- Made the flight.
I don't know how. Ran, did cardio.
Next stop, Cannes.
(upbeat music)
Alright, here in Cannes.
Week of tons of meetings.
The entire advertising industry globally gets together here
especially on the creative side but ad tech,
Fortune 500 clients.
For me what's crazy is I'm able to get an enormous amount of
meetings in during this week
which probably saves me 7 to 10 days
in the second half of the year of not having to fly to
Chicago or L.A. or San Francisco
or even, believe it or not, New York.
I tend to see some people here more
than I see them in New York.
Just when you get to that level of busyness,
you know, sometimes events like
this are just more efficient, right?
So, we'll do that.
I'm looking forward to it.
Should be really, really productive.
Got a bunch of my team here.
Kim Garcia from Vayner Experience,
crushed it.
Excited about our Experience Division of events that we put
on and events that we activate for clients and it should just
be really good. Excited.
Alright, cleaned up here a little bit in the boat bathroom.
Fully in the Cannes mode now
and super fired up to do our first
event here at the VaynerX boat.
VaynerX is our holding company that holds
PureWow and VaynerMedia.
We're here in Cannes.
We've got a bunch of activations.
Ryan Harwood, CEO of PureWow is here.
- Excited to be here.
- Which means everything will be okay.
(Ryan laughs)
Row of bunch of boats to the left
and to the right.
Some people massively overdressed.
Right there, those characters.
Going to do some panels now.
You wore a sports jacket?
- I was like this is not good.
Not gonna work this time.
(upbeat music)
- [Gary] Tommy B!
What up, baby? How are you?
How are you? - I'm very well.
Nice to meet you. - [Gary] What's your name?
- Joelle. - [Gary] Joelle.
- Will. (inaudible)
- How are things? - Very well. Very well.
- Good.
- [Tom] Way better dressed than I am dude.
Don't know what I was thinking. I'm wearing board shorts.
- Dude, the rave is about to start, Tom.
You're good. You're good, brother.
I actually think it's one macro which is
this is a binary conversation.
Either an organization cares
about it's employees or it doesn't.
And by the way I actually think the way to hack this is to
actually make this a CFO issue not an HR issue.
I think when people actually understand at
the highest levels that it's...
Listen, I'm a good guy and I like people but like the reason
I'm obsessive about retention is it creates speed.
People know each other, cadence and speed wins.
You know, business is sports.
Speed wins and so for me, when we announced Claude as our
Chief Heart Officer and I started doing more stuff on HR and just
gave a big speech in San Francisco around HR
when I talk about people I try to make it more of
a CFO conversation because if you don't it's fluffy,
it's emotional, it's nice to have.
If you make it financial,
everybody starts paying attention.
So to me, you level it up to why.
Maybe you give somebody a raise that you don't want to or
you give them tickets to a Cardinals game or
you buy them some sneakers that they've been liking on
Pinterest or Instagram.
It shows that you care and that leads to retention.
The biggest reason I spend so much time one on one with all
the faces I see here.
People that are still here, people that used to work for me
is 'cause that caring ROI plays out in a macro.
Shelly spoke to it.
I mean, you will never find somebody who's won that ever
talks about short term return.
Everybody who's winning is thinking long term because
the ironic thing is business life and life in general,
hopefully is long if nothing crazy happens is a marathon.
Yet, everybody's running around like it's a sprint.
Trying to make something happen in 30 or 90 or 180 day window.
I think the hack is can you get into the ear of the CFO?
Can she or he really realize, holy shit,
this actually matters more than you think.
And I think one of the, I invest in a company called HiQ which is
real big data analyzation of all this.
The cost of replacing engineers
in Silicon Valley is so ridiculous.
Even for me, with the people that I interact with,
even if they're mid-tier managers the emotional cost of
replacement is pretty extreme
and so that's where I would go with it.
(upbeat music)
I think I speak about regret so much 'cause
I'm so fearful of it.
