- If you play it right for yourself,
it can be the most remarkable thing.
But as a collective,
these very early days are super important.
This is inevitable at scale.
Watching this makes me laugh,
because this is exactly what the rooms look
and this is actually way more.
This is more even though it's,
these days for me, a small room.
You know, this is way more faces
than the ones that I saw in the tech space,
and a lot of these faces went on to become the founders
of Uber and Zucks
and the founders of Instagram and things of that nature.
So, a couple things.
Number one.
(upbeat instrumental beats)
You've got more perspective.
(airplane engine roars)
(audience cheers)
I just want to be happy.
Don't you want to be happy?
In 2006 and '07, when I went to South by Southwest,
people were there to be part of tech, for the sake of tech,
to change the world.
The aspirations and the ideology were remarkable.
The far majority of this room,
today, 2018, right here together, is in it for it.
They've been in it.
They're not flying in from Wall Street or Silicon Valley,
there's people in here, there's people in here.
But, the majority of this room is in it.
Now, this is super important,
as I hear that wonderful thank you
and I get it and I respect that.
This is a very important conversation, I'll tell you why.
The OG's in this room that have been through it,
that been, you know, it's funny, I was spending some time
and looking at an article being rated
and I was telling some of the people on my team,
who don't even hear this story,
the amount of times the ABC came to Wine Library
because I was navigating and doing things early
that nobody ever did before, and when you're biggest,
you get picked on because you can pay the fine.
Don't get it twisted, it's very simple.
It's called winner's tax.
They don't tell you that at B school, but that's what it is.
(audience laughs)
I'll say it this way, it's unfortunate for me,
unlike when I got into tech
or many other things I've done in my life,
because of the profiles of my business career,
it's harder for me to kind of go into new spaces
and do what I naturally want to do.
To be very frank,
I don't know if I've ever felt the combination
of gratitude and feeling humble and at the same token,
a sense of responsibility of giving this talk today because,
much like the way I entered into the tech space
or wine space, or other things that I've done,
I just want to learn, right?
I'm doing a lot of listening.
The reason I teamed up with Josh, Rama,
and the rest of Green Street is I didn't want to come
into this space and think that I knew everything
or things of that nature, I want to take it nice and slow
and pay attention.
Being underestimated and misunderstood
is a massive business advantage.
There's a lot of people in this room
that are so desperate for acceptance of like, this is real,
and all these kind of things, like this is gonna be,
spending so much time trying to convince somebody
of the legitimacy or the seniority
or the sophistication of the space
without realizing that they should be spending 100%
of their time on the end consumer
and building their advantage.
The leverage and preference of the majority
of the people in this room would actually be,
for people coming into this space to dramatically slow down,
not speed up.
For all the good, that dollars
and all these other things come out.
The more time that you have planting your flag
and establishing your brand and building a relationship
with the end consumer, the more leverage you have.
Trying to convince people that are no-people,
is a waste of time.
I think that's just something that some of you need to hear.
Because that no-person, for a lot of you,
is your fucking mom.
(audience laughs)
That no-person is your brother, that you respect,
or your homie or your sibling.
So, just be very thoughtful of who you try to convince
this is real because I think that's a lot of wasted
energy in early times.
Number two, you need to be thoughtful
of all the new people that are coming in.
If you play it right for yourself,
it can be the most remarkable thing.
But as a collective,
these very early days are super important.
This is inevitable, at scale.
Watching this makes me laugh,
because this is exactly what the rooms look
and this is actually way more.
This is more even though it's,
these days for me, a small room.
You know, this is way more faces
than the ones that I saw in the tech space,
and a lot of these faces went on to become
the founders of Uber and Zucks
and the founders of Instagram and things of that nature.
So, a couple things:
Number one,
if you are fortunate enough to be smart enough,
and that's the only word I can think of.
If you are fortunate enough to be smart enough
to be in this fucking room right now,
please do not do what so many of my homies from tech
and 2006, '07 and 08' do to me, which is reminisce
and are sad that they did not take full advantage
of their pole position in where the world was going.
The biggest mistake that so many of you will do today
is not network with other people at this place.
What I really am passionate about is for people in this room
to understand how many options we do have.
If you're in this space, even if you're a brand,
or if you're a grower, your permission
to be the media company of this space is there.
AKA, every fucking person in this room
needs to start thinking about their podcast, yesterday.
Every single person in this room needs to be thinking about
writing a whitepaper and putting it on LinkedIn, yesterday.
