Gary Vee: Why You’ll NEVER Be An Influencer (But You Can Still Get RICH!)

0:00Gary V grew up as a Soviet immigrant in New Jersey, started working in his dad's liquor store as a kid, and went on to build multiple hundred million dollar businesses by masteringing brand brand attention. and the internet. Hey everybody, I'm Gary Vaynerchuk and you're watching The Burnouts. I thought it was so interesting that you did, what, for like a year and a half, all of these weekly episodes and you were getting like 30, 50 views and you kept going. Like how did you develop that muscle of consistency without seeing the progress? I'm not doing anything in my life for outside validation.

0:37Nothing. you would be the more we get to know each other the more you will be flabbergasted on my complete and utter detachment from gary v and my business success everything in my life is good because i don't want to do anything for anybody besides myself and my family do you think that there's a level of wealth that you get to you're like okay i've made it this is enough for me yes a hundred thousand a year the only time i ever felt like something was enough for me was when i made a a year when I was like 33. That was the only point. And because that was, as a kid you grew up, that was the number.

1:12Now these poor kids are like, we gotta make 10 million a year. I'm like, Jesus Christ. Like I got very fortunate in DNA, circumstances of growing up with nothing. I grew up with nothing. I was, when we moved to America, we lived in a studio apartment, the size of literally, not this, not this, this. And so I was born hungry. I wasn't fed. and my home was so loving that it taught me that money had no variable on happiness. So I just got very fortunate of the roll of the dice of DNA, circumstances, motherhood, Jersey boy, very lower middle class. Everything shaped up for me to be who I am which is why I'm so passionate to talk about these things with the hope that I can change some people's perspective.

2:01I wish you knew me at 19. you're not getting what I'm saying to you at 49 because I made it. Making it, and you know this because of the way you grew up, money and fame do not change you. They expose you. What I got really lucky at and what I wish on all of you out there right now besides health is liking what you're doing at all times. I also think like something that I was curious about for you is you obviously have invested a lot of time and energy into building your personal brand, but then you also have this enormous business. How do you divide those two priorities? By ebony and flowing. I literally, we broke it down here.

2:40Sometimes it's 18 months of the companies and sometimes it's, in 2017, it was Gary Vee heavy and sometimes it's balanced in by 50-50, 80-20, 90-10 by not overjudging myself if I have the right ratio. Unlike you two ladies, I was a terrible student and so for me, I don't have student tendencies. I don't think there's A, work. I think there's listening to yourself and self-awareness and ebbing and flowing. And here's the big one. All the mistakes, I don't dwell on them. They don't hurt me. In fact, I'm a little weird. I kind of like losing. I like, and not like the cliche, like, oh, I learned, it's not losing.

3:21No, no, I like the humility that comes along with it. I like the punch in the face. I like the, hey, Gary, you think you're fucking big shot? Like, fuck you, here's the game. You were wrong. And I'm like, yeah, I was wrong. You know, like I kind of I'm in a good place with that shit. Would your advice be to entrepreneurs to simultaneously build a personal brand and to work on the business? Or like, how do you how do you measure ROI of me having my personal brand is beneficial for the business or it's a distraction? You're too smart for that. The answer is you do both. I actually don't see creator and entrepreneur as separate things anymore.

3:54I think it's all blending. And I'm saying you're too smart because this was my thesis 15 years ago and I got made fun of it. You guys are living on how do you measure the ROI? Did you see the cosmetics company that just sold for a billion dollars? Yeah, 100%. Come on. Honestly, I feel it's disrespective to your audience to even debate this. If this was a 90-year-old audience or a 70-year-old audience, I would talk about this for 20 minutes. Anybody who's under the age of 30 that does not understand that personal brand equity layered into a business has ROI in it is literally tone deaf. I want to copy a quote that you said to me when we got drinks.

4:27I just want to say this because I thought this is the thing that keeps living in my mind is you said, as tech continues to advance, the only thing that's going to matter is the personal brand because the tech is going to become table stakes. Right now, you know, it took us a year to build what Fia is today. The only thing that matters is the distribution power. The fact that people want to install it because it says something about who they are. For that girl who's living in Brooklyn, who likes to thrift. For the girl on the Upper East Side, who's really into her clothes and her shoes and her jewelry.

