- It's a deep thinking Wednesday
on The #AskGaryVee Show.
- [India] Tuesday. - [Alex] It's Tuesday.
- Weird.
(laughter)
Hey yo, that pretty much summed me up.
Can deep think, but I don't know what the (beep)
day of the week is.
(laughter)
On this episode,
we talk about Pinterest's ad product,
and then we got really, really, really deep.
(hip hop music)
You ask questions,
and I answer them.
This is The #AskGaryVee Show.
(hip hop music)
Hello everybody, this is Gary Vay-ner-chuk
and this episode 85 of The #AskGaryVee Show.
Feeling pretty good,
went to San Francisco yesterday.
Going to Copenhagen tomorrow night,
got Madrid next week,
so doing some serious world traveling.
The beard is coming in nicely though.
AJ's fiancee, Ally, threw me for a curve-ball the other
night where she really innuendoed through her body language
that she didn't want the beard for the wedding,
which is June 11th, I think,
so that's thrown a curve-ball in my strategy of growing this
out until the Jets lost.
So, got to really decide if I want to be
a good brother-in-law, or do I want to be,
I don't know, difficult.
What else is going on?
Nothing too much.
Meerkating got a bunch of cameras here that they've set up
with phones, which I think is really rad.
I'm enjoying kind of looking at that,
enjoying the show.
Been really happy with the new Wine Library TV design.
Getting a lot of emails and tweets from all of you that
liked watching me back in the day, taste wine,
so that's fun.
Super pumped about the Jets,
was proud of myself for getting Duke and Maryland
in the finals.
Kids are growing up.
My fantasy baseball team had a great opening day,
I'm in second place after one day,
and I think I'm ready for the show.
So, I like this.
You know what, do you remember like episode 30 I was like,
oh I gotta do more like cup of coffee,
like Regis and Kelly action?
that was a little bit of that, that was fun.
I have nothing in here either, weird.
Alright, India, let's get into the show.
- [India] Do you need a prop?
- No, I don't need a prop.
I am a prop in myself.
My personality is a prop.
(laughter)
- [Voiceover] Jeff asks,
"There is buzz around Pinterest advertising
"and they are slowly letting in biz accounts.
"Are you optimistic?"
- Jeff, this a great question.
We haven't talked enough about Pinterest
on The #AskGaryVee Show, so I appreciate the question.
Good job, India of picking that out.
I'm a huge believer in Pinterest's product.
You might have noticed very recently that they've made it
a term of service that you can't do affiliate sales.
My belief is that means that they are now going to
turn that on for themselves.
If you start thinking about the amount of commerce
that goes on, on Pinterest,
even if they 5% of every transaction,
they could right away be one of the top five to 10 companies
in revenue in the digital space.
I'm a big believer in the business,
and seeing what's going on with Faithbox,
Willie, the CEO of the company we've incubated
at Vayner/RSE, just like $4 in ad spending on promoted pins.
Some of the stuff we've seen at VaynerMedia,
the stuff I'm seeing from Wine Library,
I'm massively bullish.
I actually think that Pinterest's ad product,
a year from today, let's call it 18 months from today,
we will recall this video,
somebody make a note, (ding)
put it into your calendar 18 months from today.
We will make a video or a piece of content,
however we do it in those days,
18 months from now,
to talk about this video where I make this claim,
which is that Pinterest's ad product is a major competitor
to Google AdWords for e-comm businesses that are
digital focused.
Enormously passionate about Pinterest's ad product
and I highly recommend everybody watching this.
If you're selling something on a dot com,
that you get very serious about understanding what's going
on in the Pinterest environment,
bullish would be an understatement.
Super bullish, super bull
like I'm into it.
(laughter)
[Voiceover] Benjamin asks,
"Like you, I believe there is so much to be gained
"from social media, but what do you think we have lost
"or are in danger of losing?"
- Benjamin, I think this is a great question.
I haven't given this a lot of thought because the truth is,
I'm such an optimist.
The truth is,
I think most people default into cynicism and pessimism,
(ding)
that I think I allow those people to do that work for me.
But, what I do think about,
the one thing that is interesting to me,
is I do feel that all of us,
especially the ones that decide to participate in putting
out content, which if you look at the data,
may not be at full, full scale in the 70s, 80s, and 90s,
gets bigger as you go down.
And as the younger you get,
the more you're really putting out content
whether in private form or public form.
I think the most interesting thing is that,
I think we're losing peace of mind.
And that's different than privacy.
I think that we all now know we're living a life
on the record.
Whether we decide to put it out there in selfie form,
or if we just happen to be in the background of somebody
doing it.
