I Spent $75,000 on Gary Vee's NFTs

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I did it. Yep, I bought $75,000 worth of Gary Vaynerchuk's the Friends Project. Of course, a couple of days later, the bitcoin and ethereum markets crashed like 50%. So in today's dollars, it's like $35,000, but at the time, 75 grand. I bought his little trading card things. I don't really get NFTs yet. I mean, I can see how they're going to play out. Like, I can see how this is probably going to change business. But for now, NFTs are still kind of weird for me. I had to learn the entire process of how to buy them and what they are and all that stuff just to buy Gary Vee's NFTs. And I mean, personally, I love Gary. I love his work. I've spent some time with him in person. The project itself seemed a little bit odd to me. It seemed, it seemed like a little bit of a strange project, but there is still a tremendous amount of value to what he was doing. Enough for me to say, I'm actually going to budget $75,000 to buy into what Gary is doing. And by the way, I don't care who you are, $75,000 is a. Something that I learned early in my career was that business is about relationships. Business is about the social capital that you have with people more than your skill set, more than your knowledge, more than anything, it's social capital. And part of social capital is how you're able to contribute to other people. So that is your skill set, that, that is what you're able to create. But the leverage comes from the amount of relationship capital that you have from your network. And so six, seven, eight years ago, I started being very intentional about who I surrounded myself with. Now, full disclosure. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. My father was a teacher for 30 some years. My mom was a stay at home mom until my parents split. Then she went back to work. And I did not have well connected mentors. And so I learned that in order for me to connect with the people that I wanted to connect with, I had to find the back door. I had to find another way in. Sometimes that simply meant finding out what somebody wants and being resourceful enough to get it to them. Other times it meant just having enough cash to buy your way into that. That's the mindset behind masterminds, behind networking events. And you can work your way up. You know that old Kevin Bacon joke that you're six or seven degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Look, it's actually more like three from anybody in the world that you want to meet. Sometimes that means just strategically positioning yourself to be one step closer to a person that you want to meet. Now I think it's tacky to just like have a hit list of people that you want to meet throughout your life and then and going right after them and trying to make that happen. What I do is when I meet someone and I know that that person knows something or has something or has figured something out that I want to develop for myself, that's when I strategically position myself around them. Because ultimately you become like the people that you spend time with. And so a few years ago I started having an annual event called the Capitalism Conference. And the Capitalism Conference is my excuse to bring in entrepreneurs that I'm most fascinated with and spend some time with them. And so I pay their speaking fees, I pay for their travel and their meals and their lodging, and I sell tickets. And that is how I strategically position myself and also distill business knowledge down to my community. And the first speaker that I ever hired to keynote one of our events was Gary Vaynerchuk. This is back in 2015. And I wanted to meet Gary Vaynerchuk because he had a goal of buying the New York Jets. My personal goal is to buy the Cleveland Indians, whatever they'll be called. And it's time for me to buy them. And since this person that I saw on the Internet was 10 years older than me and 10 years ahead of me, I said, I want to strategically be around this person. And I paid Gary Vaynerchuk his speaking fee to come speak at our event. He surprised me. He was nothing like I expected him to be. He was quiet, he was humble, he was giving. He was very focused on everybody else but himself. He gave a lot of attention to my then 6 month old daughter and her mom and was very present with them. He had no other distractions going on. And so I became even more fascinated with this person. And so he got added to my list of people. I want to spend more time with this person, see how they think, see how they approach business, see how he is looking at the world. And so I have done things to strategically position myself around Gary Vaynerchuk over the years. When he launched Empathy Wines, I bought a lot of wine. There's like cases of this all over my house. I did that because buying the amount of wine that I bought got me one meeting with Gary. It was tens of thousands of dollars. I got one meeting. When he does charity raises, I will donate to the charity when it will get me a meeting or a zoom call or some way for me to have a face to face interaction with Gary Vaynerchuk. Now, some people would call this like stalking.

I mean, I'll take that hit for me every year or two years. When I get an hour or two with Gary, I hear him differently because I'm in a different place. And Gary is a person that I want to model again because he is 10 years ahead of me, 10 years closer to a goal than me, and is 10 times more successful than me. It would be silly for me not to do whatever it took to get an hour with that person. There's a couple other people in my life that I do this for too. One is Brian Lee. Brian Lee is an entrepreneur who I Revere. He has $4 billion companies on his resume. I will strategically position myself to be around Brian Lee because I want to be, think, and act like that entrepreneur. And in doing so, genuine relationships get built. Sometimes in order for you to meet the people that you want to meet, you have to be strategic at first. And strategic means willing to give, willing to be first in line, willing to support when other people think it's crazy, right? So like with, with Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary wrote an endorsement for my book. It's on the COVID of my book. 12 months to 1 million. He didn't do that because I bought enough wine. He didn't do that because I bought his NFT project because there's some relationship. We're not homies. He doesn't call me to talk about the jets.

