INBOUND GARY VAYNERCHUK KEYNOTE | BOSTON 2016

(audience cheering) (dramatic music) - Good evening Inbound, how are you? (audience cheering) I'm super excited to be here, so excited. Can we hear it one more time for that? That was fucking remarkable. (audience cheering) Good shit. (breathes deeply) I'm really excited about tonight, it's a very special day in our amazing country and for me it's especially special because I wasn't born in the US. I was born in the Soviet Union. I came here as a little boy. Both my grandfathers spent substantial time in jail just because they were Jewish. And I know that there's a lot of tension and different beliefs about what should happen tonight. But the fact that we're even able to vote and to be in this amazing country is something that we have lost perspective for. (audience applauding) And I'm very thankful to be here tonight. And to me it's super interesting because I want to talk

about the journey of an entrepreneur and by hands, how many people here are entrepreneurs? Raise your hands. Very nice. And how many people here work within organizations that are entrepreneurial within them? Raise your hands. Very nice. If we can keep these lights on that would be huge for me if you don't mind. So, for me, I think the opening statement is going to be this: if you are sitting in this room tonight and you believe that whether Donald or Hillary wins impacts you you're a motherfucking loser. - [Audience Member] Amen! (slight applause) And I want to explain this. We're so lucky to be here in this playing ground where the impact of the president only has so much impact on you because the reality is we're dramatically and I mean dramatically more in control of our lives than the media pounds down our throats. And so I hope if anything, if anything whether you're 16 or 97 and you leave here tonight you understand how unbelievable our opportunity is to play in this ecosystem. What I want to talk about tonight is a couple of things. One, we're living though the greatest era of communication change that we've lived through since the printing press, and regardless of what you do in here it is going to impact you tremendously over the next decade because it's already impacted so much over the last decade. And so for me, that is a very important thing. But before I go into the tactics that I want to bring to everybody so you bring home something tangible I want to start with something that I've been spending a lot of time with and haven't really expanded outside of the content that I've put on the internet. So, on stage tonight I thought a really interesting thing to talk about would be self-awareness. If I can spend two to three minutes with all of you and make you understand that self-awareness is probably the single-most important thing that you can spend time on for your outcome, for your future life it would be so exciting to me if hundreds or thousands of people left here today and started really realizing who they actually were. We're living in an era and we have forever where people have sold us on the optics of what we should be, where we should go. Let me tell you a story about myself. It's really fun, I got an email earlier today or yesterday from a friend of mine, Jay, that I went to college with, who works with Carolyn, who I went to high school with. Are you guys here, can you guys stand up? Can I find you? Get up, there they are. Can we clap it up for my homies? (applause) What's funny is both of them know how bad of a student

I really was. And what's really interesting to me on that is both of them also know, that for some reason at a very young age, I was extremely self-aware. I knew exactly who I was and I was able to bet on my strengths. I think that, when I think back to my life and the story of my life, and what I really wanna impose on others to be able to navigate through is I was lucky enough to have a mother who instilled so much self esteem into my body, I was able to navigate through the universe of not worrying about what everybody else thought about me. And what I've, really to be very frank with you, I've come to realize over the last year or so that I feel so much guilt, just general guilt, that I had it so good that A, I came from nothing which is a massive advantage. Can the immigrants raise their hands in this room? Let's clap it up for these people that have a major advantage. (applause) We're lucky. One thing immigrants realize is how good it really is so I had that, I had nothing, and then I had a Mom that did all the right things for me and made me feel so phenomenal and so basically, I've come to realize I've been asking myself over the last year, like why am I producing so much content, like what the fuck am I really doing here? I've got this $100 million a year business to run like why do I have fucking DRock following me around everywhere like, what am I really doing here? And I've come to realize that I have so much guilt inside of