She's down in Boca Raton, Florida, that's where the Futures Industry Association's annual gathering is underway. Let's take a look, we have the early birds out here, huh? I think people are still recovering from the trick last night.
Well, what an honor it is to kick off what I'm viewing as a day of legends at FIA, given who I have the esteemed honor of interviewing and then what the rest of the day looks like. So Vinnie, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for bringing this gorgeous trophy. We're thrilled to have you here.
It's great to be here with friends and some folks I haven't seen in a very long time. It's fantastic to be with you, Lynn. Thank you for inviting me. And it is quite an amazing trophy, isn't it? I have to give it a hand.
Got to give another round of applause for the Florida Panthers. So Vinnie, you've had such a storied life, such a storied career. Thank you from all of us in this room for your contributions to the industry, but most importantly, thank you from all of us here and outside of these four walls for your service to our great country. I want to move this chair so I can see you better. Okay. So, given all of the success you've had, you graduated from West Point, spent time in the Army, were a guiding force around NYSE and its evolution from floor-based to screen, founded Virtu Financial and its predecessors, but then you also decided to make a pretty big pivot in your life and breed a Kentucky Derby winner. That was cool. Bought a hockey team that wound up winning this cup. Yeah, it was cool. How, what lessons have you taken from all of your success, all of your experience, that have led to such success in disparate industries that no one would ever predict?
I think for me, I was truly formed through my military experience, and it's really pretty simple. You conduct yourself in cohorts, in groups of people, with clearly identified objectives. In military terms, we have a mission statement, and the idea around how do you get a group of folks to all be the best at their role towards achieving that mission. And the idea really comes down to what is the sinew, what's the connectivity between those individuals. It's usually always the amount of trust. An organization is usually as good as the lowest denomination of trust amongst the most important participants. Does that make sense? Yeah, makes sense. So I think you learn that in the military, and of course there you have some arduous physical dimension to your tasks and missions. Then when I came to Wall Street, trust requires enormous discipline. You have to earn that trust, you bestow trust, and you maintain it through enormous discipline and efficiency of your communication. So that's how you get better and better at stuff. It's really that cycle of leadership. If you want to think of it sort of as a pyramid, it starts with trust, and trust breeds more communication, and communication by definition becomes efficient, which promotes self-discipline, and then when you have a group that's very disciplined, you tend to take on larger and larger challenges and different challenges.
Yeah, yeah, such an important guide and core principle, if you will, particularly given the group that we're in front of today. The core principle is something we're all familiar with, and the exciting complexity... I don't want to take over your interview, but the complexities around our services industry, they're exciting, but they require enormous discipline and discernment. You know, where do you apply your capital investment amongst a range of technological opportunities? That's a real big question because there's no doubt in my mind that firms are going to have to discern how they invest their capital and what they become expert at and what they are not expert at, and such, through trust, through third-party relationships. But I hope that didn't sound like gobbledygook, but that's how I view technology.
Well, I think it's a really important point that you just raised about capital deployment, and something that I know is on the mind of every CEO, some of the CEOs in this room and outside of these four walls. If you think about how you've built enterprises and how you've applied capital deployment, are there deals that when you think back... No, I told that was a secret. She asked me backstage, she said 'Can I ask you about the big deal that got away?' I said I'd rather not. Well, what about your favorite one? My favorite deal... I don't think in terms of discrete events and results. It's always a continuum of curiosities and puzzles that I sort of take on and create. I really don't think in terms of deals because I feel sometimes like it makes you static. When we formed Virtu, that was a discrete moment, but the next day the evolution of the firm. So I don't think, 'Oh gosh, I bought this for this amount and I made that much when I sold it.' That's not in my consciousness. I hardly ever sell anything. Yeah, yeah, but this deal was pretty good. This is a great deal on many levels, but you can't define everything in terms of money. That's fair. I mean, the amount of impact this championship and the range of impact on the community and the broader environs of South Florida, it's incalculable. When you look at a young fan's face the first time they come to a game with their mom and dad, you know you're providing for them a transcendent experience. We all remember the first sporting event or the first event that we perceived to be larger than our ability to imagine at the time. That's transcendental. You've done a great job of creating such a family-friendly environment at the Panthers team, and that, thank you, builds on the next generation of fans. Looking forward to the next generation of fans and the enduring legacy, because I was that kid whose dad explained to him early on, 'I don't have enough money to bring you to a Yankee game.' So I wrote to a company called H-O Oats, I don't know if anybody remembers H-O Oats... Anyway, those days you would do things like collect box tops, and I wrote in to this address, and on an early Saturday morning my mother drops this envelope, 'You got this envelope from H-O Oats,' and there were two tickets in it. That's how I got to my first Yankee game. Then that was September 1st, 1962, and my dad took me. On the way to the game, he said we're going to sit above third base, and he told me the section number was section 16, and the reason we're going to sit there is because left-handed batters tend to foul off more than right-handed batters. I never figured that out, and I don't know if that's statistically accurate, but they tend to come into the first mezzanine, section 16. So he took the tickets we got from H-O Oats and he basically upgraded them. The first inning, a gentleman named Norm Siebern, first baseman for the Kansas City Athletics, fouled off a ball and my dad caught it right in front of my face. True story. Magical. He turned to me and handed me the baseball. At the end of the game, it was really a good catch by my dad, who was a very good athlete. In the old Yankee Stadium, you'd walk out and the press box was there, it wasn't enclosed. I was 6 years old, and the Yankee announcer at the time was Phil Rizzuto, future Hall of Famer. Phil said, 'That was some catch,' to my dad. My dad turned and said, 'Would you sign this for my son?' So of course I didn't listen to my mother and started playing with that baseball, and it's lost. But I remember that. Always listen to your mother, that's a good lesson.
So I want to pivot a bit to the state of the world, the state of our economy. I don't think we would be allowed off stage if we didn't talk a little bit about it. So you have a lot of familiarity with our current president, given that you were proposed to be Secretary of the Army during Trump version 1.0. If you zoom out, given your unique perspective and how well you know the current administration, what is your observation of the first 45 days in office and what his objectives are during this term?
Well, I think the president has a different level of confidence and conviction, quite frankly experience and context, and he's very, very determined. I would describe him as a virtuously intended transactional libertarian. He has a natural aversion to inefficiencies. He's a builder, he's a visionary, that's his ilk. And I think he looks at his core base as what all of America should sort of grow and aspire to. And I think he generally sees government as a source of less than completely efficient functions, and he's trying to make government less a part of people's lives. We can feel it in our industry already. You just have to turn on any financial media, and people are just, quite frankly, they look and feel and communicate more freely. So you could see that the regulatory regime is going to be... Regulation's purpose has always been to maintain standards of fairness, probity, and growth, to grow markets. And the philosophy that informs that, if it remains apolitical, it should be very, very clear to support growth of markets through education, assurance of regulatory efficiency, and that whole cycle. So very much a pro-growth agenda, a real understanding that at the end of the day, capital is a primary medium of trust. Trust back to your initial point. Trust, trust, trust is the building block of our societal structure. So it's that one word that continues to fuel growth. I truly believe that. And of course, trust is informed by indisputable information that is openly distributed. One of the decisions that Doug and I made when we first created Virtu was, and I don't know if this is still the case, we have our president Joe Molluso here, so I want to give Joe a big hand. But one of the decisions we made, and you could do this back then... At Virtu, from the first day you were in at the firm, you see the firm's complete P&L when you open your screen. So that's the most critical, the specific measure of the firm, at least in one context. But I felt it was the most efficient input to build trust amongst the participants.
