Successful internet entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk recently spoke about how so many people continue to underestimate the amazing power of the internet to change their lives. Don’t miss the part about Facebook and Instagram about half way down below. Hint… this is the part that can literally change your life and your business.
Here are the highlights:
I think that everybody in here is underestimating how special this era is.
Whether you’re a young kid and never knew a non-internet world, whether you’re my age, 42, or above and you understood it because we grew up without it, even the people that can appreciate it because we grew up without it, I don’t think are really understanding that this internet thing is no question the biggest change in the human race, ever. It just is.
All the things we’re thinking about, whether it’s political or social or financial things, they’ve just started. Everything that’s changing has just started.
In my adulthood, not even in my childhood, Best Buy rose and was eliminated because of this environment. I’ll be honest with you, I mean, it’s tough to say but I actually think Target is remarkably vulnerable in an Amazon/Walmart battle world. I actually predict, pretty aggressively, that Target will be bought by either Amazon or Facebook or Apple or Google because I think the internet companies have to buy retail to compete with Amazon.
There’s a real, real disconnect between the reality of what’s happening, all the opportunity.
What I think is happening is this extremism. Much like our social issues where we’re starting to really go in opposite directions. There’s this extremism, yes, there are hundreds of 11-year-olds making a million fucking dollars a year, making slime, selling it on Instagram, yet 99% of people that raise $2 million in capital for their start-up to make the Uber a fucking pizza delivery are going to fail.
I think the thing that’s grounding me is in this ridiculous change in our society, things like 15 years ago, if you dated on the internet and dated somebody you met on the internet, you were weird and a loser and it was taboo, and now every single person dates through the internet and swipes left and right 24/7, or slides into the DM.
Do you know how crazy Uber is as an early investor? Uber’s insane. Uber, or Lyft, or whatever you want, literally, if I stood up here and said guys, in 15 years you’re going to wan your 13-year-old daughter to go into a stranger’s car, because you’re going to think that’s safer than her driving with her friend. Parents actually, and probably correctly, think it’s safer for their 16-year-old daughter to go into strange 40-year-old men cars multiple times a day. I mean it.
But I would have never been able to sell you on that if this was 10 years ago and I’m like, let’s do start-up ideas and I pitched you on that, you would have laughed me out of the room. I know because I laughed the founders of Uber out of the room when they were like, what if everybody could get a limo on their iPhone? I was like, yeah, 1% of rich people. I never saw it playing out the way it did.
I think it’s a very interesting time.
What’s interesting to me about it is as the world’s changing, as people watching video games, more people watch people play video games than watch people play baseball. That’s just real. ABC, NBC, and CBS are finished. They’re done.
Remember when four years ago you had one show on Netflix that you liked but then you watched cable? Now you have Netflix and there’s one show on cable or regular TV. Do you understand when all the sports go to Netflix and Amazon? Amazon has bought the rights to English Premier Football, you know, proper football, soccer shit.
Tennis, Amazon’s going to be bidding for the NFL. Hulu’s going to have hockey. Google and Apple are going to have basketball. You’re never going to turn on two, four, five, or seven. Ever.
In this world, think about nothing we believe in or use, YouTube, the iPhone, Netflix, Facebook, none of that existed 15 years ago. Nothing that our entire society is running on. Everything we run on, guys, almost everybody her remembers the world pre-smartphone. You couldn’t, it’s just five minutes ago that you were like the internet on your phone! We struggle with things.
Parents all the time, when SnapChat blew up three or four years ago, parents were like, Gary, but I don’t want my kid on SnapChat. I’m like, you do know your son has Safari and can type in JizzHut.com, right? You’re worried about the one floozy 13-year-old in the fucking state and the dude’s got porn at his fucking fingertips.
That’s what I think a lot about.
Nobody here has actually quantified what’s really happened here.
For example, there’s a term in start-up land or in the business world called the last mile. It’s this big debate of how we’re all going to get everything delivered to us within an hour. Is it going to be Amazon, is it going to be Uber, is it going to be Postmates?
