Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as GaryVee, made his fortune and his reputation with his prescience.
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, fast-growing platform.
With his many endeavors, including VaynerMedia, the 49-year-old has become a digital media whisperer for Fortune 500 companies like J.P. Morgan and PepsiCo navigating online frontiers.
He has also attracted 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 the member’s only Flyfish Club, which he opened in September on the Lower East Side with $14 million in funding from membership NFT sales.
“A.I. has changed my life; it is now my copilot,” he told The Post, noting that he uses it to research everything from politics to movie trends to why more people are wearing hats than ever before. “It is my partner in my strategy anthropology work, and I’m even sharper and more effective with clearer data and faster than I was a year ago.”
The Flyfish Club is yet another addition to his already extensive empire which also includes co-founding restaurant app company Resy and wine brand Empathy Wines.
Another current passion is the live shopping taking over TikTok.
“QVC and HSN are still doing billions in revenue,” and now, TikTok has used that same business model he explained.
“I implore all of you to go look at what’s going on on TikTok shop,” he enthused. “Last week, TikTok had an event here for 100 people that are doing live shopping at scale, making hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars a year in selling live on TikTok.”
His vast social media audience helps him stay on top of the latest trends, relay insights and create a flywheel effect that allows him to both test ideas and create demand.
“Most things fail because they can’t create demand… I have an infrastructure that can create demand,”he said of his following.
While disparate, Vaynerchuk’s businesses all feed into each other.
But what makes him unique is his ability to parse technology’s impact in a way that contextualizes it for people and then pushes them to embrace it — like starting to use Uber or AI.
Part of the reason people are so receptive to his insight is because of his own hardships.
He was born in the former Soviet Union (modern day Belarus) and immigrated to NYC with his family at age 3. Growing up in Queens, he sold lemonade, traded baseball cards and worked at the family liquor store, bagging ice for $2 per hour at age 14.
After attending Mount Ida College in Massachusetts, he returned to New York. At age 31, he started making daily YouTube videos that focused on his family’s wine business. They would became part of his Wine Library TV.
After five years of posting almost daily videos and racking up around a million YouTube followers, he was able to transform the family’s wine business — originally called Shopper’s Discount Liquor — which did about $3 million in revenue annually to Wine Library. Thanks to a boost in traffic, the thriving e-commerce business grew to make $60 million in revenue.
Eventually, he stepped away from running that business to focus exclusively on his own projects. He grew a YouTube following making content about businesses and entrepreneurship.
An early video warning that Facebook’s business model generated online buzz, led to a speaking invitation from Mark Zuckerberg — and eventually an opportunity to invest in Facebook (now known as Meta).
In 2009, he launched VaynerMedia, a digital marketing agency. By 2017, it evolved to be just one subsidiary of a larger umbrella company, Vayner X — a massive portfolio that includes a speaking bureau, a production company, and a strategy firm with offices worldwide.
The combination of recognizing smart investments early on — as well as his ability to build an audience and leverage it to market products have become Vaynerchuk’s signature approach.
But it’s the context and honesty he gives his audience — something he believes is lacking across the broader media — that makes people obsessed with his opinions.
“Fifty years ago, a grandfather’s point of view carried a lot of weight,” he explained. “We’ve become infatuated with youth culture, looking younger, acting younger. We’re coming out of an era of hundreds of years where elders had respect, and now they have none.”
And now as he becomes less of an upstart and more of an elder statesman, that has become a large focus of his videos. He gives kind of tough love approach you’d more typically hear from a parent or a pastor.
For example, he’s been adamant that failing to embrace AI it will impair one’s ability to succeed.
“The answer is to weaponize the opportunity instead of crying about it,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, I was doing the same interview about social media. What transpired was either people used it to achieve their goals or they got disrupted by those who did.
“So the real question is, are you going to grab a surfboard and ride this wave or are you going to put your head in the sand and let the surf the wave kill you?”
He believes that New York City has been central both to his success and his belief that anything is possible.
“Tangibly what New York is special for is opportunity … it’s not super complicated,” he sad. “And for some of us that need to grow, that need to build, that need to provide, that need to play, the need, that need it, well, that’s the best field.”
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.