And what that does is it makes us all kind of be on
the record, tense up, right?
We're in PR form.
I think a lot of us are living the PRed version of our
lives to the public.
It's always the pictures of us at concerts and on trips.
People do share,
you know my Facebook feed is really,
basically the extremes,
and maybe I'm evolving my answer here.
I think we're losing the middle.
Maybe I'll change my answer because
when I think about what's happening,
is everybody's like, look at me,
I'm at a Beyonce concert front row, right?
By the way,
massively interesting data that I'm looking at of why
people are now going to public events just to take
the selfie to say they were there,
which is why concert and sporting events,
it's amazing how social is making the real world business
go up.
But then, number two,
I see a lot of people on my Facebook feed
and my social feeds,
sharing their tragedies.
Literally, yesterday's Facebook scroll,
which I do occasionally,
was literally people announcing that they've become sick
or pictures of their daughter with open heart surgery.
Just these real extreme emotions,
and then the other things which is like,
I'm at Bora Bora and I'm living the best life
and I'm pouring champagne down my throat.
The middle is getting kind of squeezed as we are
going to social.
Ironically, the middle is peaceful, right?
The middle is less tense.
The middle is relaxing.
The little lacks tension.
So, for me,
I'm good because I need insanity.
Like right now I'm pissed.
As you may notice behind me,
we've opened up a 12th floor.
(hip hop music)
That's right, DRock,
you're going to go down there and film some 12th floor.
That hurts me because now the insanity's down a little bit,
but I recognize that I'm an anomaly of somebody who
needs to blast Weezy songs, at full blast,
for a six-hour flight to San Francisco yesterday to get off
and be able to do my thing.
I worry about the people that are more centered
or introverted in this environment where we're getting
suffocated by storytelling and our public personas,
whether we intend to do it or we become a byproduct of it.
So, I think separating our public life
to our private life is going to become
more and more difficult and we're losing that.
It was just a hell of a lot easier back in the day.
Ironically, keep it rolling,
ironically, I think that's where Snapchat's winning.
I think Snapchat is content of the middle.
If you think about it, the shit you put on Snapchat,
you'd never make an Instagram photo, right?
It's just the shit you don't care because it goes away.
You don't care about the lighting,
it's almost the closest thing to real life.
- [Voiceover] Todd Karl asks,
"I've been in sales for over 20 years and I've excelled at
"being able to read people's body language.
"But how do you do that over the Internet
"or on Social Media?"
- Todd, first of all,
India, you're crushing this episode,
or maybe you VaynerNation, actually forget you, India,
you VaynerNation are crushing this episode with
the questions.
The truth is I love this question.
I love it because I'm freaked out by the answer.
And look, this falls very much into bravado and ego,
but that's part of me too.
I've been blown away by my ability to make that transition.
I too, did everything the way you did.
I stood on a floor, I watched, I read.
I do it all the time.
It's why I love Q an A,
it's why I love public speaking,
it's why I don't have a set presentation.
I'm reading the room in real time.
I'm reading my staff.
It's how I scale my ability to read at scale.
Like walking through the 12th floor and be like,
that person's in trouble.
It's weird, kind of like I don't even like talking about it.
It's like a really nice innate skill that has helped
me scale my personality.
I, for some reason, feel those feelings in people's
comments and tweets.
Now, maybe it took me a long time to get the cadence.
Of course, there's been times where I've maybe read into
it wrong because context and tone is lost,
but I've go to tell you,
my intuition is if you go hardcore in trying to do that
through Twitter, through your Facebook comments
on your posts,
and this is more about me reading people responding to my
stuff so maybe I know where the North Star starts,
but it's been stunning to me that exactly what I've done
in the real world is how I scaled Twitter, specifically,
in being able to read people's emotions
and asking for clarity.
Maybe in the real world, my man,
we don't ask for clarity.
I won't say DRock, are you feeling,
oh you're feeling uneasy about this wine, cool,
let's go in a different direction.
Maybe I have to ask that a little bit more tangibly
black and white in a conversation on digital,
but it's the same effort, same mentality,
and the beauty is emojis and short form and slang
have given more context around the written word online.
We, as human beings,
are great at communicating.
People grossly underestimate our ability
to be communicators.
Whether drawing on caves or making smoke signals
or radio television, the written word,
the Internet, commenting, emojis,
we're talented at this.
I'm watching all of us evolve.
Very many of us, many of you who have been romantic about
grammar, have finally let it go.
All of us are misspelling words on purpose
so it auto-corrects,
because we value the speed.
We're using emojis,
not only 13 year olds or just people in Asia,
now it is a worldwide phenomenon.
