- Your personality, your brand
is so much a part of your company's brand
and everything else, too.
I mean, so how have you thought about that?
Right now, we're being filmed by your
daily video show.
- [Gary] D-Rock.
- [Host] D-Rock is back there with DailyVee.
So how do you think about all that,
kind of building up your own personal brand
and everything else there too?
- We all have different levers, right?
Basically, here's what I do for a living.
I day trade attention.
So, what I do for a living is I day trade
end user attention.
That's how I launched
an e-commerce website in 1996,
even though that I had no tech skills
and really even knew what the hell I was doing.
The only thing I knew
was that people were gonna buy things
on the internet.
And so, that was the macro level,
and then basically email newsletter
and Google AdWords
and YouTube content,
and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn content
has all,
you said to me earlier,
you were so nice when I first reached out.
You were in right away.
I was laughing, 'cause I was like,
of course!
You have one of the biggest platforms in the world,
around the context of business,
I want to be there in that space.
To me that was the easiest 'yes' of my life!
- Well I remember it was like a Friday afternoon,
I called you up, we were talking about
the influencer program when we first launched this.
You were, I think I got like two sentences out,
and you're like, 'I'm in, I do this all the time.'
(audience laughs)
- I started spamming him,
I was like all in!
I was like 100 percent!
And so, the reason
you know, to me,
I'd been watching Snapchat for three years,
and only in January
did I start getting really loud
of this is gonna work.
To me, there is no doubt
that Snapchat is at scale
and will be at scale for mainstream,
because there's a network effect
at a certain scale and so,
I have very good intuition on what
everybody in this room is gonna do,
a lot of times before they even realize
they're gonna do it.
That's my core thing, that's what I've got.
And now I'm trying to scale it,
and the reason I decided at the height of my career
to take a step back
and eat shit and build a client services business
was 'cause I needed to scale the one thing I had.
And that's now what I have.
Now I have a 600 person,
four office,
hundred million dollar revenue business
that scales my capability as a human
to understand really how to day trade attention
and know when something's overpriced or underpriced.
In the world of social media,
24 months ago when everybody was crying
about Facebook organic reach
and wow, they pulled the rug from underneath us!
And this so bad, and don't do it anymore!
I knew, as a practitioner,
that the best ad product that I've seen
since early Google Adwords
was being built.
And so, then I became a practitioner in it.
I'm a practitioner in Snapchat.
The reason I do Snapchat stories
is I want to be a practitioner.
YouTube was something I was on so early
that I took it for granted,
and I realized I had to get my game back on,
and so that's why I do content.
Because I'm learning through my own content creation.
And then I have my own spiel.
The reason I do DailyVee is 'cause I
spew a lot about hustle
and I realized, crap,
I don't think people really realize
that I am fundamentally outworking everybody.
So basically, this is just propaganda
to stick it to everybody that I work harder than them.
The other thing about being good at this
is you get the 'I told you so' moments, right?
I love the clip
when I was on with Pierce Morgan saying that
Facebook stole Instagram for a billion dollars,
which led to 10 thousand tweets
that I was an idiot.
Because a lot of you remember
it was only 500 days that Instagram was in business.
And everybody was like, a billion,
it's crazy that it wasn't that long ago.
But a billion for that seemed like outer space.
And the same thing with Snapchat,
I been on Snapchat very aggressively since 2013.
What got me to pay attention or the moment was
tens of millions of people were using it.
This is the funniest thing.
Nothing bothers me more than when people,
first, guru, but second,
second is futurist or disruptor.
I think I'm the most practical
operator and marketer in the world.
I just market for the day we actually live in.
Right now.
Not yesterday, not tomorrow.
So do I know VR or After School or musical.ly
are emerging and things will happen?
Of course!
But do I think it's the best use of every dollar
and hour right now?
No I do not!
And so,
that's what I do.
So I watch Snapchat every day,
and then, nine, 10 months ago,
I'm like okay, this is really hitting critical mass.
And then,
when I watched the first week
of what was happening with DJ Khaled,
I was like, okay,
this is millions!