4:54If you feel like you're a stylish woman, you want to install our app because it says something intrinsically about who you are as a person. That's the only thing that matters to start. Yes. And then the second part that matters, as you know, is, is it better than the other options? Do you think we'll see a huge peak in content creators as AI lays off more jobs? Well, I think I, listen, I wrote a book in 2009 that basically said everybody was going to content create and then secondarily now with AI, with AI people, we're going to have more than 8 billion people. We're going to have 800 billion people because 792 billion of them are going to be fake people.

5:31So yes, I believe in supply and demand. Like, yes, there will be way more competition. But that's just like the punchline of the way it is. I was watching your podcast with Cody Sanchez where you were talking about live shopping and whatnot as an undiscovered kind of idea of the attention economy. me. So I was really interested in like what you felt like was areas where young people should be focusing where there can be a lot of opportunity. There are probably 5000 listeners right now of this podcast, who aspire to be a creator or influencer, and the destiny has them not winning that game. And they will not make a million dollars a year or 500 ,000 a year in brand deals and affiliates and all that.

6:10However, that same human that same girl that I'm using the analogy up right now if she went to live shopping because she is a good salesman and has gift of gab and has depth of knowledge and can hold a conversation and enjoys the streaming irl dynamic of like not only talking about this prada product but she's also naturally good at seeing that karen said something in the comments and can jump with her and then back to this she's destined to be a remarkably financially and emotionally successful live shopping personality so should we put live shopping in the fiat app yes and like by the way meta is going to do this and google's going to do like every social platform just like they all have stories like they're going to have live shopping because they're going to have to compete with the reality of the consumer behavior which is people love buying in live shopping formats and so if you look at abercrombie and fitch they completely like save their business by doing live shopping okay so we're gonna build out a live shopping strategy for fia that strategy may lead to you deciding not to put it in the app because it's distracting it's not on strategy it's okay if you don't but i but i don't think it's okay for you not to debate it when you understand it's a significant human behavior i think it's interesting because even youtube shorts has now added the ability to add like an affiliate link so that you can monetize on videos that you're putting out so i think it's just generally with the intersection of commerce and also media is becoming more prolific.

7:41So if you're talking about a product, why would you not link it into that video so you can also monetize on it? The elimination of friction is always the right answer. There's no reality in a decade where things aren't more advanced, easier. The old adage of convenience is king is remarkably true. We get annoyed when our food delivery is five minutes later than it said it would be. I'm of the age where like it was cool to just be able to call a restaurant and have them delivered you have to go to your kitchen and find the menu and call the place and can you please stay on hold I'm like sure better than driving to the pizza shop and driving to the pizza shop was a convenience 100 years ago because before then you had to make the pizza like everything progressively gets easier for us and we're about to go into the most significant easier lack of friction era since the internet, which is this AI era.

8:36I think it's so interesting that you say this because I was reading about you talking about your regrets of missing out on Uber. And you said that one of the biggest things it taught you was just that convenience was king and that people were willing to pay to be able to save time on stuff. That one was even perceived time. My brother took the first Uber in New York. And the first week of Uber in New York, because the conversation with Travis and Garrett that I was having at the time was like, yeah, this works in San Francisco because San Francisco's transportation sucks. Well, let's work in New York, subway, taxis.

9:06And I remember the first Uber I took, I ordered it from my office. I was like, this is so cool, coming down. And I'm standing there and literally eight yellow cabs drive by with the light on it. I'm like, fuck, I'm losing time. But like the perception that I was gonna gain time, yeah, convenience is the ultimate king. Where do you think there's opportunity for that with AI? For like, what is worth doing yourself versus what should you be outsourcing? For me, I want AI to do absolutely everything so I can have as much time to be creative and to be with my friends and family. And so I think what AI is going to do is create unparalleled optionality.

9:55do you want to touch on something i thought that was really interesting was that you hired a chief heart officer for your company and you've said that you think eq is more important than iq when it comes to managers can you talk about how you can relate empathy and all these different things to business yeah it's a great great segue i would argue to the business landscape that retention of employees and them being happy while they're there is the single biggest variable if you're trying to build something meaningful long-term. So you young ladies and many of the people listening, it is very many people's minds to start a startup and to sell it, right?