Everybody here has to shift from crying,
and that's what a lot of you are doing, wah-wah.
Instagram and Facebook and Google aren't taking my money.
Nobody gives a fuck about your tears.
Stop crying about what you can't do,
and start figuring out what you can do.
You can be dominating Instagram,
spend the fucking 900 hours building out
an influencer network so that they can fucking do posts
and give you cosigns.
You could.
You could start a YouTube vlog and document the journey
of building your business in a space along the way.
I wish I could watch Zuck's fucking vlog
and how he built Facebook,
if he was doing this 10 years ago.
God forbid, AKA God willing, your company explodes,
that Vlog of how you made it, is gonna be watched
for the next 50 fucking years in perpetuity.
You can do a ton of shit,
but we have to shift our marketing mindset in this space,
from being advertisers to being media companies.
We have to produce content.
You have to produce content.
So I implore you to take advantage
of this remarkable moment in your industry,
where it's not a baby, but it hasn't even started.
I highly recommend you understand
how early platforms and industries start.
The ROI is in the fucking people.
The ROI is in the fucking people, I promise you right now,
everybody is watching how you're navigating right now.
Everybody is watching.
There's a lot of you,
and I fucking was in the hall for four minutes.
There's a lot of you, unfortunately,
getting seduced by the short term ROI and finances
and the system and everybody knows it.
And, you will lose.
Three of you will get through
and make that trade, that's fine.
We'll never see you again.
But most of you will have a scarlet letter
for trying to take from it instead of giving to it.
Look, if you make a podcast called 43 year old mom,
that's literally the name of it
and you're targeting housewives and high net worth
individuals who are gonna be in the edibles space,
because that's who you're targeting,
you've gotta really just go after your target audience
with content that they'll consume.
That's always been the case.
But the reason I said one, two and three is patience,
is 'cause that's what it's gonna take.
There's still a fucking massive stigma.
Go fucking read the first 15 years of prohibition.
You know what the biggest, scariest things in the world are?
Having too little and having too much.
When you're poor as fuck and on welfare,
you don't think the trust fund baby
who's got a hundred mills has got it bad,
you think that's the greatest.
What you don't realize is,
that kid is always gonna be told that he never made it
and he's got a drug problem, and fucked up and on meds,
and at the psychiatrist 'cause his game is broken
before he even started.
The bottom line is, my dear,
everybody's got fucking problems too.
Because when it's yours, it's yours.
And so, I navigate happy
because I'm just grateful for what I have,
and other people have more, other people have less.
When I had a whole lot less, I was happy with the fuck I had
and I just every day recognize that if I'm in my own head
and realize that everybody's got their own shit too,
that I don't spend time complaining and dwelling,
I spend time on doing.
This is forever.
You, have made a decision to be an industry
that will be over regulated for the rest of your life.
I promise you that.
And that's super okay.
I did the first 20 years of my business life,
in a super regulated business.
But it still sucks compared to not regulated businesses.
Like, I don't know what else to tell you.
And so, much like the admiration I have for Travis,
I could have never built Uber,
'cause Travis had a DNA that was good at fighting City Hall.
I'm scared of City Hall.
That's just my DNA.
So, I think everybody here has to make a decision for them,
if they have the muscle, memory, and the stomach
to deal with the ebbs and flows of things.
The toughest thing, and anybody will know this,
the number one toughest thing to me in life,
is not having little, 'cause you don't know.
It's having little, getting a lot, and then losing it.
People going backwards just struggle.
I think the toughest thing in a regulated business is,
cool they open up Illinois, couple people here have Chicago
roots or they move and they go and they crush it,
they saw what happened in Cali, they want to deal inland,
and they fucking kill it and for some reason,
seven years later, they re regulate it and it's gone.
Tough.
That is what you're signing up for and I think the better,
kind of like nobody gives a fuck about your feelings,
right, the quicker you understand,
this is gonna be regulated in perpetuity,
then you can start really starting to think about
how you navigate and how you go about it.
So I wish you guys the best.
I'm so grateful that I was able to give this talk,
at this time.
It means a lot to me.
I'm super excited to get to know the majority of you
over the next two or three decades
and I wish you great health and great success.
Thank you so much.
(audience cheers) (audience claps)
Thank you.
- Gary Vaynerchuk, everybody.
- [Gary] Thank you guys.
Thank you to everybody.
- [Man] See your phone.
(mellow music)