The Pomp Podcast - #380: AJ Vaynerchuk on Building The Next Great Sports Agency

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

AJ Vaynerchuk is the co-founder of the athlete representation firm VaynerSports. He is also the former COO of VaynerMedia, a social-media-first digital agency. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of sports, how athletes are becoming entrepreneurs and investors, the best operational lessons AJ learned after building multiple large companies, and where he sees opportunity today.  =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. AJ Vaynerchuk is the co-founder of the athlete representation firm VaynerSports. He's also the former COO of VaynerMedia, a social media-first digital agency. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of sports, how athletes are becoming entrepreneurs and investors, the best operational lessons AJ learned after building multiple large companies, and where he sees opportunity today. I really enjoyed this conversation with AJ and I hope

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over to unstoppabledomains.com lastly don't forget that i write a daily letter to over 50,000 and investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with AJ. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to

make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got AJ here. Thanks for doing this, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. For sure. Let's just jump right in. Let's talk about your background and kind of what you did before VaynerMedia and then VaynerSports that you're running today. Sure. I mean, it starts with being born in Jersey. Grew up in a small town in New Jersey, kind of on the border of Pennsylvania and NJ. Grew up in a household. I'm first generation. My family's from Belarus. My parents were born there. My brother was born there. My sister and I born here in America. So, you know, grew up in a

very interesting household, one that blended two cultures. But then one also that was very centered around entrepreneurship. My father's an entrepreneur, came to this country, did a lot of things to make ends meet, but ultimately landed on the idea and grew into owning his own wine retail shop. And so entrepreneurship was the driving conversation at the dinner table. And it was interesting because, uh, Gary's 11 years older than I am. And so because of that, um, fact that it was kind of where my dad had a lot of his focus ended up being where my brother had a lot of focus. Um, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, and the dinner table conversations business. And I'm very lucky for that. And that was huge for me. And I, uh, I was also pretty good with math and naturally inclined

with math. So business wasn't a huge leap for me. Um, and, you know, grew up with that. I went to school in Boston, went to Boston University, met my wife there, and spent most of my college career trying to figure out what I wanted to do business-wise. And it was essentially unrelated to what I was studying in school. I ended up working out. I majored in advertising and minored in computer science, which is a really interesting mix. I don't recommend minoring in computer science if you're going to take computer science you should probably major in it i remember i'll never forget i was like a junior and one of my professors i mean like comp sci 242 whatever it is right one of the professors like so like you learned last year in cs 212 and cs 230 and i didn't

take cs 212 and 230 right and so that was super tough but i figured it out i'm glad i did it um and uh but i really spent most of it just trying to figure out what i wanted to do from an entrepreneurship standpoint, I always knew, Gary and I always knew we wanted to do something together. And so my senior year was really focused on honing that in. We had a few different ideas, you know, for timing, this is around 2008, 2009. So not a great time from an economic standpoint in our country. And we toyed around with like a fantasy baseball concept. We toyed around with the deal of the day type concept. But where we ultimately landed was VaynerMedia. And the reason we landed on that was because Gary was already doing so much for his personal brand, utilizing things like Twitter and Facebook, that he started having people in his network saying, hey, you're doing this for yourself.

Can you help me do this for a business? And we saw it as an opportunity to take something that we were interested in, social media platforms. I actually spent a summer in San Francisco in between my junior and senior year at a company called Revision3, which was a sister company to Digg at the time. And so we just had our hands in Silicon Valley and tech startups and what I guess was called Web 2.0 at the time. And then also through Gary's own network, just being in business, he's in his early 30s at this point, we had relationships with corporate America. And a little bit of luck came from the fact that without knowing it prior, New Jersey is actually a very big epicenter for corporate HQs, specifically around consumer packaged goods. So you have a lot of big CPG companies that are in Jersey and a lot of those big CPG company executives happen to be customers of the Wine Library and personal relationships with my brother. And so we just saw it as kind of like opportunistic.

It felt right given just the economic situation. And we also had so much belief in these platforms and how they were working for my brother that we knew brands would latch on. And so we felt like we were ahead of the pack. Nobody was really doing it at scale and we jumped on it. And that's how VaynerMedia really got going. Yeah. And so what's really interesting is you obviously have the school background, right? When it comes to advertising, computer science, like what you guys ended up building there is like almost dead on to that. But it sounds like you didn't actually know that's what you were going to go do, right?

So talk a little bit just about, obviously, you're in a situation where your brother, 10 years older, he had the relationships, right? He was kind of really out there. You've obviously kind of taken a different path where you're like, look, that's great for my brother, but maybe not something that I necessarily want to go do. But you guys end up working together. And so a lot of people don't have a brother, whether that's either way in terms of a complementary skill set.

but how did you guys really ideate to that point was it just like a customer came and said hey i really want you guys to do this i'll be the first customer or was it something where you eventually hey we should do the media side and let's go try to find some of the early customers it was it was more so the former um you know at that point so i guess it's like 2006 um my brother 2006 or 2007 my brother starts creating something called wine library tv where he's doing video blogs tasting wine and builds up a real audience from it and it's going really well um and it's just doing really well big audience big numbers um and then from that he decided to expand on his content creation which you know now knowing what he's doing now that adds up right and so he starts

garyvaynerchuk.com so he launches a personal website and the website is basically a video blog centered around business, comma, social media and the intersection of social media and business. So he does that, that starts doing really well. He then starts getting asked to do speaking gigs. And so he starts, you know, primarily in the New York, New Jersey area, and then eventually across the country. And this is really 2008, 2009. So he started to speak at events. And what started happening was a few months before I would graduate college, he just had a few executives from a few major brands come up to him and say, hey, loved what you talked about on stage. Can we expand on that? Can we bring you in for a four-hour brainstorm with our

marketing team? Can we bring you in? So he does one of those where he flies to a Fortune 500, gets in the room with a few C-suites executives, does like a four-hour brainstorm. And at the another brainstorm they're like that was awesome how do we actually go do what you just said and that's where my brother you know he's not he's not the one that's going to create the deck or write up an outline word document plan and that's where he's like hey i think i can bring in the interest kind of like the um indirect sales funnel i can start with the big ideas and set the strategy but i think i need infrastructure built out to actually create the documentation and the structure that a corporate brand would want. I feel like you were good at school. You're good

at this type of stuff. My brother was a terrible student. I was a good student. The one thing we shared is we both hated school, but I just sucked it up and was good at it. And so that's really how it came to be. It was just kind of like this natural synergy that just came to be. And we saw it as an opportunity to get a profitable business off the ground right away. And we were profitable on day one with the media. Yeah. And so obviously, he being out there and you not being out there and so much on the social content side, everyone kind of looks at like, they saw the journey, if you will, if they've been paying attention long enough, because they just saw, hey, he was talking at, you know, a thing, a video on YouTube that has 200 people. Now there's 500

people. Now there's 2000 people, right? I can watch his followers grow, whatever. With this entire time, you're basically running the operations of a business that for those people I don't know, is very large and ended up growing to, you know, hundreds of people. And so talk a little bit about just that experience for you. You know, you were young in your career, right? But kind of thrown in the fire with a great opportunity. Yes, there's revenue, you're profitable on day one. But like, you don't just get the magic pill of like, oh, next thing we know, we've got 500 employees in a really big business, right? Like, there's a lot of kind of steps in between. So let me talk a little bit just about like, once you guys said, all right,