me, for having it so good, that I want to use my content, that if I can play the role that my Mom played for me, for anybody in this room, then I've accomplished anything that I could ever dream for because, look, there's a lot of people that are gonna make money, but to me, the most important thing is how you make your money, not how much you make. And what I realized Thanks Mom. And what I realize, what I realize is that we live in a era now where we can all document and create content around these narratives and communicate in a different world. The thing that I'm completely taken aback by is the fact that this is now the television and the television is now the radio. And it's the late forties and early fifties and the people in this room that understand that and understand that Snapchat and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram are ABC, NBC, ESPN and MTV. (clapping) You like that? It's a good one, right? But I'm not done yet, you fucked me up. All right. (audience laughter) And that the business and the individuals in this room

that realize how to make M< i> A S< i> H or Seinfeld or the best shows on those platforms will win. We're living through a major shift where every person in this room has a binary decision. Either you go on the defense because of all of this or you go on the offense. Either you realize this is the greatest opportunity we've ever had, as humans and entrepreneurs or you're scared of all these changes and you judge them and you fear them. And so for me, in this huge shift of technology and communication comes the greatest opportunity ever. Again, 'cause the theme of the night for me the fact that mainstream media has been able to cast such a cloud over this ecosystem is fascinating to me. I'll be very honest with you, I'm not sad. I'm pumped. I am thrilled that so many people think it's bad 'cause that's more opportunity for me. And so what I implore you to do is spend a hell of a lot less time worried about other things that will impact you and spend a lot more time to figure out who you actually are. What are you actually good at? Are you actually in a position to be successful? What do you like doing because the opportunities are endless. The problem is we are scared to do different things because the fundamental core reality is we worry about what other people think. We worry about getting judged if we fail. One thing that I've been very blessed with is that I've traveled the world quite a bit for business and speaking and one thing that a lot of people may not understand is that entrepreneurship does not work in a lot of other countries because failure is a scarlet letter. Here, in the US, we're so lucky that entrepreneurship is met with when you fail, you pick yourself back up and you go. And to me that is unbelievable and we are blessed to be in that ecosystem and we need to take full advantage of it. - So look, (audience applause) I like the back. Yes, back, step up. This is real fuckin shit. We are fuckin like, can I ask you a question? Do you understand that you're only gonna live one time? Everybody has a lack of perspective and reality of what's going on here. We have so much opportunity. You're in a fucking convention center, in Boston, listening to fucking Hamilton. Wake the fuck up. (audience applause) Shit. Seriously. You have it so bad. Perspective is so ridiculous.

The only thing I fear besides the health and well being of my family, is regret. The thing that I'm so scared of, and one of the tactics, if I can inspire 20 people to do this that would be big, fuck I'll take one. If one person in here can start spending more time in a retirement home, go, and donate your time, your most valuable thing, and go spend time with 70, 80, 90 year olds. Do that for one day, two days, a week or two, and you will understand very quickly that the only thing that is scary is the things that you didn't do, right? It's those things. And I sit here tonight, and people are in their tactics, they're in their business, their startup, they work in their companies, and the thing that I fear I'm passionate about deploying tonight, is really pushing a little bit more what I would call practical risk. Practical risk is something that I've been thinking a lot about. A lot of people tell me they can't take the chance of going and doing what they want to do. Whether it's a different job, whether that's, by the way, I've gotten 100 emails in the last six months of people that needed the courage to shut down their startup and get a job because they were worried about the ramifications of being made fun of for not executing on their business. Whatever it is, as you sit here tonight, I want to deploy and I want to start talking about practical risk. And what practical risk means to me is the thing that I did not understand until I started getting thousands of emails a year from individuals is we're fucking fancy. It's not that you can't, it's that you're not willing to