- A lot of words to describe you.
Social media mogul, entrepreneur, internet personality,
all this stuff.
How would you describe yourself?
- I think I'm an entrepreneur.
Somebody asked me today, in an interview,
what do I do with my downtime?
I told them that I start other businesses.
This is my hobby. This is my passion.
It's what I love to do.
I love building businesses, this is fun for me.
You don't understand, I'm a pure bred entrepreneur
for real, for real, for real, like, documented.
- How did this all start?
- What happened with me is,
I had the great benefit of being an immigrant.
I was born in Belarus, in the former Soviet Union,
and came to the States in '78, set up in Queens.
And my parents lived the American dream.
They worked very hard.
My dad was a stock boy in a liquor store
in Clark, New Jersey, and eventually saved
up enough money to buy a store in Springfield, New Jersey.
I was lemonade stands, baseball cards, real hustler kid,
anything to make a buck.
And at 14, I got dragged into the store.
Heard the internet, my freshman year of college,
heard that sound, (garbled noise).
Knew that it was special.
And in 1996, I launched one of the first e-commerce
wine businesses in America, called Winelibrary.com.
Took over my dad's business, kind of running it day to day
in 1998 alongside with him.
And from '98 to 2003 helped grow that business
from a three to a $60 million business.
(air whooshing)
- [Narrator] But growing a business from three to 60 million
was just the beginning.
Let's see what Gary created after leaving Wine Library.
- I was 34 years old-- - Yeah.
- When I started VaynerMedia, I had spent the 12 best years
of my youth building my dad's liquor store for him.
I left that business, had no money, had no equity.
I was worthless to the bank.
VaynerMedia started in somebody else's conference room
'cause we had no money for rent.
So it was a ton of risk by normal standards
when somebody reads it on paper.
But not necessarily for me, it just felt like progression.
I run VaynerMedia.
We are an 800 person firm, $100 million in revenue
in four years from zero.
We worked with GE and Pepsi and Under Armour
and Toyota and the biggest brands in the world.
- What is VaynerMedia do?
- We're a modern day Mad Men.
We're a Madison Avenue agency.
The same people that used to sell commercial time
on anything you ever did in radio and television,
we now do that on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram,
and we produced the creative for the brands
to sell stuff through the phone.
We are living through a revolution.
This my friends, this is the television.
And the television is the radio, and it's 1960.
And there's a huge opportunity.
- What does being a contemporary communicator mean?
- It means that you understand where
people are paying attention, whether that's Twitch,
or Tiktok, or believe it or not, organic reach on LinkedIn.
And then are you capable of creating the creative,
the videos, the pictures, the written words,
that are contextual to those platforms
to make the agenda success.
- [Narrator] VaynerMedia grew into a global
advertising agency with five offices across New York,
London, Singapore Los Angeles, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
As time went on Gary created Vayner X,
a modern communications holding company,
that houses different ventures
like the Gallery Media Group, the Sasha group,
Vayner Productions, Tracer,
Vayner Commerce and Vayner Speakers.
Gary also continues to build other businesses.
After four years of building Resy,
a restaurant reservation app, it sold for nine figures
to American express in 2019.
Gary's also an extremely strong business collaborator.
In 2017 he became the face of K Swiss.
His collaboration helped contribute
to their $200 million plus exit in 2019.
- Shopping cart below, if you're not buying this,
you're breaking my heart.
- [Narrator] He's also a co-founder of Empathy Wines
which was recently acquired by Constellation Brands.
- You just created Empathy last year.
- Yeah, this is one of those one plus one equals 11.
Where both sides of the equation brings so much value.
- [Narrator] CEO, Gary is the Chief Executive Officer
of Vayner X, but how would Gary describe what he does?
- At its most pure sense, I am an operating entrepreneur.
- [Narrator] So, let's take a deeper look
into what drives Gary, and how he operates.
- I'm a kid who started working literally,
the day I left college.
