We don't have it figured out. That's the point.
The Growth Trip is Hector Delgado and Gustavo “Gus” Velez — best friends for fifteen-plus years, commercial real estate professionals at Panther Capital Group in Orlando, and two people building careers, businesses, and lives in real time. The show is where they do it in public: honest, curious conversations about the questions that shape how ambitious people work, think, build, and live.
Who's talking
Hector is a commercial real estate professional, builder, and someone who usually wants to know two things: how something works, and what he can do with it.
Originally from Queens, New York, with Colombian family roots, he studied biomedical sciences before earning his MBA at the University of Central Florida. Today, he serves as Managing Partner at Panther Capital Group in Orlando, where his work spans commercial real estate, business operations, and the systems that help a company grow.
His interests reach well beyond the business. Technology, money, psychology, culture, travel, and personal development all feed his curiosity about how people make decisions — and what gets them to act. That question is personal: from building a business to completing an Ironman, Hector keeps putting himself in situations where preparation matters, uncertainty remains, and progress depends on showing up anyway.
The Growth Trip is another part of that process — a place to explore ideas with his longtime friend Gustavo, challenge his own thinking, and talk openly about the ambition, fear, mistakes, and work that come with building something. He brings an analytical mind, a creative streak, and a willingness to admit when experience changes his perspective. He wants to understand things better, and put what he learns to work.
Gustavo is a commercial real estate professional, lifelong question-asker, and the kind of person who rarely leaves an interesting idea alone.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, he studied political science at Florida State University before earning a master’s in business management from the University of Central Florida. Today, he works in commercial real estate, advising clients and building toward becoming an investor himself.
His curiosity has never stayed inside one industry. Business, investing, philosophy, psychology, history, health, culture, travel, faith, technology, and the question of what actually makes a good life all tend to find their way into his conversations. That curiosity became part of the reason for starting The Growth Trip.
Gustavo doesn’t believe you need to have everything figured out before you can have a worthwhile conversation about it. He’d rather ask the uncomfortable second question, test his own assumptions, and be willing to change his mind when a better answer appears. For him, The Growth Trip is a place to document that process in public — the wins, mistakes, changing perspectives, and everything still being figured out. He’s not teaching from the finish line. He’s on the trip too.
“We prove in public that consistency compounds.”
Nobody has everything figured out. Neither do we. But asking better questions, taking action, learning from mistakes, and showing up consistently can compound into extraordinary change over time. So we explore the ideas, decisions, experiences, and forces that shape how ambitious people build their careers, wealth, health, relationships, character, and lives — and we document our own growth while we do it, questions, experiments, mistakes, disagreements, and lessons included.
Core values
Written as verbs on purpose. These are things we do in every conversation, not a poster on the wall.
Ask the second question
The first question gets the obvious answer. The second gets underneath it. We challenge assumptions, follow contradictions, and stay curious long enough to find something we didn't expect.
Say “I don't know” out loud
We don't need to be the smartest people in the room. We admit what we haven't figured out, separate experience from expertise, and change our minds when the evidence changes.
Argue with the idea, never the person
Disagreement makes a conversation better when it's genuine. We push each other, represent the other side fairly, and never confuse disagreement with disrespect.
Leave people something they can use Monday
Interesting isn't enough. Every conversation should hand you something — a question worth asking, an idea worth remembering, or an action worth taking.
Show the work, not just the win
The bad investments, the lost deals, the changed opinions, the awkward beginnings. We're not going to make success look inevitable after the fact.
Show up on the bad weeks
Anybody can create when they're inspired. We do the unglamorous work, improve through repetition, and trust that small actions compound.
To become the most trusted conversation-driven media brand for ambitious professionals who never want to stop learning, building, and growing. Trust builds slower than virality — and it lasts a lot longer.
We don't have it figured out. That's the point. We're building careers, businesses, wealth, health, relationships, and lives in real time. We'll ask questions we don't know the answers to. We'll disagree. We'll make mistakes. We'll change our minds. We'll try things that don't work. And we'll keep showing up. Because we believe action beats waiting, curiosity beats certainty, and consistency compounds.
We're not teaching from the finish line. We're documenting the trip.