What I don’t think people understand is 7-11 is actually out of business in the next 15 years because of the last mile. You need deodorant or a fucking 20 ounce Mountain Dew you’re going to press a button and it’s going to be in your fucking house or office in a second.
What I think I’ve done really well in my career by launching a wine business on the internet in 1996 when people told me the internet itself was a fad. Or buying Google Adwords when nobody even knew what a search engine really was. Or when I started a wine show on YouTube in the first six months it existed. Or went all in on social media when everybody shit on social media, I was there.
I remember what everybody thought about Twitter and how stupid it was. Or that Facebook was a college thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We put the past on a pedestal. We demonize the current and the future.
In all these changes, in all of this stuff that is going on, the thing that is most fascinating to me and the thing that I want to talk to you about is that this, doing the right thing and gratitude and honor and all this propaganda that I push, is actually more valuable than ever because let me tell you what the internet’s going to do.
I’ve been saying this for a long time and I feel like people are finally starting to believe me. I had this woman yelling at me over dinner about how this internet thing is scary and it sucks and this and that. And she’s an incredible activist for all women’s rights and all these other things. I’m like, you do understand that your media that you’re putting on a pedestal, the New York Times and NBC, is the reason all this bad stuff was able to happen?
When five or six old white guys control the media, a lot of stuff doesn’t hit daylight. When we control the media it gets a lot harder. Let me give you a news alert. Russia didn’t make you do anything. It didn’t, it didn’t. Meaning, if you’re a good person, a bad person, voted Democrat or Republican, you do you.
I have zero interest in debating politics with anybody these days because everyone’s on tilt. I just want everybody to know, the Russians didn’t hack your fucking brain. You didn’t go in saying I’m going to vote for Hillary, and vote for Donald, or the other way around. That’s not what happened. What happened is, you believe in what you want to believe.
Technology’s exposing us, it’s not changing us. What’s happening, where does this all go? What I want you to do more than anything is understand the following.
It has never been a better time in the human race ever to actually just go all in on you.
We are in a remarkable time. For all the things you may be worried about, left, right, up, down, there has never been a better time to be alive in the human race than right now.
Medicine, life expectancy, poverty, every issue we have, better. The best people to talk about what’s going on in America are 90-year-olds. They shit on everybody. They’re like, she thinks it’s bad? Ah, fuck!
This like 92-year-old woman stopped me in the street, she’s like, keep doing what you’re doing, I’m like, I mean, she looked like 190. I was like, thank you. I got to talk to her for a second and she’s like, by the way, these women, and she’s wrong but it was still funny, these women, fuck, if I didn’t have somebody grab my ass everyday in the office, I was pissed!
I was like, I get it. I was like, don’t say that in public. She’s like, fuck public! I was like, man, 92 is some gangster shit. I’m obsessed with practicality. People think I’m a destructor, I’m practical.
Facebook and Instagram ads are grossly under-priced.
If you go how tonight and Google how to run Instagram story ads, and learn how to do that, and then make a video or picture and run Instagram story ads for whatever you’re trying to do in life, become the mayor here, sell some peanuts, kombucha, get people to sign up for your fucking track team, I don’t care what, An Instagram story ad will work better than anything else you can do if you care about people 15-45. If you care about people 30-75, Facebook works better than anything.
If you sit here tonight and you are not completely fucking pumped completely pumped about your life, it’s up to you to change that.
I can’t implore this audience enough to realize that Facebook and Instagram right now is so remarkably under-priced in its ability to change the outcome of your business, your dreams, your mission. If I could do anything today, it would be to encourage people to go home and Google how to run Facebook ads, how to run Instagram ads, because that will absolutely change your game.
I think about this all the time. The ROI. The ROI of a basketball for LeBron it’s a billion dollars, for me it’s zero. Just because you didn’t have a successful ad campaign on Facebook or Instagram doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it means you suck.