let's go do this. How did you think about scaling the team, building it out, learning what you didn't know, and ultimately kind of building Vayner into what it is today? Yeah, I think a lot of it came, you know, I was 22 when we started it, right? And by the time I was 24, I was a COO of 150 person, eight figure company, right? And a very traditional one, not like a tech startup, right? Where that makes sense, right? That, you know, if somebody was super young and came up with this innovative social app or something, this was a very traditional, like I would show up to the boardroom with 50, 60 plus men and, you know, year old men and women who expected not the tech, you know, startup founder. I think so much of it

worked out from just preparation in the sense that, and a lot of luck and, you know, I would have never been able to be in the situation I was if my brother wasn't 10 years older, successful already, had a network, right? Like my business career started on third base. But what I think helped me be confident and comfortable in the role at such a young age was I was living, breathing, and thinking business all throughout middle school and high school. Like, it's a similar story to my brother's, right? My brother did it primarily through baseball cards in high school. I did it primarily through garage sales, yard sales, thrift stores, and eBay. I mean, I was an eighth grader and I would come home from school and I would literally

walk into my bedroom, which was 30% eighth grader bedroom, 70% warehouse logistics factory. My room was filled with packaging materials, random assortments of junk, my computer setup, printer scanner etc i would literally come home first thing i would do is ship out that day's orders because i had 30 or 40 ebay auctions and the night before and i did all sorts of things like i created my own like um i had a spreadsheet and a database and i had basically i gave everything a invoice number and serial number i had envelopes organized by number by category and i would come home and i would pull product off the shelves in this bedroom and i would package it all up. And then I would have to ask my mom to drive me to the post office because I grew up in

a very rural area. And then my mom would take me for like the eight minute drive to the post office. And I would see the post office, men and women there and the postal workers. And it was every day, this little kid coming in, not only was I like in seventh and eighth grade, but I looked like I was in fourth or fifth grade. Always looked young. I was always small and young looking. And so come in with 40, 50, 30, 20 packages every single day. And so I did a lot of that. And I learned a lot about just research, logistics, organization, customer service, all those types of things. And then I did that and really did well, like was making real money as like a kid. And then in college, I built websites and I was mainly building and launching blogs.

And I taught myself, you know, web design, you know, Photoshop and CSS and HTML and primarily relied on WordPress. And then, you know, I was taking computer science. So I was learning a few other things that I could do a little bit more advanced work with like PHP aspects of WordPress. You know, never to the point where I was building anything beyond building on top of existing platforms like WordPress. us, but it was enough. And I was building websites and I was signing up local businesses in Massachusetts to build their website and improve their SEO or get their AdWords running and buying domains. Like it was just dabbling and being super entrepreneurial. And then Gary and I landed on doing the business and we got it up and running. And I think the other thing too is

for as public of a front man, my brother is, I think because he's so good at that and is so well known for that. He's become actually underrated as an operator. You know, my brother operated and grew a business, my father's business from four to 60 million without any public brand or presence that's from operations. Right. And so I always had my business partner, you know, I was, it was very good that we were 11 years apart. Cause it was very clear. He was the CEO and I was a COO. It helped that he was one and I was two and, you know, having your business partner and brother also be your mentor helped me tremendously through those times. I've got four younger brothers and I always tell them like, I trust other people, but there's just something about your brother, right? Like you can think back to when you guys were fighting as kids, you know, in your living room all the way to all the good times as well. And you just, for whatever reason, you trust them, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, it makes sense. And so talk a little bit about, at some point you decide, hey, I'm really passionate about sports. I'm going to go off and start VaynerSports. What was kind of the impetus there? Did you always want to go do that? Or was that something that kind of grew over time? And then how did you guys actually get that started?

Yeah, I grew up being very interested in the intersection of business and sports. I was in high school and a diehard sports fan. Unfortunately for me, Jets and Knicks are my two primary teams. And it's been, as a 33-year-old, it hasn't been the greatest run. Chet's been better than the Knicks, but I kind of miss the glory Knicks. I was there, but I was too young for those early 90s teams. You know, being 5'6", 7'8", I remember it, but I didn't really live it. So I was always a big sports fan.

And then just like my two biggest passions are business and sports. And so the sports business side is that intersection. So for example, I loved the NFL draft growing up. Loved. I went all in and would learn all the college football players and try to fit, you know, do mock drafts and read all the mock drafts and try to understand what makes the good teams good. What do they do in the draft? What are some of their philosophies? How do they differ from the other teams? You know, another aspect is I was always interested in the salary cap and the management of the team. I think, you know, as a Jets fan, there was some really interesting, the Jets had a track record, and still do, frankly, of having a lot of their young drafted stars end up out of there. So, you know, Keyshawn Johnson, when I was really little, you know, 9, 10, 11, 12, he forced his way out. John Abraham was another one, Darrell Revis, when I got older, most recently, Jamal Adams, right? And so the Jets always had that kind of history, for whatever reason.

And so being a Jets fan, I was always interested in that aspect. What led to Keyshawn getting traded and why was he traded for what he ended up getting traded for and stuff like that? And then even like Madden, I would play a ton of Madden, but I would play franchise mode more than I would actually play the actual game because I liked the roster construction and trades and salary cap and the draft and all that. And so I grew up liking it. How we ended up getting there was we, along the way, so I was, I ran VaynerMedia with Gary from 09 to 16. We did a lot of angel investing along the way and had some really good success with that. And one of our smaller investments later on in that 2015, 2016 time period was a small boutique sports agency. And we did it more for fun than anything. It was a small check for both of us. And, you know, agencies don't have the biggest multiples, don't have the biggest upside. But we just were genuinely interested in the space and we thought it was fun. And so we got involved.

And when I ended up leaving the media company looking for a new challenge, I originally left with no plan. And that was important to me. I was always the kid that had a plan. I got in early to Boston University. VaynerMedia started before I even graduated from Boston University. So I was always somebody that knew what the next step was. And I just like, you know what? I don't want to know the next step. I kind of want to let it go. I want to take a little bit of time. But soon into my time off, my original plan was to take a year off. Two months in, you know, I loved, you know, I loved all the free time.

I loved shedding the responsibility. At the time, I didn't have kids. All I had was, you know, a girlfriend and a dog. But, you know, there's only so much golf that could be played and only so much dog walking and things like that. And so I started kind of going into the portfolio and just catching up with companies. And after like another month or two, I realized that I probably had, between my own personal investments in the fund that we did, there's probably like 80 companies that were active. And I found myself gravitating to the sports agency, even though objectively, it probably had the lowest upside. And that's all I really needed to know. And I thought that from having previous experience with a few athletes along the way, primarily

on the investing side, and a little bit on the VaynerMedia brand side, and then just looking at the current agency that we were investors in, and then just reading like the industry rag and kind of immersing myself in the culture of athlete rep. I just felt like we had an opportunity to bring a differentiated offering, which is important to me. I don't want to do anything if I don't think I can do it better and different. And I also thought that I could take my experience building VaynerMedia and really apply it strongly to VaynerSports. Because at the end of the day, even though the clients are very different, there's a very big difference between like a Pepsi and a Leonard Williams, it's still client services. And so, yeah,

that's what led to it. And so what was the differentiation, right? So I think many people don't even understand like how a sports agency works. So maybe just kind of go through like, hey, here's the business of a sports agency. Here's how they make money. And then when you guys stepped in, kind of what was your pitch to, you know, really the athletes in terms of here's what we are going to do different or better than everybody else. Yeah. So it, and I'll speak to football specifically, even though we've expanded at numerous sports, I can, I think I illustrate this best just talking about football.

