these random like linear algebra or like stochastic systems classes together and I feel like of the people who were going out and getting drunk on a Tuesday like of that group, which is not a big group at Princeton. Gabe and I were, like, the nerdiest of that group. And so we sort of, like, naturally became close through that. [00:10:10] S0: Do you remember your first impressions? Like, I I told you how Gabe described you when I spoke to him the other day. How would you describe Gabe when you first met him? [00:10:18] S1: So confident. Like, so much just sense of presence, sense of self. Super funny. I mean, out the gate, just, like, hilarious. But not, like, warm and fuzzy. He was a little bit intimidating when I first met him, but always just, yeah, super smart and sharp and and hilarious.