Vinay Shahani

Intro: (00:00:00) In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islanders here each month, we’re teaming up with Lexus to host creative visionaries, a series of four episodes, featuring leaders and creators in the community who inspire us. This episode will future vice president of marketing at Lexus, Vinay Shahani who will discuss how depictions of Asian-Americans in advertising have changed over time and his role in fostering this change.

Maggie: (00:00:29) Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Asian Hustle Network podcast. Today, we have a very special guest with us his name is Vinay Shahani. Vinay is the vice president of marketing at Lexus USA. He is responsible for leading all aspects of marketing for the Lexus brand in the United States, including marketing strategy, communications, and media production, marketing incentives, digital social media websites, retail initiatives, and sponsorships engagement marketing and events and motorsports. Then I was named 2021 all-star marketer by media posts, a 2015 rising star by the automotive news, and a recipient of 2014, the salute to excellence award by the Asian Pacific American chamber of commerce. He was also a member of the board of directors of the ad council from 2014, to 2017, born and raised in Michigan.

Vinay earned a bachelor’s degree and mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree in both business administration and manufacturing systems engineering from Stanford University, Vinay is an avid automobile enthusiast and lives in the Dallas area with his wife and children. Vinay welcome to the show!

Vinay: (00:01:34) Maggie, thank you so much. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here with you and with Bryan.

Bryan: (00:01:39) We’ve been definitely looking forward to this all week for this episode! Just to give our listeners more perspective on who you are. Tell us a little bit more about your upbringing, and what that it was like?

Vinay: (00:01:49) It’s hard to believe that all these years have passed by, but as Maggie read my bio, I was born and raised in Michigan I’m of Indian descent. So, my parents immigrated from India in the 1960s and they landed in Michigan I always ask them, why did you go to Michigan of all places, it was cold weather and less snow, but like many Asians, my parents were attracted to the United States for the opportunity.

My dad was a mechanical engineer. He came to Michigan to take a job with a Ford Motor company. And that’s where he worked for his whole career. So, I was born in the mid-seventies, kind of very much a student of the car business because of my dad’s career. I fell in love with cars. I mean, that’s really what it came down to when I was a little kid.

That’s all I want to talk about was cars and car stuff I knew exactly what car was driving down the street and I became just a fan of the industry. That really kind of influenced me in where I wanted to go career-wise my parents are from Michigan originally and I’m very fortunate that I got a lot of great lessons from having immigrant parents. I think that really kind of set me off on the right foot.

Maggie: (00:03:01) That’s amazing. I saw in other articles, from previous podcasts that your father would take you to a lot of car shows before, and that’s where your kind of just fell in love with the auto industry and that it kind of ignited your passion for cars. I think that’s just so amazing that you were able to find that passion so early on. So that’s just incredible.

Vinay: (00:03:18) Maggie, it’s a great point. I think I was like four years old when I went to my first auto show. And back then the Detroit auto show was this big glamorous glitzy thing and they’re not like the auto shows you see today.

Where it’s cars on the carpet, but they were celebrities would come in, they would have big reveals and black tie and it served champagne. I was too young for that, but I thought I wanted to be a car designer. I thought I could draw cars and I could be the next person to drive or excuse me, to design cool new sports cars.

But I didn’t have any artistic ability. So, I was like, all right, I got to scratch that plan, but you know what? I was good at math. I was a good sort of problem solver and systemic thinker. And so, engineering seemed very natural and that was kind of my dad joined Ford because it was a career and he was very sort of math-oriented and stem-oriented.

My dad never loved cars that’s where he and I were very different. He did it because it was a career in it. And it aligned with his, I guess, call it skillset. But I went down that path from just pure passion and love for the product and probably took a few steps that were consistent with what he took, but ended up being very different paths. If you know what I mean.

Bryan: (00:04:37) I feel like nowadays passions, everything, right? Because there are so many hurdles, so many things you have to overcome and you’re truly passionate about it. You’ll be more innovative in the field, right? You have to think outside the box because you’re obsessed.

You think about it all the time. How can I make things better? And kind of curious too, and understanding that you do come from a south Asian background. Yeah. How has that played a role in becoming a marketing executive?

Vinay: (00:05:03) That’s a really good question, Bryan, I think big factors. The first of which again, I mentioned that my parents were immigrants and they came over from India, and my dad, when he came to this country, he didn’t have a penny in his pocket.