give up dumb shit for a better life. You're not willing to go backwards. You're not willing to make yourself dramatically happier, to move out of your home and downsize and go into a different neighborhood. That to me is fascinating, the fact that things, whether home, car, watch, clothes, going out, is holding people back from a substantially happier life is fascinating to me and something that we need to debate. Because at the end of the day, that one at bat is all we got. And so if I can absolutely push you one tangible item, I see some people have pads and pens, and I'm fascinated by that. Go, ready? Go to a fucking, F-U-C-K-I-N-G, retirement home, spend time, collect data, realize regret is the worst, and do something about it. Got it? Awesome, let's clap it up for her. (audience applause) I really want to talk about the phone and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat, because it's a place I come from and I wanna get a little bit away from the heady shit right now and get a little bit back into practicality. If you are not producing content, on the five to six major social network platforms today, you are creating an enormous vulnerability for whatever you'd like to happen in life. The person you want elected, getting money for your kid's charity, selling shit. Communication has shifted forever, and these platforms really, really matter. The problem is, even at a conference like this, where there is so much marketing skill, I am flabbergasted by the lack of practitionership in the actual creative ability and paid media amplification of creative to make a business action. I, for a lot of you that don't know, built my family's liquor business really on the back of Google AdWords. Google AdWords came out, I bought the word wine for $0. 05 a clip, and even though I was doing direct mail and doing local television and billboards, I get a lot of accolades in this ecosystem from building my dad's liquor store from a three to a $60 million business. But the truth is, I stand here tonight and admit to you not excitingly that it should've been $150 million. Because if I'd actually understood how unbelievable the arbitrage was, on Google AdWords, I would've spent a lot more money on it and grew my business much more. But, I was too patient. I did well, not enough. I did not go all-in, and I built a nice business. But in reality, I left a lot on the floor. Tonight, as we sit here tonight, the number one arbitrage in marketing in the world, and I don't give a shit if you do B2B. How many people in B2B, raise your hands? Uh-huh, I know you fuckers. How many people in B2C? Uh-huh, so even better. This is why I do this, it allows me to go in a certain direction. B2B clients for me, at Vayner, and the startups that I'm involved with, are doing even better than B2C clients on social, specifically Facebook, because there's one amazing thing about B2B. We, and I'm in it now with VaynerMedia, we know the name of the customer. We know the businesses we want. We even know the decision maker we want. The problem is, we suck. We get real lazy, and we send bulk fucking emails on Linked-fucking-In. Can we make a pledge tonight? Actually you know what, let's do this. If you're willing to pledge to no more bulk email horse shit spec email on LinkedIn, stand up so I can clap for you personally. Make a pledge. Let's wait, get up. More, fuck this bulk email shit. Don't sit back down dude with the beard. Get the fuck back up. I see you, I'm talking to you, yeah you. There we go. No, no, let's clap it up for this pledge, no more. (audience applause) Enough. Thank you. Guys, best part is, the shit doesn't work. How many people here have done email marketing in their career, raise your hands? Are you looking for your seat? Hey, (audience laughter) Got it, okay. How many people here have done bulk email, have done email marketing in their careers, I'm just curious? In 1997, I had a 200,000 person email newsletter for Wine Library and WineLibrary. com that had 91. 3% open rates. Not because I was a hero, but because email marketing hadn't existed yet. The thing that I'm most fascinated by is that I know as a marketer, and I'm a marketer, as a marketer, the number one thing, the thing that I know more than the sun will come up tomorrow, is that marketers ruin everything. (audience laughter) It's what we do. When I saw that little fucking ghost, I'm gonna fuck up that ghost. I got you Snapchat. I'm gonna ruin the shit outta this platform. (audience laughter) You show me attention, and I'll show you a place that I wanna sell. And that's how it gets changed. And bulk email in 2016 is insanity. Nobody's opening that shit. And what, just cause you have an algorithm that says, Hey Gary? And by the way, I saw 10 of these emails today. All the fuckers in this room that have the Hey Gary thing that's in a different font than the rest of the email, you suck. (audience laughter) Right? I mean enough of that. Jesus. Fuck. B2B, I'm