Most people didn't know what it was. I bought the word wine for five cents a click and owned it for 9-and-a-half months before anybody bid me up. This is before ten cents was the minimum. That was obviously a very good thing. And on and on. A lot of you became aware of me for the first time when YouTube first came out. And again, in 2006 most people weren't thinking that YouTube was going to become the phenomenon. Tomorrow Casey's gonna talk or the next day. People are building real businesses and brands. This was a decade ago. There wasn't a video on YouTube, when I started Wine Library TV, that had a million views yet. Not one. Not one video on the platform. So it was a small platform. Everybody thought it was stupid. There was no advertising. But it was the first time that I understood that content could drive business. I was just, you know, as some of you might remember I just sat in front of a camera for 20 minutes at a time, drinking four bottles of wine. And hundreds of thousands of people thought that was interesting enough and I was educating. It was also the first time in my career that I felt the effects of what has now been the foundation of what I've tried to do over the last decade. And it is probably my biggest recommendation to this room today. And this is probably good human being advice, not just entrepreneur and start-up and investor advice, what I learned from Wine Library TV is the following: The true story of Wine Library TV was the day that I thought I was going to start it do something similar to QVC. And I don't know if you have a QVC or a shopping network in Europe but QVC in America it's a show and they sell stuff through the TV. I thought I was going to do the QVC of wine. The first episode of that show when that camera went on and that light went on I realized that this was going to be on the internet forever. And that I just didn't want to peddle wine. I decided I wanted to be a value to people in learning about wine because I was scared that if I was peddling something I didn't believe in that somebody would come up to me at a party and say, "Do you like this? " And I'd say, "No, I hate it. " They're like, "Well you fucking said it was awesome "on Wine Library TV. You're a scam artist. " I'm like, "Shit, no. " So I was very focused on leveling up and I really believe the one great piece of advice if you want to take anything from this talk is we have to start realizing that giving and doing things in business without expectation of return from the other individual is probably the greatest leverage that you could ever deploy in your business life though it is extremely rare in today's business environment. And it has absolutely been the bedrock of what has allowed me to win. All my engagement. All my selfies right over there and signing books. All the content. I have nothing to sell. I have a book that I fucking sell once every three years for $13. This is not about monetizing an audience. It's about building leverage to build brand versus sales. One of the biggest things that I see going on right now in digital media is that we don't have a lot of people doing branding and marketing. We sales. The reason so many of you were confused by the value of Snapchat is because in the digital landscape we now think transactional. Everything is about what's the ROI of every piece of content. Every single action. What's the last attribution? What's the conversion rates? It's all become math based and that's fine because I love sales more than anybody. But I promise you, these fucking guys, Nike they didn't tag me on a browser and then re-cookie me and then travel all over the internet and pound me with banner ads until I gave up and bought it. (laughter) I bought it because they fucking marketed to me over the last 20 years and I don't even fucking know why I but it. And that is a very important point. Because what we're living through is a time where people are just being very transactional and conversion based when everything continues to get arbitraged. Another thought that I'm curious how many people here have gone to the life that I've gone to? Over the last three months, I no longer have a laptop or an iPad. I now only have live through my mobile device. How many people are on that level doing that? Raise your hands. Not a lot. And think about this conference. I really think that this trend, I do believe that if I came back here in two years, that 50, 40, 30% of the hands in this room would go up to that following question and I'm completely fascinated by it. And then for everybody in the room that is building businesses on the internet the thought of what's happening in your landing page optimization or the UI/UX of your product in a desktop environment I think is in the beginning stages of being disrupted. And that's what I really spent most of my time in. Which is what's the attention arbitrage? Where do I think your eyes and ears are gonna be before you do and how I go and land grab and buy up that property and how do I then deploy and build the best houses on that property through content? That is the pattern of my career. In 2006, I thought this social media thing was going to be really big and in 2007, 2008 I laid my foundation. And by 2007 and 8, I invested in Facebook and Tumblr, and Twitter and things of that nature. And I did quite well. I also used them to tell my story, sell