Gary Vee’s Secret To Become A Successful Entrepreneur (The Founder Hotline feat. Gary Vee)

You know, if I can help Andrew, mazel tov. If that program then helps others at the cost associated with it, mazel tov. It's all just fucking good on good on good and yes, I think the way we do business is gonna be the way everyone does business in the future because it's going to be required to be successful and if people can move on that version faster which is more about EQ than IQ then they'll be more successful and that's what I want for people. Not successful with money. Fucking fuck money. Successful with content and joy and happiness. Of course money matters. I don't dismiss I'm an entrepreneur, I gotta buy the New York Jets, so that's gonna— I'm not gonna be able to win that. I'm not gonna buy the Jets with hearts, but like, but you can do both. You can, it can be kind and it can be entrepreneurial. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be rugged. Nice guys finish first. The second you figure out that nice guys finish first, not last, is the second good things will happen in your life.

First question for you, Gary. is, of course, we have to throw in our, like, shout out to Day One Fellow Cheryl Patel asks, Gary, you've dealt with failures all your life, publicly as well. It seems to be an inevitable thing in entrepreneurship, but I'm curious how successful entrepreneurs like you are able to get past so many failures but somehow keep going.

Failures are personal. They're not public. Meaning, when I fail, I have the enjoyment of leaning into my addiction of humility, and I love that I've learned, and I don't have to make those same pattern mistakes in the future, so I double win. I get another dose of humility, which I achieve for and strive for, and I get a learning that I'm smart enough and capable enough of not repeating. The reason people are scared of failure is 'cause they worry about people's opinions on the outside. Their parents, their siblings, and the general public. Anonymous people on Twitter and Discord and the world. Which is silly because the reality is it's your life and what you really learn is you've gotta, the reason people are scared of failure is 'cause they have egos. Yeah. They actually think that their life is that important, that people's judgment of their failures is important. I know, even with my significance of awareness and popularity, success, notoriety, that at the end of the day, I'm just one little speck of 8 billion people on Earth during a little 100-year window on the universe's trajectory of all time, and so I, I'm humbled by that, and thus, when I fail, That's me with myself, and that has nothing to do with any of you. Has nothing to do with any of you. Let alone the people closest to me. It has nothing to do with them. All of a sudden, once failure becomes an insular game, not an external game, failure does not become scary. It actually becomes interesting.

I love how you didn't just like try to diminish failure and say it's not failure. Failure, you leaned into it. Correct,

Andrew. It's a really interesting insight. People are like, I didn't fail, I learned. Fuck that shit, you failed. I fail. Like, like, Vayner, I've tried to do an events company at VaynerX for 13 years. I've had 3 stop and starts. Those were failures. VaynerLive failed. I tried to do a sampling company. VaynerSampling failed. Like, failure's real. It's awesome. I love that that shit didn't work.

Wow. Here's a follow-up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna unashamedly say this is my follow-up. When do you know to shut something down or look for an exit strategy when things are, maybe, you know, on the other side of failure, you know it, but in the middle of it— You don't. Entrepreneurs, okay. Yeah, I'm— You have to think through that.

Yeah, I'm looking at a lot of faces here, Charles, Matt Mazzia, like a lot of people I respect, like we've all done good and bad in that, right? Oh, God, you don't know, right? We sold Empathy Wines to Constellation right before COVID If we waited 6 months, we would've done better 'cause everybody was paying more for DTC brands, right? Like, so we were wrong, even though we had a massive exit. Like, you know, like, you don't know. You're guessing. But I would tell for a lot of people here, if you're starting to actually burn out, meaning you don't enjoy it anymore, one thing I'm always fearful of is the following scenario, and this one will land, Andrew, for you and many others. Okay, should I sell this? 'Cause I'm really actually not liking it anymore. I've got this $1 million, $10 million, $13 million offer on the table, but oh fuck, I know that for the next 24 months I can drive this train. I'll eat a little more shit, but I can sell it for $25 million. A lot of people do that, and sometimes it works out. The problem is, other times the recession comes, interest rates go up, VCs stop funding, and your $10 million offer goes to zero. I have many friends, publicly known people, who passed on massive exits only to then do an AccuHire and make pennies on the dollar for spending another 2 and a half years being unhappy. So to me, the only practical answer to your question is selling it when you're not liking it. Because you don't know if it's gonna be financially better or financially worse 'cause it's out of your control. But you do know that you've sustained for the last year unhappiness Driving it, so you should sell it.