gonna go tactical, 'cause I wanna leave with, I wanna you know lately I've been trying to get even more tactical in my keynotes, 'cause I love the emails that I get where, hey thank you so much, it helped my business. Here's the tactic. I'm gonna give you the best blueprint I have for B2B selling right now. And I really hope it brings you some value. And I'll go into, I'm gonna go into it in detail, I'm gonna get a little nerdy. If you're in a B2B environment, you have to run Facebook ads and you have to do it now. They cost about five to six dollars CPM right now. On average, the cost of these CPMs will be $30, 36 months from now. I'm saying this because I know I'm gonna have the video of this, and in three years, you're gonna see me share this clip and I'm gonna tag it, I told you so, motherfuckers. (audience laughter) It's gonna be $30 a CPM because everybody's gonna figure out how much attention is really on that platform. So the supply and demand curve is gonna change just like wine now is a six- seven dollar word. Got it? Okay, so now you're gonna run Facebook ads and first and foremost you're not gonna outsource it to somebody else. You're not gonna find little Susie that's 23 in the office and be like, "You! You're young. You know social media. " You're not gonna do that. (audience laughter) You're gonna actually spend ten hours and read and watch videos. It's crazy. You can learn anything. So many people are like, "Gary, but I don't know "how to use the Instagram product. " I'm like, "I get it. You go to Google "and you search it, Fuckface. " Okay? (audience laughter) That's what you do. It's not super complicated. It's crazy, anything you don't know you can search in two seconds. Everybody is crippled like they don't know. It's fucking there. You do that. You become a practitioner. You actually deploy the Facebook ads yourself so you have some ability and knowledge so somebody can't hose you. You need to be the person that knows it the best. You then target, there's a way to target, employees of... One more time, B2B, raise your hands. You guys know who you're going after. I want you to target the employees of that company one by one. The employees. Now you take a step back. Now you know you're targeting 15, 17, 22 different businesses. If you wanna get really crazy, you target them one by one and you make videos or pictures just for that company. But if you want scale, you can put them all in a bucket. And now you're gonna make a video or a picture, a billboard or print ad or a television commercial, and you're gonna make it, and what you're gonna do is you're gonna make the creatives start with, "Does your CFO know, "Does your CTO know, "Does your CIO know. " You know exactly who in that organization is the person that needs to see that content. And you're gonna start the video or your picture with that statement and I promise you, for hundreds of dollars, depending on the size of your business, sometimes for thousands of dollars, that person is gonna get 12 to 25 to 100 people forwarding him that piece of content and will be the gateway drug to your sales team to convert and close. It works every time. (audience applause) That's it, right? I could talk about... You like that, right? It's practical. Black and white. You got it? I can talk about one life and all that shit, but that's fucking up in the clouds, right? THat's like who gives a fuck, right? Yeah. I care. Okay, that's one. Good. Next. Two. The single best arbitrage in marketing, and I wanna take a step back. I wanna make sure everybody understands. I think the slide was up there, we'll end the slide. I day trade attention. I am not a technologist. I'm not digitalant this. I'm not a fucking blogger. What the fuck? (audience laughter) I'm somebody who is obsessed with attention. From when I was six years old and instead of standing behind the lemonade stands I would sit and watch cars drive by and figure out where to put the signs. I was sick, you know. To now. I stand here and actually say if you have the money in I would say HubSpot. If I ran the marketing, the number one thing that I would do is run a Super Bowl commercial. I stand here today as a marketer that trades attention and I believe that the number one deal in marketing today is actually a Super Bowl commercial. It's six million dollars but the entire country, whether they watch it on YouTube or during the game will know exactly what you're up to. Now most people fuck it up because they try to make some funny video for 30 seconds and then we forget, but that is to me the number one play. The number two play in the world is Facebook video because I believe that Facebook video not confined to 30 seconds has the ability to build enormous awareness. VaynerMedia had a very special thing happen last week. I don't know if any of you guys caught this but when the Cubs won the World Series, we ran... (audience applause) Who's from Chicago? (cheers) Finally, right? Fuck. 108.

