- And uh, a buddy I went to college with.
- Let's give him a shout-out, though.
Seth, I'm proud of you, here, getting set up
for the big event this morning at Wine Library,
who hooked us up with this audio?
- My man Skylar.
Skylar Adler.
- Skylar, Skylar Adler, we're proud of you.
We're thankful.
Awesome, alright, good.
(rock music)
- Would you like home space, or like?
- What is that?
Yo, okay, hey vlog.
So here we are at Wine Library,
I haven't been at Wine Library
at 8 AM on a Saturday in many, many years.
Doing the event, the Q&A session, a lot of fun,
super fun to be back in the stomping grounds,
and we'll see what's up, see what we can do.
Man, what goes on here, if anything at any time?
What goes here?
I feel like this needs to be smarter.
I think this needs to be smarter.
Back to my old school.
You can take a boy from the liquor store,
but you can't take the liquor store away from the boy.
You need help?
Uh huh, uh huh!
(laughing)
Memories, feelings, the feelings.
I mean, this building's especially interesting
because it's the building that we built, right?
But it wasn't super easy, it took way too long,
so I have a funny vibe towards it.
Amazing, but like, sometimes like this,
fuckin' wine room took a year too long.
Hey guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuk,
I'm here at the Wine Library,
and I'm super excited to be talking to you
because corporate gifts.
And the bottom line is, there's not a single
wine club out there that even
remotely can hang with this one.
(laughing)
Cool, well thank you so much for coming, this is super fun.
It's funny, me and D-Rock were joking
right before saying we do so many events,
and a lot of times people say,
"Well how many people were there?"
and we're like, oh, 100 or 200,
but if this is what 85 looks like
I think we've been underestimating every event in our lives.
(crowd laughter)
Thanks for coming out this early.
You know, it's funny, when I was putting this together
I'm like, you know what, let's organize this at 8 AM
on a Saturday, let's see who's really committed.
(crowd laughter)
So I'm enjoying that part.
Listen, to that point, if you're gonna be here
at 8 AM on a Saturday, then I think the far majority
of you have a whole lot of context of
who I am and a lot of my spiel, right?
So instead of repeating stuff that I think
you can hear online or you're probably really
super close to, I think we can really go
pretty hardcore into Q&A, and so,
do you guys feel collectively like
that might be the way to go?
- [Crowd] Yeah.
- Alright, cool, we'll do that and then,
like if I want, I'll find things along the way to say,
so, I mean, look, with two hours
I'm pretty sure we might be able to get to everything here.
Actually, I wish Tyler was here.
The four D's, there's only ten people and it takes
an hour and a half and he gets mad at me.
So, why don't we start raising hands?
Let's go, who's got a question?
You in the back with the hat.
What's your name?
- [David] David.
- David.
- [David] So I'm from Cleveland,
I own a dog grooming business,
we've been a business for about a year and a half now,
it's growing incredibly fast,
we just opened our third location.
- Hey Seth, you don't have a second mic do you?
I could pass this though, lets do that, lets pass,
this way he can capture it though.
Dog business, Cleveland.
- [David] Dog business, Cleveland.
We just opened our third location in a year and a half,
growing super fast, I'm only 23 years old
and I'm just kind of wondering,
at what point do I, I feel like I'm just kind of
throwing shit at the walls, as far as like,
I don't know anything about business.
At what point do I, I have huge ambitions for this business,
you know, at what point do I try to find somebody
that might be able to push it faster or further,
or do I keep figuring it out along the way?
- Yeah, so I think that there's
a lot of ways to go about it,
I think that you've gotta recognize that
there's a lot of people who, never in their lives
will build a business with three locations that's profitable
or not sinking, so I don't think that underestimating
yourself because of your age is the right strategy,
I think the most concerning thing for me was
the first words out of your mouth are faster.
You know, and I think I talk about patience in a lot of ways
but I don't talk a lot about it from,
I talk about it more from, you've gotta be patient
to get to the success things, instead of,
you've gotta deploy patience pretty much the entire way.
Right?
I mean, I'm always stunned by people who reply to me
pushing patience, and replying in the comments,
DM, or e-mail, "Easy for you to say, rich guy."
Right?
Which is super funny for me because,
I think I'm probably deploying the greatest
patience of my life right now.
Like if you really understand
the economics of my day to day,
you know, the fact that I'm even operating
Vayner Media, is me deploying
an enormous amount of patience.
I'm running a very non-profitable, not interesting business,
I'm eating a lot of shit on a daily basis.
Client services at the scale that we're at,
at $150 million level, and 800 employees,
it's just not a fun business when I can just,
look at the economics around something like this, right?
Or the things that you see, like 4 D's is far more me
than Vayner Media, I can live right now and make
15 to 20 million dollars a year,
which is more money than I make enjoying myself
and just being Gary V.
So I think the thing you need to think about is,
it's working, but the thing that will hurt you
is if you have too much ambition locked up
in the amount of locations.
You know, locations remind me of likes.