If you don’t run a successful ad campaign right now on Facebook and Instagram in the way that it’s so under-priced, you actually really suck. Now, here’s the good news. A lot of people run ads that are self-serving. The reason so many things aren’t working for people is that it’s good for you, not for the other person. Nobody wants your $897 bullshit e-book. That’s why your fucking Facebook ad didn’t work. That’s the problem, not Facebook.
I really, really, really want to implore people to understand that I sit here with a lot of business regret because when my dad’s business grew from $3 to $60 million, it should have been from $3 to $250 million. But I didn’t run enough Google ads.
I hit hard on Google when it first popped but I didn’t spend enough because I was a kid and I didn’t realize how special that moment was. That moment went away. Buying the word cabernet and Merlot and pinot grigio and Bordeaux and Napa Valley and wine and wines and wine gifts and this and that, they were five and 10 cents a click. I bought them all and nobody knew what the fuck was happening.
There were millions of people on Google and I got bigger than Haskell’s and Sam’s and Sherry Lehman’s and Wine Club and everybody was confused why. That’s what’s happening right now on Facebook and Instagram.
I’m telling you the fucking truth, I’m giving it to you, and 98% of you will not do anything about it.
We have to understand what’s going on. Why is Toys R Us going out of business? Why are all these things happening? It’s happening because the internet is eating up our society.
Why do we have such big opportunities?
Because everybody here can start a competitor to Coca Cola, which used to take $50 million because you had to buy into Albertson’s and to Safeway and Target and you had to make it and you had to fucking market it on television and now it costs $200,000.
You make something, you slap it on Amazon, 3PL, you run some Instagram influencer ads, and you’re in the game. It’s crazy.
What’s crazy about the internet, unlike what we grew up with whereas if you wanted to open up your store, your dream store, you had to be there so by the time you got home at seven, you couldn’t do that. The fact that you can do this from 7PM to two in the morning until it means something, enough to give you the courage to jump off the other thing, this is just practical.
The dream of being happy and living your life has actually become practical.
You’re sitting on the information but because it wasn’t like that for last 300 years, you can’t wrap your head around it. And because it seems so crazy, the idea of doing it and nothing happens for six months, makes you feel like it wasn’t meant to be and you get out. Because you were built and groomed within a school environment.
The only reason I’m successful is because I got Ds and Fs and I didn’t listen. I mean it. It’s how I see things differently. You need somebody else to have already done it. You need to see the path. I don’t like paths. I need blank slates. This is a blank slate.
I can’t wrap my head around it. That so many people here can build a $50,000 to $500,000 a year business on Amazon just by going on websites in China, buying something, and then relisting it on Amazon. That, my parents and I had dinner in New York and we had this nice dinner and we were coming out and our waitress ran out and grabbed me and said, thank you so much. She said, my fiance was out of a job for 19 months, depressed, doing drugs, saw one of your Instagram videos and a year later on Amazon is making $1.3 million a year. To me, this is fucking nuts.
So I am super excited about the time that we’re living in. I love what’s going on, I love that the big companies are losing, I love that the establishment is in trouble. I love it because I think it’s going to be better. I think we’re all going to be happier. I really do.
When Best Buy goes out of business, I don’t see that as a negativity.
I see that as an opportunity. I love that people are like, oh, Best Buy shouldn’t go out of business. Best Buy put people out of business. Everyone’s like, this is unfair, Walmart, like Target, Target put people out of business.
How are you confused by this? All of a sudden this was the moment to stop capitalism? Because Target’s here? Target put people out of business. Ironically, if you really play out my thesis, the people that are going to put Target out of business are back to the small people.
That is the most interesting shit to me of all time.
This internet thing is big. It’s real big. It’ll be bigger than we all thought. To me, the fact that you’re not doing Facebook or Instagram or YouTube out of a social point of view, to the detriment of your business and happiness and opportunity, is nuts. Because you’re mad that people aren’t talking to each other in real life, you’re leaving opportunity on the table for yourself is not a good idea.