Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary Vee, has amassed wealth and fame through his foresight.
He invested in Facebook and Twitter in their infancy, predicted the rise of e-commerce, and built an audience on YouTube in the early 2000s when it was still a new and rapidly growing platform.
Through a number of endeavors, including VaynerMedia, the 49-year-old has become the digital media whisperer for Fortune 500 companies like JPMorgan and PepsiCo, navigating the online frontier.
He has also amassed 50 million followers across TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X, with users eager to learn from his business acumen.
The media personality's current passions include AI and a members-only fly fish club that opened on the Lower East Side in September with $14 million in funding from membership-based NFT sales.
“AI has changed my life. It's now my co-pilot,” he told the Post, explaining everything from politics to movie trends to why more people than ever are wearing hats. He said he uses this tool to investigate things. “It’s a partner in my strategic anthropology work, and we’re even sharper and more effective with clear data and speed than we were a year ago.”
Fly Fish Club is the latest addition to his already expansive empire, which also includes co-founding restaurant app company Resy and wine brand Empathy Wines.
Another recent passion is live shopping, which has taken over TikTok.
“QVC and HSN still make billions of dollars in revenue,” and now TikTok uses the same business model, he explained.
“I I encourage everyone to come and see what's happening on the TikTok shop,” he enthused. “Last week, TikTok held an event for 100 people who are doing a massive live shopping here, and they make hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars a year from live sales on TikTok.”
His vast social media audience allows him to stay on top of the latest trends, communicate insights, test ideas, and create a flywheel effect that allows him to generate demand.
“Most things fail because they can't create demand…I have the infrastructure to be able to create demand,” he said of his supporters.
Vaynerchuk's businesses are different, but they all influence each other.
But what makes him unique is his ability to parse the impact of technology in a way that contextualizes it for people and encourages them to embrace it. For example, start using Uber or AI.
Part of the reason people are so receptive to his insights is his own hardships.
He was born in the former Soviet Union (now Belarus) and moved to New York with his family when he was three years old. growing up in queensat age 14, he worked selling lemonade, trading baseball cards, and bagging ice at his family's liquor store for $2 an hour.
After attending Mount Ida College in Massachusetts, he returned to New York. When I was 31 years old, I started making daily YouTube videos that focused on my family's wine business. These became part of his Wine Library TV.
After five years of posting almost daily videos and amassing about 1 million YouTube followers, he has built his family's wine business (originally called Shoppers Discount Liquor) into a business that generates about $3 million a year in revenue. We were able to convert it into a wine library that we had been raising. Thanks to increased traffic, a thriving e-commerce business has grown to $60 million in revenue.
Eventually, he stepped away from running the business and focused solely on his own projects. I grew YouTube after creating content about business and entrepreneurship.
An early video warning about Facebook's business model went viral online, leading to a speaking invitation from Mark Zuckerberg and ultimately an opportunity to invest in Facebook (now known as Meta).
In 2009, I started VaynerMedia, a digital marketing agency. By 2017, the company was just one subsidiary of a larger umbrella company, Vayner X. Vayner X has a large portfolio that includes speaking bureaus, production companies, and strategy firms with offices around the world.
The combination of early recognition of smart investments and the ability to build an audience and use it to market products is Vaynerchuk's signature approach.
But what makes people fall in love with his opinions is the context and honesty he gives his audience — something he believes is lacking in the broader media.
“Fifty years ago, my grandfather's perspective carried a lot of weight,” he explained. “We've become obsessed with youth culture, looking young and acting young. We're coming out of a centuries-old era where our elders looked up to us, and now we're starting to look up to them. There is no respect for that.”
And now that he's less of an upstart and more of an elder statesman, that's a big focus of his videos. He takes the kind of tough love approach you often hear from parents and pastors.
For example, he is adamant that not embracing AI will undermine our ability to succeed.
“The answer is not to lament opportunities, but to weaponize them,” he says. “15 years ago, I was doing the same interview about social media. What happened was either people used it to achieve their goals, or they were sabotaged by the people who used it. It was.
“So, the real question is, are you going to grab your surfboard and ride this wave, or are you going to stick your head in the sand and let the wave take you?”
He credits New York City with being central to his success and his belief that anything is possible.
“Obviously, what makes New York special is the opportunity…it's not that complicated,” he said sadly. “And for some of us who need to grow, need to build, need to provide, need to play, need, need it, that’s the best area.”
This article is part of a new editorial series called NYNext, which focuses on innovation across various industries in New York City and the people leading the way.
