What the days (and nights) are like for an international lobbyist and nightlife entrepreneur.
During major social events in Washington, DC, there’s a good chance Vinoda Basnayake L’08 is there making sure people have a good time.
Basnayake is the owner of Versus, an entertainment company that owns five bars and lounges around the nation’s capital and hosts pop-up parties at exclusive venues including embassies and Formula One races.
In April during the White House Correspondents Dinner weekend, his company ran the bars at embassy and media parties, making sure legislators, television hosts, and diplomats had plenty to drink.
His nightclub, Heist, where staff sometimes place stickers over patrons’ camera phones to encourage privacy, has also hosted politicians and celebrities, including Drake, LeBron James, and Dave Chappelle. Michelle Obama hosted a birthday party there in 2018. In January, Snoop Dogg dropped in after a performance. “I partied with him that night,” Basnayake says. “There was bottle service, and the DJ started playing Snoop’s hits when he came to the club.”
Basnayake doesn’t simply own some of DC’s most exclusive nightlife establishments. As the first chairman of DC’s Commission on Nightlife and Culture, a position he has held since 2020 and to which he was just reappointed in June, he also helps them work more efficiently with city officials.
During the pandemic he helped secure funding for nightclubs and bars that had to temporarily shut their doors. When it was time to reopen, he helped pass legislation for how to do so safely. “The nightclubs wanted it,” he says. “If you’re a responsible operator, and you’re doing things properly, you’re incentivized to want regulation.”
Basnayake’s most recent win was helping to change dram shop laws, which held businesses responsible for damage caused by people who got drunk on the premises, and thus made for “absurd amounts in nightlife insurance premiums,” Basnayake says. “We were able to get that law changed, and everyone’s insurance premium came down to a reasonable level.”
While his nights are often filled with parties, by day Basnayake is an international lawyer, lobbyist, and consultant whose clients include Qatar, Senegal, and Jamaica. “I’m very, very busy,” he laughs. “But it’s all fun.”
He also promises that his story, with its various components, makes sense—once you hear it.
Basnayake fell into the nightlife industry by accident. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he knew about a lot of the city’s bars while attending college at Georgetown, developing a reputation for taking so many people out that nightlife and concert venues asked him to be an official promoter. “They would call me and say, ‘Hey, you know, we’d love it if you came in with your friends, and we’ll give you a free table or free drinks,’” he says. “That turned into, ‘We’ll give you 20 percent of the table, 20 percent of the day.’ It was very organic.”
After graduating from Georgetown with a degree in finance and international business, he turned his attention to planning tours for musicians. “My crowd was international, so I thought I could bring in people who were blowing up in Europe or blowing up in Asia and didn’t have a US following yet,” he says. He sold out a tour with British singer Jay Sean and threw pop-up parties, including some at government buildings.
He realized having more sophisticated legal and financial skills could come in handy, so he applied to a joint program between Penn Law and Wharton. “I was never going to go to a law firm and practice law,” he says, admitting he was brutally honest about this on his admission application. “I appreciate that Penn let me in. Maybe someone said, ‘Thank God, this is the least boring admissions essay I’ve ever read.’”
He studied international public policy and secured an internship one summer working at the International Trade Commission. His worlds collided when his nightlife company, then called the Night Life Agency, threw a summer soiree at the building where he worked. That evening he was approached by Barbara Boggs Sigmund, a Democratic politician who was married to Tom Boggs, a lobbyist in DC. She told Basnayake that she was impressed with his people skills and that he should meet her husband.
Boggs hired Basnayake on the spot. “I had never thought about a career in lobbying, but the way that Tom presented it to me was like, ‘Look, all these people who are ambassadors, kids of heads of state, heads of state themselves, they seem to trust you with discretion. They’re going out with you, so if they trust you in one sector, they will probably trust you in another sector,’” he says.
“That was such a valuable lesson for me because I realized what differentiated me,” Basnayake says. “I had genuine relationships with my clients, and they knew that they could count on me, and they knew they could trust me with anything.”
After that he developed two professions simultaneously: nightlife entrepreneur and international lobbyist.
For the former he launched a new company named Versus to operate permanent venues. In 2010 he opened his first: Eden, a four-story nightclub with LED lights, a tiki bar, and a rooftop. It was only a few weeks old when the Backstreet Boys rented out the roof after one of their concerts. At the time a big news story in DC was about two people who’d crashed a White House state dinner during the Obama administration. “The same people tried to get into the Backstreet Boys party, and security was like, “We’re really sorry, you can’t get in. You’re not on the list,’” Basnayake says. “The next day above the fold in the Washington Post was a story that DC’s hottest new nightclub has tighter security than the White House.” Lines started forming nightly.
In the daytime hours he worked for Boggs, then for the law firm Nelson Mullins, and eventually for himself. During the pandemic he started a lobbying company called VS Global. His rolodex includes former presidents, celebrities, musicians, and politicians.
He is or has been a registered foreign agent for multiple governments including Qatar, Korea, Sri Lanka (both of Basnayake’s parents are Sri Lankan), India, Sudan, Senegal, and Jamaica. One of his more fun projects was helping Will and Jada Pinkett Smith produce a movie in Jamaica called Sprinter, a feat that earned him an official Hollywood title. “I’m the executive producer of that movie along with my coproducers Will and Jada Smith,” he says, laughing. “It’s pretty amazing.” He has also helped Qatar sponsor events at the Kennedy Center, including an autism awareness gala.
Meanwhile, as part of his role with the DC government, Basnayake recently traveled around the country to study how other cities work with their nightlife industries. “We should make sure that they don’t operate on the fringes and aren’t something that everybody knows is happening but no one is directly communicating with,” he says. “The way cities should approach nightlife is that this is a very active, valuable part of the community, not a bad word.”
—Alyson Krueger C’07