When the Cubs won the World Series, we ran an ad, an "ad" after the World Series. First it was Nike, then it was us, and we brought back Harry Caray from a classic 1984 commercial and that went big and everybody said we were geniuses and I got a lot of emails that night and it was super awesome and I replied to everyone saying, "Wait until tomorrow. " What tomorrow was, was the next day we deployed a two minute plus video where Harry Caray, we took 30 years of him calling games and chopped it up and had him over a two minute video call the final out of the Cubs winning the World Series. That video has 30 million plus views at this point and has drove a lot more incremental growth and awareness and B2B activity for the brand than the commercial did. Though the commercial media, like buying the commercial and making sure you all saw it cost multiples, 20, 30 times more expensive than what we deployed in a Facebook environment. This is what's happening. My friends, I want you to become historians of marketing. also understand what marketing is. We have confusion in the marketplace of marketing and branding versus sales. We have a lot of people in this room that are digital natives and they really understand sales. They understand optimization. UI/UX. They understand cost per click. They understand how you convert and change things and things of that nature. But what they don't do is actually brand and market. And if your business is growing you have to have a healthy balance of marketing and sales and branding. My friends, I did not buy these sneakers because Nike fucking cookied me and sent me to some fucking website and converted me. I bought it because of brand. And there's a lot of people here that are mixing it up and the reason Facebook is so special is it's the first platform that I've seen that does marketing and brand and sales in one place with underpriced attention. If you grew up in Google like I did, there was no brand there. We all had blue letters. That brand was eliminated. So, if I had one plea for the collective room tonight from a marketing and branding and business standpoint, it is that we have to understand the following. And this is tough for the digital landscape but very easy for the Madison Avenue landscape. Creative is the variable. Creative is the variable of success. The one thing that we all trade on in this room, no matter how and what you do, whether you're B2B or B2C, whether you sell sneakers or wine or books or your services, no matter what, we are all tied to attention. We are all battling for your attention, but once you have my attention, that creative is the variable. If your video sucks shit I can give you 9,000 ideas on Facebook you will lose. And that to me is something that has to be debated in this ecosystem much more. The other world I live in, Madison Avenue, where they believe in commercials, they're the other way. They just think it's art. If you understand and start respecting both art and science, math and creative equally, friction creating that diamond, you'll be a successful marketer over the next decade. The problem is we usually fall into one camp or the other. If you sit here tonight please start understanding respecting and building your skills around the one that you don't actually do. Because what's happening is we have unbelievably overpriced attention. The other thing that's happening is we have people that lack self awareness to know what they're good at and what they're not good at. And when you start understanding those variables, you start actually making results happen. I'm blown away by the world that I live in today. For a lot of you that don't know, I run a 750 person firm called VaynerMedia. I'm leaving here right after this talk going to London, we just opened a London office. What we do is we work with the biggest brands in the world. Under Armour and Chase and Toyota and Pepsi. And the amount of money that is wasted, just watch what I'm about to show you and I think we can all agree this is not a 14-year-old girl crowd. Raise your hand if you now when you watch television fast forward every single commercial or watch Netflix or HBO GO, when your favorite show airs, you don't watch when it airs, you watch it now on your time. Raise your hands. I just want everybody to look around. Keep 'em up. Especially front row. Look at this. Let me just give you the punchline. Everybody. - And how many people here if they're still using DVR or TiVo, fast forward every single commercial when given the option? And so, even if something crazy like the remote control falls off the bed, every person here grabs this any time that there is a commercial. Yet, $80 billion is spent by the biggest brands