Greg LaVecchia was standing somewhere between a bar exit and the Hudson River waterline, cigar in hand, watching the Statue of Liberty glow in the distance, when he decided to say out loud what had been building all evening. Spain had just won the World Cup. It was 9:30 p.m. in New York City. The cigar was half-destroyed from the drive over. None of that stopped him. What stops most people, he argued that night, is not their talent or their circumstances but a set of instructions they inherited from a generation navigating a world that no longer exists. For anyone in their 20s right now who feels like the old map is not matching the terrain, what follows is the GPS correction he wished someone had handed him.
Greg LaVecchia is 31 Years Old and is the CEO and co-founder of Bloom, a wellness company he built alongside his wife, Mari Levecia, starting in 2019. Three days before this conversation, he had been on stage at a Manhattan mastermind event with 500 entrepreneurs, most of them under 30, running businesses generating between 10 million and 250 million dollars a year in annual revenue. He put it plainly: ‘I feel like 80% of the stuff I was taught in high school and middle school and elementary school is totally obsolete to the arena that we are now playing in.’
The resume rule nobody warned you about
The first lie on his list is the loyalty myth. The previous generation taught that staying at one employer for a decade demonstrated commitment and would be rewarded with promotions. Lav’s reaction now, when he sees a resume showing a single employer across 10 years, is the opposite of admiration. He reads it as a yellow to red flag. What he wants is someone who has worked in three places, absorbed different cultures and methods, and can bring that layered experience into a growing organization. The corporate ladder as a life strategy, he argued, was always heading somewhere most people under 35 do not actually want to go.
Closely tied to that is what he calls the fake authority trap. Consultants who charge 350,000 dollars a year, wear suits, and read existing data back to the people who hired them occupy a shrinking category of high-status work. The entrepreneurs who are genuinely high-status, in his view, are the ones who have built something real, answer to a mission rather than a manager, and structure their organizations around trust rather than clocked hours.
What social media is actually selling you
The section of the evening that carried the most heat was his breakdown of the fake wealth trap. Nine out of ten people displaying a Lamborghini, a gated property, or a picture-perfect family on Instagram, he said, cannot actually afford what they are showing. The car is leased. The house was purchased for the post. The family photos do not reflect the reality behind them. He connected this directly to the rise of sports betting platforms and day-trading course sellers, warning that someone who is down financially and looking for a fast fix is exactly who those products are designed to reach. ‘Bet on yourself,’ he said. ‘There is nothing more important than betting on yourself.’
His framework for personal risk was simple and drawn from baseball: a 300 batting average, three hits in ten at-bats, is Hall of Fame territory. You do not need to win every bet. You need to make a few good ones on yourself and stay in the game long enough for them to compound.
The remaining traps covered friendship audits (every person in your life is either pushing you forward or pulling you back, and the ones pulling you back need to be kept at a distance), relocation (New York City, Austin, Miami, and Los Angeles as the four cities he ranked for entrepreneurial inspiration, with Austin carrying the least distraction, where he spends 70 percent of the year), and the selfishness-before-selflessness inversion, which he attributed to a concept from serial entrepreneur Andy Frisella: accumulate enough resources, energy, and knowledge first, and your capacity to help others will exceed anything you could offer while running on empty.
On academics, Lav graduated college with roughly a 2.5 GPA and received academic suspension twice. His wife had a similar record. They built a multi-billion dollar organization. His read on the academic system has not softened: it has not structurally changed in 300 years, and he sees no direct relationship between how someone performed inside it and how they perform in the modern business arena.
The cigar that did not survive the drive
Somewhere on the passenger seat during the ride over, the cigar Lav had been looking forward to all evening took enough damage that it was already compromised before he ever lit it properly.
By 9:30 p.m. he was outside anyway, looking at the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and what he thought might be Ellis Island, telling anyone in their 20s who would listen that the stands are full of the last generation and the arena door is wide open. The cigar was ruined. The view was not.
