Gary V on The Content Excuse Keeping Home Service Owners Invisible

Posting better content helps reset the algorithm. The algorithm is just people. There is no algorithm. It's people's interest in what you're saying. Taking a break and coming back and doing more bad stuff isn't going to help you. Most people get into levels of depression because they have a viral moment and do nothing with it. It's the reverse. You don't need a big boulder. You need thousands of little pebbles consistently. We all love candy, but if you eat candy for lunch, breakfast, and dinner, you will eventually throw up. And so I would say a lot of why I'm me is I've consistently stayed protein in a world of candy, and I think in the end I win.

Thanks, my man. Happy New Year.

Yeah. Even before trading cards, which was really fifth, sixth, seventh grade, you know, I was just, you know, you know this, Tone, like some people are just born for certain things. Like when I see athletes or when I see musicians, you know, back in the day, like a lot of tennis players were like 14 and 15 and winning Grand Slams, especially on the female side. These Olympians that are like 12 and winning the gold medal. Like I was just that person with business. Like by fourth grade I was getting D's and F's because I couldn't understand why it mattered. I was so passionate about lemonade stands and washing cars. Like if it snowed I wanted to shovel snow for five bucks instead of sledding. If it was 90 degrees out I wanted to sell lemonade or ring doorbells and wash cars. It was just so in me and, yeah, I just refined that game as a child and then as a teenager, and I've just always been in both business but also hard work. I think there's some people smarter than me that are like business people but they figure out like, let me code this, and I've just been in both, like get dirt under my fingers and grind. I've tried to be smart but I love the process. I love the practice. I love the late nights. Like I'm just that person that's process over profits. Even like the money has shockingly not been at some level the motivator even as a kid. It was just like more fun for me to create a fake little store in the neighborhood and have people buy things than getting the money. I didn't even want to buy stuff. Like it wasn't even like that. It was just the game. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And I would say that for a lot of immigrants like myself, you know, because I was born in a shithole. The USSR was a bad place. And then we came here, we were dead broke. So we lived in a shithole in Queens, like New York. Like I don't think it was it per se the immigrant. Like I would argue an American born in a trailer park has that same advantage, which is like when you're from the dirt, you're a different animal. I mean, it's not complicated, right? Like does a zoo animal beat a lion that grew up in the zoo beat a lion from the jungle? Ever. And so, you know, and then I had the best circumstance, which is we didn't have money but my mom filled every room with nothing but love and optimism and joy. So some people grow up in shit but the parents are in a bad place and it's dark, you know?

Yeah. 100%. And I felt like I got the most love. If literally I got in a car accident and the person didn't live, my mom would come out with a shovel. Doesn't have the best back, but she'd be like, 'Let's go ahead and take care of this.' If I did go to prison, she'd move next to the prison. I mean, I'm her baby boy. Like, that's it. Like, she's going to be close.

His best claim is word is bond. He really... My dad, I don't know what my dad thought. I didn't see him until I was 14. He worked every minute. Like he showed me how to live a certain life. Not... He didn't tell me. My dad wasn't... I didn't have a dad that told me life lessons. My dad showed me life lessons. How to be a man, provide for your family, be your word is what you back up. He was old school like that. He didn't even know what I was doing in sports. I think my dad, this is real, showed up to one sporting event in my life and it was because the baseball game was like five minutes from the liquor store and he popped out. It was huge for me. I mean, I can't even explain to you what it feels like in my body right now. It was like I was shook that he was there. It was that out of character, out of my norm. He woke up and went to work before I woke up and he came home after I went to bed and he worked seven days a week. So I didn't see my father until I started working in the liquor store that he had when I was 14. And that's when I really got to know my dad. The next 20 years was all my dad. I was in the liquor store all the time. And he was cynical and different than my mom. But my mom had already laid the foundation and my dad was able to sprinkle in his things and, you know, I'm obviously incredibly grateful for my parents.

Well, there was only probably one year of that, Tone. There was only one year where I wasn't thinking about the business that I saw my dad. It was the first year I worked in a liquor store. I hated it. You know, I just came from making actual money. 300 bucks, 600 bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks at the malls of New Jersey selling cards and being my own boss at 13 and feeling like a million bucks. And now I'm working my dad's liquor store on the weekends instead. And I'm getting paid $2 an hour to bag ice in a dingy basement like I was Sloth from Goonies with some 17-year-old degenerate who hated my father. And I'm bagging ice for 10 hours a day. My pinky's about to fall off because it's so cold in that ice box. I'm like, 'What the hell is this?' I was in the basement. I hated it. And what I learned was what I didn't want to do. My dad was a dick to his employees, straight up. He would yell at them. I didn't like it. This was not... Where's this optimistic rainbows that I was used to with my mom? It was year two when I went upstairs and started stocking shelves where I started thinking about the business because I could watch customers, you know? I was a psycho. I was like watching how they bought, what they bought, why. I was 14, psycho, bro. Like business savant in hindsight. It was my norm. I didn't know anything else. But now looking back, I'm like that's just crazy. I was so in that game. And what I learned a lot of things. No question. The thing I learned from my dad was no complaining and hard work. Period. End of the story. You know, like did not complain. Like it just didn't even cross his mind nor my mother for that matter. Everything was so shitty back in the USSR in the 60s and 70s when they were growing up that the worst things happening in America. Like my mom, my grandma got mugged the first week we're in America and we were just happy that she didn't go to jail for 10 years. You know what I mean? It was like such gratitude of being in America. So, you know, it was hard work and discipline and non-complaining. I also learned not to eat breakfast and lunch.

