How Empathy and a 'YES' Mentality Drives Business Success

i'm on a binge right now to try to educate a lot of people that the soft skills are actually the hard skills i know you don't love talking about yourself that way but you can help a lot of people right now which one over indexed or you think was foundational or which couple really mattered during this chapter the garyvee audio experience hey everybody it's gary vaynerchuk super excited to uh be back here on the podcast 2021 has been a journey on original content on the podcast and that journey continues today in very exciting form for me personally and for i'm sure many of the listeners of this podcast because today we have what is easily described especially for my generation as one of the entrepreneurs that many of us looked up to were aware of put some real wins on the board as a young man has continued in uh that journey and is now writing a book that i'm excited to talk about and i'm excited to hopefully dig into some stuff that hasn't been touched on before because i'm going to go very improv like i tend to do but unlike many of the guests that come through i always say some of you might not be aware this one i have a funny feeling almost all of you are aware the iconic michael dallas here michael it is a real pleasure thank you for being on the show yeah thank you very much gary great to be with you thank you my friend for that one person that isn't i always like to do comic book number one right episode one give me two three minutes on context on even maybe how you see yourself how do you talk you know hey who are you nice to meet you what do you think like tell me a little bit about yourself so why don't you give a little uh two-minute bio not something i do a lot but uh yeah so i started a technology company uh in my dorm room when i was 19 at the university of texas and today we're a little over 100 billion dollar business operating in 180 countries and we're the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and you know technology capabilities to enable companies to drive their digital transformation take me back a little bit further before we get into the book what was the seed do you have a sense of like what was the moment or the three or four building blocks that got you to starting the company or the journey sure so i was um really fortunate you know in junior high school to get access to a teletype terminal this is before the pc i learned about byte magazine and was reading about the dawn of the microprocessor age and you know radio shack for a brief moment in time made more pcs than anybody and then you know apple came out with the apple ii and i had saved up enough money from entrepreneurial ventures to get one of those and what were those entrepreneurial ventures oh it was uh you know baseball cards uh stamp auction uh stock trading all kinds of very but it's funny all three of those very trading oriented no if you think about it stamps baseball cards and stocks all kind of buy sell for more very much also by the way my dna though i had a little more lemonade car washing shoveling snow in the mix there but it was interesting i love entrepreneurship so much i'm always curious all three of those and for everybody who's listening stamps were no question the baseball cards of that generation prior probably a generation or two above michael and definitely above me as well um interesting that all three of those fall under the same in my opinion from my perspective realm of buy it for something sell it for more yeah i you know got a job working in a chinese restaurant when i was 12. i was a dishwasher uh got promoted to waterboy and then made her d uh got recruited away to a mexican restaurant and michael do you think you had lots of jobs learned a lot about consumer by being on the trenches of restaurants yeah you certainly learn how to uh be empathetic and to serve and to uh listen carefully and you know you want to please right and you want to do

well and so you know you learn how to relate to lots of different kinds of people and figure out what is the best path and the best strategy to make that happen i agree with that so you know the apple ii comes along i uh get one of those take it apart uh 1981 ibm introduces the ibm pc and you know most people maybe don't uh remember this or weren't alive then but uh you know during the 1980s ibm was the most valuable company uh in the world and you know was uh completely dominant in the field of data processing which you know sort of has become what we think of as technology and so when they introduced the ibm pc uh you know i got involved in that took that apart started upgrading them i was helping my friends learn how to program and you know uh started upgrading computers for my friend's parents and that turned into a little bit of a business went off to college michael were you known so right so this sounds like this is high school were you known as like a whiz kid because you understood this new computer thing because of that yeah pretty much yeah makes sense i was pretty geeky yep and um oh i forgot i also uh had a job at um at a newspaper and figured out how to sell more subscriptions than anybody had ever sold before and made a bunch of money doing that and uh how did you do that by the way so uh i figured out that people that were buying the newspaper uh several things about them but one very distinctive one was that they were often getting married and it turns out that when you get married in texas as in many states you have to get a marriage license and that is available under the freedom information act so you could go to the county courthouse and request all the marriage licenses and on the license uh the the couple filled out they listed the address that they wanted the license to be sent to and so i created a direct mail campaign uh made you know about eighteen thousand dollars doing that which you know back in uh in the early eighties was it a trillion dollar i mean when i was making yeah when i hear that i'm like oh i know exactly what that is because when i was making seven hundred dollars you know a weekend selling baseball cards in 1990 or 1989 it was like a billion i mean numbers were just different and when you're a kid everything's compounded so that was massive i also love the fact that you're already getting into smart data you know i a lot of my success in social media marketing comes from the fact that i did a ton of direct mail from my dad's wine store and i