The typical football, the most commonly represented type of football agency is kind of the equivalent of your accountant. It's very much a professional service that's provided. is a situation where the vast majority of those providers have a very narrow point of view and level of expertise. And so what ends up happening is the relationship is transactional. So one of the biggest things that I saw that is the most common theme throughout the industry is that the agent and the player only have a relationship as long as that player is still providing a commission to the agent. So if a player goes pro, signs with an agent,

and falls flat on their face, you will find countless stories of the agent just stopping, stop picking up the call. They don't pick up the call. If a player retires, even if they have a very good career, there's no longer commission checks coming. The professional services of the agent is done. It's over. And so, you know, you have that within the industry. You also commonly have a second offering that is separate from the contract advisor slash agent, which is centered around marketing and PR. So you have marketing agents, you know, publicists, et cetera. So that exists. That also operates where it's like, Hey, I'm, you know, the marketing agent or the publicist is either on retainer or on a commission basis. If you're not driving revenue, you're not being

service, just like an accountant or a lawyer, right? And so we came in and we looked at that and we said, okay, we have a background in marketing. We have an interest in this contract representation side, which basically requires, you know, negotiation experience and things of that nature. We're going to come in and combine the two. And that concept isn't novel. There are other players that do it, but what is novel is doing that concept well. We have competitors that provide both contract and marketing. But when I looked at it four years ago, there wasn't a single player in the space

that was doing it on an A-level, and I thought that we could. And then the last piece is the fact that even beyond that, we're adding this third layer of entrepreneurship, business, personal branding, investing, right? Basically my background, my brother's background, and we're integrating that in a world

where I feel as if athletes are craving that more and more every single day, every single month, every single year. And so that stemmed from, like I said, we had some exposure to athletes and was fortunate enough to share dinner conversations with guys like Draymond Green, Carmelo Anthony, et cetera, entirely from the lens of investing. But talking to them and learning more about how they're moving and how their agent does and doesn't play a role really opened my eyes that there was a gap to fill. and I just don't think that athletes 10 to 15 years ago were seeking the same type of service as they are today and so we just thought that the entire industry was servicing athletes as

these one-dimensional commission makers and we just felt that athletes are just getting smarter and smarter and want to do more and more and are broadening their horizons and we thought we could support that. So a lot of people have come on to the podcast and various conversations talked about this idea of kind of an evolution. So whether it's an athlete, a creator, whoever, right? Basically, it's like you do what you do. So if you're an athlete, you play a sport. If you're a creator, you create content. Then eventually it got to the point where maybe I don't want to take the advertising dollars of a sponsorship. Maybe I'll just take like half in equity, right? So I'll earn equity. Eventually that became, okay, maybe I should actually put money

forward and invest. Now what we're starting to see, I think, is more and more creators and athletes and people would just with audience say, wait a second, maybe I actually should like start a company, right? And how do I go partner up with an operator? And then I think kind of like the end goal for some of these people is like this holding company, right? Where you can invest, you can own assets, you can kind of do a whole bunch of different things. And, you know, people will debate where we are along that journey, but that just kind of feels like the trend. Absolutely. It feels like you guys saw that early and stepped in and said, look, we can help you negotiate your

contract, but that's kind of the table stakes of what you're trying to do. It's less of like an athlete manager or sports manager, and it's more of like a business confidant or a business partner to some degree. Is that fair to kind of categorize it? No, I think that is fair. And something I touched upon in that prior topic we just talked about that speaks to this is partnership and the fact that when our clients are done playing, our job is not done. So, you know, we're a young agency, so we only have so many players that are done playing, you know, but, you know, guys that have, you know, finished their careers, we're still involved in their lives and we're still partners and advisors in the things that they want to do. And I think it speaks to that point where

when we sign a client to VaynerSports, the idea is that, yes, we're in the business of representing great athletes. So yes, their athletic talents are foundational to the partnership, but it is a partnership, not a transaction, and sports are unpredictable. If something doesn't work out, that doesn't mean we're going to stop picking up the phone. And the idea is that what we're trying to do and what we're trying to incorporate is that the best time to network as a pro athlete is when you're playing. The biggest mistake that former players have made, and I've had numerous conversations like that is that they assumed that they could get to the business stuff when they were done but the problem is when they're done depending on how their career went um they're

just not as relevant as they once were and gary and i talked about it like gary before vayner sports existed would clear his calendar if a new york jet or a new york nick said hey i want to come sit down with you and talk shop but if they were three or four years removed like it's kind of like what have you done for me lately kind of thing and not that Gary would ignore them but he just wasn't as excited to take that meeting and that's the reality of it and so we always tell our guys and we encourage our guys that yes you know you have a lot on your plate but if you just got drafted you're hot right now we can't and yes we believe you have a great career but we can't predict that you might shatter an ankle you might something may happen right and so we're

always encouraging our team to be active and network and increase their exposure to things while they play so that when they're done playing, they can really go full steam ahead and not have to start from scratch. How much of the kind of sophistication that you guys have on the business side ends up actually informing or changing the way that you negotiate contracts? So for example, for an athlete that says, hey, I'm going to make $100 this year, right? And 20 of it's going to come from my contract, but 80 of it's going to come from endorsement deals and businesses and investments and other things. Does that actually impact at all the way that you negotiate the player contract or those two things separate and you just kind of have a holistic plan?

You know, it's a little bit separate, um, primarily because there's just all these rules and regulations that dictate what can and can't be done from a player contract. So I think that, yes, we can borrow from our business experience and things of that nature. But, um, I will say that the collective bargaining agreement, um, limits, you know, some things that we can and can't do. And that goes sport by sport. Got it. That's fair. And I don't know if you, maybe you don't want to name names or something, but maybe give like an example of when you guys talk about what you do with the athletes outside of those player contracts, like what's an example, whether it's through an endorsement deal, an investment, a business,

just to give people a sense of like, Hey, this is what some of these athletes are actually doing off of the field while they're playing. Yeah. I'll give you an example. A recent one um or relatively recent but i think it's perfect and speaks to just our approach uh we represent a guy named derrick morgan derrick um had a great nfl career we represented him for his last two years in the league um played nine years was with one agency first switched to another and then landed with us and um by the time we started working with derrick he was really established you know he did really well he was a former first round pick he signed a nice second contract and you know years eight and nine were kind of accelerating the idea like he had already

started kind of exposing himself to more he got his mba as part of a program that miami offered he did had done some private investing um and then you know that kind of made itself selecting why we were such a good match for one another um but you know i think him partnering with us was yeah maybe i'll do one final contract maybe i won't let me ramp up while i'm playing and still active to get a few things going. And so one of the things that I'm proud of is first and foremost, Derek and his family are vegan. So Derek's vegan. His wife, Charity, is actually a chef and vegan herself. They raise their kids vegan. And so one of the things that we helped do was, you know, Charity is this amazingly talented and amazingly charismatic individual with a real work ethic.

