Gene Farrell is the President and CEO of Vanilla, the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors. Since joining Vanilla in 2021, Farrell has led the company from an early-stage startup to the defining platform in modern estate planning — closing $85 million in total funding, securing the first U.S. patent ever granted for estate planning technology, and building a client roster that includes Vanguard, Mariner, Carson Group, Cetera, and Osaic. In the past 12-18 months, Farrell made the strategic bet that would define Vanilla's next chapter: building VAI, the first AI purpose-built specifically for estate planning. Rather than adapting generic AI to a specialized problem, he directed Vanilla to build from the ground up — training on 35,000-plus estates and embedding 190+ combined years of trust and estate expertise into the platform's reasoning