was very good quote unquote at it and you can transfer those skills yeah so i got into direct mail at the age of 16 uh with a massive direct mail campaign for the houston post newspaper and uh you know when i went off to college i really kind of ramped up the business of upgrading computers talk about all this in the book my parents got really upset with me kind of uh you know one point was sitting there watching my mom cry and you know because she thought that you were getting distracted from studies which would undermine your future oh yeah for sure yeah it makes sense and uh and so there was a 10-day period where i completely stopped and it was during those 10 days that i really decided that this was something more than a fun way to make money and a house because in those 10 days you were so unhappy because it wasn't a part of your life that you knew this was different yeah and i just felt the opportunity was too compelling so michael on that note i apologize because i'm being very selfish for my audience and i think this is an incredible opportunity for them sure no worries michael please explain to this audience that there's a by the way this you know i have a nice young base but there is an ungodly amount of 45 to 90 year olds listening right now but for the ones that aren't 45 to 90 please explain how different entrepreneurship was positioned i mean you were a step you know ahead of me you know for me it was 1990 was high school entry in 1994 was college entry and like i was unbelievably productive as an entrepreneur but my poor grades i don't know i think you might have been a better student than me but my poor grades were

most people thought i was going to be not successful because entrepreneurship almost had no place at the table for profession i'm gonna have to assume and i just want everybody to hear from you because i think now everybody's a creator or an entrepreneur or aspires to be one so the culture shifted explain to everybody like what the positioning was from having a business on the side at school like it was very unique no yeah it was definitely unique uh i you know very i didn't really don't know anybody else that was doing it and interestingly enough you know it was the dawn of the pc age and none of the students were even interested in personal computers i was selling to you know small businesses and doctors and lawyers and you know uh you know universities in the area the those were my customers but yes i didn't really think of it as i'm gonna have a career as an entrepreneur i just saw an opportunity and was off to go you know and executed build a business and uh it had gotten to about eighty thousand dollars a month uh in my dorm room and i thought uh what year was that michael it was uh you know 1983 1984 is when i incorporated the company two weeks before i finished my final exams with my freshman year so michael in 83-84 you're doing a million dollar run rate selling something that most people outside of a geeky culture or professional culture didn't even have demand for again for everybody's listening money's gotten weird back then that number is staggering i can't even like i forget about inflation to put into context if you find a kid like a charlie demilio that's making 30 50 million a year being an influencer like i have to assume that when you would tell your most inner family or friends about where the run rate was it was almost difficult for people to believe it to be true no well it wasn't i wasn't my style to go around telling people which is why i said inner circle right i'm sure i even know your style now so i assumed back then even but somebody had to hear it right a cousin a best friend like who whether it was three people or 30 people i have to assume they were astonished at the scale that this could be no yeah for sure and you know the first nine months uh that i started from may of 84 we had um six million dollars in revenue and then the first full year was 33 million we grew 80 percent compounded for eight years in a row and then for six years after that we grew uh sixty percent compounded so if you do the math on that you get well over ten billion dollars which is exactly what happened and so uh you know the business uh got off to a fast start was it called dell from the beginning it was incorporated as dell computer corporation our trading name for the first few years was pcs limited and there's a fun story in the book about exactly how that happened it was uh kind of a lawyer who named the company you said a lawyer named it which i love given the name that you told me just now it sounds exactly like a lawyer did that branding work when did you switch it to dell so the actually the lawyer named the company dell computer corporation for the legal term because last name got it and then you named it from a front-facing brand standpoint it i had i've been a uh you know kind of sole proprietor uh before and i had named the company pcs limited because you wanted it you wanted to seem bigger on the name more broad you know who the heck knows i mean we were focused on pcs and we were pcs limited so so that was the name you know kind of starting in the uh beginning of 1984. then we incorporated it as dell computer corporation fast forward to about 1987 and we started our global expansion uh in the uk and uh we hire a team over there and they're getting going and you know they're like well we can't be pcs limited because that doesn't make any sense you know what should we call the company and you know we were so busy uh growing so fast back in austin we're like we don't know you just figured you just name it and so the guys in the uk decided well the actual name of the company is still computer corporation so that's what we're going to call it in the uk wow so there was a period of time there and then uh i was kind of reluctant but the team