in the world to make 30 second videos of a Jeep going up a hill or some guy grabbing a beer, or some lady with a baby using some oil, $80 billion. It is completely not practical, it is broken, and it is the reason that 95% of the Fortune 500 biggest brands in the world have declined in market share over the last two years. Here's what matters to everybody in this room, all that money, all that money is coming into our ecosystem. Once they start calibrating how bad it actually is, when Coca-Cola and BMW and the biggest, IBM, start taking that money from page 147 of Sports Illustrated, and from a commercial of Guiding Light, and they take those dollars and they put them into Facebook and Instagram, the price of our attention is gonna go through the roof. So I sit here today and plea, and I plea, that if you are not activating your marketing in that ecosystem, you are gonna miss the golden era of Facebook marketing and you will regret it. And people run around here, there are people in this room, that run around here with an opinion on Facebook marketing, and they've never deployed a single ad on it. There are people here that run around and have opinions on Instagram marketing and have never deployed a single penny on it, period. Also, we sit here today in early November 2016, when the greatest marketing arbitrage besides Facebook advertising is influencer marketing. You may not like it. You may not think it's cool that people have detox tea pictures in their Instagram, or that fucking waist thing that freaks me the fuck out. (audience laughter) (chuckling) But it doesn't take away the fact

that right now, even in a B2B environment, that if you took the hours and map the people that had 400 followers, 500 followers, I'm gonna go back into practical details, you go into Instagram, you go into search, you start searching hashtags for your business, SaaS, right? Whatever your industry's about, and you start finding people that post, you start building a database and then you email them one by one with context. We already made a fucking pledge don't break it already. (audience laughter) And you ask them to promote your shit. And the price points are incredibly under priced for the amount of attention you get and the business development opportunities. Yet we continue not to do that. Meanwhile, what's overpriced? Twitter's overpriced. It breaks my heart, a lot of you guys know that Twitter was my coming out party. It is absolutely the platform that put me on. It's not fun for me to sit here and say that it's overpriced, but the problem is Twitter has a fire hose problem. There's so much, and we don't populate it. It's just like email going from 90% to 30%, and that is a problem, and the ads are overpriced. And that's just the ecosystem. So unfortunately for them, they're dealing with what we're dealing with. The other thing that's overpriced is all programmatic advertising, banner ads are such a mistake for businesses today because there's nobody here going to the right side of dailydaily. org and clicking a fucking banner ad. And so we sit here tonight with an ungodly amount of ridiculous marketing tactics, and looming ahead of us, is so much technology.

How many people here have Alexa Voice in their house? Alexa, raise your hand. Stand up actually, let's get the blood going. Stand up, I need a context here. Has Alexa in the home. - Think Board! - Yes I know, you're on the screen. You're pumped, right? It's fucking awesome, right? Get up here with me. (audience cheering) Very athletic, Jesus. (laughing) - You got a Think Board in your office. - Thank you man, it's good to see you, good. Just chill right here, just chill. - You've got one of our products. - I know, I'm aware. Just sit, I think. Yeah. No, you can do whatever the fuck you want. You're fucking big boy, I like it, do your thing. - Thanks man. - Hey man, how are you? Jesus man, you look really young, you look good. All right. (audience laughter) I mean, that's good, but this is way better, right? Free advertising. When you start thinking about Alexa and all these other things, one of the things that my career has been completely predicated on is the fact that I am willing to take chances on things that aren't mainstream yet because I understand that if I go after SocialCode, and Vine MikMak, and if I go after Yak, if I go after all these things that I only need one of those seven to actually hit, Snapchat, Instagram, to win that bet. We have enormous fear in this room to, I have to wait or, let's wait 'til it's big, or what if I waste my time? Awkward right? Yeah, super awkward. You could leave if you want but you could chill too. Got it. - Will I waste my time on these platforms, right?