And she was ready to kind of, now that the kids were getting a little bit older and Derek's career was kind of settling in. She wanted to take the bull by the horns and build a personal brand around her cooking and her vegan lifestyle. And so we helped Charity launch her personal brand, designed her logo, built her website, got her up on Instagram, walked through content creation strategies, this and the other thing. And Charity has done extremely well. And we helped her get it started, but she really ran with it and saw the opportunity. And then Derek, when looking for endorsements, we really doubled down on who he was. He said, listen, I've done well playing football. Of course, getting a $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 endorsement deal, nobody's going to turn

that down per se. But at the same token, I have the luxury of kind of picking and choosing what I do based on my own beliefs and values. So one guidance he gave me, and I'll never forget it, was like, I will never endorse something that I wouldn't, from a food perspective, that I wouldn't let my kids eat. So if a company came and he wouldn't feed that brand to his kids, he's not taking their $10,000 easy check for an Instagram post. So I took that to heart. And through a network that the Morgans had, through a network that we had, we circled Beyond Meat as a perfect opportunity for both Derek and Charity. And so we did a deal there. It was not a cash endorsement. It was an equity-based endorsement over a period of time.

And I think where that really worked out well was I sat in the driver's seat with them negotiating the paperwork. And I think my experience and the lawyer that Gary and I use for all our venture capital related activity who supported me in this negotiation on behalf of the Morgans, all that experience and Gary doing personal advisory type deals, deals with startups where they use his brand image and likeness and things like that, I don't think there was anybody more qualified to get the Morgans the best negotiated advisory equity barter type deal for a brand like Beyond Meat than us. And the best part was Beyond Meat continued being successful. They eventually IPO'd and the Morgans did a lot better taking equity as opposed to a small cash deal there. And I actually remember when I think it was with the Tennessee Titans, at one point his wife, by accident, I think had convinced half the defense. They were basically eating vegan.

And there was articles literally written about the fact that, you know, here's one of the biggest, baddest, meanest defenses in the NFL and nobody's eaten any meat. You're exactly right. It started because Charity was basically meal prepping for Derek because Derek would go to the facility and a lot of the food there just wasn't what he was trying to eat. And so he had this food and then one of his teammates was like, hey, that looks really good. Like, can Charity maybe hook me up on those? He tried it. He loved it. I think it ended up being 11 of the 53 Titans, primarily on the defense, were vegan for that

season two, three years ago. That's 20% of the team vegan. It was crazy. It was pretty cool. Yeah, that's awesome. And then you're understating the performance of Beyond Meat. It was absolutely exploded in value. Unbelievable IPO. One of the best IPOs of the year that year, right? Yeah, absolutely. Talk a little bit about the impact of COVID. Obviously, there's certain sports that uh have kind of been postponed uh or shut down in the middle um obviously we'll see kind of what happens with the nfl and their plans to get this going but just how have you guys seen uh the athletes specifically or some of the contract negotiations

impacted by this it's been a very very unique year um you know i think that the biggest thing that covid did to the nfl you know the nfl was lucky they were not like the nba or mlb or these other sports that were in the season and had to shut it down you know it was the off season for the nfl and yes you know the some of the pre-draft process was different you know there was less in-person meetings things like that that was an impact um the nfl draft was virtual that was different um but as far as like material changes the nfl really only started experiencing those material changes over the last few weeks once training camp got up and running um and so it's been different for all the obvious um tangible reasons and you know i think hard knocks uh the

hbo show that's following the rams and the charges right now does a really great job kind of showing how different the nfl is right now with covid in terms of protocols around covid i would say probably the single biggest impact that it'll have though on our clients and the majority of players is the fact that the preseason was eliminated um it really reduced the opportunity for rookies to get up to speed um so i think the fact that there was no preseason and that all players weren't afforded the ability to create uh tape basically you know go on the field and do what they can do in a preseason game has really um hurt some of the younger players that need the opportunity to get on the field and show what they can do and then on the flip side i think

for veteran players it's benefited them in that regard because you know there's less basically the nfl it's a next man up type business and every year there's a new pool of players trying to take your job and so if you're an established player um you know it's really hard for a younger player to take your spot and so i think mostly it's hurt the young and the unproven and has helped in terms of security for some of the more established players and then i think you'll see i think especially in the early part of the year these first few weeks of football games gonna be sloppy because the first few preseason games are sloppy right and so i think you're gonna see a lower quality football at the outset but i think you know come mid-season everybody's gonna hit their

typical form and as long as the nfl continues the success that they've had i think there's only four active cases in the entire nfl right now um as long as they're able to keep it at bay i think the season will happen and it'll be unique that's for sure yeah i actually didn't know this one of my brothers was telling me, uh, at one point there was this like clause where, uh, I think it was any player that opted out of the season could get $150,000 stipend. And, you know, I, maybe I'm off on the number or whatever, but, but the whole idea was basically, you know, if you're a rookie and normally you would go to training camp and maybe you're kind of on the cusp of, will you make the team or get cut or, you know, whatever, uh, it actually may be more financially savvy to

take the money right and then kind of live to fight another day um and i did maybe 15 minutes of googling and it seemed like there was a whole bunch of controversy around should players do that should they not how do you think about it whatever and it just really highlighted like the nuances here right is because because somebody said in your seat like it just is more complexity of decision making it sounds like absolutely no there was a ton of nuance um if you look though i think it was just shy of 70 players that opted out and the vast majority were veterans And I think if you look at the common thread, we had a client opt-out. Our client, Geronimo Allison, a wide receiver for the Lions.

If you look at the most common thread of the opt-out, so there's two aspects. One, one point I'll address is, and it's a misconception, it's not a stipend. It's actually a cash advance against your salary. And so, for example, for my client, Geronimo, he got $150,000. The number was right, but it's an advance on his contract. He signed a one-year contract, a little over a million dollars. So if he comes back and plays next year and he earns that contract, he's actually going to be paid $150,000 less than he was scheduled to earn.

So it's an advance. But the other piece too is that if you were deemed high risk, so if you personally or a significant other or a child in your house was high risk from COVID, certain aspects of your health history, you got $350,000 instead of $150,000. And if you look at the breakdown of, I think it was 68 or 69 players that opted out, a good chunk were high risk. And then the next most common thread was young family. So many players opted out, my client included, had just welcomed a new baby a month, two months, three months prior. and so that that comprised the lion's share of the players that opted out and for the most part maybe there was one or two guys that did it but that concept of hey if you're a football player that probably won't make the team it's pretty financially savvy to take the 150k that barely

happened and i think the biggest reason for that is you have to keep in mind for everybody coming into the league this is their dream and they are on an nfl roster and they have the ability to make a career out of this and you don't get to that point without believing in your own skill set and to be a player that sits in that position maybe you're on the bottom of the roster if you then in turn opt out no NFL team's gonna admit this but it's a like I said it's a young there's gonna be a new wave of players next year and you've dramatically decreased your opportunity to make a team and so it was a I barely anybody took that route maybe a few yeah well everyone nobody believes they're gonna get cut either right that's the whole other you need that belief and

