I started Leo D’Cruz & Co. for two reasons. I wanted to create a firm where clients, colleagues, friends and family all felt held when the pressures of the world seemed unpredictable. And I wanted to build something warm and sophisticated in a world that courts chaos at every turn. So I reached to my childhood for inspiration. Let me share two warm memories to show you what I mean.

There’s an old faded photo of me around two years old. I’m at my grandfather’s farm, mounted up on the muscular back of a caramel-colored hunter, and backgrounded by lush green, a rural red barn, and a wide wheated pasture. I don’t remember that morning, but I know what it opens up: racing my mother through the woods, branches reaching for our faces, our laughter echoing on the wind, the sound of hooves pressing into the earth beneath us, driving us forward at a pace that would leave most people trembling. It was here that my family taught me a fundamental lesson: not only how to stay cool under pressure, but how to lean into the joy of life even as you feel it rushing past you.

And during warm summers in the Finger Lakes region, friends and I would wake early, collect our tackle boxes, wade into the cool waters flowing through the ancient, and to our child minds still magical, valleys of the Allegheny Plateau, and we’d slowly lift river stones to trap live bait before casting our lines for the pike holding somewhere below.

We’d set our rods and wait in the quiet for the slightest twitch on the end of our poles. In the stillness of these moments, I learned the skillful craft of patience and what it feels like to let the right moment come to you.

Leo D’Cruz & Co. is about lightly holding a sliver of peace so ideas can form, emotion can rise, and people can dream. It’s not about hope, and it’s not about wishing for something we don’t have. It’s about believing in who we are and courageously building together. It’s about taking the lessons I learned as a boy and artfully pouring a bit of that magic into the people who make life better for us all.

Leo D’Cruz