10:29That's like, and that's interesting because I'm a little bit more OG. Like every business I've ever built is only I'm trying to build in perpetuity and leave it to my kids. It's very immigrant shit, right? So when I started investing in Silicon Valley, startups in 2006, seven, one of the quick observations were like, wait a minute, they're not building companies. They're building financial arbitrage machines just to get to the exit. The thing I always cared about was the app. I used to call it the atmosphere. Now it's called culture, right? Everybody who's listening, I have about a 2 ,500 person global marketing agency.

11:04My career 15 years ago took a weird shift where I started an advertising agency and on Madison Avenue like Don Draper Mad Men style I put the flag in the ground that said hey advertising you've got this all wrong it's not television and search and direct mail and billboards social media and content and podcasts and YouTube are going to eat up the world and I got laughed at and now we have one of the biggest companies in the entire industry what you're referring to is Claude Silver who first came to me as an account person but I could just see that she was like me. It was all about the people. And she actually quit because she herself, in working for me, found her purpose and she thought she was going to go be like a Sharma or whatever.

11:45And then luckily, I was able to a year later convince her to come back. And instead of being the account person, I made her the chief heart officer. So I wanted to set a different tone in my company that our HR department is actually your friend. In fact, one of the biggest things that happen at my company is in the boardrooms. My chief hard officer, Claude, has more juice and political clout and say on decisions than my chief financial officer, Alan Harker, which is unheard of. If you really know business, like the CFO has a lot of fucking say. In fact, most companies, the CFO's running the company, not even the CEO, which is like a brain fuck for an entrepreneur like me.

12:23So yeah, it's been great. We have unheard of retention. in my company last night. I had a 45 minute drink with Ben Allison and I was like, how long have you been here in AdBand? He's like 10 years. Like that, in AdLand, in advertising, a year and a half people are moving, jumping around. It's a pretty fucked up, and in fact, one of the reasons I still love building VaynerMedia is the industry's a little fucked up. It's not very good to its people. It's not very good at what it does right now. And I kind of am enjoying fucking it up. And the way I think about that is it's not just, back to something we were talking about earlier.

12:55You know what I like about my career and what I hope others have this. Business is fun because if you really want to play it, it's a place you can be selfish and selfless at the same time. I love Vayner because in one point, selfishly, I'm building a very large company and it's going well. But in the other point, I'm really fucking up an industry that's fucked up to people and now people are starting to have to copy me because I'm winning and the beneficiary of that is everyone who's going to work in advertising. That feels nice. And that's like the good side of business. The good side of business is if you're a good guy or girl and you're successful, people will copy you.

13:35And that's profound. And I'm a big believer in that. In fact, one of the only times I've ever been booed publicly, booed, when I was giving a keynote speech at South by Southwest, and my opening line was fuck Steve Jobs at the height of Steve Jobs. Literally dead silence of them booing. And I said, I understand, but let me tell you why I'm saying that. and I said I have watched over the last 24 months 10 of my friends who have startups go from being nice guys to being dickheads because the word on the street is you have to be tough on your people to get the most out of them. I don't like that part.

14:09I like the innovation part. I like building great products. Like I want to champion good behavior in business because I believe it is wildly capable. There's unlimited people that are not known, many that are known, that are running great businesses and being very human to the best of their ability. And what would you say is places that we should focus right now? Live social shopping. Live social shopping. Okay, live social shopping. But besides that, because every girl is on TikTok, Instagram. Should we be on Snapchat, YouTube? Where else should we be? Are you asking, should we be there marketing to build up our podcast and our app?

14:40Yeah. Yes. Substack, Snapchat, YouTube Shorts. I got a big one for you. Facebook. Facebook Blue. We were just hearing that from the Diary of a CEO team that they're all over Facebook and it's one of their biggest growth channels. Facebook Blue is a fucking monster. And you know what's happened? And this may make sense for the youngsters in this room right now. Because of Marketplace for like random stuff for their apartment. And because of groups. It's almost like online dating 20 years ago. There's a lot more 22 to 32 year old usage of Facebook Blue than people realize. But it's almost like every 24 year old doesn't even want to say it out loud.