And that's, and you know, people, people like to throw around the term that this player stinks or sucks, right? At the end of the day, if you're wearing an NFL helmet, you are an unbelievable athlete and you're an unbelievable football player. You just might not be as good. You might just not be one of the 1500 best in the entire world. But if you're the 1600 best football player in the world, you are the best player in middle school. You are the best player in high school. You are the best players in college. You know what I mean? And so it's so hard for anybody to really believe in that. I wouldn't want anybody to think of it that way. Yeah. I love when people look at MMA or UFC fights, right? And they're basically like, oh, that guy's horrible. I'm

like, that guy will literally put your head through the wall, right? We recently got into the MMA business. We represent about 20 fighters. I've gotten to spend some time in person with one or two of them. There's not a single person that walks into the octagon that wouldn't send me straight to the hospital in less than a minute. Yeah. And so talk a little bit about, you guys have gotten into MMA, you've gotten into baseball and also gaming. Talk a little bit about starting in NFL and football and then kind of expanding into those other sports and kind of why the desire to do that and then how you guys have actually executed. Yeah. Always wanted to be a multi-sport agency. I think that a strength that I have is the ability to multitask and do a lot of different

things. And I think our offering, what I described earlier in our conversation applies to any athlete, right? And so the ability to share that offering with multiple athletes is important. For us, we've been in a great position with, you know, the early success that we had on the football side, my brother's personal brand equity, the brand equity we've been able to build for VaynerSports. We've had so much come our way over the last few years of, hey, let's expand into basketball, baseball, cricket, soccer, everything, right? I probably get five to 10 emails a week from somebody in an industry saying, let's expand. We turned it all down for the first few years just because we wanted to make sure that we maintained a focus to ensure that we actually

delivered on our words, right? We have this belief, you know, the conversation you and I had a few years ago, like we had a plan and a vision, but talk is cheap and we wanted to walk the walk. So we wanted the first few years to make sure that we got our offering right and got the flow right. And then over the last year, we've been more open-minded to expanding. And really, our expansion is driven by opportunity more than anything. I've always said when people ask me, what's going to drive you to expand? I need one of two things. I either need the right partner. And what I mean by that is somebody who is an established agent in that business that has a track record and understanding and the relationships needed to go do well right away, or I needed a marquee client so that we could build around that marquee client and then build the business off the great work that we do there and the case studies and the reputation. And so for the three sports, we brought on Greg Genske. We merged with his company. Greg and his team have an amazing track record, decades of experience in baseball. Greg has negotiated $4 billion worth of baseball contracts. He's done record setting deals for guys like CeCe Sabathia, Vernon Wells, Carl Crawford, all record setting deals, all hundred plus million dollar deals at the time of signing. so walks the walk understands how to land great players and um and really saw an opportunity and synergy between his company and ours so that checked the box in terms of finding the right

partner for baseball same thing with mma we brought on an agent and his team uh lloyd pearson lloyd represents hall of famers champions has been in the business a long time has an even longer background just in terms of sports and negotiations and so that was a no-brainer for us to get into mma uh rather quickly and so checked again the partner box and then the gaming box because it's a younger industry you don't really have the most established partnership opportunities um but we were able to bring on uh buga one of the the fortnight champion so we were able to bring on a gamer slash esports athlete who literally is the best at what he does and fortnight being one of the biggest titles in our country. And so again, wasn't the marquee partner, but it was

the marquee client to build around. And we've been doing some great work with Kyle and his family to get him to where he needs to be. So the people that are not up to speed on kind of e-sports will say, what do you mean that there's athletes, there's sponsorships and why are you guys calling the sport? They're just sitting there playing video games, like the whole nine yards. Talk a little bit about we understand now what you do for like an nfl player for example what are you guys doing on the on the esports side and what's the same or different um just given kind of it's uh yeah much more marketable if you will and kind of more of an international appeal yep so i think the most analogous example for kyle aka bugha is um a golfer or a tennis player

right it's an individual sport and so we're not actually negotiating anything from like a team perspective so to speak right uh meaning he does not play for the new york giants he does not play for the texas rangers he goes in similar to a golf tournament um where he goes in and there's a cash prize like the fortnight world cup and he wins that cash prize he gets that money we're not negotiating with epic uh games or you know twitch or anything like that in terms of his performance where the representation comes just like tennis and golf is on the marketing side and the opportunities there so where we're representing kyle is essentially um the opportunities that he has with brands and brands direct and so it's you know i think anybody that says um an esports

athlete isn't a real athlete you know i have empathy for that argument but at the same token And in my eyes, it's just the modernization of sports. And I think there's a lot of things that people in our generation, except as sport, that maybe a hundred years ago, people weren't seeing as sport and humans evolve and things evolve. And, you know, at the end of the day, it requires a skillset and talent. It requires a lot of hard work and practice and he goes and competes against other people and wins and there's something to win, right? And if there's a brands that want to give the winner a bunch of money, sounds like a

sport to me. And so, yeah, the easiest, really easiest way to explain it is it's just like being a golfer or tennis player in terms of being an esports athlete. It makes a lot of sense. Where do you guys go with this, right? So obviously this started out as kind of a personal passion of yours turned into, okay, we've got one sport, got a couple of athletes. Oh, wait, this works. Now you're in multiple sports growing, merging with other companies and agents. And kind of, you can see like, okay, this is something that is very scalable across sports. And also kind of vertically, you can go very deep in certain sports. Like, how do you see this playing out? Or what's kind of the vision in your mind in terms of where you guys are now to 10 years?

just more of the same. Honestly, I think that probably the most interesting aspect of it is just understanding how it best fits within the entire Vayner ecosystem. Just because between VaynerX having all sorts of differentiated offerings and all the different things that my brother does, VaynerSports, I think, will continue to add great clients, add more sports, add great groundbreaking you know marketing endorsements and deals i think where it probably grows the most and just honestly it's only a matter of time there's nothing that we can do to accelerate it is just be patient is what we talked about earlier in terms of building these deep deep partnerships with our clients so that they are you know it'd be amazing if we could

have clients that are more successful in their post career than their actual planning career And so I think, again, I can't have, nor does he want to, nor do I want him to have Alan Robinson retire right now. But I know the Zoom meetings and the things that we talked about this offseason, he's going to be able to put into practice whenever he's done playing the game of football. And I think the more we're able to accomplish that and really show that we're partners and we're partners for during and post-career, I think probably what is maybe the most natural evolution is spinoff businesses where I'm actually business partners with Alan on a startup together, right? You talked about these athletes wanting to maybe, instead of just being an investor, own and operate their own. I think plenty of our clients will own and operate on their own. And I think there will be situations where it's interesting enough and we want to do it with them. For example, Derek has a fund focused on Opportunity Zones, and I'm an advisor to that fund. So I think that will naturally happen.

And so more sports, more clients, and more post-career opportunities together. Yeah. One of the things from the outside, I think just your entire family, right? From your father to your brother to yourself is you guys always seem to kind of understand, okay, here's where the world is going. Whether we're right or not, we've got an opinion and position ourselves there. And then you throw yourself into the mix, right? And you guys have been, at least historically, very good at understanding opportunities, vetting those opportunities, and choosing when to kind of, hey, let me spend my time versus let me spend capital versus let me just avoid this, right? And not spend time and energy and money. Talk a little bit about how have you honed that over time? People don't think of that as a skill, but I actually think that the when do I actually participate versus not participate, that vetting process is probably one of the most important things you actually do. That's a great question, and I love that, and it's so true. I think part of the answer is not having a fear of being perfect.