my wine, do my thing. I think this is super important to understand because I think we also decide that things are emerging too fast. This is not just being first mover. A lot of people like to give me credit, "You predicted all this stuff. "You were so right. " I just want to be on the record forever there's plenty of people here recording, I haven't predicted shit. I'm not Nostradamus. What I've done well is I've moved quickly once you actually started using them. I didn't predict Twitter. I wasn't right about Snapchat. I was just looking at data. Snapchat two years ago when I first started talking about it already had 10s of millions of users. There was real people using it. I'm not predicting anything. I'm paying attention. There's probably very few people in this room that are paying as much attention to Anchor, to Peach, to all these platforms as I am but I'm not putting all my content or all my time and I'm also not crippled by putting my time and effort into platforms before they have 100 or 200 million users. For example, how many of you remember that five minutes four years ago where SocialCam got big? Raise your hand. Alright, so three nerds. (laughter) SocialCam got big for three minutes because of the Facebook News Feed juiced it and it had a lot of users and it was hot for four months, six months. I used it feverishly and used it a lot. It collapsed and meant nothing. But during that period, I learned so much about mobile video and the cadence of it and how people interacted with it that when Vine came along a year and a half later and then Instagram video and then Snapchat. I had already put in the work and had the learnings from human behavior that I deployed against the next thing. There are way too many people in this room that do not do actions because they're crippled by the short term results versus what it means in the long term. And this goes to marketing, running your business, and this comes down to what I probably want to spend a few more minutes on right now, which is, my friends, there's a lot of people in here that are start-up founders that should not be. My friends, there are a lot of people in here that work at agencies that should not be. They should be probably switched and vice versa and different things. One of the things that is absolutely driving me right now in my life is the untold depression, the untold suicides, to just get dark for a second, it's not fun to talk about but it's important. We are lacking self-awareness in this space. In a very substantial way. And there's a lot of people that are about to be met with a lot of disappointment and are struggling. How many people are an entrepreneur in here? Raise your hand. You guys and gals know, this isn't easy. There's nobody else. It's fun to work for somebody, you know why? You get to blame the boss. She and he is an asshole not you. When you're an entrepreneur where there's nobody else behind you, it's on you. And one thing we're not talking about is the level of success. Everybody thinks that the build fucking Uber. Everybody thinks they have to make millions of dollars. It's unbelievable what we've done. And I absolutely want to make sure that we're starting to have real conversations. Making $100,000 a year, €100,000 that's massively successful. We need to recalibrate what success looks like in our space because we're forcing through the branding of what we're doing very impractical, very high risk, very low return results for so many. 'Cause everybody's shooting for 10 billion. Guys, there's like four apps that big. There's like Uber and Instagram. How many fucking billion dollar companies do you think there are? And so I really am passionate about starting to reframe the conversation about the number one thing that I have noticed in my 20 years of my success because let me tell you something I suck shit at almost everything. What I've done well is I have deployed self-awareness around
what I am and I know what I am. There's a lot of things that I wish I was. Seven years ago, as a lot of you know, I had plenty of leverage and the web 2. 0 social media movement. I was one of the guys. 20 most followed people on Twitter. I didn't go raise $40 million to build the next Facebook. I didn't raise $50 million to build a platform around wine. I was self-aware enough even though I had all the opportunity in the world to build product that I wasn't gonna be successful. Seven years ago I went out and built a boring digital agency. Right? I built something practical. All my internet friends, a lot of people that are going to be on this stage, they made fun of me. Why don't you go build a big company or something grand? I built what I knew I could build. I'm very proud that over the last four years I've grown VaynerMedia from $3 to $100 million a year in revenue not fucking valuation. (laughter and applause) And cool, great, that's fine and who gives a shit what I am way more worried about than what I've done is what you're gonna do. I implore you, my friends, this is fancy, first of all, this is unbelievable. This is one of the nicest setups to a conference I have ever seen. Let's clap it up for these guys. This is unbelievable. (applause) Right? There's like fucking food trucks. It's sunny and shit. This is fucking awesome. (laughter) Anyway. What I did well was I didn't give a shit. I'm old. I'm 40. When I grew up in