I'm sitting on that unhappiness. Yeah, KP, you're up next. We got this back and forth going.

I know, we needed that pause though. That was great. Gary, another question from David Salin. You're a huge stan. Shout out, David. What advice do you have for founders who maybe are burnt out or they're in between You know, in the phases between 2 different things, looking to meet the right folks to start the next thing. Like, how do you, how do they go about figuring out who the right people are for the next thing?

By putting themselves out there. By DMing people right now as they're sitting in this, you know, you're, people, it's all about fear, my friend KP. Like, people are scared to reach out to somebody. People are scared to network with people 'cause they're worried about, they're worried about being, you know, declined. I get this. You know, in high school I was scared to like ask the prettiest girl out because I didn't want the no. Nos are scary. But in business I've never had that. And so, you know, it's just the truth, right? It's just the truth. Like, how do you—

Does it ever go away, like the fear of rejection?

Yes, by practicing. What people don't understand, and this is where modern parenting lost their way, the last 30 years modern parenting tried to eliminate the taste of losing and and it demonized losing, and it demonized people saying no, and so now people are fully scared of it. The way to get there is by getting a ton of nos. No is good. So it's kind of like anything, swimming, riding a bike, hooking up, all the things that we were scared of through life, you got better at it the more you did it. And so like, you need to ask people like, do you want to have a business meeting? And they don't reply to your DM or your email, that's good. The amount of people that are mad at me in the world right now for not replying to their email, is probably quite high, but the reality is, is I'm just one human being and I get 10,000 of them a day. I can't get there, and comma, the weird part is, it's actually probably equally as good that I'm not replying to them as if they actually got the 15 minutes, because it's another at-bat of getting a no.

Unbelievable. Andrew, you got a question?

Another David following up, and actually a question, I think. How do you, so this is you, Gary, how do you handle the stress of being a founder and entrepreneur?

I don't have the stress of being a founder and entrepreneur because I found, you know, this is why I don't like GaryVee. I don't want people to map towards him because he got lucky. I have to remind everybody, I'm 46 years old, I'm gonna be 47 in 3 weeks. I was selling lemonade at 6 as my hobby. I was selling baseball cards at 10 as my hobby. It snowed in Edison, New Jersey, and I grabbed a shovel in my garage, not ran outside with a sled. I love entrepreneurship and work. I am a very loud advocate that I was a D and F student. That was unheard of. I want everybody to understand this. There's people in their 40s here. That was unheard of. Yeah. In the '80s, especially for an immigrant from Eastern Europe. Unheard of. I am a— I'm no different than an actress, an athlete, a musician. I've been this guy from the beginning. I'm like Beyoncé, LeBron, not that I'm them in entrepreneurship, but like, they didn't know they were gonna do anything else in their whole life. Neither did I. So when you ask me, do I have stress? I don't have stress. I have gratitude. Every time I'm losing, Every time I'm publicly bashed, every time I lose money, every time, like, I get 39 battle scars a day, but I love it 'cause I don't do this shit for the money or for the fame. I've been doing this long before any of you knew me. I wasn't even a public person until I was 30 years old, to remind everybody. Now every person's a public person by the time they're 15 on TikTok. This was not my— this is not what I thought I was gonna do. I was just gonna be a businessman. and the world turned in a certain way that worked out for me from a popular culture standpoint, but it is not my addiction. I don't need your attention. I don't need your admiration. I don't live for it. I just, I'm public because I think it's business development strategy, but it is not what I aspire to do. I aspire to be an entrepreneur, so I am doing my life's mission. What's your life's mission? I feel like I'm a teacher or guidance counselor or a religious figure. I'm doing my destiny. I'm so fucking happy. Do you understand?