I think what holds people back too often is they're too worried about the scoreboard or what it means or what if they're too early, what if they're wrong. You know, the way Gary and I always describe it, because we talk about this topic a lot, is we look at that type of activity as a net score. So if you're right 11 times and you're wrong once, no reason to harp on the one time you were wrong. You're up 10 on the net, right? And so that's how we look at it. And I think part of why we're able to, on the outside, appear to do so well is that we're willing to be wrong. We're willing to test. We're willing to iterate. And I think maybe even the most, like the subset skill that's most important to make the overall skill work great is removing your ego and knowing when to cut bait. knowing when to, I'll give you a good example. Anybody that's following my brother right now knows he's obsessed with sports cards, right? And so right now there's a real time and a place where sports cards and collectibles and things like that are having a moment and who knows how

long that moment is. That's another skill. But we've, like you said, we've thrown ourselves into it. To my brother's credit, him more than I, but I've also kind of followed suit and have been in it pretty heavy too and we've put a lot of you know money and time and effort behind this concept but what what people don't realize is that we actually did this exact same thing like seven or eight years ago and failed we actually started a company called vayner toys nobody knows but it was incorporated we had staff and the whole foundational concept was to buy and sell vintage toys video games sports cards collectibles etc we missed you know our our overhead was too high the liquidity of obtaining um you know the inventory was too illiquid it just didn't work

um and it didn't have a moment it didn't you know people didn't suddenly become obsessed with that type of uh that type of inventory right and so we missed but we we cut late quick we never even really made it very public um because we knew it was experimental and we wanted to see how much it worked or didn't work and so we missed but our learnings from that miss allowed us to really strike and strike hard this time around and we're doing really well as of this moment so like i said the real skill that we need to finish this piece off is knowing you know what's the top what's the bottom more like a stock market type play here um but i think we we had i mean vayner x has all these different divisions that do so well. But we have a lot of divisions that are in the graveyard.

We had a sampling division. We actually started a co-working space. And we were moving offices so fast. We were growing. And we always were conservative because we said to ourselves that if we outgrow this office before our lease is done, this is a champagne problem having this lease, right? And on the flip side, if we overextend ourselves and get too big of a lease and we don't do as well we'll get crushed financially by over uh pursuing our lease so we moved like in new york we moved like five times in six years or something because we're just growing so fast which was great one of those times we did we had like three years left on the lease we're like oh man like we this is really just sitting there um we actually created something

called vayner space and we tried subleasing that space and we actually had some good success and We had tenants sign up, but then eventually the landlord shut us down because they actually had another space in the building that wasn't a co-working space, but was more like a traditional shared office space. And they had a line in their contract that said that no other company in that building could compete with them. They told the landlord they shut us down. We took the L, right? But constantly willing to try, constantly willing to innovate. And I think the key thing that you said is we're never halfway in or out. We're passionate. We have conviction. We have confidence. And we maintain the same level of confidence no matter what the end result is. If we're right, that confidence helps us be super successful. If we're wrong, we were wrong. And we just deal with it, take our L and move on. Yeah, and I think part of this is betting on the right markets, obviously, right?

So understanding, hey, it's having a moment or it's going to have a moment, which you guys have done very well at, but also the execution. So it's easy for kind of the armchair quarterback to sit and say like, oh, I think sports cards are going to be big in three years, and I've got some money, but what do I do, right? Or I've got some time and energy, and I'm intrigued, but what do I do? Both you and Gary have been great operators. And so for you, like, how have you grown from a management perspective, from an operator standpoint? And, you know, I'm assuming that now you deal with different problems, but you're able to go from kind of zero to 50, right? And it's more muscle memory in this new industry rather than having to start all over again and kind of start from scratch. Yeah, I think that I love this question too. I've had a lot of thoughts around this concept and it's an opportunity to kind of articulate it and we'll see how I do. I think our society utilizes the term experience in a very narrow minded way and in a very traditional way that I don't think is actually the right reflection of experience. I don't think we're counting experience correctly. So the way experience is predominantly defined in sports, in business, in just about anything

is years, right? If you've been doing something for 20 years, you probably have more experience and you're probably better at what you do than somebody that has five years experience. I completely disagree. My mindset is, to your point, the things that I deal with operating, we're a small company, we're about 20 people, but things pop up, I'm dealing with different problems. my ability to work quickly and efficiently and do those things well come from the fact that I don't think I have 11 years of business experience. I truly feel like I have like 80

because in 2011, we went from 150 to 400 employees. You can't tell me that that year of experience counts the same as somebody else's year of experience doing far less, right? And so it's kind of like, there has to be something to be said about talent, repetition, practice, opportunities to implement those, you know, like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. I think it's a cousin of that. And what I always try to tell people, you know, because something that I face is that, you know, if I'm walking in and recruiting a young athlete, that's a question that comes up. I've only been in the football. I've been only an athlete rep for four years. I've been in business for 11. I'm 33. How can I make somebody feel comfortable? How can I make the kid or their family feel comfortable that they're in the right hands with me? and part of it's like i try to use like sports like i love carmelo anthony right carmelo's a great great player hall of famer right but tomorrow you gotta start an nba french franchise you want luca or you want mellow everybody's gonna say luca right and my point is that um just because and that's not a perfect analogy but my point is just because somebody has 20

years of experience of doing something doesn't mean they actually have the true authentic experience of doing the things that you need them to do on your behalf. And I feel as if my years of experience far outweigh the actual 11 years that it is. My father once said to me, and it just was like seared in my brain. He said, some people get 10 years of experience and some people get two years of experience five times. Which was just like, some people are, hey, I've done this for 10 years, but really you only learn things for the first two years. And then you just repeated it over and over again until you got to a 10-year mark and you somehow think that that is 10 years of experience. It's really not, right? And I think that's kind of your point here is-

Exactly right. And it also feels like the skills that, I think a lot about like a toolkit that an operator has, right? And there's like core skills. So you got to be able to communicate, you got to be able to hire well, you got to be able to manage like all that kind of stuff. But then there's the like outside of that core skillset, very industry specific things. So the ability to negotiate with a professional sports team, a contract is a skillset that is specific to the sports industry, right? There's nobody else in the world who is going into work every day and trying to do that stuff. And so where do you think about mentorship versus just kind of trial by fire? And what I

mean by that is there's obviously a lot of people who have done the business that you're in today for a long time. So they've got some value just because they've literally survived, right? Let alone thrive. And then some of it's just, you got to learn on your own, and you want to do things differently. So how do you kind of find that balance between taking stuff from the core skill set of people who've been around for a long time versus, hey, we want to do something different. We think that's actually where the innovation and disruption comes from. Yeah. So I'm a big advocate and a big believer of having somebody with experience and traditional experience in the industry that you're attacking. So for example, with VaynerMedia, we brought in

a gentleman named James Orsini and James came in and eventually replaced me as COO. We hired him with the idea that he would replace me, but it was about a year after we hired him. And what we liked about bringing on James in particular, and we had other people prior, is he was like our chief context officer. And so, so many meetings were had as we were building this rocket ship of a media agency where it was like, all right, James, how would this, because he had big, big traditional holding company, massive agency experience. James, this is the situation. How would they handle it? He would explain it and we'd say, it would either be, okay, we should learn from that and take like 90% of that and make it our own and like do that. Or cool. We're definitely not