I mean, he spent all his money to just get to the country and obviously he started his career and I think what I saw from my dad was a work ethic that I think was foundational in the south Asian community and just in the Asian community, in general, he worked his ass off to build his life and to set the foundation for his family.

I think like as a child when you see that it kind of sets the bar pretty high. So, I think that was something that led me to have very strong aspirations. And I could see that if you put the work in, you’re going to get what you want in life. So, I think that’s probably the first thing. The second thing I think about, and you guys can probably relate to this, just from what I know about you, Asian families tend to put a high emphasis on education.

And especially for my parents, education was a way to build a better life. It’s the way to more prosperity. And I think that that was something like, there was never any college question. It was like, all right, you got to go to college and you’re probably going to go beyond that.

So, what do you want to do with your life and how do you go run after it and make it happen. I think that’s probably the third thing, which is my parents and that culture that we were raised in Michigan that the south Asian community was tight. First of all, there wasn’t a whole lot of them in the sixties.

And I think naturally when you’re an immigrant, you come together with other people that you recognize. I understand your traditions and they build a community. And I think that community, what I learned from them was being hungry. Be hungry to go make it happen, go work hard. No one else is going to do it for you.

And like looking back on it today. I think those tools, those skillsets, those ways of looking at problems saying, you know what? I may not know the answer today, but I’m going to work my ass off. Figured out, those are foundational tools. And I feel fortunate that those were instilled in me early in life.

And I think that in and of itself is a privilege that many of us Asians have in terms of our upbringing. And then the final thing I’ll say is this mentality of never being satisfied whether you’re South Asian or East Asian it’s a foundational concept in Japanese thinking this notion of Kaizen and continuous improvement.

I’ll never forget. When I was in junior high and I came home with a report card and I had one, a minus out of seven grades. I had one a minus, the rest were A’s and I showed it to my dad. And he was like, he doesn’t even smile. He looks at me. He goes, what happened at first? I’m like? Cause my neighbor, my buddy, that I went to school with his parents would pay him $40 for every, a $30 for every be $20 for every seat.

And I’m just like, how is that even fair? But what I realized, looking back. Was, he was setting the bar high for me and it’s like, don’t ever be satisfied. You can always do better and again, that’s, those are some of the things that played into how I look at things and my drive behind wanting to get into my dream industry, my dream job, as an exec in the car business.

Bryan: (00:08:11) I love that you bring up, the Kaizen model, continuous improvement. It doesn’t matter how you improve every day. As long as you improve a little bit, every news will compound, right? The proper mindset for any leader, any executive, any entrepreneurial out there is that you may not be the greatest today, but as long as you reflect upon it and know what direction you need to head towards and improve upon.

Everything will compound and add upright. And your story about your dad’s setting the bar high is highly relatable to most of us on this podcast, right? I don’t know why you start the memory of mine too. But I remember in second grade I got like a 94% off a test and I started crying, started crying my butt off right. Because it’s the expectations we have for ourselves. Like we have to push ourselves to the next level because it’s all mindset.

Vinay: (00:08:57)Yeah 100%. I think I think you’re right. And you see it a lot. You see it. For me, it was like when I went to college, I grew up in a town in Michigan that was majority Caucasian.

And then when I went to college and I got to the University of Michigan, all of a sudden like, boom, I’m on the scene with like all these other Asians. And I was like, I’ve never seen this many people before, whether they were Chinese American, Indian, American, Pakistani, American Vietnamese. I mean, I had friends from all over the world right. You start to see these commonalities and you’re like, wow, I really kind of get it. I do think there were some bad things that I saw that also led me to kind of want to be a leader. And business and the one bet that just came to mind while I was in college, I was fortunate to get to do internships.

And I did them at Ford Motor company. So, the first summer I worked in the climate control division, and what we were responsible for was designing air conditioning systems for new vehicles and what we would do as you would imagine, whenever you build something new, you want to go to. And so, you build a new SUV with a new air conditioning system where it would be the best place to test that SUV.

Take a guess right. And in Las Vegas, in the desert, you guys, you hit the nail on the head. So, we go to Phoenix and we let these cars sit in the sun until the interior temperature gets up to 140 degrees. Then all seven of us would pile into the vehicle and we all had these comfort meters. In our respective position in our SUV.

