Gary Vaynerchuk - How To Become A Billionaire

In 2006, I saw a man walk onto a stage and give a talk in which he said boldly that his dream and his goal was to buy the New York jets and he was willing to work harder than anybody else in order to make enough money to buy the Jets. Now, that resonated with me all the way back in 2006, because my dream as a kid was to buy the Cleveland Indians. Now the Cleveland Guardians. And if you're not tracking along yet, I'm talking about Gary Vaynerchuk. I started following his work in 2006 when he said he wanted to buy the Jets. And over the years, I've had the privilege of hanging out with him 5ish times in person or in a group setting. The first time that I met him, though, was when I booked him to speak at the first ever event that we held. It's now called the Capitalism Conference. Back then it was called Freedom Fastlane Live. And today I'm going to share with you some of the best clips that he shared on stage at our event. The thing that I wanted to digest from Gary was how he planned to buy the New York Jets. I knew it was his goal, but I had never heard how he was going to do it. So this first clip is him breaking down exactly what his plan is of how he's going to make the six or seven billion dollars that it will take in order to buy an NFL football team.

From what I'm taking away, the plan is, yes, is a.

You have.

You have your core business that is.

Basically build a business called. That was wrapped around my singular skill of really good marketing at scale to be an evergreen machine on my side for the rest of my life that I can then use to deploy all my other business behaviors and use that machine to make those business behaviors big.

And when you say those other. I mean those other assets.

Is that cash?

I'm gonna. No, I'm gonna buy Twinkies. The business. Like I'm gonna buy a business for 2, 3, 4, $500 million and then flip it for 2, $3 billion.

Okay. So your core business basically gives you leverage.

That's right.

In order to get into other businesses or points in other businesses or entire other businesses that give you the points.

No. Yes.

And the exposure for people to actually want to use you as in the name of an investor, which from my understanding, is the only reason why you like have your name out there.

You don't sell the dream.

No, I don't want to sell a dream. You just build up.

You Just build up name recognition. So people want to say, Gary Vee's an investor in this.

Guys, there's no growth hackers showing up on cnn. It's just what you want to play. I want to build leverage with everybody in this room. I'm not trying to extract something from you in a one month, one week, first time you landed on my website, one speaking engagement situation. I have the potential to know you hopefully for the rest of my life. And so for me, I've always had this secret backup game plan of the reason I wanted to provide everybody. Long before there was Kickstarter, I was like, you know, what if I just provide a lot of value at scale to every American, like all of them, maybe all of them will give me 10 bucks to buy the jets one day if I can't get there. You know, like, it's like I, I literally think like a marathon runner. The reason I'm out there is a couple things. One, I wanna be a practitioner. So if I'm doing the social, every single tweet, all 200,000 of them, I've written with my thumbs, right? Like I game planned our Snapchat, our Instagram strategies, like I do it and I wanna be the best craftsman in right now I'm immersing myself in VR because I know it's a decade away and I wanna understand it like a tactician, but I also use it as brand leverage. I get paid to speak, it's great money. I get paid millions of dollars in advance to write a book if I want to. It's great money. I can do things.

It has brand equity, but I have to be right and I have to be good. And the problem is too many people are selling, they're bottom feeding, they're selling to dreamers and not practicality and it has no shot of being long term. And two, they're just not patient.

When Gary shared this on our stage, he had not done it yet. He was still building the Death Star. He had not launched brands through that marketing arm, but he has now. If you followed along with the Empathy Wines launch, he used his Death Star to put that on the map. And he sold it for, I've heard, over $100 million just a couple of years after launch. He's done that with a couple of brands, but most notably, he's done it with a veefriends and veefriends is his NFT project. But if you look a little bit further behind the curtain, what you might know is that Gary's plan isn't just to use Vayner Media to launch brands. It's to use veefriends to launch brands too. For example, I am an owner of One of the NFTs called the dinner Deer. This allows me to have dinner with Gary once a year. And Gary told me the last time that we met that he might launch a venison jerky line and and call it the Dinner Deer and use the veefriends community combined with VaynerMedia to make a multimillion dollar jerky company. That was just an example, but it shows you how his thought process has changed from the time he's been on stage until now. And it'll be interesting to watch how the rest of the strategy unfolds in the future. In this next clip, listen to how Gary approaches a new opportunity or a new marketplace. And it's pretty basic, but it's created all of his growth. And I'm gonna give some commentary at the end of this clip, but listen to how he approaches new opportunities. Watch this.

