The Future of Entrepreneurship and Business Growth | Inventures Keynote 2025

0:00This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. I think the thing that I would like a lot of you to know is that in building a large business or in building something substantial, I do not believe that you have to compromise your humanity. I do not believe that sharp elbows are the only way to win in business. I wish more people knew that the foundation of sustained economic success is actually by caring about others, not trying to extract every penny out of every deal, leaving something on the table for the other side, building an internal culture that leads to so much retention within your organization that you are able to go faster and harder than your competitors because you have so much trust amongst yourselves.

0:58And so when I think about my past, what's very clear to me is that the way my mother mothered me to be a good human being is disproportionately the reason I've had substantial financial success. You know, I think that unfortunately people really believe that business is dirty and you have to kill the other guy and all this. And listen, I love competition. I believe in merit I believe in those things but I yeah I just it's very clear to me that if you're running a marathon and you're trying to do something significant and for the long term the better you do it from a humanity standpoint the more likely it will happen did you have people that you look to obviously your mom's a huge influence did you have people in the business that you look to you're like, that's it, that's not gonna do it.

1:58No, I didn't, I idolized athletes and other things like Randy the Macho Man Savage. And I looked up to different kind of characters. Within business, even to this day, I have a very unique framework. I'm very insular. It's me and the audience. I always trusted the audience. To me, it was me. The thing that molded me was the end consumer. I didn't look up to Steve Jobs or Bezos or Oprah or anything like that. I thought the context was too different. I believe too much in the now. I believe things are moving too fast. I think there's tried and true principles that work, but I feel like I've been a businessman my whole life for context in this room, whether it was lemonade stands or trading cards and then working in my father's liquor store.

2:46I have been working since I was six, seven years old. a lot of the core rules of entrepreneurship were so natural to me. I don't learn really by reading or watching. My currency of learning is living in the truth. I think entrepreneurship is not something you go to university for. Entrepreneurship is learned in the trenches. And I agree. I bring my mom to all my talks. She's great. She's so supportive. so no I didn't in fact back to my opening line the only time I've ever really been significantly booed in my career on stage was they told me not to curse at this talk so I won't use the exact words but I was at South by Southwest in 2007 or 8 and my opening line was F Steve Jobs and everybody booed me because he was on such a pedestal at the time the point I was trying to make is we don't have to be jerk offs to our employees to be successful and so

3:51and so no my my teacher my mentor my framework was always the eight billion people on earth on what they wanted to buy why they bought things what they were interested in why are they interested in those things? That has been where I spent my energy. One of the things that I like that you said is, think about understanding history allows you to have pattern recognition. Yes. Talk to me a little bit about that. Right now, what are you recognizing? What patterns are you recognizing? So, electricity. It's here right now. Nobody here is thinking about that. Only a short period of time ago, electricity was invented.

4:41When electricity was invented, kids, most people did not put it in their home because society said that there was actual demons in the electricity. Demonizing something, the slang term came from us humans being scared that electricity had demons in it and so we would still use candles in our home instead of bringing electricity because we were scared of new technology. Right now, the majority of this room, if they're really paying attention, is demonizing AI. They are scared of what AI is going to do and how it's going to take their money. Yet, it will be like electricity. It will be a profoundly good technology that will be omnipresent and will advance manhood and create more opportunity, not less.

5:35But because we are all right now in this room in a place where it could hurt us in the short term financially, we are demonizing it. That would be an example of me using history to tell me what is happening right now. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Also, it works with another good segment and president. So, talk to me about AI. It's going to kill them. It's just, what's your approach to AI? How are you thinking about that? The easiest analogy that every one of you should understand that I can really do in one minute that I hope gets you on the right side of this conversation. AI is an insanely enormous wave that is coming right at you.

6:27All of you have one of two options. Option one, you are going to put your head in the sand and your overall strategy is

6:40or two, you are going to grab a surfboard which is called your time and efforts to learn how to use it and you will grab this surfboard and you will ride the largest wave that has come at us since the internet itself and you will be highly successful and you will enjoy the ride. Some of them will get smashed into the rocks. I believe many people that I'm looking at in blue light right now will choose the first option out of fear, out of complacency, out of laziness, which hurts for a room like this because they pride themselves in not being lazy, but being lazy in the form of curiosity and the work required in knowledge on something that is this large is way worse than being lazy and not wanting to come to the office or only working five hours a day.

7:44Way worse. If you are here at this conference, you are who you are. This room, not one person that decided to spend their time to be in this room right now should be on the side of laziness on this issue. This room represents the people that should be riding the surfboards. But that is how great fear is. Fear is the single worst energy in society. Fear is what dictates so much of your unhappiness. Fear is what leads to the political, religious, and all the other bad things that happen in our society when we weaponize fear. please my friends do not let the fear of another technology wave coming along hurt you this is your biggest opportunity truly since the mid to late 90s to take advantage of the internet and explode but use the lessons of history and know how many people poo-pooed or underestimated the internet and allowed that technology to hurt them you've got recent history on your side electricity to be demonizing.

