- When you start thinking about Alexa
and all these other things,
one of the things that my career
has been completely predicated on,
is the fact that I am willing to take chances on things
that aren't mainstream yet,
because I understand that if I go after Social Code
and if I go after Vine and if I go after MicMac
and if I go after Yacc and if I go after all these things,
that I only need one of those seven to actually hit,
Snapchat, Instagram to win that bet.
We have enormous fear in this room to,
I have to wait
or let's wait 'til it's big or what if I waste my time...
awkward right?
Yeah super awkward,
you could leave if you want,
but you could chill too,
got it.
Will I waste my time on these platforms, right?
Will I waste my time on these platforms,
if it doesn't become big,
and so one of the other themes that I really wanted
to leave here with tonight,
knowing the demo of this room,
is we have to have a lot more risk tolerance
on new platforms.
If you're not playing back to details,
and I know you're taking notes,
if you're not playing with Marco Polo
and After School and House Party,
then you're not there potentially at the platforms
that could become the next things at the top our tongue.
How many people here,
let's be really honest,
let's be really, really, really honest
with ourselves inbound.
Please raise your hand if this is true.
How many people in this room,
and I want everybody to look around,
said two and half years ago,
three years ago, maybe even a year ago,
that they would never be on Snapchat,
that that was stupid, and now have a Snapchat account?
Raise your hands.
Raise it high, higher.
This, this is where all the action is.
This is where all the action is.
This is the opportunity in this room
but we continue to downplay.
We continue to downplay the upside 'cause we fear the risk
of being on there and wasting time.
If you have not achieved
what you want to professionally or in life,
time is the number one thing you've got.
You need to deploy as much of that as humanly possible.
That is the asset.
When you have not achieved the things
that you want to happen in life
and it is because of time that you haven't wanted
to put in to these platforms or worlds.
That is a massive mistake, it's the one asset you have.
Not everybody in this room has money...
(clapping)
- It's true, you agree, right?
- [Audience Member] I agree.
So are you going to work your fucking face off?
- [Audience Member] Yes.
- Thank you.
It's the one thing we have,
it's the one thing we have
because everybody wants to come up with excuses.
I spend my life
reading excuses on social media and my inbox.
"I'm this, I wasn't born that way,
I wasn't born here, this, I'm a female,
I'm an immigrant, I'm a minority, I'm transgender."
Excuses.
Reality, by the way, I truly believe
those are disadvantages.
I'm not naive to the short-comings of this country.
The problem is, nobody cares, the market doesn't care.
So we sit and we dwell.
What do you think we've been doing for the last month
and what we're gonna do tomorrow morning?
We're gonna dwell and complain,
and that's utter defense.
Instead of going on the offense,
and so we spend unbelievable amounts of time
dwelling and wasting our time on dumb shit,
like people literally email me and say
"You're so lucky and I wish this was happening to me."
And then the third tweet,
or the third Instagram post is
"Awesome Saturday, stayed home and watched
an entire season of fucking Game of Thrones."
(audience laughing)
We need to start understanding how big
this opportunity is because for everybody in this room,
you will sit back in 20, 30 years and regret
if you didn't execute in this era.
And, by the way, I don't want to hear that
this is for 20 and 30 year olds.
40, 50, 60, 70, it's an equal playing field
if you're willing to be a practitioner
and understand the ecosystem
that I've been speaking about tonight.
There's never been a better time.
Look, it's very honest.
These kind of characters, there was no respect,
for 20 year olds in the business world
20 years ago when I came out.
But now, because of technology,
there's a lot of organizations that absolutely respect
20 and 30 year olds.
Also, what is happening is I'm spending so much time
with 40 to 60 year old executives
who are dwelling and are upset
and tell me dumb shit like
"Gary, I didn't grow up with this shit."
Neither did I, Alice.
(audience laughing)
I was 20 before I even was on a computer.
I didn't grow up with this shit, I figured it out.
And so I sit there and see
completely capable operators that have made it happen
for the last 20, 30 years being crippled by
"I don't understand how Snapchat works,
"it's so confusing."
We're just filled with excuses, we are.
People are just losing their hunger.
And then, by the way, let me get really mad for two seconds,
with my fancy rich friends.
The thing that I'm completely blown away by,
that I had no idea was going on,
in capitalism and meritocracy,
is once you get rich, you actually try to spend your dollars
to create laws that allow you not to work
and still hold onto your money.
(audience claps)
100%, right?
I mean I'm blown away by this.
You were benefit...
You were benefited because in your 20s to 60,
for 40 years you grinded and out-executed somebody
and you were able to make lots of money,
but now that you're tired and you're finished,
and you're older and don't want to put in the work,
you don't want the next young buck
to come along and eat your lunch.
That's not how capitalism works.
(audience claps)
It's true, it's just not.
So we have all these trends, and we have the great fortune
of living in an era where things have been really good
for a very long time.
And so, I walk around the world and I told my wife Lizzy,
I'm like "Lizzy, listen to me, I don't care,
"clearly because I was such a shit student,
"what the kids do at school, but please,
"they can't be in programs where we give away
"seventh place trophies."
(audience claps)
I have no idea who wins the election tonight,
but we need to fucking ban
seventh place trophies in America.