fucking doing that. That's terrible. Right. And so he literally was there and so many other partners and employees prior to that, just to inform us. And again, because you don't want to recreate the wheel. Right. And so there's definitely things we did in the first two to three years of VaynerMedia, that was a waste of time and we recreated the wheel for no reason. But having somebody basically tell you the context and then we're able to make our own informed decision based on that, I think is massively helpful. And so same thing with VaynerSports. One member of our team in particular, Andrew Brandt, is basically my chief context officer in this regard. He's somebody that started his career as an agent. He actually worked for

from David Falk, one of the legendary basketball agents who repped Jordan and Ewing, amongst others. And so Andrew worked for Falk for a number of years. Then he actually got poached by the Green Bay Packers to go run their football administration salary cap for the Packers for about 10 years. And then he actually, after that, went into the world of media. So he appears on ESPN, he writes for Sports Illustrated, and a few other things, right? So he's got this three different aspects of the industry experience. And so he is a member of VaynerSports. He's a certified agent for us. Again, we brought him out of retirement as an agent. But his biggest role is like that chief context officer perspective. And what I love about him is he can tell me how

a big agent would do it. He also tells me what the team is thinking because he served, he's the most senior team executive that is currently a sports agent on the football side now. And so his biggest value that he brings to me is context and information. And then I do with that what I think is best. Yeah, that's awesome. When this is all over, what do you want people to remember you for? I think the biggest thing that I want to be remembered for is making an impact and doing it the right way. So I want to be remembered as somebody that really helped people be successful and and didn't cut corners or didn't screw anybody over along the way um you know there's somebody one of my business partners is a guy named brandon parker

brandon's father um is the late great eugene parker eugene is one of the best football agents of all time one of the best sports agents of all time he unfortunately passed away a little while ago um but eugene represented hall of famers up and down uh he was deon sanders his agent for context. When you get elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, you actually nominate somebody to induct you, and they put the gold jacket on you and everything. Dion nominated Eugene. And so Brandon is now my business partner. He's the chief operating officer of our football practice. And the single biggest compliment that I've gotten since being in this industry has come from Brandon. It's come from Brandon maybe five or six times, just randomly. We'll

be talking through a situation, whether it's a challenge or something with a client or a strategy session we're having, and I just feel like, man, you remind me so much of my dad. And it's the biggest compliment for me because being business partners with Brandon and running into people in the industry, I've never met a single person that hasn't said the most glowing things about the late, great Eugene Parker. and and the theme is he was the best and he did it in the best way and so i guess that's i'll summarize it that way i want to be the best i want to do in the best way possible that's absolutely

awesome um ask the same uh two questions to wrap up and you can ask me one two let's end it uh the first is what's the most important book that you've ever read it's a good question i am not a great great reader it's it's something i wish i was better at what's the most important piece of content that you've ever consumed. Could be a movie, could be whatever you want, music, whatever you want. That's okay. I like that. And I appreciate you throwing in the life rap. I will say the single best piece of content I've ever consumed in my life was one of my brothers. And I think that fits. He's my mentor, my best friend, my brother, older brother. Gary did a post it's a silly one too um but i think it's important because it doesn't really have anything

to do with business it doesn't have anything really to do with anything tactical it's more just like emotional and and getting through life in the best way possible and use the analogy of a bucket and he basically said listen you know to people that are watching your your body and your your capacity for dealing with adversity or your troubles or your own personal demons whatever think of it as a bucket and and the way to release the water that's filling up that bucket is through open and honest communication and being honest with yourself and what you want to do is as that bucket is filling up you want to let water out the bucket before it fills up the worst thing that you can do is have the bucket come to the tippy top because that's the breaking point and

that's when you're going to break and so for me i think we talked about it earlier i i was very fortunate. And I'm self-aware. Like I said, I started on third base as far as business goes. I started on third base as far as life goes, really. I grew up comfortable. My family was middle-class. By the time I went to college, my parents took care of my college tuition. I didn't have any college debt. I'm lucky as fuck, right? But on the flip side, one area where I got unlucky was with my personal health. I suffer from something called Crohn's disease, a disease that has no cure, at least yet. One that impacts your digestive tract, your intestines and your colon and things of that nature. And I really struggled with my Crohn's. Mainly in my, call it

from like 18 to 25, countless trips to the ER, countless different types of medication trying to help it. I had a period of time, like a three-month period of time where I went to the doctor to give blood every single week for three months. Leading up, I ended up having intestinal surgery. Leading up to that surgery, I went to the ER five different times in a 12-month period. And so between dealing with my personal health issues and the stress that came with taking a company from two to 600 people over a seven-year period of time, I struggled in some ways. And I think that piece of content really helped me understand how to deal with my struggles and maintain those struggles and turn those struggles upside down. And so probably the most impactful

thing i ever did and i'm glad to share it is uh i sought out therapy i sought out help um my therapy was entirely focused it was a very narrow subject but i think it helped me um it helped me immensely and i think it also helped me um utilize that same kind of thinking and concept across other parts of my life it was entirely centered around my battle with my health and my career and how the the trickiest part was um one of the worst things for crohn's disease is stress but one of the most stressful things i would endure in my career was falling behind because i got sick and so now that is a nasty nasty cyclical pattern right and so my entire i went to therapy for like a year and a half or two years and it was entirely centered around that

basically working through coming to grip with my health and coming to grip with my career and and finding a path towards allowing those two things to exist with one another and so um i think my brother's piece of content was the tip of the iceberg or basically, because I think what I struggled with was I internalized everything. It was two things. One, grew up in a very competitive family and had a lot of pride and I guess ego to be successful and do well and not show that weakness. But then also I felt like, and I still believe this to an extent that a leader within a company needs to display strength, right? And so if I was a mess walking in as the COO of a fast growing rocket ship type company that would hurt the business right and so i just really struggled

with the balance of of dealing with it all and i think my brother's content um i actually don't watch a lot of my brother's stuff it's kind of a joke people like i out of all the content my brother's ever created i've probably seen like one to two percent of it um i i don't think i've seen a single piece of my brother's content in months and the point i make is that not that i don't love that content love my brother's content i'm just blessed that i get to experience it just could I speak to him on the phone or do business? I don't need to rewatch it basically. But that was one random piece I saw that helped. And I think that was pretty significant for me because it impacted my career and impacted my relationship with my family, my friends, everything.

How much of its importance do you think was it that Gary wrote it versus could have been anybody else? Do you think that made you pay more attention to it? I'm always fascinated by the fact that people we know, we tend to internalize the content more, right? I think it definitely played a role that it was Gary. I think you got to take into account the 11 years older than I am. And so growing up, when I'm five or six, he's 16, 17, right? He goes to college when I'm seven, right? He's in orders of magnitude older than me at that point, right? He's almost triple my age. And so I think that I always looked up to him both physically and, well, I don't look up to him anymore. I'm taller than him. But, you know, throughout my childhood, I always looked up to

him physically and metaphorically. And then, you know, up until that point, I had so much, I had so much success before I watched that video, right? I'm 24, 25, doing really well. Vandermere is doing so well. Everything I did up until that point, a lot of it was lent from just following my brother's kind of mentorship and guidance. So I think because of that, he had a ton of credibility for me and it resonated uh as the uh oldest of uh five boys there was zero chance we were getting out of this conversation without one jab being thrown in and so it was it was subtle but if you didn't catch that aj said he's taller than gary that one's out of his control so i think you can do about that one but the other jab that i'll give is that