15:15I love Facebook Marketplace. Here's the thing. Why most people are not great at social. and what has been the foundation of my 20 year career of staying relevant is you can't post the same picture and video on Facebook and Instagram the exact same way and think the same thing's gonna happen. We disrespect the audience too much. I'll give you an example. You two ladies, when you open Instagram and when you open LinkedIn, you're still you, right? You're the human, but your entire mindset of why you're in there is completely different. The way you're gonna act in this podcast is gonna be different than when you guys act in a business meeting, which is gonna be very different than when you're acting with your family, which would be very different if you guys took a girls trip for a weekend to a spa or Vegas or Ibiza.

16:03Wait, why have we done none of those things, Sophia? Because you're building. Yeah. Because you're building. When are we going on that trip? No, don't do that. Just keep building. I like what you guys are doing. In like six years, we will go on it. And it's gonna be enjoyable. So anyway, what most marketers do wrong is they don't realize, First, the consumers are slightly different, obviously. You're gonna get a lot more 63-year-olds on Facebook Blue than you will get on TikTok, though plenty of 60-year-olds are on TikTok. But more importantly, the psychology's different. And so the clip you use, even if you decide to use the same exact clip, the copy that supports the clip needs to be different.

16:39The first three-second preview might be slightly different. What are the things that should be different? TikTok and Instagram have become more and more an interest layer more than a community layer. Right? Whereas Facebook has more of a community. So I'll give you an example. If I'm trying to sell those shoes on Facebook versus Instagram, by the way, they're nice shoes. I would look at those shoes if I did an Instagram more from the lens of like a magazine runway, more like a culture thing. Whereas that shoe on Facebook, I would talk more about, this is the shoe you should buy your girlfriend right now.

17:14Like to a girl. Is somebody having their 30th birthday? in your network, this is the issue as the gift because I know the community mindset there is even deeper than it is on Instagram. Whereas on LinkedIn, if I was trying to sell that shoe, I'd be like tired of having something that doesn't feel comfortable because you want to look great as you're running through the airport to your next meeting. You see where I'm going? I need to understand the psychology of the person I'm trying to target on each platform, thus rendering my creative and my copy slightly different, even though the agenda in all three is to get them to buy that shoe just like your agenda is to get all of them to download the app and use it.

17:52I want to touch on something that you said about, so your audience has started to skew more female. There could be multiple reasons why, but specifically I'm curious, do you have different advice for men versus women on the type of content they should be posting on social media to go viral? Do you think it's different? Not really. Meaning here are the things that I, Look, girls and boys are different. There's different things to think about. But the reality is that an audience is attracted to value. Value is the game. It's not super complicated what's value. For me, I have very substantially strong 20-year credibility of bringing business advice specifically for what's happening that most people can't see.

18:35Which is becoming more and more valuable. I am also valuable because I am a very positive person, but I'm grounded in practicality. So it's all love and it's good and you can, but it's not like coddling. It's like, this is real shit and you have to be accountable. And so for people who are ready for that and like that, they will like me. So, you know, I think it, I think my advice is not different. I'm saying it's about self-awareness. Yeah. Part of the reason I ask is we had a debate in our office the other day where I don't know if you've seen a startup Cluelay. Yep. Okay. So there's the Cluelay approach to marketing.

19:09There's several other companies that market in a similar way. And of course, they've been tremendously successful at getting a lot of attention. But a lot of that attention has been male attention. So one of our friends runs a very similar Instagram account. And he told us 90 % of his audience is men. And so we were thinking about, okay, if we want to appeal to women, should there be differences in the way that we do our content? Of course. But again, that's only one generalization, right? Like we have to click down next. Then there's women of income level, gender, race, age. Of course, human, you know, and then it goes down to literally individual marketing.

19:40I'm a 49-year-old white male, high income, but literally most of the people that target me, I don't want to watch. I do not want a high-end sports car. I don't give a fuck about golf. I don't smoke cigars. All the shit that targets me is so off, but I understand why they're targeting me, right? And by the way, I'm sure it does quite well with many 49-year-old New York City high net, you know? And so what I would say to you is, yes, you start with boy-girl, and in some level that's one place to start. There's country, America versus India. Or there's age, Gen Z versus boomer. Like there's these macro things and then you keep going lower and this is where AI is gonna play a big factor.