We're evolving and we're great at it,
so I look for those cues and keep trying to evolve
and stay ahead of where I think we're all evolving to.
- Hey Gary, Ryan here from onproperty.com.au,
just want to say thank you because your book, Crush It!,
allowed me to go out full time on my own.
My question is why did you start a service business,
your agency, instead of starting a media company,
which you seem really good at?
- Ryan, great question.
I mean this is...
Can we get like a,
Can you make some sort an all time great
episode alert thing here?
Put it in my hand.
(majestic music)
This is a great question
and it's a very specific, detailed answer
for a couple reasons.
One, I'm not sure that I was aware of how good I was
at it five years ago.
Two, I had an inkling when we started VaynerMedia.
The first project we worked on was something called
Daily1to10.com
and we were doing Facebook fan pages driving to a Tumblr.
So, I was on that kick from the get,
but three, the most practical thing was,
I knew that speed mattered and that money mattered,
and that scale mattered and the agency-client
service business was very obvious to me
as the quickest path to scale and money.
Because now we have Vayner Publishing
and we're building out lostlettermen.com,
you can check it out, we just bought it,
wait for the redesign, but we're now staring to get into
the media business and we have the infrastructure
and the scale and the skill set.
And I have 500 people that I've been able to effect
with my thinking.
They've got to counter that with their own thinking,
but clearly, as a CEO and a thought leader in a space,
I'm sure I'm evolving their thinking towards a direction
that picks up speed.
Because the more I agree with them,
and they agree with me,
the quicker we can be at what we need to do.
So, really, the answer to your question is,
because I'm patient.
I thought the right strategy was to build out
an infrastructure that allowed me to get to it later.
Plus, not to mention,
media's evolved enormously in those five years.
And if you look at media and the upside of media,
and the media sites of today,
five years ago they were very predicated on SEO and SEM,
something that I never really loved.
Now, we're predicated more on social sharing and content,
something I love more.
So, I think that, my intuition,
and I'd like to think rightfully so,
at the time was, I was not the perfect player for that time.
But my intuition was, there's a chance that the market may
move into that,
if I'm in a certain place in five years to capture
the market's evolution on the media side perfectly,
then I can win triple.
And I think I'm starting to maybe play out
and benefit on that bet.
So, I was just strategic about it.
- [Voiceover] Antoine asks,
"What usually prompts you to walk away or turn down
"great opportunities?"
- Well, Antoine, I don't want to be in the business
of saying no to great opportunities.
I'd like to think that the answer to the question is
my intuition.
I'd like to think my intuition is allowing me to walk away
from bad opportunities that may look good on paper.
You know, I just go with my intuition.
Really nothing else.
I mean, I'm not an analytical thinker.
Right?
I'm not going to look at a whole lot of data.
A lot of these big funds that try to ask me like,
well how did I know this startup was going to be great
or why did I think this was going to be great,
it was never predicated on monthly active users
or some sort of other data set.
It was me, what I would like to say is that I like to
taste things.
It's me observing
and then me counter punching that observation.
I tend to be very, very all-in on my intuition,
and so that's, you know,
that's kind of how I make the calls.
It's funny the way you asked the question.
You asked the question in what I think is more of
a defensive mindset,
which is if you breakdown the question,
it ends with the real kicker which is,
run it one more time for me, India, how do you--
- [India] How do you, what usually prompts you
to walk away from or turn down or know when to say no
to a great opportunity?
- To me that never runs through my mind.
The thought of saying no to great opportunities
is just not in, I don't put those words in that
pattern of a sentence.
So, that is what I think you should be thinking about.
It sounds to me that you're crippled by the miss.
I'm not.
I just keep having the at bats and the swings,
and I know that I'll have more wins than loses
and if I pass on something good,
so be it.
But literally, I mean, we've talked about it
on this show before,
passing on Uber's angel round twice and leaving $300 million
dollars on the table.
Literally, outside of being a great story to tell you
how I feel, doesn't come into my mind ever.
Well, maybe once in a blue moon.
But, pretty much never, and I think
that's an important thing.
And an offensive mindset versus a defensive mindset,
something I want to get deeper into content team.
- [India] That's everything.
- Cool.
Question of the day, what is the biggest miss
of your career?
What is the one thing you said no to
that weren't that great?
I had a meeting the other day with a woman who passed
on being one of the first 600 or 500 employees at Google.
She felt pretty down about it.
So, I'm fascinated by that.
So, give me your answer.
You keep asking questions,
I'll keep answering them.
Much love, thank you so much for watching.
Hope you enjoyed it.
He's a Jets fan, he's used to losing.
That hurts.
Alright, see ya.
(laughter)