I love that. I mean, Gary, the guidance counselor thing, I feel like is super overlooked by a lot of people, and it was one of the indirect reasons why we started this Founder Hotline, you know, to be honest, 'cause we thought a lot of founders could use Support and guidance from somebody else, and just like the, the support system to say, I hear you, I see you. That's, that's like takes them a long way. So you've been doing this for decades, and I appreciate, I appreciate you doing that. Um, Gary, one follow-up with the— you'd mentioned the age thing, right? And I know a lot of audience here are above 30, above 40, and I, I'm in circles— I'm 34, Gary, you're 46— I'm in circles where people think 22 is too old. You haven't made it yet. How did you develop a healthy relationship with time, Gary? That's my question.

I hung out with 80-year-olds when I was a kid. I gravitated towards grandparents and great-grandparents from a very young age. My best friend when we first came to America, 'cause we were poor and everybody was working, was my great-grandfather. He passed unfortunately a year into being in America, but I have always gravitated towards them, and what you learn when you spend time with 80-year-olds, if I could tell anybody anything here, spend time with an 80-year-old that is not your grandparent. Just have a combo, a dinner, strike up a conversation. To this day, the only people I strike up conversations with at airports are people that I think look like Yoda. Like, are they 90? I want to talk to them because they've lived it, they give you context, and I'm practical. Like, you're 36, KP, right? Like, think about this. Think about, think about 15 years ago when you were 21. You probably remember your 21st birthday, right?

Yep, yep, yep.

It feels like yesterday and it feels like 7 trillion years ago, right?

True, both are true.

Right? So if you think about those 15 years, you can think about how much you've accomplished how much opportunity you had, whether you accomplished it or not, how many reps, how many at-bats, how much time that actually is. Now, what I do is when I'm 36 and I do that 15 thing, then I go, in 15 years I'll be 51. When you hang out with older people, you realize 51's a child. I have unlimited 50, 60, and 70-year-old friends who act no different than my 30-year-old friends. Yeah. And so a lot of you see me publicly going deep into youth culture. I love the kids, I love the Gen Zers, the young millennials, but I spend a lot of my not public time with 60, 70, 80-year-olds, and it's context, and that context allows me to understand.

Brilliant. Andrew.

Yeah, so follow-up around time. So this is from Nina. How do you prioritize your time? How do you make decisions on Within, you just gave us a little bit of a sense of older versus younger, but how do you just with 1,000 priorities in a day say this is what I'm gonna focus on now, today, next?

I have 3 full-time admins and 2 chiefs of staff. We have a 1-hour meeting every Thursday to look at the week ahead. We analyze every minute on the minute. The meeting I had right before here was a 15-minute meeting. The meeting before that was a 15-minute meeting. I get a lot done 'cause I believe in 15s. I think everybody in here has 1-hour meetings that are actually 7-minute meetings. You multiply that times 183 meetings a year, you can imagine what ends up happening with efficiency. I go with my intuition and my gut. I've got a ton of things going on. I have 8 different companies inside of VaynerX, the holding company, and I'm the active CEO of VaynerMedia. So I'm a chairman of 7 other companies within that holding company. I have VeeFriends, which is taking up an enormous amount of time. I have my family, my personal life. I have my nonprofits. I have GaryVee the brand. I have tons of investments. I have a fund. I have a lot going on, but the real answer, and this is gonna be a bomb, the real answer is I don't judge myself when the last week wasn't as efficient as it could have been. The number one reason that people struggle with time management Is 'cause they beat themselves up for not having a productive week, day, or year, and they don't realize that it's just subjective, and they're grading their own homework, and they're fucking themselves up.

I couldn't agree more. I think the productivity culture is sometimes taking us to the extreme.

Yeah, because productivity is subjective. When people are like, Gary, you're saying yes to too many things, I'm like, let me tell you something I said yes to that you would've said no to, that led to X, and I achieved more financial success with that serendipity than you did with your entire fucking strategy of douchiness.