20:24When I was saying make 100 pieces of content a week five years ago, I literally got ridiculed by everyone. I'm saying that this podcast in five years is gonna put out 10 ,000 pieces of content a week. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Why not? I wouldn't be surprised at all. I would put a million pieces of content. There you go. And what will that do? That will give you the optionality to actually make your podcast and your app relevant to a 67-year-old Hispanic female that lives in the Pacific Northwest. Right? Because in that, you may be able to show her in the content. You may be able to reference coffee and rain culture.

21:02Rain culture, I love it. Hey, I'm from the Pacific Northwest. By the way, there was a reason I said that. You know, I thought I could hit that with you. And so, yes, I think that if you're trying to get an audience, you have to win on relevance.

21:24So one idea we had is we wanted to put a Birkin in like a glass thing and run it through Times Square with a QR code on the front of it. And then if you download FIA and you go through the whole onboarding process, you can basically like opt into the giveaway, right? I think the thing you have to think about immediately is what kind of user you're gonna get from that. Like it'll feel good on the numbers, but it's classic. The thing I learned about email in 1997, how many people were on the email was important, but what was way more important was how many opened it. Yeah, I think the thing that people get caught up in is growth hacking for the sake of growth hacking.

22:01like listen again kind of talking about what i've observed for what has worked for me and and i also talk a lot about a lot of things and i never use myself as the only proxy the other thing that i've seen from the people who've been able to be consistently successful or relevant or executing is off of one basis if you are obsessed with the marathon versus the sprint you have a shot because it is a actual marathon. So if you are able, let me give you a perfect cliche thing that you might be dealing with. If the reason this concept is popping up is because it could be one of two things. We're rolling and let's put fuel on the fire or wait a minute, we had this great like last two months but like we can feel that it's slowing down a little bit.

22:48We need something to like get it because you're addicted to the growth you had prior eight weeks or 15 weeks. Both of those need to be like really thought and understood. don't make the clip just for the maximizing of views some of my favorite pieces of content for me are the least performing views content I put out because I had a purpose of what I wanted out of it so let me give you an example this may not be on your radar but I am building a Pokemon Sesame Street Disney Marvel like brand called VFriends 280 characters patient panda you know like I'm really excited about intuitive iguana We better get a free set.

23:25Yes, I have to. Keep me at the office. I got you. So I'm really excited about it. When I put out a piece of content where I'm asking people to buy stickers or trading cards or stuffed animals, because I'm like, I feel comfortable, back to a book I wrote called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. If you're giving and giving and giving and giving to your audience, like I think an appropriate podcast for you would be the entire podcast is four minutes and you're just telling your audience, a lot of you have not downloaded the app. We love you. and like it would mean the world to the two of us if you all would download the app and really play with it and give us your feedback.

24:00That's a productive podcast. Not a pre-roll, not a mid-roll, not, oh Gary, thank you for doing that for us right now. And I mean it, everybody, please download the app. No, I mean an actual, how long are your podcasts usually when you put them out? 30 minutes. Great. When I wake up and I'm addicted to your podcast and I see there's a three-minute podcast, I'm like, that's interesting. And it's like just titled The Ask. and you're just being very honest with them. Here's what I will tell you happened. What would happen if you do this and listen to me? It would not get the most listens of all time, but fucking Christ, would it get a lot of downloads?

24:34And that's okay. So sometimes I'm getting 800 ,000, a million views consistently on my content and then I'll post something that gets 110 ,000, but 400 of those people bought a t-shirt or started watching the cartoons with their kids or bought a stuffed animal. You see where I'm going? So you've got to mix it up. The only KPI can't just be brand and awareness. Sometimes it's okay for it to be a business ask. And the more you give them, the more likely when you go in for a business ask, it will do well. That's so funny you said that. We had the exact same conversation yesterday with our friend who came in and staged an intervention with us who said, you guys have been so focused on brand building on your Instagram.

25:19You're giving people all this content about fashion, your own personal stories, whatever. Why are you not directly telling them, here's what the app does. Can you download it? And I was like, you're so right. We need to go make a video right now being like, this is why we built this. This is what it does. Please download it instead of being like, here are the best trends of the month. Yeah. And by the way, it's called relationships. You have a relationship with this audience. You guys have consistently. And by the way, I would do brand over everything every day of the week. but you've got to sprinkle the occasional ask especially when you have what you have in place which is you have a very good app.