By Brock Castellanos III, Founder & Chief Vibes Officer, NepoCorp Ventures
I am writing this from the rooftop of my Brickell penthouse. I am wearing a Loro Piana cashmere hoodie that costs more than your car. My personal chef Marcelo is plating a single soft-boiled quail egg on a slab of imported Himalayan salt. Marcelo does not make eye contact with me. We discussed this in the interview. My executive assistant Tabitha — Yale '23, Sigma Kappa, daddy's in reinsurance — is silently weeping in the kitchen because I told her the espresso was "off-temperature by maybe two degrees." She'll be fine. She has to be.
I am thirty-one years old. I have founded fourteen companies. All of them have failed. I have never been more successful.
There is a particular kind of person — let us call them the unblessed — who looks at the modern executive landscape and asks, with the strangled bleating of the middle class: Why does that man have a job he is not qualified for? They see a Treasury Secretary who cannot read a balance sheet. They see a Director of National Intelligence whose grandfather built tract homes in suburban Phoenix. They see a Secretary of Education whose only relationship to public schooling is having driven past one on the way to a polo match.
And they ask, How?
I am here to tell you, with the calm, predatory clarity of a man who has just had $4,800 worth of platelet-rich plasma injected into his scalp at 6:00 AM: this is not a bug. This is the entire product.
I. Competence Is for People Who Have to Work
Let me explain something to you, in the voice I use when I'm explaining things to my fiancée's father, who made his money in commercial flooring and still doesn't understand what I do.
Competent people are exhausting. They have opinions. They have credentials. They have boundaries. You ask a competent person to commit light financial fraud at 11:00 PM on a Sunday and they say something like "I'd like to consult with counsel" or "I'm spending time with my family." It's repulsive.
You know who doesn't say that? My new VP of Strategy, Cason Pemberton-Hicks. Cason was sixth at his prep school in a graduating class of forty-two. He spells "logistics" with two G's. He cannot operate the conference room television. Last Tuesday I watched him put a fork in the microwave and say "huh." When I ask Cason to do something illegal — and I do, constantly, as a kind of cardio for my soul — Cason says "yeah, totally, what's the workflow?"
Cason cannot leave. Cason will never leave. Where would he go? Goldman? Please. Goldman has standards now. McKinsey laughed him out of the interview when he asked if "synergy" was a kind of yoga. Cason is mine forever. He is mine the way my chef Marcelo is mine, the way my building is mine, the way the smell of my own skin is mine. There is something deeply peaceful about owning a person whose only alternative to you is a Best Buy management track in Boca.
That is loyalty. That is the only kind of loyalty that scales.
II. The Mirror Cannot Have Competition
Every morning I look at myself in the bathroom mirror for forty-five uninterrupted minutes. This is non-negotiable. I have a $19,000 Toto toilet that plays Brian Eno when I sit on it. I have a marble vanity carved from a single block quarried in Carrara by men I will never meet and do not think about. I examine my pores. I examine my jawline. I tell myself: You are the smartest person in any room you choose to enter.
I cannot have that ruined by a deputy.
Imagine — and I want you to really sit with this — imagine if my Chief Operating Officer were good at her job. Imagine if she gave a TED Talk. Imagine if Forbes called her "one to watch." Imagine if she walked into a board meeting and closed a deal without me. I would have to do something about that. I'm not being dramatic. I'm being descriptive. There is a small, clean room in my mind where I keep the file labeled Threats To My Specialness, and competent subordinates are filed in there next to my brother Chip and the man at Whole Foods who asked if I'd "considered the bulk bin." The file is not large. The file is not allowed to be large.
This is why I hired Tessa Vorhees as COO. Tessa once described our supply chain as "the truck part." Tessa cannot pronounce quarterly. Tessa thinks EBITDA is a cocktail. When I walk into a meeting with Tessa, I am — by simple linguistic comparison — Cicero. I am Henry Kissinger with a better skincare routine. I am the only adult in a room full of beautifully-credentialed children, and the institutional investors love it. They write checks. They write big, soft, weeping checks.
Tessa makes $740,000 a year. She is worth every penny because every penny is a penny that is not making someone else look good.