i like to throw at him is um he can't be president at least he can't be now he wasn't born here I think my brother can do anything, but that one legally isn't within his hands. I love it. I don't think that I could go through a conversation listening to my brothers without them throwing jabs. So that's fair game. He can't control either one of them. So perfect. That's right. Exactly. Second question that you'll get to ask me when to finish is a little bit more fun. Aliens, believer or non-believer? believer why um not not based anything on anything tangible not because i saw a ufo or i believe any of those things but my mindset is just that like if if we're on planet earth and we're all doing

this thing and there's all these other planets that we know for sure exist and then there's this just unbelievably vast area that we don't know anything about even though it's been thousands of years of us researching and we have the best brightest minds in the world working on it i'm more so just playing the odds of just like they're just i just feel like there has to be something else going on that's really it again like i'm not i don't have any theories i haven't seen a ufo i don't really believe most of the ufo stories that i hear but it just feels like how can like it feels it feels a little self-centered and egotistical to think that we're the only thing living and breathing and making shit happen around in life it feels like

every once in a while there's like one of these scientific i'll call it a breakthrough basically like a discovery right like i don't know there was ice on mars or you know whatever the thing is that previously was thought to not be the case and there's a lot of people are like freaking out and there's this group of people who are just like well if did you think we knew everything right right you know like it's kind of just like you know even earth right i mean they discover things all the time in the ocean or whatever and you're just like look we probably know way less than than we're comfortable understanding so i think i think that's probably the foundation of my saying yes is that i just feel like you just made that point like there just has to be more

that's kind of how i feel and we're there's so much we haven't figured out that it makes me feel like that makes it pretty obvious that there is something else going on absolutely uh you could ask me one question to uh finish up what you got for me well as the oldest brother um do you name a do you have a pivotal point in your life where you felt as if you really had to step out up to the plate for one of your younger brothers. And if you're comfortable sharing, like, you don't have to go into detail. I don't want anything too personal, like situations where the oldest had a really, you know, I feel like my brother shaped so much for me and was there for me. I'd love to hear it from your, you know, your experience on the other side of the table. So I'm going to tell

you a story that I didn't. And in hindsight, my parents basically like, you know, beat it into my head of like, hey, this is your job type situation. I think I was in third grade, my brother was in first grade or on the school bus and they used to play this stupid game i literally think it was called like slapjacks or something where the kid in the seat in front would turn around and they would you know basically slap each other's hands on the top of the seat or whatever and uh i can't remember if i was sitting next to my brother or near my brother or whatever uh but next thing i know i see his face and you know he's in pain not crying but like something's wrong and i basically said you know are you good yeah he's fine right as as a uh as a first grader

who doesn't want to get in trouble, you know, kind of does. And, uh, and he's holding his hand, but he didn't really want to show it to me, whatever. So we go to school the whole day and I kind of forget about it. We go home and he basically walks in the door and he shows my mom is his hand. And I can't, you know, I mean, literally one of his fingers is, uh, one of the joints is off to like a 45 degree angle. Like, I mean, it's just, it's broken. You don't have to be a doctor. Like, Hey, we got to get this taken care of. Uh, and in hindsight, you know, it's kind of always things like how did a first grader go the entire day at school and like you know but but i remember when uh when he showed my mom my mom's first reaction when she goes how

did this happen and he said on the school bus and she immediately turned and looked at me and said what did you do yeah and i remember being like what do you mean and she was like somebody hurt your brother and you didn't do anything it was the first time i realized like oh wait a second like that rule about like you know no fighting that only applies if you know it's it's somebody other than your brother type situation, right? Like, Hey, you're supposed to do certain things to protect your brothers or whatever. And so it was this like weird situation where, you know, I wasn't in very many situations, you know, from like a physical danger standpoint, but I think that just like that moment was, uh, one in which you realize like this applies not just to their

physical safety, but a whole bunch of other areas. Yeah. And I I've talked to my mom about it before. i'm like i probably wouldn't have learned that so much later in life unless in that moment i mean she didn't yell at my brother she like the first thing she did was she turned she said it to me i remember being like wait a second you're telling me he broke his finger and i'm about to get in trouble like i love that your mom killed it in that i love that story it speaks to the the big picture of things that's a good one i love that and the other thing too is so you've got one brother one sister right so uh in a family of five boys we fought all the time right over you know stupid stuff everything from you're wearing my socks to you know i'm gonna eat the last cookie

type situation and uh my dad used to tell us all the time he's like look whatever you guys do in here i don't want you guys fighting or anything right but like what you're gonna do what you're gonna do and basically i'm gonna try to you know make sure nobody gets hurt uh but when you walk outside nobody can mess with your brothers like you can right and so it's always like this this weird thing and um i'm between me and my youngest brother uh eight years difference so you know close to you yeah yeah and so when i when you think about that like that's a pretty big difference right 11 years eight years like you know when i was in middle school my brother's like not even in school yet right and and so you just like that i think is the hard part is the age difference but

then once you get past a certain age and you know maybe 20 like the youngest one then it's like hey look we're all together right yeah maybe someone's got more experience than whatever but at this point, the age difference matters less, I think. Absolutely. No, I agree with that completely. I think something that I've really been enjoying is being a father. I have a three-year-old daughter, a one-and-a-half-year-old son, and a third on the way in December. Oh, wow. Are you excited? Super excited, super nervous, honestly, because we're going to have three kids under three and a half. That's going to be a thing. Are you ready for that?

oh yeah sure am i mean what else am i gonna say right um but what's been cool though is you know for me i was the youngest in my family and even within cousins there was never a cousin that was young enough or close enough to like for me to impart some of this stuff and you know i've enjoyed mentoring um you know younger uh young professionals and things like that but like teaching my daughter life lessons along the way based on like shit you just described for example i've really um taken that responsibility to heart and i think it's because of like what my parents did and what my siblings did for me as the youngest it's now my turn um so it's been i love that story with your mom and your brother yeah that's awesome uh i've got to imagine that your son and your

daughter even though they don't realize it yet like just being so close in age later on in life going on it's pretty cool right yeah yeah not right now they're they're fighting a lot um but but for sure. And it was something, you know, my wife is less than two years younger than her brother. And I look at their relationship and my relationship with my sister and my brother is as close as possible. Like we are uncomfortably, ridiculously close best friends. But I, I, and they know I was by myself from 10 to 18. You know, my, my, by the time I was 10, both my brother and sister were in college. And so I think like, man, wouldn't it be cool to go to middle school with them or go to high school with them? And I didn't have that. And they did.

they were my brother was a senior my sister was a freshman in high school so they had that one year like that kind of thing and they shared friends growing up and things like that i was in completely different uh generation so to speak so i'm very excited for our three kids to literally be it'll end up being i think senior high school sophomore high school eighth grader for our three which is pretty dope yeah that's awesome where uh where can we send people to find you on the internet or uh anything about vander sports yeah uh for me personally twitter and instagram it's just ajv those three initials, my initials. And then same thing, primarily Twitter and Instagram, just VaynerSports, where we're at mostly. Awesome, man. Anytime you get a three-letter

handle, you know you were early, right? I was early. That was the benefit of having our hands in Silicon Valley early, for sure. Absolutely. All right, man. Thank you so much for doing this, AJ. Walk through it again in the future. Appreciate you, brother. Take care.