8:58I taught a lot of you that here today. That's a long time ago. You may have not known that. But many of you, just looking at the crowd, you were here when everyone said social media didn't mean anything. Or the iPhone. I mean, especially in Canada, people thought the Blackberry was gonna win. You know? Like, you've... Like, all of you in the... Again, looking at the crowd, some of you have had 20, 30, 40 year careers right now. You've seen internet come along, be underestimated, hurt, and help people. You've seen social media be very underestimated 15 years ago. It is the foundation of the reset of geopolitics and commerce across the world.

9:41You've seen the smartphone come along. Do you know how many people here when the smartphone came along said, nah, I'll keep my pager. I don't need anybody calling me. We continue to demonize technologies, but this AI one, this AI one, this is not the iPhone, this is not social media. This is much more internet. This is big, big. This is not a fad. This is the rest of your life. And professionally, it's going to impact you but even personally as a human being. You know how you make fun of your grandma because she doesn't know how to use some sort of app? A lot of you are becoming your grandma right now.

10:18I feel that. I remember the moment that my mom was out on technology and it's called Rudy and she thought it was very rude and she was basically, she's like, that's it. And I felt that when my kids got on Snapchat. I was like, I don't want to learn this. There are people literally becoming their grandma right now on this AI issue and what will happen to them is the same thing that happened to grandma which is you will have no choice. Technology is undefeated. My friends, technology is undefeated. So if anything, if anything is accomplished at this conference today, me knowing that five to 10 people, based on how passionate I've been for the last five minutes, I believe that a dozen of you will now actually leave here who have been demonizing this or kind of like hoping it's not coming, will start to allocate the hour a day of research required and the downloading of apps and the testing of apps and learning, just like you learned everything else.

11:18You must do it. You will be hurt if you don't. Is that how you think you now gave fear in different places? Who's doing it, making yourself try it out? Yeah, in the realist way. I think, again, this should work for everyone. I was one of these people. I was scared to learn how to swim. I didn't want to drown. I was late to swimming. I was late to riding a bike. I didn't want to skin my knee or bang my elbow. I was scared to kiss a girl. I went through those adolescence things. But you all know this. You know, having your first kiss, swimming, riding a bike, every one of those things, eventually you just got to a point where you were like, fuck it, and you went.

12:02I'm swearing now. I'm swearing. I've only been able, friends, I've only been able to hold it for so long. You know, I think you can handle it. So, I think the same thing here, like, I get it. Like, you know what's so funny about me, personally, as a human, even though my entire career has been maximizing new technologies and winning on them. I, by nature, am not so, I don't want it to happen either. I'm at the prime of my career. I've just spent 15 years building the largest independent advertising agency in the world from zero to$350 million a year we'll do this year. You think I want AI? Don't clap because I'm in trouble.

12:45And the point I'm trying to make is you think I want AI to be here? I don't. I won. You just figured this thing out. I don't want this to happen either. I just realized I have no choice. I do not understand this idea. I do not understand this naivete that you think you have a choice on this issue. How many people are retiring in the next five years? And I don't mean you're going to execute so awesome that you're going to sell it and buy a private plane and whatever. I mean you're old and you're finished. Raise your hands. I want you to truly raise your hands. I want to see people retiring within the next five years strictly because you're actually retiring and going to hang out somewhere warm.

13:30Raise your hands. Yeah, there's about, I see you lady. All right, there's about seven. There's about seven people here that plan on retiring within the next five years. What do you think this AI thing's going to look like in five years? My friends, get on this and get on this. Like, in fact, I think everyone here should get up and leave this conference right now because nothing's going to happen here with me in the next 30 minutes that's more important than them spending 30 minutes on learning how to download the right AI apps, using it, taking notes in every meeting, making content, admin, look, your admin, who here has an admin?

14:08Raise your hand. Raise your hands high, please, if you have an admin, right? They should be using it to make themselves more efficient, for you to be more efficient. Like, this is real life. This is oxygen. This is oxygen. Get on with. I don't want you to go. I want you to stay because I think we can get a lot out of this. We already have some good advice. So, while we're at it, one of the things I'd like to say, are we reasonable to accept excuses? Yeah. I want to drive through some other ones that I hear a lot from on-on. Please. How hard it is to build a business and build a business in Canada, too.