There's a thread here of compounding. You pick an attitude, you pick a mindset, and then you let it ride, and you can't get in your own way. But KP, you're up. Yeah,

next question. So Sean Huntington asks, What are the soft skills that make for a great founder? What role has kindness played in building your success, Gary?

Kindness is the foundation to retention. Retention is how you build a real company. Number one. I think accountability's number one. I am baffled by leaders' ability to blame everybody but themselves. If you're a leader by nature, everything is your fault. And so I take accountability in everything that's happened in my personal life in my professional life and everything in between. And so, it doesn't mean, I mean, I have plenty of feelings in my personal and professional life of like what the other parties had to do. And, but I don't spend time on blame or dwelling. The number one characteristic of a winner, leader, is accountability. I think compassion and empathy's the next. The reason I hold no grudges is I understand why. And so, I think compassion and empathy mixed in with accountability. I think competitiveness is a major factor. I think the world has demonized competition in the last 30 years in a very unfortunate way. I think 8th place trophies actually lead to a lot of anxiety and depression with children, now 20 and 30-year-olds. not the reverse. Merit matters, and so I think competitiveness matters, tenacity, ambition. These are kind of the hard soft skills, and then on the soft soft skills, it's definitely kindness, empathy, caring, being sweet, approachable. Like, I just don't understand how people don't know that likability is a direct correlation to something that's healthy.

What does that— how does that show up for a founder? I'm gonna turn it back towards that day one Yep. A very focused topic, right? Someone who's a solopreneur, they're in their own head, they don't have a team, but they obviously have people. How does that come home for somebody who's starting a business?

When you're kind to your vendors, to your potential customers, to the customers that fired you, you win. See, it's— the big problem is that people say like, I'm kind, and then I double-click into it with a founder that I'm an investor in or a leader in my companies, I go, you're kind when it's easy. Right? Next year it's gonna be hard. The economy's getting softer. There's a lot going on. Like, are you kind when it's rough? Uh-huh. Right? How does it show up for a solopreneur? Solopreneur is scared. She in here is scrapping. They're trying to get by. They don't want to go back to their job. So when you're scared and scrapping, The ability to be, I'll give you an example. You're a solopreneur, you got a customer. They're paying you $1,000 a month, you're pumped. They fire you a month in 'cause they have a problem. Are you gonna be kind and gracious to them or are you gonna be like, fuck you? Most people go to fuck you. I think if you go to kind and gracious and understanding, even though it's a gut punch to you, that that comes around long-term and it matters.

Man, I just wanna ask everybody 'cause I'm like looking in the mirror. That's so real. And life is getting harder, right? The economy's getting harder. We're all gonna face that.

Let me give you a super macro one. You being kind in every scenario on the way to your ship sinking is exactly how you're gonna get a meaningful job on the other side of your failed startup, and people just don't look at the bigger picture.

I love that long game. I love that long game.

Yeah, um, well, I mean, I'm just kind of reflecting on it. Um, so I have another question that's, uh, a little bit more tactical. Um, so again, this is by John Wayman, and, uh, John Wayman's a, um, therapist and marriage counselor and is very successful. I want to read— so here's the question: I want to grow my practice by persuading therapists and coaches to follow a more customer-friendly model, which I think the session model, over charging and billing for hours. I can't find people to do this. How do I go about doing that?