III. Expertise Is the Enemy of Vision
I had an idea last Thursday at 2:47 AM after my fourth Negroni and my second bump of something Marcelo cannot legally identify. The idea was: what if we acquired a regional airline and used it exclusively to deliver oat milk to our other portfolio companies? It was, and remains, the best idea I have ever had.
I called my VP of Aviation Strategy. He does not exist yet. I will hire one.
He will not be a pilot. He will not have an MBA. He will not have any opinions about "FAA regulations" or "fuel logistics" or "the basic physics of why airplanes need to land at airports rather than the helipad of my Tulum compound." He will be a 26-year-old named Bryce who I met at Soho House. Bryce will say yes. Bryce will say let's run it. Bryce will say love that for us.
Experts ruin things. Experts come into your office holding printouts. Experts use the word unfortunately. Experts have a kind of low, droning, municipal energy that makes my skin crawl in a way that no amount of cold plunging can fix. The last time I spoke to a true subject-matter expert was in 2019, when a structural engineer told me my proposed twelve-story glass treehouse in Aspen was "not really a thing that can exist." I fired him. I hired a man named Garrett who had a podcast.
The treehouse collapsed in March. Garrett is now my Chief of Staff. He makes 2.3 times what the engineer made. He pronounces it ar-chi-TECH-ture and I have decided to find that charming.
IV. The Airbag
Every founder needs an airbag. This is the most important hire you will ever make.
An airbag is a senior executive whose primary function is to deploy, with great violence and at maximum visibility, the moment your company commits a crime. Their resume is their crumple zone. The press already hates them — you made sure of that during the hiring announcement, which you leaked yourself, to Axios, with a photo of them looking weird at a Christmas party. When the SEC comes knocking, you stand on a podium in a $6,200 charcoal Brioni suit, you furrow your brow with the practiced gravity of a man who has watched the Succession finale eleven times, and you say: "I am as shocked as anyone. Trust has been broken. I have personally terminated the responsible party. Today, we heal."
Then you have a martini. Then you buy a boat.
My current airbag is a man named Lawson Mecklenburg-Strauss, my Chief Compliance Officer. Lawson was a Pi Kappa Alpha at Vanderbilt. Lawson has been credibly accused of three different things I cannot legally enumerate. Lawson has a tan that suggests something is medically wrong. Lawson would, if asked, take a bullet for me, and that bullet would be a federal indictment. He is perfect. I love him. I think about him sometimes when I cannot sleep.
V. The Bottom Line
People — small people, credentialed people, the kind of people who carry tote bags and have opinions about public transit — will tell you that competence matters. That meritocracy is the engine of a healthy society. That institutions exist to function.
These people are confused about what institutions are for.
Institutions are not for solving problems. Institutions are stages. They exist so that a certain kind of man — a man with a strong jaw, an inherited surname, and a healthy contempt for the concept of consequences — can stand in the center of them and be seen. The supporting cast is not there to be good at their roles. They are there to make sure the lighting flatters the lead.
You don't hire the best and brightest. You hire the loyal and the dim. You build a court, not a company. You surround yourself with people who will never, ever, under any conceivable circumstance, be confused for you.
And the beautiful part — the part that brings me a calm, almost pharmacological joy — is that they know. Cason knows. Tessa knows. Tabitha, weeping into the Krups, knows. Lawson, polishing his federal indictment in advance, knows. They know they are disposable. They know they are mine. And it makes them work so much harder. It makes them smile when I walk into the room. It makes them laugh at jokes I have not yet finished telling.
That, dear reader, is leadership.
That is vision.
That is what I do every single day, while Brian Eno plays softly from a toilet that cost more than a Honda Civic, and it is why I am — by every metric that actually matters — winning.
Brock Castellanos III is the Founder and Chief Vibes Officer of NepoCorp Ventures. He is the author of the forthcoming memoir Born on Third, Stole Home: A Founder's Journey, available for pre-order from a publishing imprint he owns. The views expressed in this op-ed are his alone and do not reflect the editorial position of IRREVERENT Magazine, which we feel needs to be stated explicitly and possibly notarized.
EDITOR'S NOTE: IRREVERENT publishes guest contributions to broaden the discourse. We did not fact-check Mr. Castellanos's claims about his personal staff, his treehouse, his toilet, or the legal status of his Chief Compliance Officer. We attempted to. He had us removed from the building.