14:46Hire. You know, a lot of people are like, it's hard to build out a team. I can't find the right people. I'm on the West Coast. I'm on the Eastern time. What do you say to people like, I just can't grow, I can't find the right people? Quit. I mean, like, what do you want from me? Pay more. Or use AI, like I just told you to, so you don't need to hire. Like, I do not understand this concept of crying. You can't hire because you're in Calgary? Move. But I'm getting to a point. Like, there's no crying in baseball, they say. Well, there's definitely no crying in business. What do you want from me? You don't think, like, it's easier to build a business in America?

15:33Go do it. Like, I love when people are like, oh, it's so easy. Like, everything is hard. Do you understand that everything that is great is hard? Love is hard as shit, right?

15:51But like, you're asking to build a business. When you were saying, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I'm going to build a business, you were asking for a 1 % life. You were saying, I am going to live in the 1 % where I live on my own rules, on my own back, where I have full control, where I do not have an employer, of course it should be hard. And if the market changes and it's harder to hire, well, build a business that can afford to pay more because that's one of the variables or leverage modern technology. Good news. The AI thing, you know, they say it's going to replace jobs. It is going to replace jobs.

16:36Some of those jobs that they're replacing, are the ones that you're looking to hire for. Learn how to use AI, you won't have to hire anybody. You don't need to offshore in the Philippines, you can offshore to a bot. You like that? I think so. So, what do I say to excuses? Tough. I mean it, meaning I'm not trying to give tough love here. I think everybody knows that I'm right. I don't know, I worry about things all day long, but complaining about them? I'm like, you're in 24-7 solutions. Find a solution. And when I say move, I mean it. Like if you're going to sit here and be like, you don't get it, Gary.

17:18There's nobody in Calgary. I'm like, you don't get it, Rick. Move.

17:26All right. We're going to do another one. I like this. You don't have to move either, but don't make excuses. All right, I want to talk about venture capital. It's my turn this morning. I fucking love what you wanted to say about venture capital. Calgary's doing pretty well now. There's some deals here. Overall, you know, venture's slowing down all over the place. You've said in the past that the emphasis on fundraising and pursuit of venture capital has caused us to fundamentally lose the art of building a real business, one that is profitable each month and can pay its own bills. We need to put pressure on the entrepreneurial community as a whole to start focusing on making money, not raising money.

18:11So talk to a room full of people who say there's not enough access to capital in Canada.

18:19Move. I'm just kidding. All right, but this is having a wrong effect. Tell them they can do it from here. Because they can. The point of me saying move should inspire someone to say to me, no, I'm not moving. and I can do it here because you can. Meaning, my big thing on these kind of issues is, going back to the last question, this one is, if you can point to someone who's done it, then it's been done. You know, like Spotify was invented in Sweden. Facebook was actually funded in Boston, not Silicon Valley. This whole obsession with Silicon Valley is laughable. Like, there's unlimited high net worth individuals in Calgary.

19:02I have friends who LP raise from Calgary. The LP level, real checks. I don't know if you know, but there's oil money here. Like, you know, like this concept. There's also like athletes that play for the flames who get paid a lot of money a year. They might have 100 ,000 to give a startup. Like, this is a perspective mind shift issue. What do I think? I think there's unlimited opportunity to raise capital when you have a company in Calgary. There's also things, I don't know if you heard about this invention, it's called a plane. When you live in Calgary, you can take a plane to Los Angeles or San Francisco or Vancouver or Toronto or New York City or Dubai or Doha or London.

19:50Like these concepts make me laugh. Like there's also something called a phone. You can call someone. Zoom exists. You can have a Zoom meeting while you sit in Calgary with, you know, a human that's in New York City and she or he will give you money. Like, what are we talking about here? You have to talk about revenue. Well, yeah, if you want to talk about that part of the quote, like, that's, like, the concept of giving up a big piece of your business for money that you're then going to likely burn because, you know, when you have money in your wallet, you tend to burn it. It's always been foreign to me.

20:25I do think coming, look, capital matters. it helps some of the biggest companies in the world. The problem is it became cool. There's so many companies that raised capital that never needed to. They just thought they were supposed to. And so I think you have to be, if you're building Uber or Facebook, you're gonna need capital. Like Amazon, yes, you will need capital. But I think when you have a small app or things of that nature, there is a way to think about monetization early on. Everybody was going for the 1%, 1%, 1 % unicorn idea. There's a billion businesses that can be done. And in fact, it's similar to the way I think about people putting mortgages down in their home.

21:04I don't mind raising capital. I think too many people raise too much capital. Like a lot of the businesses that are running around in this room really only needed$250 ,000, not$4 million. And then the other issue on that quote is everybody became professional fundraisers, not actual entrepreneurs. It all became about financial arbitrage. How do I get to metrics to raise the next round? and we got so unhealthy in a period of time where if you get to enough metrics in the series B you could take money off as a founder and so you were making money but none of your investors made money and there was still all these bad behaviors.