By pounding the narrative into the universe at scale. I couldn't find entrepreneurs that wanted to be empathetic and kind to their VCs, their employees, their vendors, and then I just made 7 trillion pieces of creative over a 10-year period, and miraculously you find more. And at first it was dozens, and then it was hundreds, and then it was thousands. Every single person here that wants something accomplished has to realize that scaled creative in social channels and then doing unscalable work, I see Greg S. in here, right, who's behind HiHo, that Q&A platform leads to depth like I've never seen. Which is why I decided to get behind it. And so, you know, there's depth, there's width, but it's all about creative. Like, you know, the world was changed by writers, by poets, by musicians, by public speakers. Everyone here can have the world they want. The problem is most people that are trying to do good or optimism are quieter than people that are trying to do negativity and bad. Negativity and darkness and bad is louder. They're on the offense. Positivity and happiness is content, thus not pushing themselves to be loud. One of the biggest things that I'm trying to do is be loud in the face of negativity, right? I see Vicki, one of my favorites, Vicki J, just like that, like, like, in the face of anything and everything, I always want to go positive and do good. And I'm empathetic to people's feelings, but I'm always gonna push positive things 'cause it is positive. Life is complicated. There's a lot of variables. There's a lot of nuances, but positivity in this room needs to be louder. And so if he wants that, the reason he's not finding it is he's not putting it into the universe enough. More creative, more written word, more audio, more video, more jumping into me saying yes to this. Mhmmm. I had these 30 minutes as if, like, I would've rather have somebody take a razor and slash my face and allocate the 30 minutes to this, given how much work I have to do before January 1st, and yet I said yes to this 'cause intuitively I felt that I could leave a positive impact in these 30 minutes to somebody within the 2,000 people that are sitting here right now, and I was like, fuck it. And so it's painful, and like, after I hang up, I'll be like, fuck, I really probably needed that 30 minutes, but then in 9 months, 16 months, 4 years, somebody here is gonna email me and say, I was I was listening to Twitter Spaces, you said something about accountability or kindness and it changed my life and then all of a sudden it's all fucking pro.

Couldn't co-sign that more. I mean, the very fact that I'm here with you, Gary, was because 10 years ago I was listening to one of these things that you did and I decided I'm gonna be an entrepreneur. I'm gonna show up for myself and after 10 years here I am with you. So it's crazy how ripple effects work. But 2 last bits. Andrew, I know we have the big announcement. I can't wait for Gary to talk about that. I know VaynerX is involved. I can't wait to, you know, get Gary's perspective on it. I want you to announce it. I want you to farm that for a little bit.

Andrew, don't be— Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, don't be mad at me. I'm so pumped. I didn't realize you were announcing what we've been working on in this format, so.

We teased it before you got on, and we were gonna save the final 5 minutes, so.

Oh my God, it's gonna be big. Gary, I can't wait to hear your rant on that. So I'm gonna save like 2, 3 minutes on that one for— but the biggest question, everybody, the elephant in the room, everyone's wondering, pondering, thinking about but not mentioning, Gary, recession.

Yes.

Macro-wise, everyone's freaking out. The banks are freaking out. Every, every news channel is like freaking out. I feel like there's a lot of fear economy going on, but what is your take on it from your vantage point? Number 2, how should entrepreneurs Founders, business people think about this?

Turn fear into common sense and practicality and humility and everything will be beyond okay. Let me say that nice and slow so everyone understands. You should be fearful. Things are happening. Apple doesn't shut down production of iPhones for its health. Banks don't do what they are doing right now which is clamping the fuck down, right? VCs don't, even though they got tons of dollars to deploy, they're smart. What are they gonna just write a check at a higher valuation when they know the market's gonna be different in 6 months? This is real. This is the time to not waste money as a company or as a human being. Maybe you don't need Starbucks every day. Maybe you shouldn't order from Postmates every day. Maybe you should cook in your little apartment. Maybe you don't need to take an Uber. Maybe you don't need to do these things. Like, you definitely don't need to be buying shit that you don't need. You don't need to upgrade your car. You may not need a bigger television. You may not need 17 employees. Maybe it's 11. It's devastating 'cause you don't want bad for those 6 people, but like, if you go out of business, then all 17 people are out of business, right? So, don't take it as fear. It's just real life. Actually realize the last 10 years you should've been grateful for. And you should have gratitude for how easy it was. COVID wasn't hard, COVID was easy. The government printed an unlimited amount of money. Why do you think we're here? I love how people are like, it's their fault. It's not their fault. Who printed all the fucking money? We printed all the money. Like, I don't understand, like, how people don't understand. Like, there's nothing common sense or natural about I'm gonna sit at home and the government's gonna pay me more to sit at home than have an actual fucking job. It sounded all fun, but the problem was People bought fucking Dom P and fucking PlayStation 5s with that money. Like, don't you understand? People are confused out here. They're living insecure and they need stuff to patch up their insecurity or to flex in front of others. Life is about self-esteem, period, end of story. And so what do I think? I think everyone should be very thoughtful about every dollar they have. Now look, I have lots of savings, so I don't have to change anything. I cannot do anything for 7 years different, so I'm less worried. But if I had to change my lifestyle, I would immediately. And I'm gonna change my lifestyle because there's gonna be opportunities. And I'd rather buy a business during this time than have another extra fancy dinner. Like, people need to get the fuckin' smart. Be practical. Like, I don't know what you think's gonna happen. Don't fuckin' hope. And don't ask the government to do something for you. Like, fuckin' do it for yourself. I'm a mom of 2.