This is millions of people watching this!
This isn't the tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands
that I thought people were getting
from Snapchat.
This is three
I mean, I got a screenshot from it.
Three million people.
I'm like, okay.
This is now at real true meaningful scale
which means, it's not just 13 to 18.
And then I just live life!
I travel so much,
I started seeing 30 and 40 year old people
with a yellow app on their home screen, right?
It was really that basic.
And then there's the thing that blows my mind,
which is,
everybody in this room can do what I do,
which is wake up in the morning
and the first thing they do, grab their phone,
look at the App Store top hundred free apps,
and look at the charts.
It's just been sitting there in the top five
for fuckin', I don't know, a year and a half!
That's real data!
There's no guess,
I'm not predicting musical.ly's success,
it's been a top 20 app for four and a half months.
This is just, this is not a joke
what I'm about to tell you.
In 2006,
when I was 31 years old,
I didn't even know agencies were a thing.
Because the way I built Wine Library,
I did it all myself, direct to the platforms
that I was using.
I didn't even know that Madison Avenue
advertising agencies existed.
Somebody came to sell me billboards.
If you lived in New Jersey during that time,
I used to have billboards of myself up,
talk about narcissism.
(laughs)
There was billboards of me saying,
"Watch the Wine Library TV Show"
because I literally used to drive
from New York to New Jersey,
like, 'hey, Gary', you know.
And when the guy sold them to me,
I did the creative, I gave it back to him,
and then he gave me a bill.
And I lost my shit.
Because I didn't know,
I thought he worked for CBS/Viacom
but he had some Lopez media,
he was a media agency
and was charging me.
I'm like, for what?!
I literally didn't even know that ecosystem.
And the truth is, my under-education,
my lack of education,
my lack of that has hurt me.
Because I had to pattern recognize later in my life.
It's why I am gonna win later in my life.
The reason I'm not gonna buy the Jets in my 40's
and I'm gonna buy them in my 70's
is because I didn't know,
when I put all my personal post-tax money
into Twitter and Facebook,
this is sad as fuck,
I'm now 35.
I didn't know that I could go to other human beings
and raise money and take 20 percent of the upside.
If I did, I'd already be a billionaire.
'Cause I would have bet my life on Facebook.
So just think about that.
Just basic, something you could read
when you're 11 years old on the internet
of carrying money,
basic fun dynamics
was something I didn't know
at 35 years old,
because if I did, I would have raised it,
made a lot of people in my world at the time
a lot of money,
and I would have made 20 percent of the upside,
which would have been remarkable.
So, you know, I don't,
when I say I don't have mentors,
I think of that as a weakness.
But I just know it's my truth,
and it's all I got.
It's like meditation.
Meditation is about to explode in America, right?
What happened with Starbucks and coffee shops
and what happened with sole cycle and exercising
is one thousand,
one thousand person gonna happen with meditation.
In four and a half, five years,
everybody here is gonna go to the fuckin'
meditation thing,
and they're gonna have their fuckin' t shirts
and we're all gonna sit there
and it's gonna be at scale
and it's a trillion dollar business.
- Why do you say that?
Why?
- Because I pay attention to consumer trends.
Because of headspace,
because of the couple of studios
in New York and L.A.,
because I just know how shit works.
And the only reason I'm telling you the story
now is to get it on film,
so we can do the recall in four years
and be like, 'I told you!'
(audience laughs)
So if you want to know why I'm telling you this story.
But, oh I was trying to figure out
why did I get to here besides that.
I will never do it.
I am so happy,
and so grateful for the way I'm hardwired and softwired
that I'm literally scared
to do meditation,
'cause I'm scared it might trigger something
in my brain in a different direction
and make me not this 100 percent complete happy.
And it's the same reason I don't have mentors.
I know what I'm doing, it's good for me,
I like it.
I don't even want to be affected by other people.
I don't want to hear from any fuckin' guru,
I want to watch what you guys do at scale,
and make my decisions and just do my thing.
(reflective music)