Gary Vaynerchuk

Background

It’s Gary Vaynerchuk’s special day, and we are dying to tell you all about him! You may have heard about him through one of his multiple ventures, VaynerMedia, or may have even listened to one of his inspiring podcast episodes. Whatever the case may be, Vaynerchuk constantly proves himself as a thriving entrepreneur, a personality, and a force to be reckoned with. His story begins in Babruysk, Belarus, on November 14, 1975. When he was three years old, Vaynerchuk and his family immigrated to the U.S. Hence, in 1978, Vaynerchuk and his entire extended family found themselves sharing a studio apartment in Queens, New York. It’s safe to say he had the entrepreneurial spirit from the very beginning because, at the age of seven, he was running a full-blown Lemonade franchise. You heard us right! A ‘franchise’ of lemonade stands in multiple locations, which he managed all by himself. Before that, he would pluck flowers out of his neighbors’ yards and use his charm to sell them right back.

As a teenager, Vaynerchuk added some more experience under his entrepreneurial belt by starting a business that made him thousands of dollars every week — selling baseball cards. The business was booming, and throughout high school, he earned big bucks selling baseball cards and toys to corner stores and his peers. Sasha Vaynerchuk, his father, began working at a relative’s liquor store in Edison, New Jersey, eventually moving the whole family with him. This turn of events also led to a halt in Vaynerchuk’s newfound career as he began working in the family business, bagging ice for $2/hour. He bagged a degree in management science from Mount Ida College in 1998 and took charge of the liquor store. Leveraging the internet, he transformed their local brick-and-mortar store into one of the first e-commerce platforms for alcohol in the country, rebranding it to the Wine Library. Shortly after, he kicked off one of the first long-form episodic video shows on YouTube in 2006, “WineLibraryTV.” These major improvements grew the business from a profit of $3 million to a whopping $60 million a year.

A couple of years and unprecedented popularity later, precisely in 2011, Vaynerchuk stepped away from the business to start up his digital ad agency, VaynerMedia, which, as of 2016, grossed $100 million in revenue. The digital agency is a subsidiary of VaynerX, which oversees other media and tech companies like Vayner3, Resy, and Empathy Wines. He also serves on the boards of Candy Digital and V.C.R. Group, and he is an angel investor in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Venmo. He has more than 12 million followers combined across his social platforms. His podcast, “The GaryVee Audio Experience,” is ranked among the top 100 business podcasts in the world, and he is a five-time “New York Times” Best-Selling author. The sky is the starting point for the entrepreneur, investor, author, and speaker, Vaynerchuk.