Will I waste my time on these platforms if it doesn't become big? And one of the other themes that I really wanted to leave here with tonight, knowing the demo of this room, is we have to have a lot more risk tolerance on new platforms. If you're not playing, back to details, and I know you're taking notes. If you're not playing with Marco Polo and After School and Houseparty, then you're not there, potentially, at the platforms that could become the next things at the top of our tongue. How many people here, let's be really honest. Let's be really, really honest with ourselves, Inbound. Please raise your hand if this is true. How many people in this room, and I want everybody to look around, said two and a half years ago, three years ago, maybe even a year ago, that they would never be on Snapchat, that was stupid, and now have a Snapchat account? Raise your hands. Raise it high. Higher. This is where all the action is. This is the opportunity in this room, but we continue to downplay the upside, 'cause we fear the risk of being on there and wasting time. If you have not achieved what you want to professionally, or in life, time is the number one thing you've got. You need to deploy as much of that as humanly possible. That is the asset. When you have not achieved the things that you want to happen in life, and it is because of time that you haven't wanted to put in to these platforms or worlds, that is a massive mistake. It's the one asset you have. Not everybody in this room has money. It's true. You agree, right? Are you gonna work your fucking face off? Thank you. It's the one thing we have. have, because everybody wants to come up with excuses. I've spent my life reading excuses on social media and my inbox. I'm this, I wasn't born that way, I wasn't born here, this, I'm a female, I'm an immigrant, I'm a minority, I'm transgender. Excuses. Reality. By the way, I truly believe those are disadvantages. I'm not naive to the shortcomings of this country. The problem is: nobody cares. The market doesn't care. We sit and we dwell, and what do you think we've been doing for the last month, and what we're gonna do tomorrow morning? We're gonna dwell and complain, and that's utter defense, instead of going on the offense. We spend unbelievable amounts of time dwelling and wasting our time on dumb shit. People literally email me and say, "You're so lucky, "and I wish this was happening to me," and then the third tweet, or the third Instagram post is, "Awesome Saturday. Stayed home and watched entire season "of fucking Game of Thrones". We need to start understanding how big this opportunity is

because, for everybody in this room, you will sit back in 20, 30 years and regret if you didn't execute in this era, and, by the way, I don't wanna hear that this is for 20 and 30-year-olds. 40, 50, 60, 70. It's an equal playing field if you're willing to be a practitioner and understand the ecosystem that I've been speaking about tonight. There's never been a better time. Look, it's very obvious. These kind of characters: there was no respect for 20-year-olds in the business world 20 years ago when I came out, but now, because of technology, there's a lot of organizations that absolutely respect 20 and 30-year-olds. Also, what is happening is I'm spending so much time with 40 to 60-year-old executives who are dwelling and are upset, and tell me dumb shit like, "But Gary, "I didn't grow up with this shit". Neither did I, Alice. (audience laughter) I was 20 before I even was on a computer. I didn't grow up with this shit. I figured it out, and I sit there and see completely capable operators that have made it happen for the last 20, 30 years being crippled by, "I don't understand how Snapchat works. "It's so confusing". We're just filled with excuses. We are. People are just losing their hunger, and then, by the way, let me get really mad for two seconds with my fancy, rich friends. The thing that I'm completely blown away by, that I had no idea was going on in capitalism and meritocracy, is, once you get rich, you actually try to spend your dollars to create laws that allow you not to work and still hold onto your money. (audience applause) A hundred percent, right? I mean, I'm blown away by this. You were benefited, because in your twenties to 60, for 40 years, you grinded and out-executed somebody, and you were able to make lots of money, but now that you're tired and you're finished, and you're older and don't wanna put in the work, you don't want the next young buck to come along and eat your lunch. That's not how capitalism works. (audience applause) It's true. It's just not. And we have all these trends, and we have the great fortune of living in an era where things have been really good for a very long time, and I walk around the world, and I told my wife, Lizzy. I'm like, "Lizzy, listen to me. I don't care, "clearly 'cause I'm such a shit student, "what the kids do at school, but please. "They can't be in programs where we give away "seventh place trophies". (audience applause) I have no idea who wins the election tonight, but we need

