Hi, I'm Scott Shea, and I am the co-founder of Signature Bank, which we grew from $42.5 billion to $83 billion.

And I'm also the author of In Good Faith, questioning religion and atheism.

And I am one of the passionate few.

First of all, thank you, Omar.

I hope people get out of this that you should be a whole person, you know, faith and business.

Or whatever, it doesn't necessarily need to be faith, but morality in business, but you need to be a whole person.

I hope people get that out of this. Hey, guys, welcome to this episode of The Passionate Few Podcast. Today we have a very special episode as we're sitting down with somebody all the way in the East Coast, not other than Scott Shea. He's the co-founder and president of New York Signature Bank, but he's also the author of In Good Faith. and today's going to share his incredible story,

but how he became an entrepreneur of New York Signature Bank, but he's also the author of In Good Faith. And today's going to share

his incredible story, but how he became an entrepreneur and the life lessons he's learned. And you guys are going to get a ton of wisdom from it. So no further ado. Thank you so much for being on the show. Scott. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Homer. Yes. It's an honor to have you on the show here. So can you give the audience a little bit of context as to the scale of New York Signature Bank? Because before we get into your story, I really want the audience to get a grasp of just how big you guys have built this beautiful New York Signature Bank.

Well, it's a fascinating story.

And one day it'll be probably a case study.

We started, I had this crazy idea in the 90s that New York was over branched, but under bank.

There weren't enough high-quality banks in New York, focusing on the middle market.

And there were the big banks, which at the time were just merging and consolidating in a ridiculous kind of way.

They were good at servicing the huge mega companies, the Verizon's, the IBMs, the Pepsico's,

but they, and they were good at mass market retail because they had to

scale. But the vast bulk of people in the middle weren't being well served. So I had this

idea and I was joined, I persuaded two people to join me who became my co-founders, Joe DePaolo

and John Tamperlain. And we started the bank from scratch with

$42.5 million in capital. We had 50 million in assets 20 years ago. Today, without any

acquisitions, we've never made a single acquisition just by growing the company. Everybody who's

come into the bank has wanted to be here. Well, let me just tell you, we turned, we broke even

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