And over time as the air conditioning is, as you’re driving around in the air and just cooling down the interior, you dial in how comfortable you feel. So, 10 is I’m extremely uncomfortable. In terms of feeling too hot. One is the most comfortable. And so, we do this all day and we’d go and we’d interrogate the data and we would look at the charts and you see all these graphs over time and each line represented one person and where they were sitting.

And there was always one that tended to be a little bit higher than the others in terms of and ironically, that was me. And so, we’re trying to dissect and analyze the data. And this one guy chimes in. He goes, well, your people are always warm. You’re used to a warm climate. I’m like, what did you just say to me?

Do you mean like tall good-looking people? Is that what you’re talking about? And of course, I knew what he meant, but it pissed me off, pissed me off that he was calling me out based on my ethnicity. He knows nothing about me. You can’t say that just because your parents came from one part of the world, that’s warm that you’re going to automatically feel more comfortable when it’s warm.

That’s ridiculous, but it pissed me off. And what I learned from that and what it did for me as a leader is like, I never want to make someone feel like that when I work with them, I want them to feel respected. I want them to feel like I see you. I respect you. I want to hear what you have to say. And that experience set me in, I think the right frame of mind in terms of how I approach team dynamics and interpersonal dynamics and how we work together.

I think about the importance of being seen and recognized.

Maggie: (00:11:55) I’m so glad that you brought that up and that you stood up for yourself at that time. And I think there’s also this other misconception or stereotype that a lot of us as Asians, we don’t know how to stand up for ourselves and we don’t know how to talk back, right and we just tend to stay quiet. We don’t voice our opinions. And I think that’s when that stereotype kind of heightens and people will take advantage of that. But those are, there are those little subtle remarks that people, most people think are not harmful, but they add up and it’s always those subtle remarks that are the most harmful because people think that it’s okay to say something.

But it isolates someone so much and it makes you feel singled out. And I’m just so glad that you were able to stand up for yourself because during those times it’s like it’s most needed when we need to talk back and say like, that’s not okay. Like, I’m sure if anyone had that kind of remark or comment directed towards them, they would not appreciate that. And it’s always for us for ourselves. It’s, it’s, that’s the starting point for us. That’s the stepping stone for us to progress forward.

Vinay: (00:12:53) It’s such an important point, Maggie, and it’s something, it’s a point that I try to instill with my kids all the time. I have a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old and I don’t have all the answers, but I think as you get experienced, you become more confident and maybe I was a little.

Overconfident as a younger kid. I don’t know why, but I had a mouth on me and I wasn’t afraid to use it. Do you think back to that era? I mean, I’m much older than you both, but back when I was a kid, if I watch TV, if I watch advertising, I never saw anybody that looked like me in an Ad and didn’t happen.

And I think that underscored again, the importance of being seen. And I always said to myself, like if I ever go into that field, I want to change that it was super important for me. And I think fortunately with the work that you guys are doing, putting a spotlight. Creative people, entrepreneurs, we’re showing people, showing younger people that you can have the confidence, you have the confidence to go and do whatever you want to do.

And that is so important because you don’t always get those signals depending on your upbringing, depending on the stage of your life, that you’re in, you know, depending on your financial situation. The cool leveling fact is that hard work can clear up all of that and have confidence in myself and it’s okay to speak up for yourself.

People will respect you and you’ll feel more and more comfortable doing that the next time it ever happens and we all know what’s going to happen.

Maggie: (00:14:17) Absolutely and I think that’s like a perfect segue into the next question that I want to ask now that we’re on the topic of representation right. How have you seen the depictions of Asian-Americans in advertising change over the years and how have you personally contributed to the evolution as well?

Vinay: (00:14:33) Yeah. Thanks for that. I think you can hear, that I’m pretty passionate about representation and I think just to remind the club. Initially, as I said, when I was a kid, I didn’t see much of us anywhere right. I mean, whether it was advertising or whether it was entertainment, I think it was the exception, not the rule to see Asians and maybe you did see something, but it was always a stereotype and this used to piss me off too right. There you’d seen an Indian as a convenience store owner, or you see an east Asian as a laundromat owner, or maybe a restaurant owner, but you didn’t see them as bosses. You didn’t see them as bad-ass as, and I think times have changed now and you just look around you see something Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft with all the stuff that’s happening on Twitter.