I think the thing that I wanna get across is what's your process? Who are you? Do you have the self awareness to understand what you do? And more importantly, can you then deploy your self awareness around your strengths or weaknesses against the white space in the market? What is the white space? And I will tell you right now, we are living through the greatest opportunity of white space because people are pouring really good money into places where people are not paying attention anymore. There's $90 billion. This really probably doesn't affect this room, but there's $90 billion being spent on television ads. 90 billion on the production and distribution of television ads. By show of hands, how many people in 2015 have watched TV shows on their time, not when it's actually aired, and have fast forwarded every single commercial every single time? Or have watched Netflix or have watched your favorite show on your time, not when it aired. Raise your hands. Interesting. Everybody by show of hands, when given the chance, how many of you have fast forwarded every single commercial? You know what's interesting about what just happened here? DVR fast forwarding has declined in the last six months. For the first time in six years, less people are fast forwarding. You know why? Because they're not even giving the fucking time to grab the remote to fast forward. They're just grabbing their phone, paying attention here, waiting for that shit to just go through.

And so Google AdWords. How many people here do Google AdWords for their business click throughs declined on Google AdWords 22% in the last six months, because we're getting conditioned. We don't want to click them. They're ads, just like my open rates used to be, 93%. And the shit that I believe in in Facebook and Instagram advertising that so many of you can change your business on will suck shit in three, four years too, because more people will understand. And it just becomes supply and demand. And so the combination, the way the blueprint for me has to start with, what are you good at? And are you being realistic with yourself? There's probably 85% of the jobs in my company that I could not do. And I'm not joking. For example, I could not be a copywriter, an entry level creative for my own agency, because my grammar is so staggeringly bad that my English teachers are like rioting that I'm a New York Times best selling author.

But I can be the CEO. And so I think that's the thing that a lot of people are missing. They're plugging away and they're letting their one strength carry all their weaknesses instead of taking it out and then deploying the other commoditized stuff and either outsourcing it or actually just not even doing it. So I would adore and I would hope, and I hope that I can break through to one person on that audit tonight in the mirror, in the hotel room. Cause that's what matters.

This idea of arbitrage is pretty darn simple. But after I rewatched this clip, I was thinking about all of the successes that I had in my life. And it was from being early on a trend or early where there were arbitrage opportunities. I made a lot of money doing search engine optimization before there were a bunch of people doing it. I made a ton of money on Amazon before a bunch of people were doing it. Now I'm building my brands around influencers because people are not doing that. I built a podcast pretty early, before there was a ton of podcasts. I do these YouTube videos and guess what? Like, I don't have the biggest audience on YouTube because there's a lot more people here. I'm not early on this trend. So it's interesting to think about how this is applied even today. And it makes you want to pursue whatever that next thing is in case it becomes the TikTok or becomes the new Twitter. So it's interesting that Gary's idea of arbitrage on early opportunities, it's still applicable today and he's still using it as part of his plan to buy the New York Jets. After Gary's talk. We sat down and I rapid fired some questions at him. And there's a few parts that really landed with me and that still stick with me today. One of them was him talking about why none of us have the right to complain. None of us who are on a path towards success have a right to complain. And the reason is because as entrepreneurs, we get to choose to do whatever it is that we want. We get to choose the projects that we pursue. And I think one of the things that makes Gary so amazingly successful is that he genuinely is driven to do these projects intrinsically, even if they failed, even if they didn't make him famous, he would do them because he has so much conviction for them. That makes me pause and think, do I have that much conviction for what I'm doing? Does that really align with who I want to be? Because if I can figure out the equation of how to align where I'm naturally motivated with business, that is when you are really powerful. And I think that is Gary's superpower. Here's what he had to say about it.

I do not believe that anybody has the right to complain. You will never hear me complain about the hours I work or the things I miss out on. I'm so mad at people that complain about the successes they don't have while they watch entire seasons of Games of Thrones or are a part of the fucking softball team.

Or fucking are on planes playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends. What the fuck's the matter with you? Of course you're not gonna have that because you're not deploying the work. So what I think is I don't judge anybody here that did something to get the monies. I judge somebody who sits in here who's not happy and complains about it and has gotten to a place where the practical stuff has been checked off. Right? The debt's not accumulating anymore. Right? Like you're in a place. The reason I wanted to hammer home and I kind of glossed over it, was that I took a step back in my career, was because I think if you're a really great entrepreneur or thinking long term, you're willing to sacrifice things, you know what cripples everybody is. You didn't have anything. You found an idea. You found somebody that gave you a concept. You got something that worked, and now you got something, something that you were sold by the American media machine that you want, like a fucking watch or a car. Like, you know, you got something, and the fear is you don't want to go Back to not having it. My greatest rationale for marrying my wife and the greatest thing that I know about myself is not only am I capable to going back to Queen's studio apartment, I secretly want it to happen like, you know, Rocky V when it's all sad and shit. Cause he's like, back to the thing. And everyone's like, oh, too bad. I'm like, that's fucking awesome. Like for me it's the game, right? And so like, I don't need fancy shit.