to fucking ban seventh place trophies in America. (audience cheers) And so we have all these macro-situations going on, and not to mention, for a lot of people here under 30, you haven't been in the game during an economic downturn 'cause things have been very cushy for the last seven years where if you're 23 years old and you have an idea, you're company's miraculously worth $4 million. And so we're living in a very intriguing time, and I think that the passion and the angst and the energy that I bring tonight are predicated on a couple of tried and true things. Number one: If you're not making long-term decisions, you will be vulnerable. The market's changing very quickly, and anybody who's looking for short-term stuff, gets short-term stuff and then gets hurt in the long term. Things like, Airbnb. Guys, Airbnb shouldn't have been invented by Brian and Joe. Airbnb should have been invented my by Marriott, but Marriott is looking short term and isn't creating business models to put themselves out of business. Uber should have not been created by Garrett. They Garrett and Travis. They should have been created by the guy or girl that owned the most medallions in New York City or by Greyhound. If you sit here tonight and you're doing well, you're in danger because there's somebody young and hungry that has the internet, which is a platform that creates a zero cost to get into the game that's coming after your shit. So if you don't do what I do, which is wake up every single morning, every single morning and try to put yourself out of business, somebody else is going to do it for you. It is much more fun, my friends, to put yourself out of business then have somebody else do it for you. And so, please, if you're cushy, who's cushy? Raise your hand if shit's going real well. (audience laughter) Jesus Christ. Three people raised their hand. I think you need to shut down this fucking--

you doing good? Awesome man. What was that, I'm like are you doing good, you're like, yeah, we're doing okay. Yeah, right on. Yeah, always. So, you've gotta understand, the only thing that's interesting to me, and the only thing I have-- I always say that basically my career is predicated much more similar to Marino Rivera than anything else that I can think of. If you're a baseball fan, he was a very good closer for the New York Yankees, where, basically, his entire career was predicated on one pitch. He had one pitch for 17 years, and nobody could hit it. And that's basically my business career. I've got one pitch, which is the following, I know what you're gonna do before you know you're gonna do it. It's the thing that I was gifted with. Just like if you can sing, just like you shoot. I've always had the intuition. I was made fun of, and aggressively made fun of, for launching a website in 1996, because just like people sit here and think that Vine or Snapchat is a fad, there's people in this room that remember where the whole internet was a fad. But I bet on it. And I built a big business, and then I was made fun of because this thing called YouTube came out, and I took a chance on that cause I thought it was gonna big and started a wine show and sat in front of a camera and drank four bottles of wine for 20 minutes. And hundreds of thousands of people watch it. And then that worked. And then Twitter worked. And I invested in Twitter and Facebook and things of that nature, but I had so many losses along the way. One thing that's never talked about with my genius career was that I was on YouTube super early, but I left six months in and started producing Wine Library TV exclusively on Viddler. I was wrong. (audience laughter) One thing that's not talked about is that I thought that

the biggest start-up in the world in 2010 was gonna be Yobongo. I was wrong. (audience laughter) And I continued to be interested in being wrong for the rest of my life, because I am a purebred entrepreneur. Because I'm not scared of trying things and wasting my valuable time because I want things, and most of all, and this is the most of all of the whole thing, I just genuinely don't give a fuck about what you think about me, (audience applause) balanced with, I really care about what everybody says about me. (audience laughter) And in that friction, and I meant that. You have to deploy real ego and real humility around this course, because we live in that world. But if I can inspire anything in the time that I was here today, it's very simply this. Please do me one favor. I'm gonna wrap it up with this, and this matters so much to me. Please, whatever it takes, call your grandmother, go to your great grandfather's burial spot, go back to the old country. Go to a shelter. Do something, do something that re-calibrates your perspective on what is actually going on here. We have never had it better. My friends, I'm gonna leave you with a very interesting data point. You guys like data? Who likes data? Great. Let me give you some fucking data, more people in America will die from a coconut falling out of a tree and hitting you on the head and killing you, than terrorism. (audience applause) Yeah! I see you tentative, like is he fucking serious? I'm dead fucking serious. Kids seven to 11 watch more Twitch, eSports than all the four major sports combined. That's data. We're living through a totally different time. Ten years ago, the weirdest thing in the world was your friend dated people online. Now every single person swipes to the left and right 24/7. And so the trends in our society have changed. And either, you're gonna sit here and binary, this is a black and white conversation. Either you're going to leave here and understand how fucking awesome it is, and you're gonna take full advantage of it and be a winner. Or, you're gonna sit and dwell on all the negatives of it, and be a losing player. It's just the truth. It's not complicated. It's not fun for me to say. I don't want you to lose. I desperately want you to win, but this is on you. Nobody else is in control. There are people who deal with things like the loss of their children or real diseases. We're sitting and dwelling about not getting enough likes on fucking Instagram. We're sitting and dwelling about forces that don't really have impact on us. It is time that this collective room and our space understands this is the greatest golden era, of not only business, but life. And you really, and I mean really, need to fucking grab it. (audience applause) Thank you.