the United States being a good student was the big thing. I was making $3,000 a weekend selling baseball cards and getting D's and F's and everybody thought I was a loser. That's what the narrative was. Now it's reversed. If I was in school now making three or $4000 a weekend as a 13 year old, I would have been the next big thing, right? I went through it and I did not succumb to the current thing that everybody thought in America which was the right thing which was go to the best will you could go to. I understood who I was and I went in all-in on my strengths. And I implore a lot of you to do that. There's too many people sitting in this room that want to be the number one, CEO, founder but if you were the seventh employee of a company. I'd would much rather be number 41 at Facebook than number one of Face-smuck. (laughter) And so, I think we're seeing that. I'd like to stand up here and I'd like to say look there's a lot of things that I wish I was different at. As a matter of fact, let's be very meta- right now, do you know that I wish I didn't curse on stage? Do you know how many people don't share my content, don't like me because of it? I wish I didn't do it, I just can't be anything that I am not. So I implore you don't worry about what's cool right now or what we are all focused on or what your mama wants you to be you need to go home from this conference you'll be inspired, there'll be cool people, there's interesting shit but I'm telling you with the bottom of my heart it is fundamentally irrelevant if you don't know who the fuck you are. The quicker you can start forcing yourself to understanding what role you play number one, number seven, PR, marketing, product, UI, everybody wants to be somebody else. I wish I was the quarterback of the New York Jets. It's not going to happen. (laughter) And so if I can accomplish one and by the way I'm being very realistic I'll be very, very transparent with you this little seven minute rant that I just came up with, I'm trying to reach one person. This is not so easy. It's hard to have the ego and the humility at equal ends to figure yourself out. But I promise you as I have looked across the landscape and I have looked at 25, 50,000 start-ups at this point, right? I have now spent the last four years of my life with the Toyotas and the Pepsi's and the GE, you know, the biggest brands in the world, myself, my inner circle the one connection point from Corporate America to start-up to VC to personalities, the one connection point is self-awareness. Once you start understanding yourself, once you start actually executing on who you actually are versus who you wish you were things start to change very quickly. And so the reason I'm passionate about this is always very worldly advice and is probably historically always good things to talk about I just feel that if any of you really paid attention to the macroeconomic infrastructure of what's happening in our space right now this nirvana that we've lived through for the last six or seven years is about to shift. It just is. It's just the data. I don't want it. I wish it was nirvana forever just like everybody else. During the down cycles, the people that are able to win are the ones that are most in tune with themselves. practical. So again. To make this valuable to you in this room. Number one, if you're a startup please start understanding how you're going to make money as soon as possible. You're running a business. Businesses need to make money especially when there's no money to fund you based on your last valuation. Number two, as a human being sitting at this conference, this is all very encompassing and very exciting but start chipping away against what you think you want and start really looking at what you bring to the table because the quicker you figure that out the more success you will have. And number three, please start understanding how to provide value without expectation in return. It is unbelievable to me how many people already today I was here for five minutes, seven, eight people giving me something as they think but really expecting something in return for that give. Humans can feel that. It's not the way to go. And we really need to start thinking about that. And number four, understand the following and this is very ironic given my concerns about where the market is going. I'll end with this. In lieu of all that this whole thing that we are living through has just started. The consumer web is only 20 years old. Windows 95 kinda started this thing. The internet thing is very new. Everything that we all talk about didn't exist 10 years ago. Over the next 10 years the biggest companies in the world from Europe and Asia and US, from anywhere in the world because we are now at scale the biggest companies in the world are going to be created over the next 20 years from zero. There are people sitting in this room right now that are going to build the next major company. And so we are all so blessed that we are actually human beings during this period where there is so much upside, so much opportunity, and so everything I've talked about when you parallel on the obnoxious opportunity and land grab and opportunity if you're able to wire those two things together, I think a lot of good stuff could happen for you and I'd like that for you. I'd like that a lot. Thank you. (applause) (techno music)