ultimately convinced me to you you were more relying on your humility and just kind of like you thought it might be audacious to name it after yourself that's why you were holding off a little bit well i you know thought about the osborne effect uh you know um adam osborne you know uh you know introduced a new machine it failed and you know he it kind of became memorialized as the osborne effect and yep you know i certainly uh didn't want that to happen they and you know when when so let's go let's segue because i know we don't have a lot of time and i appreciate how busy you are and i want to get some stuff on the book what's the book about for those curious because i want everybody to pick it up and get them value and number two why do you think you wrote it now because there's a whole lot of times i assume you could have wrote it in the past and maybe even in the future since you're still a young man what break that down for me well the book really starts out at the moment that i am trying to uh take the company private and really reignite ex explain that to everybody even in the macro context because i know that might not be something everyone knows right so the company goes public in 1988 issue shares to shareholders was that an insane moment for you yeah it was pretty fun i was 23 years old a public company and uh you know it was kind of the only way you could access the capital markets to grow their you know uh the venture wasn't available to us there were no space back in 1998 and all these ways to fund today the jobs act all these different things vcs private all of it non-existent the only way to get real cash to go real crazy which is clearly your ambition at that time was to go public yeah exactly so fast forward 25 years the stock had appreciated thirteen thousand five hundred percent that's uh 27 times more than the s p 500 during that time but market wasn't giving us permission to really transform and we'd been investing in all sorts of new areas in cloud and security and software but kind of the more we did it the less the market liked it they were infatuated with smartphones yep and uh thought that you know hey smartphones are here so the pc is gone dead people michael why do you think there's an obsession and i listen i throw around the term i've really tried to not more because it's just not true when there's a new thing that will absolutely take market share this obsession with then taking whatever is the incumbent and just calling it dead when in reality looking at innovation over the last 100 years it's far more dented sliced for a little bit you know and why do you think there's such an obsession of like oh this is here now well this is all dead instead of no this is gonna take some market share do i believe that the social media stream has taken market share from television commercials i sure do but it's not officially dead there are still television commercials in 2022 why do you think that is in our society well first of all news flash uh last quarter we shipped more computers than ever before and i love that so you know if it's dead it's giving a really good impression of being alive uh but well that's the question so that news to that news flash that's my point right like here we are all these years later after smartphone and people what people don't realize is that markets expand and people have three devices not one right it's an and thing not an ore thing and that's kind of what we thought then and look i mean uh just because it's conventional wisdom and everybody else is doing it and believes that it's right doesn't mean that it's completely right and if you find those opportunities that others don't see uh there can be just tremendous opportunity and so that's what you saw and that's where this book catches up like hey the market's telling me you stink you're the you're in the past i see that it's going to be and not or which is brilliantly said i say it all the time let me do something about this and take it back private and take back my company in essence right and you know when you do that you put the company up for sale basically because anybody can buy it you know if somebody wanted to pay a penny more than i and silverlake were willing to pay they could have done that and so it was an epic battle uh carl icahn showed up and was sort of the joker in the whole program there and that were you michael were you anticipating

anticipating the icons of and the other you know characters that look like him showing up or was that a surprise yeah well it was a total surprise i you know he'd never bought uh or owned any of our stock in the past and uh you know maybe i should have anticipated it but totally missed that one um and you know it was the biggest uh go private ever for uh a tech technology company at the time and you know what we did was give the shareholders some of the benefit of our uh transformation if it was successful without taking any of the risk and uh so shareholders got you know a big premium and uh we took on all the risk and we went for it and we you know we started super aggressively hiring more r d engineers and introducing tons of innovation uh hiring thousands of additions where were you in your life at this point as a professional filter where how what were you active in before this maneuver i was the ceo of the company so got it so you went from public ceo i'm sorry but i wanted to make sure i had that context and everybody listen so you were the public ceo but because of the lack of permission for pricing the stock you decided to take it private yeah basically that's right i mean you know we um had a period of great success but you know things started to change in the late 2000s and we started to go in all these new areas and as i said kind of the more we uh were rebuilding and transforming the company the less the market liked it and ultimately at that point in time being public was rate limiting for our transformation and so i felt that wow you know we could really accelerate this if we weren't thinking about uh earning every 90 days right and michael was the company structured in a way this is where i want to get people educated where because you went public in a very different day than some of the companies that have gone public in the last decade you as a ceo and the founder of it at that point what i love what you're man it makes me admire you so much i have such lack of interest to ever do anything public because i'm incredibly scared of being held accountable every 90 days to something because then you can never do what you need to do for the consumer because you're just milking your p l for profit you were in a position as a public ceo that if you made the statement like hey world i'm going to do what's right for us in three years from now that they might the board might have been able to get rid of you and you wouldn't have been able to see it through which then forced you to have to take it private to be able to do what you wanted to do with your company well so um maybe yes and no so you're not yet earlier in 2012 uh the shareholders re-elected me to be uh you know