Gary is an immigrant. He came to the state estates at a young age and his family had nothing. Now he has some stuff. I asked Gary about his relationship with risk. Is he afraid to lose it all? Now that you've had some success, now that you've overcome growing up in poverty, do you fear this? His answer left me stunned. And this is the most quoted part from his talk that I repeat the most often because it left the room kind of shocked. Here's how Gary said he manages and thinks about risk.

What is your opinion and your relationship with risk? How do you view and evaluate it? Is it even a real concept to you? And how do you measure that, if at all?

Yeah, it's not real. Like I fuck with risk. You know, I like it. Like it's part of the, like, if you're an entrepreneur, you're risking, you know, Like I think the biggest, riskiest thing I'm doing is I get some weird strange fan that kills me on the streets because I'm out there. I'm not joking. Like, the risk of being like, if you play, say to anybody in this room what you think about risk is like asking somebody who has a business or is an entrepreneur, like, what's your thoughts on Oxygen?

Do you know what I mean by that?

I get it.

But there's, let me break it down. There's no such thing as a game. Like you have to be okay with risk if you do business because it's the core, it's one of the core foundations of what happens. It's the biggest reason most people don't do it. It's the reason we have so much fake entrepreneurs right now. Because risk has been eliminated. There's so much free flowing money these 22 to 25 year olds are raising money. There's no risk. They just learned on somebody else's back.

Mm.

I ask because when you're at. There's 400 people in this room and about 398 of them have a fear that it's all gonna go away one day.

I think weirdly, all 400 of us do, right? Like, there's always some piece that. But again, I kind of told you what I thought about that. I don't know. I could say this. There might be one and a half other people that actually are like me, that actually think that's kind of romantically cool.

I'm being serious. Like, the single biggest thing I live for in my life is I told you so. It's actually quite sad and not noble. I live for sticking it to people.

The thought of losing everything. And then everybody's like, see, he wasn't that great. Like, all the shit. It's like Ronda Rousey, right? Like, she lost. Now everyone's shitting on her. And I'm like, fuck, I wish I was her. Because right now I'd be like, motherfucking, I'm gonna fucking show everybody, right? And so, like, nothing would drive me more and put me in the most ninja form of myself than to lose it all, live in a fucking studio, have my family be like, what the fuck? And then, like, literally, like, as like the shitty fucking faucet with the fucking cockroach in the corner. I'd be like, cockroach, we're gonna fucking get it all back, motherfucker. Like, I just. I. And I don't. And I don't know. And I don't know if it's. Cause I secretly, like, want a movie made about me. And that would add some drama to the fucking plot, you know? Like, I don't know what it is, but it's funny. I'm so cozy with Risk because the on paper, bad thing that happens on Risk is actually really intriguing to me.

The last time I saw Gary, he told me privately that in 2020, he was actually afraid that VaynerMedia was going to go out of business. He started to question whether or not his business was going to be able to survive the pandemic. We all got punched in the mouth and we saw how many businesses went away after that. And you know what we did as a country? We inflated. We printed our way through it. We got over the punch as fast as possible. I think now we're experiencing the real punch where interest rates are higher, where it's harder to get funding, where the market is softening. Now entrepreneurs are getting punched in the mouth. It will be interesting to see who really wants it, who really believes in what they're doing, and who has the stones to be able to weather this storm. I believe that we're in the punch of the mouth that Gary said we needed. And this is where entrepreneurs are going to have to toughen up, sharpen their skillset, cast bigger visions and become real entrepreneurs, not just fake Internet entrepreneurs like we've had for the last 10 years. One of the ways to sharpen your sword is to get around people like Gary, get into the room where there are entrepreneurs who are overcoming these types of challenges. One of the ways you can do that is by coming to the next Capitalism Conference. This is where we invite the Gary's of the world, the other entrepreneurs who inspire me, and the people who are winning from our community. We put them into one room for two and a half days. We open up our network and our Rolodex and our strategies for one another. If you want details for the next Capitalism conference, go to capitalism.com Capcom and you can see all the dates, details and speakers there. I'm ryan moran with capitalism.com you just watched clips from Gary's talk at one of our conferences and we frequently release these here on the channel. So I hope you decide to subscribe to this channel so that you can see all of the best keynotes from the Capitalism Conference. And I hope to see you at the next one. Thanks for watching. See you next time.