(audience cheering)
And so we have all these macro situations going on,
and not to mention, for a lot of people here under 30,
you haven't been in the game during an economic downturn
'cause things have been very cushy for the last seven years
where if you're 23 years old and you have an idea,
your company's miraculously worth 4 million dollars.
And so we're living in a very intriguing time,
and I think that the passion and the angst,
and the energy that I bring tonight
are predicated on a couple tried-and-true things.
Number one,
if you're not making long-term decisions,
you will be vulnerable.
The market's changing very quickly,
and anybody who's looking for short-term stuff,
gets short-term stuff and then gets hurt in the long-term.
Things like Airbnb.
Guys, Airbnb shouldn't have been invented by Brian and Joe,
Airbnb should've been invented by Marriott,
but Marriott is looking short-term
and isn't creating business models
to put themselves out of business.
Uber should've not been created by Garrett,
they should've not been created by Garrett and Travis,
they should've been created by the guy or girl
that owned the most medallions in New York City,
or by Greyhound.
If you sit here tonight and you're doing well,
you're in danger.
Because there's somebody young and hungry
that has the Internet, which is a platform
that creates a zero cost to get into the game,
that's coming after your shit.
So if you don't do what I do, which is wake up
every single morning, every single morning,
and try to put yourself out of business,
somebody else is gonna do it for you.
It is much more fun, my friends, to put yourself
out of business than have somebody else do it for you.
And so please, if you're cushy, who's cushy?
Raise your hand if shit's going real well.
(audience laughing)
Jesus Christ.
Three people raised their hand.
I think you need to shut down this fucking--
You're doing good?
Awesome, man.
What was that?
I was like "You're doing good?"
You were like "Eh, we're doing okay."
(mumbles)
Alright, yeah, always.
So...
You've gotta understand that the only thing
that's interesting to me, and the only thing I have,
I always say that basically my career is predicated
much more similar to Mariano Rivera,
than anything else I can think of.
If you're a baseball fan, he was a very good closer
for the New York Yankees, where basically
his entire career was predicated on one pitch.
He had one pitch, for 17 years, and nobody could hit it.
And that's basically my business career.
I've got one pitch, which is the following.
I know what you're gonna do
before you know you're gonna do it.
It's the thing that I was gifted with,
just like if you can sing, just like if you can shoot,
I've always had the intuition.
I was made fun of and aggressively made fun of
for launching a website in 1996,
because just like people sit here
and think that Vine or Snapchat is a fad,
there's people in this room that remember
where the whole Internet was a fad.
But I bet on it and I built a big business.
And then I was made fun of
because this thing called YouTube came out,
and I took a chance on that 'cause I thought
it was gonna be big and started a wine show
and sat in front of a camera
and drank four bottles of wine for 20 minutes.
And hundreds of thousands of people watched it.
And then that worked.
And then Twitter worked.
And then I invested in Twitter and Facebook
and things of that nature.
But I had so many losses along the way.
One thing that's never talked about with my genius career,
was that I was on YouTube super early,
but I left six months in and started producing
Wine Library TV exclusively on Viddler.
I was wrong.
(audience laughs)
One thing that's not talked about,
is that I thought that the biggest startup
in the world in 2010, was gonna be Yobongo.
I was wrong.
(audience laughs)
And I continue to be interested in being wrong
for the rest of my life
because I am a pure-bred entrepreneur
because I'm not scared of trying things
and wasting my valuable time because I want things
and most of all,
and this is the most of all of the whole thing,
I just genuinely just don't give a fuck
about what you think about me.
(audience claps)
Balanced with I really care
about what everybody says about me.
(audience laughs)
And in that friction, and I mean that,
you have to deploy real ego and real humility
around this course because we live in that world,
but if I can inspire anything in the time
that I was here today, it's very simply this.
Please do me one favor, I'm gonna wrap it up with this,
and this matters so much to me,
please, whatever it takes, call your grandmother,
go to your great-grandfather's burial spot,
go back to the old country, go to a shelter,
do something,
do something that recalibrates
your perspective on what is actually going on here.
We have never had it better.
My friends, I'm gonna leave you
with a very interesting data point.
You guys like data?
Who likes data?
Great.
Let me give you some fucking data.
More people in America will die
from a coconut falling out of a tree
and hitting you on the head and killing you, than terrorism.
(audience cheers)
Yeah.
I see you tentative, like "Is he fucking serious?"
I'm dead fucking serious.
Kids seven to 11 watch more Twitch Esports,
than all the four major sports combined.
That's data.
We are living through a totally different time.
10 years ago, the weirdest thing in the world
was your friend dated people online.
Now every single person swipes to the left and right 24/7.
And so the trends and our society have changed.
And either, you're gonna sit here,
and binary, this is a black and white conversation.
Either, you're gonna leave here and understand
how fucking awesome it is, and you're gonna take
full advantage of it and be a winner.
Or, you're gonna sit and dwell on all the negatives of it
and be a losing player.
It's just the truth.
It's not complicated, it's not fun for me to say,
I don't want you to lose, I desperately want you to win,
but this is on you.
Nobody else is in control.
There are people who deal with things
like the loss of their children, or real diseases.
We're sitting and dwelling
about not getting enough likes on fucking Instagram.
We're sitting and dwelling about forces
that don't really have impact on us.
It is time that this collective room
and our space understands this is the greatest golden era
of not only business, but life and you really,
and I mean really, need to fucking grab it.
Thank you.
(audience clapping)