uh chairman of the board with 96 of the vote so you know got it so that wasn't the case you just so it was less i'm sorry to throw up it was less that you might have not seen it through because people would have been upset that it wouldn't have been performing as well in the short term for long term it was more that you actually just saw how big the business opportunity was and so you decided to go about it that way yeah the the silver lining in the market kind of not understanding the transformation that we were on and not understanding that you know the smartphone was not going to uh destroy the pc that was more of an end thing created this incredible opportunity to accelerate the transformation and so uh you know we went through that and you know within 18 months after we had done the take private our net debt was basically zero so we just were paying down debt at a ferociously fast rate and then we decided to kind of quadruple down and do the biggest merger acquisition ever in technology with emc and vmware and create the number one company in all of cloud infrastructure and you know we thought that would work well it turned out to work uh far better than even we imagined and uh now we're public again we just got a two notch upgrade back to investment grade we've paid down tons of debt and last quarter we grew 15 percent we had uh 50 billion in revenues in the first half of the year and uh you know michael with that insanity of success uh wha what would you say just another day at the office gary that i know brother

and listen you are truly and i don't say this lightly you truly an incredible entrepreneur and visionary of the last 40 years and because of your humility and the way you navigate just you know one man's point of view macro underrated um you know i'm gonna ask you an interesting question that actually ties into my new book which talks about emotional intelligence being a framework for success and i don't know you uh i know several people pretty well that are fairly close to you and i've always had this sense of you so i'm excited that i got to achieve to ask you this the first chapter that insanity i'm going public at 23 years old the brilliance in my opinion from a business standpoint of taking a private to where you are now betting on the cloud to your point i get it i lived through those years of like i understand why you believe that because it absolutely worked but it worked incredibly well what um from an emotional intelligence standpoint forget about the business strategy maybe the consumer lens some of the different stuff technology chops which you have in this last in this book in this chapter this last decade or two through 15 years what emotional intelligence are you most proud of or you think was most significant for you to navigate it was it empathy was it compassion was it accountability was it patience like if i asked you the soft you know i'm on a binge right now to try to educate a lot of people that the soft skills are actually the hard skills and i again from afar really see a lot of them in you but don't really have under the hood so i'm trying to go there in this latest chapter where the book picked up and this great chapter of your career which emotional intelligence or human characteristic skills do you think and i know you don't love talk about yourself that way but you can help a lot of people right now which one over indexed or you think was foundational or which couple really mattered during this chapter i think i learned a lot about empathy and you know understanding people's motivations and i think you know that was helpful to me um i think i also uh upped my game a bit in understanding how to tap into to passion and to uh really you know make uh what we're doing as important as it really is and uh you know have people super excited that what they do matters in the world and uh you know that's been pretty powerful uh but look you know it's all about how do you uh you know create a winning team of people enable empower them give them this exciting vision and um you know turn them loose you've got to have the right strategy too right and you've got to execute um but you know you put those things together and you know uh treat people with respect and fairly and uh you deliver do you think people underestimate kindness in business they think it's a weakness given how we've portrayed the business world sharp elbows win compete do you think very point blind question do you think kindness and business is underrated well i think there's a long arc to uh you know reputations and relationships and you know i can't tell you the number of times that you know interacted with somebody and then uh you know three years later five years later they turn up a completely different company completely different position and it's like oh i remember you you know you were you were great to work with and all that comes back to you yes it does you know uh just dealing with people in the right way i think really matters and um you know call it play nice but win uh something my parents taught my two brothers and i when we were little kids and it's kind of stuck with me how about candor something i've struggled with as a public persona strong on stage my content actually it's my strength as a private you know business leader it's something i really struggled with were you naturally good at candor was that something that you needed to evolve excuse me is uh you know i call it kind candor as an ethos now in the company because i think candor has often been used as an excuse to not be nice and it definitely at all wait many times to the insecure leads to a lot of fear so i've always had this interesting relationship with