You see Parag, he’s the CEO, young CEO of Twitter, my friend who lives here in Dallas, this guy, I meet Sanker and he’s a CEO of a company called the religion of sports. They did Tom versus time on Facebook. Watch Tom Brady. He’s a part-owner of the company. You know, we talked. Dave Liu, and, and what he’s doing with hyphen capital giving opportunity for Asian entrepreneurs.

I mean, it’s inspiring when you look around. So, my point of view and our collective point of view at Lexis is we see you, we see what you’re doing, and we want to change the narrative and we want to show what’s happening and to answer the second part of your question, Maggie, I think we want to show.

That we see you. We know you’re bad-ass. We know your empathetic leaders, your athletes, movie stars, fashion icons, and moguls, but you’re also Americans too. And I think. Where I’ve been able to assert some influence. First of all, I have a great team. I have a great team of partners. You’ve met some of them, you know, whether they’re our agency partners.

So, we work closely with the IW group. That’s our Asian ad agency. We work with a company called Walton Isaacson that does the same thing for black, Hispanic, LGBTQ, plus, all of that. And we have our general market or a transcultural affluent agency team one, and together we work on. Lifting, you know, rising the tide for everyone.

So, what we’ll do is we’ll celebrate cultural moments. This is important to me. So, Lexus, we celebrated the lunar new year. Earlier this year, we did a campaign for Holi, which is a big Indian festival a couple of months ago. We partnered with, I don’t know if you use Peloton, a DT Shaw, she’s a Peloton instructor.

Richard Murjani she’s the star of never have I ever, yeah, we worked with Tiffany Pham. Who’s the CEO of Mogul. We brought her into our flagship luxury car, the Lexus LS. We did a campaign with her talking about modern empathetic leaders. So that’s where we’ve been able to shine a spotlight on some of their people and the cool things that they’re doing.

But ultimately just showing everyone that look, we have a very diverse market that we serve, and we want to reflect that in who we are as a brand.

Bryan: (00:17:24) I don’t think words can describe how much I appreciate what you just said right? It takes people like yourself exactly. As like yourself to essentially trouble. Is this path, right?

Because you would think that by today will be what will have a better recommendation for the Asian community, right. And I feel like still nowadays is very skewed towards East Asians. Like still needs to be a lot of work for south Asians, Southeast Asians, and the full diaspora. It makes me happy to hear that let’s, this is pushing forward with representation and I can see where it started from, I hope I can give you a lot of credit here.

I can see, see that great and your vision and pushing your team in the right direction because it takes one person to voice what’s wrong right, and sometimes when you’re at a company that has been around for hundreds of years, a hundred years, the issue isn’t quite as obvious and you need people to call it out. That’s how you can continuously improve things and Kaizen that model.

Vinay: (00:18:19) Yeah, no, it’s a great point. I mean, look, I wish I could take all the credit for it, but I can’t. I mean, first and foremost, we’re an Asian company, right? I mean, Lexus was born in the United States. We’re a Japanese company, but the Lexus brand started here 33 years ago.

And I think that there’s an underdog mindset that permeates how we look at things. We have a very diverse group of people in the company, in the marketing organization. I would say, though, that what I bring to the table is this is top of mind because I lived it in brief. I grew up with it. I have friends who I’m seeing do fricking amazing things that I’m humbled by my wife.

I mean, my wife’s story. She’s, she’s one of my biggest examples of like a trailblazer. She’s a doctor. She worked in hospital medicine for 14 years and one of the things she saw time and time again. These people that would come in where if they had just focused on preventative care, they wouldn’t have been in the situation that they’re in.

So, she decided to become an entrepreneur. And I give her a lot of credit because doctors, doctors aren’t trained as entrepreneurs. She became a lifestyle medicine physician. She went and got board certified in lifestyle medicine, and obesity, medicine, and she started her practice from nothing. And now she advises companies on how to improve health.

She has gotten me healthy. She’s got an ROI family health issue helps people reverse diabetes. She’s a trailblazer. And she did it. Like she saw an opportunity. She followed her passion because she was passionate about it and she’s doing something about it. And I see so many people like that. I think it’s just so inspiring and we want to be an amplifier.

We want to tell that story. And I think Lexus, honestly, we’ve done well historically with Asians. You probably see it a lot. You know, your parents, your parents, friends, they’ve driven Lexuses. They see Lexus as the brand. But I think the opportunity for us is your generation and younger people who have other options that are available to them.

And we want to rekindle that relationship with affluent Asians in particular because we want them to see what Lexus has to offer. And, and it’s really sincere when I say we want them to know that we see them because that’s the building block, the foundation of building a relationship with a group of people.

Bryan: (00:20:36) Definitely and you don’t have to worry about us, my parents drive Lexuses. My sister drives Lexus. I personally love Lexus. So not to worry about our generation.

Maggie: (00:20:46) Yes, Bryan’s whole family drives Lexus. A lot of Asian people love Lexus and it’s durable. It’s, you know, they always say, yes, Lexus is the most durable car out there.

Vinay: (00:20:58) So that’s, that’s the double-edged sword because I agree with you. We have that reputation of being durable, reliable, and having high-quality value. Where we haven’t had a strong enough reputation is in the sexiness, in the performance. And that’s where I’m pushing hard. So, as an example, we run a motorsports program, Lexus races in AMSA, which is the international motorsports association.

It’s owned by NASCAR. So, it’s a part of NASCAR, but it’s. Sports car racing series, where we compete against Porsche Lamborghini, Ferrari Aston Martin. And we have two vehicles that my team sponsors and works closely with the race team. And that’s where it’s like when people realize we’re racing RCF, GT threes on the track, and you can go buy that vehicle in the showroom.

I’m like, we got to blow that story up and let everybody know the same thing with the electrification. You know, electricity is becoming important. We started electric before it was even a thing with a hybrid. That’s essentially on the same path, right? You add an electric motor to a gas motor, and then you get a lot more benefits that more, better efficiency, better performance.

And now we’re turning these hybrids and plug-in hybrids to be more performance-oriented. So, you look at the new NX that we just launched that has a plug-in hybrid version. Fun to drive. We’ve got an all-electric battery electric vehicle coming later this year. Then I want to tell those stories because a lot of people don’t realize that Lexus is in terms of the products that we sell in the segments that we’re in. So, it’s a cool opportunity to tell a fun story about the brand.

Maggie: (00:22:32) I love that you bring that up because as a storyteller and a marketer of any brand, your biggest goal is to try to connect and engage with your consumers and your audience right and I’ve also heard that you’ve like Lexus wasn’t on TikToK until you came on board. So that’s just like another way that you can expand on social media because all other brands are like on Instagram, on Facebook, but then TikTok is this whole new platform. I heard that you were the one who brought it up and said, like, why aren’t we on Tik TOK? And you’re able to kind of dive into this new generation and this new audience and grab their attention.

Vinay: (00:23:08) Well, it’s funny. I got to give credit where credit is due. And it was my wife that my wife started her own TikTok channel as a doctor. And I saw how doctors were using it. And I was blown away because of shadow banning, right?

So sometimes like there, my wife will come up with this great content and it won’t go anywhere it’s because they changed the algorithms all the time. And she noticed that. Was competing with Instagram reels and the algorithms were heavily favoring reels content. So that you have an option to kind of go up against TikTok.

When she was going through that, I walked into the office one day. I’m like, hey guys, show me what we’re doing on Tiktok. And it’s like, wow, we’re not in it yet. And I’m like, okay, this is, this is our time guys. We got to jump in and the team did a phenomenal job. The first TikTok campaign we did. It was super relevant. 

It’s about distracted driving and most people think they’re just looking down at their phone for a second, but the reality is you’re looking down for on an average 4.6 seconds. And so, what we did was we set up this car. Where the windows go dark for 4.6 seconds while you’re driving on a closed course.

So, all of a sudden you can’t see for 4.6 seconds, and the panic that ensues, like when you realize you can’t see I’m here, like what is going on? And that’s the reality, what people. Understand is 4.6 seconds. When you’re going 60, 70 miles per hour, you are like a missile heat-seeking missile. At that point, you can get into a lot of trouble.

And just coming up with a quick video that showed that story was super impactful in terms of getting the attention. Very young people, many of whom probably didn’t pay attention to Alexis until we had that compelling content that was out there. And then of course you just get better and better, and you, you find ways to find other partners and other platforms where we can experiment and try things.

And my big thing about my team is I’m going to celebrate failure as much as I celebrate success. Because if you show me that you’re going to try something new and take a risk. And if we fail, maybe we didn’t get the right engagement rate. Maybe we didn’t get the right number of followers. Maybe we didn’t get enough conversion.

