E3: Vinay Menda of Blank Street

“I don’t like the concept of failure versus success. You succeed and fail every day. It’s about learning from those failures and using them to understand how to succeed.”

When he was in college, Vinay Menda founded a venture firm in his dorm room. It was his dream to build a different type of business, but as he put it, “We launched a fund because we didn’t think we were good enough to build a company yet. I kept meeting these incredible founders I looked up to and thought, ‘My best way of being in this world is to invest in these people, start helping them, and just learn from them.” Fast forward to 2020, when he and Issam Freiha realized that dream and launched Blank Street Coffee. In just a few years, they’ve seen incredible growth. Shane sits down with Vinay to discuss choosing to start a business instead of going into finance, looking to your customers and employees to define your brand, and how New York pushed him out of his comfort zone.