Yeah. My dad did not eat breakfast or lunch and I don't eat breakfast or lunch. Like 35 years later, that's been like my framework. All this intermittent fasting that got popular like five years ago, I've been on that for 20 years.

Well, if I'm thinking about your audience and all that and what I... Good news, let me tell you the real story. I started working in my dad's store in 1990. I didn't launch winelibrary.com until 1997. I made a big impact on my dad's business before the internet. The internet obviously took us to the moon and then Wine Library TV. I got wine internet famous and that took our business to the moon. But there was several things. First, I was into merchandising. So my father's... the first impact I had on my dad was making signs for the store. Like there would just be a box with wine and be like $4.99. And I'm like, 'No one wants to buy this shit.' I'd make a big ass sign and be like, 'This wine pairs with chicken and it's better than $10 wines,' and all of a sudden we're selling three times as much. I'm like, that was number one. Number two was the customer's always right even when they're wrong. My dad was very good about the customer being right. But my dad's very principled. So if a customer was trying to be cute, he didn't like that. And I definitely changed our culture of like, that's a battle not worth fighting. You cursing out a customer on the floor who's trying... forget about stealing. I'm talking about being cute with a coupon or something. Well, the other customer sees that and that's bad for our reputation and that's going to mess up our... So, a little bit of that, little controlling the emotions. And then the biggest thing, my dad's liquor store was called Shoppers Discount Liquors. We sold beer and liquor. I was very good at listening to the customer. I knew that people wanted to buy more premium wine from us. So, I brought in a lot more premium wine. And I also got educated about wine and started really getting wine nerdy. There was more margin in wine than there was in beer and liquor. So really those were some of the big... and then most of all, brother, employees. If my dad was on right now and you were like, 'Yo, OG Sasha, that's his name, Sasha, what did the kid teach you?' He would say to treat the employees better. And I don't blame my dad. My dad's not a bad person. Let me tell you, Tommy, what was going on. You know, it's like, you know what was going on, Tommy, was that in Russia everyone stole because the government owned everything, Tommy.

So my dad just thought everyone was going to steal in America too. They didn't. He didn't. Like, you know, like he just grew up in an environment where employees stole everything. In Russia was the black market. You worked at the butchers. The government owned the butcher store. You would steal some of the meat and try to trade it for some clothes. Everything was scarce, you know.

So, you know, my dad's first piece of advice to me the first day I went to the store was keep an eye on the employees. They try to steal. That was his first piece of advice to me.

So, I think I transformed him from seeing the employees as enemies to seeing the employees as teammates.

You know how like some people are like talent agents or like remember like back in the day? How old are you, brother? Tommy, how old?

Great. You're a hair underneath me. I'm 50. You might have caught this, but you definitely are probably aware of it. Back in like the 70s, like these A&R guys in music, they'd have to go to a club and like catch, you know, Guns N' Roses playing to 50 people and be like, 'These guys,' you know what I mean? Like someone next to catch them early.

That's right. Like, exactly. Like, and in sports, right, you see like a kid, you're like, I see, you know, like someone...

So, I have that in business. I do. I have it. Like to be dead serious, here's your answer. In 1995, I went into a dorm room because there was some commotion and they're like, 'You got to see this.' And I had heard of it like a little bit like on the news or something. The worldwide web, the information superhighway. Bro, I did not own a computer. I was not a tech nerd. Like, I wasn't that kid. But I literally watched, literally for the young kids listening, I watched someone go on the internet on AOL. Like I stood behind him on a desktop computer and heard that [dial-up sound] if you remember, and watched a human go on the internet and I was like, 'What the...' you know, like quick, like I was like... and then I waited an hour because everybody got like 5, 10 minutes to mess around and I sat down on this... changed my life, brother. I just typed in like buying baseball cards and we didn't even go to the web. We stayed in AOL and I found a bulletin board where people were like, 'Eric Davis rookie card, nine bucks,' like looking for Donruss '82. I was like, what is... like my brain was... and I was like, this is that Prodigy stuff that some kid told me about a couple years... I like, this is real. I'm giving you my internal thinking. And bro, 20 minutes later, I swear to God on my kid's health, I was like, 'This is going to change my life.' That's it. Like, I don't know what else to tell you. I just knew that every person on earth was going to do this and that I had to figure out how to use it for business. And the two things I used it for were the only two things I knew. I found eBay a few months later and started posting and buying and flipping. And I started trying to convince my father that we needed a website for a single store liquor store in New Jersey. And I registered winelibrary.com. That was a name I was kicking around with my dad because I wanted to change our store from Shoppers Discount Liquors. And we launched one of the first, one of the first five e-commerce wine stores in the country.