That’s okay. It’s okay. In my book, because guess what? We learned something from that and that’s going to make us better the next few times. And our team is just fantastic about that. We had this; we call it a PDC. Plan do check and act and we follow that cycle and everything we do, it’s part of that Kaizen mentality.

And that makes us better every single time. That’s how we raise the bar in what we do. So, it’s a, it’s kind of fun to experiment and do fun, new things.

Maggie: (00:25:50) I have to look up that video about the windows shutting off because I can only imagine how effective that would be to have an ad like that. I think a lot of us that we think we can see in our peripheral vision, as long as we can see it, our peripheral vision everything’s okay.

But I think we overestimate our ability to understand what’s going on around us when we’re looking at our phones while driving. So, I mean yeah. Amazing ad strategy for that.

Vinay: (00:26:15) I mean, again, I give credit to our agency partners, our team, and coming up with that creative concept, you know, it’s a team sport, right?

I mean, marketing is a team sport and we’ve got the best agencies. We’ve got the best people on the team. I will send you the link to the TikTok video, but it was super interesting. And again, it was a learning opportunity for us. So, we had this going back to the earlier conversation about confidence, confidence comes with experience.

Confidence comes after, you’ve tried a few things and you say, okay, I think I’m, I’m getting this, but it also comes with the humility to say, okay, maybe I didn’t do this. But I’m learning from it and that breeds more confidence. And it’s great to see that amongst the team. And we’ve got one of my big passion points is mentorship and growing new leaders within the organization.

That’s where I see my biggest role as the head of marketing for any organization, whether it’s my current role, whether when I was ahead of marketing for Volkswagen. You want to grow your leaders. You want to give them the experience. That’s going to give the confidence. That’s going to help explain what the corporate values are that will ultimately drive the business.

And that’s where I want my legacy to be. It’s just helping young people, helping people who are growing up within the organization, get to where they need to be in terms of their goals, their aspirations.

Maggie: (00:27:30) Absolutely. And on that topic, we have one last question for you Vinay that is what advice would you give to the next generation of Asian marketers and advertisers?

Vinay: (00:27:42) Oh, that’s such a great question. And I think it’s very, just a very simple concept. Follow your passion. Know that if you work hard, anything is possible. If you put your mind. I’m living proof of that. You know, I’ve given you examples of entrepreneurs who I know who’ve done that same thing. I think too often, we get in our way.

The only thing that’s stopping you from achieving your goal and your passion is yourself. And I think we, as, people, especially Asians got to recognize. First of all, look around, there are plenty of examples of people. Who’ve just done amazing things and broken through those barriers? But if you see an opportunity, go grab it.

You’ll be amazed at what you’re capable of doing when you put your mind to it. And when you put your hard work behind it and you chase your passion.

Bryan: (00:28:35)    I couldn’t agree with that statement more like your living proof.  A lot of times we tell ourselves voices that we can’t do this. You can’t do that. You let others’ opinions, including our parents stop us from what we want to do. But I think true passion always shines through, right. And you want to live life in a way where you won’t regret your decisions and you know that you fulfill your full potential. Thank you so much for that answer.

Vinay: (00:28:59) It’s my pleasure and again, major props to you, Bryan, and Maggie for what you’re doing with the Asian Hustle Network and, and the spotlight that you’re shining for the stories that you’re telling. You’re giving people a platform and a voice, and we salute you for what you’re doing and again, on behalf of everyone at Lexus, thank you for letting us be part of it. And, thanks for letting me be part of the podcast.

Maggie: (00:29:25) Oh, Vinay. It was our pleasure. So where can our listeners find out more about you and Lexus online?

Vinay: (00:29:30) Well, you can follow us on Instagram, and Twitter. You can go to lexus.com. We can make sure that we give you a graphic with all of our handles on a link.

So that’s possible. I love talking about what we’re doing at Lexus. So, at vinaygoblue is my Instagram handle, but at Lexus is another, another great avenue for people to learn what we’re, what we’re doing, and again, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Maggie: (00:29:54) Great. Thank you so much, Vinay. We’ll leave all of that in the show notes of this episode, it was amazing hearing your story. Thank you so much for being on our podcast.

Vinay: (00:30:01) Pleasure’s mine.

Outro: (00:30:05) Thanks to Vinay for sharing his inspirational story with us during Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage month. And thank you for tuning into our final episode of the creative visionary series presented by Lexus.