A View from the Top with Zia Yusuf, chief executive of concierge service Velocity

Even if you’re as rich as Croesus, you still need a digital Jeeves – that’s why Zia Yusuf launched luxe concierge service Velocity. Andy Martin reports

Zia and his Velocity co-founder Alex Macdonald

I was wearing my Kenzo patchwork jacket, my Billabong denim shirt, and a sort of Gareth Southgate waistcoat. And I had slapped on David Beckham Homme quite liberally. I was taking notes with my Montblanc pen, trying to blend in with supermodels, Premiership footballers and hedge fund manager types at a snazzy restaurant in the upmarket Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan. Because I was having a power breakfast with Zia Yusuf, co-founder and CEO of Velocity. And if you’re worrying about how much it costs to join, then it’s probably not for you.

“And your membership name is?” said the exceptionally charming hostess at the door. For a brief while, I was living the dream. Even the smashed avocado on toast seemed like the best smashed avocado I’d ever tasted. Likewise the coffee. And the cutlery and the napkins were outstanding too.

“My mum told me not to buy nice things,” Yusuf says, “because you always lose them.” Velocity doesn’t do things, it does experiences. In an exclusive way. For “premium consumers”.

“We treat members as human beings,” said Yusuf, “not very rich people.”

Yusuf’s key insight is that even if you’re as rich as Croesus, you still need a digital Jeeves – an all-purpose concierge service – to fix things for you, discreetly, effortlessly, infallibly. I didn’t even try to download the Velocity app. It can probably spot if you’re not a billionaire.

Zia Yusuf, 32, did not come from money. Born in a village outside Aberdeen, he is the son of Sri Lankan parents. His father is a paediatrician for the NHS and his mother is a nurse.

At the age of 13 he had a moment that he still recalls fondly, when his father came into his room and said, “Do you want to go to Disney World?” He had always wanted to go to Disney in Paris, but his father said, “We’re not going there, we’re going to the original in Florida!”

They had scrimped and saved and maxed out the credit card and it was still 10 months in the future – and the young Yusuf was so excited he could hardly sleep for the last month. “But it was something to look forward too. That’s what we try to provide at Velocity. It’s about making you feel like a kid again.”

He went to Hampton School, then studied international relations at the LSE. In his final year he signed up for Merrill Lynch, for the sake of “peace of mind”. But this was in 2008. After Lehman Brothers went to the wall he got in touch with the guy who had given him the job, just to make sure everything was still in place. He got an automated message back: “This person is no longer with the company…”

Nothing is plain sailing. Everything always goes wrong. Unless, that is, you’re a Velocity member. There’s a story by Kafka of a bloke who goes up to an open door but the doorman keeps him waiting outside for years until he is finally dying and then he slams it shut. Tough.

Velocity is like that, but the exact opposite. There’s a guy holding the door open and ushering you through it very respectfully wherever you go.

If you’re a member, you’re walking on a red carpet the whole world over. You get the top table at the Ivy or a seat at the Wimbledon final. If you want to go surfing, they’ll arrange the perfect wave, with palm trees and sultry breezes, just for you. If you’re looking for the Holy Grail, it’s here, somewhere on the app. You want the moon? Have it. Have two. You have a dream? Dream no longer.

“We’re a tech company,” says Yusuf, pushing a perfect mini-croissant in my direction. “But tech is a means not an end in itself.” The average “basket size” is $2,500. The biggest is $500k – for a single transaction. Client data is sacrosanct. No harvesting or marketing. Trust is paramount.

F Scott Fitzgerald reckoned that “the very rich are different from you and me”. Ernest Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” Yusuf is more of the Hemingway school of thought.

It was while at Goldman Sachs that he realised two things. One is that the super-rich have exactly the same anxieties and desires as everyone else. And the other is that they are not “leading crazy lives of hedonistic pleasure”. “They’re obsessed with what they do. They have more capital, but they suffer from time poverty.” Velocity gives them time back again by doing everything for them at the click of a button.

Check the app. You want to go and swim with blue whales? It’s done. You want to… and here, glancing through the app, I come across something so sublime that I am not even allowed to say what it is. “As easy as ordering an Uber.” There is no hassle. Hassle has been abolished in the great and glorious realm of Velocity. It is, I have to concede, a wonderful world.

Velocity was born in 2014 and launched in public after two years of development. “We (Yusuf and co-founder Alex Macdonald) agreed with Elon Musk – it can’t be slightly better, it’s got to be amazing.” They can do something as simple and sentimental as picking up your grandma at the airport too. And there is a romantic side. They have now arranged 14 full marriage proposals, always in the perfect setting, with (so far) 100 per cent success rate. I imagine they can do divorces too, in a beautiful way.

Yusuf himself used his own app recently. He had almost forgotten his mother’s birthday. Velocity stepped in and saved the day: a Sri Lankan-style dinner at Hoppers in London. “My Mum is hard to please,” says Yusuf, but she was delighted. “It was a lot better than an e-card.” He’s going to take her on safari the next time.

It’s hard not to agree with Yusuf that “the paradox is that we have the ability to go and do more than any generation in history. But our tendency is to order in a pizza and binge on Netflix.” He wants to get busy people out into the real world again – effortlessly. And he stresses a surprisingly ethical dimension to the whole business. It’s not just about arranging meaningful and magical moments, or even matrimony. These experiences can actually make a difference to the wider world because the people having them also have a lot of power.

Yusuf cites the case of a CEO who went on a “giraffe collaring” adventure with a team of conservationists. “He came out of it a changed man. His company went green overnight and he killed all single-use plastic cups. And our platform made it happen. Nothing beats an experience for changing your view of the world.” Which is why the velocity.black website has a special section called “impact”.

“It all sounds great,” said a hard-working single mother who was giving me a lift later in the day, as I was coming down from Cloud 9. There was just a hint of bitterness in her voice. “I would like to go swimming with whales and tagging giraffes. Can I join?”

“Of course you can,” I replied, soothingly. “You just have to win the lottery first.”