21:38Luckily the economic tighten up that we've been through has actually cleaned this up quite a bit. That's what naturally happens. So I think we are in better behavior than when I was talking about that but those are my thoughts on those issues. Yeah, I always tell my editor we could change the whole sector if we stop talking about people raising money and started saying that they had borrowed billions of dollars? A hundred percent. Yeah, the celebration of the fundraise was very toxic to young entrepreneurs. And, you know, and by the way, I don't cry for VCs because they're just trying to deploy capital and show returns that are fake to raise their next round because they're living on their two and 20.

22:18So like when people like want to like, you know, say whose fault it is, it's the whole ecosystem. It's not just the founders and the entrepreneurs. The VCs were playing their own game. And then the institutions and the LPs were playing their own game and on and on and on. You think we're in a good direction, right? I like pain. Yeah. I do. I think adversity is the foundation of success. I think when the money's flowing and we're just printing money, that that's a problem. And I do think that when we find the middle, we always do much better. And unfortunately, in entrepreneurship, in politics, in society, we become way too left and way too right when the center is always the answer to the quiz.

23:04I want to get a little bit of political advice from you. We're in some pain, I think, right now as a country in Canada. We sort of realize we've become overly dependent on the U.S. as a customer, as a protector. we have a hard time defining what we're about, picking a thing I've heard you use the term scared money, scared money doesn't make money I feel like Canada is a bit of scared money vibes these days if you look at Canada's brand we've got a new CEO what's the move, what's your advice what you can't do you know I think I think it's a really challenging question look what has happened with these tariffs is unprecedented was very hard to predict.

23:51And look, the reality is, is the U.S. is one of the most important global markets in the world. And our relationship is historically and still, like let there be no confusion, just like any country, you know, there's a big difference between a government that's operating a country and the people of a country. And we've seen that from time. I was born in the Soviet Union. Me personally. Not my parents, not my grandparents, me. I, the human being, was born in the Soviet Union. I can promise you that the people that lived from 1917 to 1991 in the Soviet Union did not see America the way the government saw America.

24:30I promise you that if you went and spoke to the lovely people of North Korea right now, their point of view on the world, if they even knew what the hell's going on in the world, is different than how the government sees it. I think this is, if I'm running Canada, I A, realize that this is an incredibly short-term blip. Two, even if it's long-term, the reality is that you can sit on ideology all you want. The reality is America should be one of Canada's biggest customers because it's one of the biggest markets in the world. It's also Sweden's and Peru's and just like China is one of America's biggest, it's just a big market.

25:09This concept of let's just play within Canada is not going to do Canada any good, meaning it's fine. And I do think that what the world is definitely all going to do right now is get more insular because of this. Every country, not just Canada, every country is now thinking about how do they grow their own economic situation because now the cat's out of the bag and you never know when other tariffs and other things and people can see that tariffs and the economy is being weaponized, right? We're getting away from dropping bombs on each other. It's more about economic behavior that is creating these variables.

25:46What would I do? I would focus on building the internal market as strong as possible. What do I think about that? I think this is a page that people should take from China and America. Why has China risen so much in the last 40, 50 years? It's because it's taken a more economic, American entrepreneurial capitalistic approach to their internal market. What should Canada do? It should keep every one of its best entrepreneurs in Canada by creating rules that benefit the people that actually drive the economy.

26:27And by the way, I don't say this from a political lens of like what do Republicans and Democrats or conservatives and liberals think on this issue. I say this to every government, including America, by the way. This is about to become a talent game because of technology. We can now have meetings in Zoom. And by the way, Zoom is like a beeper. In 12 years, 15 years, we're all gonna be in VR glasses having meetings where we're not gonna be together, but it's gonna feel more like this than it does on Zoom. And so all of a sudden, you can live anywhere and conduct business and you take into account private aviation and the costs going down and technology.

27:13The most talented humans in the world are about to become the asset and whoever has the most positive tax laws and the most positive ways to keep them are gonna win. London has a problem, the UK has a huge problem right now. They are losing their best talent. And by the way, the Middle East and other parts of the world are not fooling around. America was built on one concept, the American dream. That concept literally for 150 years got all the best talent no matter where you were in the world. You were born and if you were an entrepreneur and a creative and a maker and a driver, a driver, your dream, whether you were born in Cape Town or in Calgary or in Stockholm, if you were an A +, your number one dream in life was to get to America.

28:09And America's immigration policy and the brand and the policies on taxing and how they kept their best talent is why they became the world power. Because they got the best talent no matter where they were born to go there. Countries are about to replicate that. And what would I do if I ran Canada? I would have a policy to get the best talent in the entire world from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, from America. Like, do you know how many Americans would move to Canada tomorrow if they had policies that made it financially interesting? Do you know how beautiful this place is? Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal.