Inspiration compilation storybook part 8 Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Babruysk, a city in what was then the Soviet Union, which is currently Belarus. His family moved to New York when Gary was three. He and eight others crammed into a single studio-apartment in Queens.

When he was little older, they relocated to Edison New Jersey where his father opened a liquor store, Shopper’s Discount Liquor. Gary had an immediate flair for entrepreneurship. At the age of 7, when most children played at having a lemonade stand. Gary had a franchise of lemonade stands and hired other kids to run them.

At the age of 13, with a thousand-dollar loan from his father, Gary began buying and selling trading cards, earning thousands of dollars back, proving his flair for business, and his quick mind for how to make something profitable.

Oddly enough it was his father who derailed his success. When he was 14, he was brought in to work at the liquor store for $2 per hour bagging ice. Overnight he went from earning a couple of thousand dollars a week to nearly nothing.

Not one to accept a setback, and realizing that his only way out was up, he sat down with a book about wine and learned everything about the product he was selling. Soon, he was on the sales floor, selling the bottles and by the time he was 22, he’d taken over the family business that was now making a couple of million dollars each year.

In the mid-1990s, Gary took a long look at the emerging internet technology and began thinking how to apply that to the business best. He created one of the first e-commerce sites and renamed the liquor store The Wine Library. He did this despite repeatedly being told that the venture would fail and no one would buy wine over the internet.

Furthermore, in 2006, Gary started a VLOG or Video Blog that covered wine topics. Every day with a different podcast, he leverages another marketing method that again left the naysayers looking down their noses at him.

They did not look down on him for long. By then he’d taken the $3 million per year company and created a $60 Million per year e-commerce giant.

In 2009, Gary felt that he’d proven his point and left the wine industry to capitalize on the knowledge he’d gained from his experiences and created VaynerMedia, a digital ad agency with this brother, AJ. Among his clients are PepsiCo, General Electric, and Anheuser-Busch. As of 2016, VaynerMedia became a $100 million agency.

Since then, he’s bought PureWow, a media company, invested in Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and other social media outlets.

Gary himself is worth more than $160 million, quite the change from the poor kid in an overcrowded apartment.

Gary is still very active as a lecturer and entrepreneur. He’s started companies representing professional sports figures and been part of a reality TV show assessing application programmers looking for investors. He also connects with his fans, answering questions on the #AskGaryVee show, where he gives inspiration to the world through a variety of social media outlets.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a prime example of someone who had early success. But someone who didn't understand what Gary was doing forced him onto a different path. Rather than being derailed, Gary went on to find success where he was. He knew where he wanted to be and proved that we don't have to be ruled by or even defined by our setbacks, nor should we listen when told something that's new must by definition fail.

All that makes Gary Vaynerchuk one of the grittier inspirational figures today.