I walked into Wine Library about six o'clock that night,
worked for two hours, then went home.
And literally from that moment,
literally the day I left college,
to the second I'm sitting here right now,
I have never not been the chief operator of a business.
And I've made payroll every single week
since I was 22 years old.
And I'm proud of that because it's practical as fuck.
I've taken VaynerMedia as the CEO and COO, for that matter,
I have operated it every day.
I've taken it from zero to $200 million in revenue
with no cash infusion, started it in a conference room.
It's now my second company that I built.
And what I want to do is inspire two 14 year old girls
in Kansas city right now to build a billion dollar company
on having a bunch of employees
hugging each other in the halls.
And it is not lost on me that I am taking the gifts
that my mom and dad gave me
and I'm giving them to the world.
And my happiness framework, and the way I treat people,
is for some reason becoming cool.
And if, and I'm just gonna squeeze the shit out of that
because it's leading to good.
I know I'm onto something so fundamentally different.
And I know that I can inspire people to do it
'cause it's gonna have the empire part too.
See, that's when people don't get.
The reason I'm gonna win, is because I've got both.
The honey part means that you want to go change the world.
The empire part means you'll do it at all costs.
I'm neither.
- [Narrator] Gary has a natural ability
to see consumer trends, which led him to be an early
investor in companies like Uber, Twitter, Tumblr,
Facebook, Snapchat, and Venmo.
(air whooshing)
- I am predicting that Facebook acquires Instagram,
15 million users for Instagram,
probably gonna push 30 next year.
And I just have this funny feeling
that the Zuk's gonna look at that talent,
look at that app, bring it in house.
(air whooshing) So I was on Pierce Morgan.
His opening line is, "This company is 550 days old.
How the hell is it worth a billion dollars?"
And my opening line is, "They stole it."
I get out of the studio, and literally there are thousands
of tweets of people calling me a fucking idiot.
And then I guess last year this time, right,
Facebook bought WhatsApp for 18 billion.
And every article like the next day
after the news came out, is like, "Oh, wait a minute.
They fucking stole Instagram."
- [Narrator] And more recently,
Gary predicted this acquisition.
(air whooshing)
- When Joe Rogan inevitably announces
that he paid a hundred million dollars to exclusively
be on whatever pop platform he's gonna go on,
I have a funny feeling everyone's gonna be like,
"Wait a minute."
- I have an announcement. The podcast is moving to Spotify.
- [Narrator] Gary's also involved in a variety
of organizations, like Charity Water, Pencils of Promise,
Bojangles' MikMak, the All In Challenge,
the Minnesota Rokkr, VaynerSports, and more.
Now, let's take a deeper look
into Gary's personal brand, @GaryVee.
- [Woman] Gary Vaynerchuk, AKA, Gary Vee,
is a self-help media mogul.
- [Narrator] One of Gary's core beliefs as a marketer,
is that every company and human being,
is a media company first.
Because of that, he built Team GaryVee.
A team of strategists, video editors, writers,
and designers, to help him grow his personal brand.
Gary's been putting out content for 10 plus years
across the platforms at the time.
Starting with wine content, with Wine Library TV.
Then he moved to hosting the Ask Gary Vee Show,
a Q and A show between Gary and his audience.
Then, he started documenting his life's journey
through DailyVee and WeeklyVee.
(air whooshing) - Like, it's so obvious
to me what's gonna happen with DailyVee.
It's gonna be so fucking crazy,
what it all looks like a year from today.
(air whooshing)
- [Narrator] And he also started a live stream Q and A show
called Tea with GaryVee.
Gary is also a five times New York times
best selling author and travels across the world
for Keynotes and has a top business podcast where he talks
to some of the biggest entrepreneurs, investors, artists
and thought leaders of our time.
(dramatic music)
- When Gary Vaynerchuk retires or goes off in the sunset,
what do you want to be remembered for?
- That I gave more than I took.
I really want to be remembered for that.