For some reason people care about how many likes
and followers they have even though it has
no proxy to the reality of their situation.
And I think locations are very similar.
Look at this.
This is the only location of Wine Library, right?
So one thing that I spend a lot of time on,
and again, an audience that I think
understands me deeper so I'm gonna try and go into
a little bit of a different angle,
almost everything I talk about
is me giving advice that I'm actually living.
You know, I might just be further along in the path,
but it's everything that I've, I never try to guess.
And the way I learn is by doing.
And so, almost everything I talk about
is predicated on what I'm doing,
have done, and will continue to do.
So I would tell you to slow it down, you know,
like let it slow down.
One way to really lose is to get out of control,
right, like once you start learning how to drive
when you were a kid, you're like,
"Alright, let's see if I can go 80",
that's when shit gets dangerous, right?
(crowd laughter)
So I would tell you, it's not about somebody else.
The best way to get bigger is to be calculated
and smart about it, and so my intuition is
if you've gotten it this far this early,
then you've saw something and you've executed
better than others, and you've taken advantage
of, whether it's your area or region or digital marketing,
or hustle, passion, or a million other things
that are to be, but I don't think faster is a good model.
I think proper and calculated.
Make sense?
- [David] Yeah, definitely.
- Cool.
Questions?
Go ahead.
- [Man] I struggle with time management.
So I work from nine to five, I'm 28,
I still live at home with mom,
student loan debt, the whole nine,
I really try not to make excuses
and I'm grateful that my mom's letting me get on my feet,
how do I get past that whole, okay, I'm tired of
coming home from that nine to five,
friends are calling wanting to watch the game,
and I'm good with cutting them out,
how do I do the 7-2 AM and still be productive at my 9-5?
- Yeah, there's a lot of different things here.
First of all, you should audit your 9-5.
I would make it as easy possible.
Like, there's an arbitrage.
To be productive at your 9-5, a lot of people,
but I will crush it, I mean this is now 2009,
this 7 PM to 2 AM thing, it's been around for a while
which is crazy, I mean I've answered this e-mail
so many times, it's been amazing,
this is one of my big pieces of advice,
I know I'm building it up,
but it's actually crazy.
The amount of people that I've been able to tell,
who've gone from making 58,000, 73,000, 190,000 in their 9-5
to, from 57 to 51, from 73 to 60, from 190 to 90.
Because what they did was, they figured out what they
needed to even just barely live,
but their 9-5 got way easier, they just literally,
some of them literally would go and work
at like Sachs 5th Avenue on the sales floor
and have eight hour shifts where,
retail's a good one right now.
Go work retail.
Nobody's coming in.
(crowd laughter)
And you can be on your phone and work!
- [Man] I love my 9-5 job.
- You don't love it more than what you want to happen.
- [Man] Correct.
- The end.
Life's about choices brother, there's nothing else to say.
You know, this is where it gets important.
You know how I love saying binary?
Cuz it is.
If you love it so much, then you wouldn't be here.
So you don't love it enough, so fuck that.
Got it?
Like, make a little less or make more,
just make it something that doesn't take up your brain,
and energy, so that you're fuckin',
the bigger issue now is that
you were so bored for eight hours
that it's tough to restart, not that you're out of energy.
I mean it.
That's the answer, it's not so easy to execute.
- [Man] Right, because most of it has to do with finances.
- I get it, I get it.
Especially when debt is compounding with that interest,
like, this is why I'm just, I really, you know.
- [Man] And I hate making excuses.
- Dude, it's not, I can tell, it's not an excuse,
it's a fundamental issue that I'm trying to put
a lot of pressure on as one person,
and hope it builds momentum.
The thought of going to college
and collecting six figures of debt
in the way, what college does for you in return,
in today's world, is wrong.
There's just nothing else to say.
It's fundamentally wrong, especially if it's not a layup
to six figure jobs.
Listen, you wanna go and be a consultant
at Bane and McKenzie or Goldmann Sachs,
because it's Harvard and Stanford,
you can sell me a little bit.
But that's a small percentage.
And if you're an entrepreneur, what the fuck?
(crowd laughter)
I mean, Babson's a great entrepreneurial school,
but it's the minor leagues to real life entrepreneurship.
So, my answer is simple, just to round this out.
Life's about choices, right?
And like, they're hard.
And it's about patience.
What I'm telling you is probably like
a good solid seven year mapping game plan.
And for you, you're like, "Fuck man,
it's not feeling good to be 28 at my mom's house,
the fuck is Gary talking about 35?".
Here's what I'm talking about, life is long.
Okay, let's move it back and I'll set up there
for the last half an hour, this way we just.
- [Man] How ya doin?
- Good.
Hey vlog, today on a Saturday,
got to see a bunch of people, good to be back
in the stomping grounds, super fun, super fun.
(upbeat music)
That was my favorite part of the whole talk.
(crowd laughter)
As soon as you talked I looked over
a little bit in the eye and I watched dad go.
(laughter)