There's the wake-up. This is awesome.

I only wish one thing, that this was somehow like— somebody should leak this to Bloomberg, CNBC, instead of whatever they're playing on TV. Gary, thank you so much. All right, the last segment. Andrew, I want you to reflect on— I mean, not reflect, basically like announce to the world the big news about the partnership.

Yeah.

And Gary, I want you to react to it, give your 2 cents on it. Go on.

Here we go. My quick 30 seconds on this. I mentioned before we ran a VaynerX incubator over the summer. It was an awesome first take at our collaboration between Day One, VaynerX. We're running it back. We have a new program launching. It's going live in Q1. It's live now. It's a track within the Day One Fellowship that is where you'll get to connect with and learn from the leaders, the operators from within VaynerX. It's called the Leadership and Operations Track. It's a new program where, you know, Gary's and the VaynerX approach to leadership in business are gonna get put front and center. So you get the killer combination of a day-one program with the community and the collaboration with your peers, with everything, the learning entrepreneurship from some of the best. And so that's live right now. Gary, before I turn you the mic, 'cause I'm gonna let you have the last word, For everyone on this call, we're giving a special announcement launch discount for the first 50 people who sign up. There's a code for 50% off. It's Hotline 50, like the founder hotline. Hotline 50. That's cool. Go to the site. First 50 people. But no, that was it. That's the infomercial.

Wait, wait, wait. So the site that he's referring to is joindayone.com. J-O-I-N-D-A-Y-O-N-E dot com. Okay, so Andrew, I heard you pitch. Everyone's pumped. Gary, can you pitch the same thing in your words?

Look, I love Andrew and his co-founder. Like, you know, I invested. I want them to win. The biggest thing I can bring them value is the Vayner operational way, the VaynerX way. I have 30, 40, 50, 100 executives now that have been with me for almost a decade. They love giving back. This is just a gift. Honestly, what is this? This is karma on top of karma on top of karma. Yeah. You know, if I can help Andrew, mazel tov. If that program then helps others at the cost associated with it, mazel tov. It's all just fucking good on good on good, and yes, I think the way we do business is gonna be the way everyone does business in the future because it's going to be required to be successful, and if people can move on that version faster, which is more about EQ than IQ, then they'll be more successful, and that's what I want for people. Not successful with money. Fucking fuck money. Successful with content and joy and happiness. Of course money matters. I don't diss money. I'm an entrepreneur. I gotta buy the New York Jets, so that's gonna— I'm not gonna be able to win that. I'm not gonna buy the Jets with hearts, but like, but you can do both. You can— it can be kind and it can be entrepreneurial. It doesn't have to be rugged. Nice guys finish first. The second you The second you figure out that nice guys finish first, not last, is the second good things will happen in your life. I have to run. I'm 2 minutes late for something else. Love you. Hit me up on Twitter right now. I'm gonna be reading it 'cause the meeting I'm in to see what you most took away from this meeting. Love you, see ya. Love you, see ya. Bye. Love you, see ya.