Steve Distante is an entrepreneur, business strategist, author, documentary film maker and farmer.
Stephen Distante is the Chairman and Founder of Vanderbilt Financial Group, a disruptor in finance focused on socially and environmentally responsible, ethical, and impactful investments. A leader of leaders, Steve shares his unique message of entrepreneurship with purpose as an author, an engaging keynote speaker, a filmmaker, an ambassador to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and through the online educational platform he pioneered, Impact U.
Under his leadership, Vanderbilt’s culture has garnered awards such as the Future50 Award, Corporate Culture Award from SmartCEO and was recently heralded as a Best Place to Work on Long Island for five consecutive years, as well as being recognized as one of the finest run companies by the M.A.P. organization. Headquartered in a LEED-certified Platinum building, Vanderbilt is known as “an always evolving wealth management firm” for their continued commitment to innovation and impact investing. Steve has been a pioneer in the impact investing space – embracing it early on as an opportunity to affect real change in the world by providing capital to impactful companies without concessionary returns to clients.
He and his wife own a 360-acre farm in Georgia, Cally Farms, where they grow Paulownia trees and host entrepreneurial retreats www.CallyFarms.Eco. Steve’s book, Pitchology: The Art & Science of Raising Capital for Entrepreneur pitchology.ai was written to help entrepreneurs not get taken advantage of and to better understand a variety of financial opportunities within our businesses.
Steve also helps to prop up the entrepreneurial community. As a former President of the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) of New York City, Steve founded the new EO Long Island chapter in 2018. EO is the world’s most influential group of founding entrepreneurs, with over 16,500 diverse leaders in 60+ countries. Named as the United Nations Global Ambassador of EO, Steve represents entrepreneurs working across the globe on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a collection of 17 global goals set to transform the world by the year 2030.
His Strengths are Futuristic, Activator, Arranger, Connectedness and Input.