And you know this, brother, like hustlers like us, like we find the thing. We're not scared to waste. You know what my biggest strength is? I wonder if this is yours, Tommy, and I wonder if I want people to hear this. I'm not scared to waste my time even now when it's extremely valuable. Bro, I get paid... I'm just being very honest here. I get paid $350,000 to give a keynote speech for an hour.

Right. In New York City, which takes me 10 minutes to get to, but I'll sit and spend nine hours on something that might never materialize because I know if all I need is one of those things: Bitcoin, blockchain, AI, social media. I mean, it's happened to me, you know, time and time again. I've wasted many hours to not waste several hours that have changed the course of my life. And everybody out here, brother, that's listening, many of them are scared to waste their time when their time is worthless.

And so that's basically VCs. You know, you don't hit them all out of the park, but you got to be willing to take the time, meet the people.

I used to... I've run the gamut. You know, again, I don't know if you're doing video or audio, but these stock certificates above my head, which... those, that's Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. They were the first three companies I invested in. I killed it. I like, you know, like you know sometimes your first album's your best. Actually in music a lot of times your best album is your... your first album is your best album. But you know, in those scenarios I looked at the horse and the jockey. So Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr had already existed when I invested. They were early, first, first little couple, first year, first couple months, first year. So I could see what it was. I could taste it back to like, you know, the internet thing. And then when I met the kids, Ev Williams, who was Jack Dorsey's partner, he was primary for me. They were really co-founders. Mark Zuckerberg obviously went on to be one of the iconic businessmen of all time. And this really brilliant kid, David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, who I would argue understood where social was going. I think TikTok is more Tumblr than it is Facebook. You see interest instead of social. Anyway, all three of them, workaholics, you know, ambition. I felt like they could will their way to the other side. Later, Tommy, because I want to teach people about my mistakes, after those three where I loved both the platform and the person, later I started investing in companies even earlier. So, I had to hear a pitch of an idea and judge the kid. I started to overvalue education, which was crazy because I hated school and thought every... like it meant nothing, but too many of the startups, the kids went to Stanford and Harvard, so I got tricked. And so I started overvaluing the college they went to. That was bad. I started overvaluing the idea because I couldn't see the product because they were pitching me the idea, it was early, and I thought about how I as a good operator would operate it, but I didn't know how to judge a kid if they knew how to operate. I could judge their energy, their tenacity, their hopes and dreams. So, my chapters for a long time in very early startup life, early stage, $4 million valuation, angel round, that was very... that proved to be great because I hit some real home runs, Venmo and other things of that nature. But definitely in hindsight was a little bit more guessing than I would like because if I want to gamble, I'll go gamble, right? If I want to invest, I'm now looking for the jockey and the horse and I want to see the horse. Show me your little pony. Like, show me at six months. Like, now what I need...

Show me. I don't even care. You don't need any success. I need to see it.

Right. Like, I can't look at the deck anymore. Show me the product six months. I can project if it's going to be different. Netflix was very different when it came out than what it is now. You know, you know Venmo. I can project, but I need to see it. I need to touch it. And so, that's where I'm at as an investor.

It's not advice. It's I wish I knew what my kryptonite was in my 20s so I could fix it. Gary Vee, Tommy, as you can tell on this podcast, he's as a public figure very candid, shoots it straight. Gary Vaynerchuk in real life, if I like you, even if I... even I don't even need to love you. If I like you, I struggled with giving you actual feedback because I was scared that you would get scared and get messed up or like I didn't... I didn't value candor. So, I wish in my 20s I understood that candor was a gift you were giving to people, not a scare tactic.

We call it, we call it internally kind candor.

You know, I have 20...

I have 2,700 employees at VaynerX and our marketing firm VaynerMedia, and we call it kind candor. And I've been training it to my team and it's changed our business.

I... you know this, brother. You're now in your career. A lot of our managers use candor or feedback as an excuse to be a dick face.

The end. We have managers, you and I, who have kids that are more talented than them reporting to them, and the manager is going to suppress them because they're scared they're going to leapfrog them.

So if you just call it firm feedback or if you just call it candor, well now you got a problem because people are going to weaponize it. By calling it kind candor and holding our leaders accountable to it, they know they're getting graded by the people that they're giving feedback as well. And one of the things we ask is, did they have any question? Did the person giving you this feedback show any level of humanity? What does that mean? It means that, you know, it's that old Mary Poppins song. I don't remember it, but it's like a little sugar on it. Like, you know, I don't...