candor how about your relationship with candor well i've always been very you know forthright and and uh candid in that sense but i was pretty opaque for uh a long time and really where that came from was i did get off to a fast start in life yeah and um yeah what happened was a lot of people came to me and they were asking me for things right right made me feel uh pretty uncomfortable and so i built a barrier between myself and uh just about everybody and you know that was kind of limiting and you know as time has gone on i figured out other ways to deal with that and this book is way more personal and i think anybody that even people that know me will be surprised at how candid what what made you comfortable to go more personal to your point even where your inner circles like oh you went a little further is do feelings about legacy do feelings about if i give them a little bit more this may help someone cause it because going more personal has an incredibly interesting selfish selfless framework so i'm dying to hear what made you feel like you were ready to go there yeah that's the framework gary and it's i would say time and just maturity i mean i did write a book in the late 90s and it has very little of those you know kind of uh that you know the personal feel and this new book has a lot more of it and i explained exactly what i was thinking and feeling uh during all of those key moments and times and you know while it might have looked from the outside like everything was going fantastically or even in inside in the company you know people like oh you know these guys know what they're doing well it wasn't always that way and i explained you know everything that that was going on the good the bad and the ugly and you know a lot of our mistakes and uh you know mess-ups and lessons learned those are the things that built the learning and ultimately created so much more success later on michael at that 19 to 23 year old age group that 19 that's let's call it listen to the story that 16 to 23 year old michael did you have a business idol was there anybody you looked up to you know i grew up um hearing stories and reading stories about uh you know charles schwab and ted turner and william mcgowan you know who created mci and then of course uh you know bill gates and steve jobs who were you know 10 years older than i am and you know all that excited me the the entrepreneurs of of that time that were creating new things and disrupting you know big businesses uh you know those those were my heroes and what about now are you too busy and have too many focuses and interests family professionally or do you like the game of entrepreneurship enough that you have a sense of some of the up-and-comers i'm sure many of which have probably tried to reach out or have reached out or have spent time with you do you have a sense of the new crop do you get curious about the new crop or is like is that not where you would spend your attention yeah no i love that i do get to spend some time on that um you know uh look i think what's inspiring right now is there are so many uh entrepreneurs right and there is so much risk capital that's going after a lot of really hard problems and you know that's super exciting i invested a number of those uh you know certainly through our company but also through uh msd capital and msd partners and uh get to spend time with with some of those new entrepreneurs that are building incredible businesses and that's that you know that's a ton of fun what have we not let's wrap this up touched on that you want to make sure i mean one thing i love about my audience is they um they know that i have trouble reading and that's not how i consume my content per se but they have an audio book for just for you gary did you didn't read it did you i did i read the whole thing i am so proud of you michael i'll tell you that's [ __ ] good for you it's it's 10 hours and 30. oh i just finished mine it's the it was the hardest thing i ever did yeah i know man i know it's like emotionally draining it's hard training it's hard good for

you prepared for this yeah you thought it was going to be appropriate yeah i just thought i'd try to read this thing and i'll be done no it's hard not to be a robot i don't know if you ad libbed i get very off script you know so good for you i'm really proud of you because it is a time suck uh so first of all now i know a lot of people are going to go that route but i this is a reading crew a lot of people that's why i keep writing books so many people consume and learn from them what did we not touch on because i know i bounced you around a lot i have a little specific style that we want to end with of what people can expect from this great book yeah look i think a lot of human potential is left on the table because people are uh too afraid to fail and don't want to take risks and you know uh my life was a great example of uh of taking some risks and um you know uh i wouldn't advise everybody to drop out of college but uh you know uh there's it seems a lot more practical today than it was in your era it was insanity in 2021 it's there's a lot more practice yeah i don't think you agree with that right michael say again do you agree that there's a lot more quote-unquote practicality and opportunity now for that not to be the path whereas in comparison the path of the 80s was very clear it's a little more blurry now does your degree actually get you an roi positive situation the modern you know the mature internet with an emerging blockchain has so much opportunity it it feels less crazy and feels a little bit more to be honest practical against the ideology of college today than it did let's say 30 40 years ago well i don't think you know it's great generic advice to uh give up the opportunity to to improve your skills right let's put it that way and i do think more and more um opportunities are skills based instead of degree based and uh you know that's right kind of that's kind of my thought yeah i think that's exactly right nonetheless what uh let's wrap this up will any part of the book that we didn't touch on that might be good you know i think we we covered it uh we covered it pretty well i do i do go uh really all throughout you know the not only 37 years of the company but my childhood and uh hope people draw some great lessons from it and uh it was a lot of fun writing it and it was really hard to uh to do the audiobook it's a fun way to end michael listen i'm glad i did it i'm glad you did it too brother i think it speaks to your authenticity i'm really i'm really glad we got to do this i really appreciate your time i'm cheering for you i hope everybody in the vayner nation picks up a copy of the book uh i think this is one of the true underrated operators of the last half century and and i wish you nothing but health and happiness my man thank you so much gary great to be with you youtube watcher what's up it's garyvee first of all thank you so much i hope you're doing super well during these times i also want to ask you please subscribe because my commitment and exploration of youtube is about to explode stories polls more content more engagement more surprise and delight this is the time to subscribe i hope you consider it and i hope i see you soon