But there's a little bit of a relationship, enough for him to endorse my book. And, like, that was. That was a big deal to me. A really big deal to me. Brian Lee, who I just absolutely admire, he and I converse from time to time. I will go out of my way to help the businesses that he invests in for no other reason than I genuinely like Brian. I genuinely want to spend more time with Brian. There's people in our lives that we go out of our way to be around to help and to serve because they have more to offer than you do.

And a lot of entrepreneurs don't want to be humble enough to just do what it takes to be around people who are ahead of you, who have more to offer than you. And so when Gary Vaynerchuk launched Veefriends, and I saw that one of the offerings was a dinner per year for three years for $60,000, I mean, I spend that amount of money on masterminds every year. I spend that amount of money to be around other people to network with. And I thought to myself, if I spent that money to be around Gary, like, that's just as good as joining a networking group. And then I spent an additional $15,000 to join his Zoom hangout. I think it was the Hangout hawk that I bought. And that's five Zoom calls a year for three years. That's 15 times that Gary can see me face to face. So based on our existing relationship, based. Plus three dinners in person, plus 15 opportunities to converse face to face, that's worth $75,000 and more. And here's a question. What am I hoping to get out of this? What's my ask? What am I wanting to get? What am I hoping to get out of a relationship with Gary or Brian Lee or Brooke Castillo or like any of the other big people that I have built some sort of a relationship with from a business setting? Answer, Nothing. If you go into a relationship hoping to get something, then you're always looking for the ask. It's now a transactional relationship. If I have three dinners with Gary and meet with him 15 times over, Zoom. And pay him $150,000 to keynote an event next year, and I get nothing out of it, that's okay. Because.

If you approach it from any other perspective, as you're hoping to build a genuine relationship, then you're asking, then you're trying to take. You're not trying to contribute. And relationships don't get built that way. If there's someone that you want to meet and be around, you better be willing to find ways to contribute to them in any way that you can. Without an ask at all, without even having the thought in my brain, this could lead to something. You have to completely eliminate that in order to show up from a place of genuine service. My only hope in spending time with these other entrepreneurs that I network my way into is to become a different person, is for me to transform, for me to adopt the thoughts and behaviors that those people that I admire have. That's the win. That's the win. And as you become that type of person, you attract a different level of success. That's where the ROI is. Now, I mentioned before that I had to learn this entire NFT world in order to do that. It was some legwork on my part and I liked going through the process. But what stands out to me after going through the process is that NFT technologies are going to dramatically impact the way that we do business in the future. For example, so I have a book sold 50,000 some odd copies, called 12 Months to 1 Million. And it struck me, could we do a special release of my book as an NFT that got access to me, Meaning I have all these people who have demands on my time. If somebody goes out and buys a platinum version of 12 months to 1 million and there's only a hundred of them available and they buy it for $10,000. So I've just now sold a million dollars worth of books. But with that platinum version, it had access to me twice a year at my home where I would actually look at their business and open my network to them. That's interesting. That's interesting because now I can make everything that I do an asset for other people. If somebody else can take that book and now resell it to someone else, instead of canceling their membership, they can sell their membership to somebody else. This becomes really interesting to me. Anytime you want to sell something, anytime that you want to raise money for something, you can back it in the asset that is NFTs now. Right now that's just in strange things like character cards and pieces of art that people are selling and flipping. But in the future, that may apply to everything. The limited number of available items creates a marketplace for it, which means that if you buy something, it's backed in something. So this has changed my opinion on the whole crypto space because now I see how we could collateralize just about every intangible that you want to buy. Intangibles like I sell events and I sell masterminds and I sell mentorships in our capital incubator. Can you imagine how strong of a sell it would be if you weren't just paying to come to the event? You weren't just buying a mastermind spot, but that purchase was actually an investment because you had an asset that backed it up. That's where I think this is going and that's how this has changed my brain about how this landscape is going to take place. And it's making me rethink the way that I do business moving forward. All right, so that is why I spent happily invested $75,000 into Vee Friends. I'm actually considering buying more. I mean, now that Etherium has come down in price. The gift goats on sale. Like, I might want to buy some gift goats. Find out what Gary's going to send me a couple of times a year. We'll see. Or maybe I'll buy a lunch lion or whatever it's called. See Gary a few more times a year. Ethereum's down, so why not buy Gary when he's on sale? So I think that the relationships you build are the best ROI you will ever have. So you may not have 75 grand, but you have time and you have the ability to find out what people want and find ways to get it for them. That's how you build relationship capital. And that will take you very far. Hey, I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses that they can sell. If you want my time, if you want to work with me on your business, here's how you do it. We have an incubator called the capitalism incubator. Capitalism incubator is where I and my team will work with entrepreneurs to help them cast a clear vision, launch profitably, and build the foundation of a seven figure business that they can scale and sell. We stack the deck with our network that I've spent more than $75,000 building over the last decade. And we bring that into the incubator to help people have the resources and the relationships that they need in order to have a business they can sell. And entrepreneurs pay for that. And it's a really good investment. And you can find out what we do over@capitalism.com Inc. That's Inc. And this incubator. This experience will transform you and your business vision. So that you become the type of person who's capable of having a seven figure business that you can sell. Or if you're not ready for that, just subscribe to the channel. We do a lot of stuff here for free. Take care.