I love life so much that when I'm 84 and I know I don't have
30 years left, I'm gonna be sad.
The reason I tell you this is you're young.
I don't know what you're expenses are or debt is, right?
But the bottom line is,
it's always easier now than it is tomorrow.
- [Joelle] Yeah. - [Gary] It just is.
- [Joelle] I told you, I was shaking your hand--
- Done! Done!
- [Joelle] I'm gonna implement and I know what you're like
and I know you're gonna hold me to it.
- What's even crazier is I would fuckin' hire you
if your startup fails. I would flat out do it.
Just for the story, we would run this video.
You know? - [Joelle] Alright, I love that.
- Good luck to you. - [Joelle] Thanks very much.
- Thanks for stopping by.
Cheers, mate. Stay well.
Hi. I'm glad you came.
Really good to see you. (crosstalk)
How are things?
- [Woman] Nadine Kaiser. - Nadine, how are you?
- [Woman] Nadine's actually one of your neighbors.
She's (censored).
(upbeat music)
- [DRock] How'd the panel go?
- Panel went super well. Shelly's a beast.
Straight winner. Important issue.
You know, diversity and inclusion is not about checking
a box of being politically correct.
It's the smart fuckin' strategy to win.
(indistinct chatter)
I'll be right back up.
Hey, hey. First one down.
(upbeat music)
And Dog is in the building.
Looking good, Dog.
- [Dennis] Dennis Ossipov-Grodsky,
universally known as Dog.
(laughs) Edit that.
- [DRock] What's the most valuable thing you've learned
while working with Gary?
- To be honest with you, I think he embodies change.
Change has been a beaten up word, right?
Everybody talks about change.
I've been to companies that did talk change
but change took forever
and market course corrected them and with Gary
I think he embodies change
and he imposes that mentality
organically, by the way, on the rest of the organization.
And I have not seen an organization that was more
nimble and flexible in accepting change.
Pivoting, adjusting, adjusting to the market conditions,
adjusting to his vision, right, because he has incredible
intuition and proving it right or wrong.
So I think it's also important to not to be precious about your
change because change comes.
Sometimes it's the right change,
sometimes it's semi-right change,
sometimes it's outright wrong.
So it's very important for organization to be able to go
into that change, test it out and say two months later,
"You know what?
"It was a mistake, we're pulling out.
"We're changing it."
So change.
- I think, and it's such a cliche and it's something that
he says all the time,
but I think it's a marathon and not a sprint.
I think this week at Cannes is actually probably one of the
best representations of that.
You know when you think about it,
there's a lot of different people that we're gonna be
meeting from a lot of different companies and a lot of people
here are thinking more transactional.
What's the short term opportunity?
How do I sell them today?
How do I close the deal?
Where the way that I'm thinking about it and it's really what
I've learned from Gary is how do I actually build a genuine
relationship with this person with the idea that we might not
do anything together for two, three,
four, ten years.
But ultimately, I might want to
recruit that person ten years from now.
Or I might want to do a deal ten years down the line.
Or they're gonna go talk to their friend and say,
"Hey, I just met with the VaynerMedia team.
"They're really, really smart.
"You should be thinking about what they're doing."
And so it's really just coming at it with a long game mentality
versus how do I make the most money or
close the deal in the short term.
Which is a total mind shift for most people because they're in
it for the short game versus kinda the
30, 40, 60 year game plan.
- At the party, Maverick doing his thing.
Bunch of big wigs.
Kelly McCarthy.
She helped me build VaynerMedia in the early days.
Mav Carter, one of the great executives,
LeBron's boy.
Hustlin' at this event, making shit happen.
Alright, it's getting late in the night.
Alex Castlin looks homeless.
We've established that.
Ryan Harwood looks like he ate a good amount tonight.
- Oh!
- We've made some stuff done.
Bunch of the peeps.
Productive meetings.
Ryan, productive?
Kristin, you out?
- Over. - And out.
(upbeat music)