where I need to hire an office assistant. Sales are great, but I don’t
necessarily have the capital to pull the trigger. Any creative ideas on how to achieve this?” – David, that is a great
question, and it’s really fun to be in the presence of DRock, one of the people who
I think payed forward and is going to feel the huge
dividend on the way back. Meaning, I know a lot of
real hard-core watchers and listeners. I know that you DRock first
at a video for me for free. Was that Clouds and Dirt? That’s epic, let’s link that up. And, you know, that led to a relationship which lead to a full time gig. And now, will be my heart and soul as long as he’ll have me in my video’s world, which, you know, Super Bowl videos of the Jets winning. Amazing, you never know DRock. So, I think one of the things you can do is use your social capital to put out there that
you’re looking for somebody and that this how you can compensate. Obviously, money is the accepted
compensation in our society but I gotta tell you, like
I think that there’s a day and age with the internet
being a middle platform where other things can be used. And so, I don’t know So, obviously you just felt an
edit because DRock screwed up kind of like Pete Carol
at the one yard line by not double checking the card. Because I’m not double checking the card, or the card went weird on you. Okay, well, you messed up.
– [DRock] (mumbling) – Yeah.
– Right, let’s get a DRock messed up alert. I wanna make sure, I
wanna double check this. Just so you know, I do double check so I want to see if it’s pretty, but it better really over the top to rock the DRock messed up alert it better be legit, ’cause it only happens once every 66 episodes. Does anybody think it’s
interesting that it’s episode 66 one more six, the devil, the
Patriots won, Belichick. And so, anyway, going back
not sure where it got cut off but just make sure you edit it weird DRock everybody knows that there was a mistake on your end. I think that there’s a lot of ways to be able to barter out that service. I would literally put on Craig’s list and on your social media, and e-mail blast and take your ten closest
friends and have them blast and say look, I’m looking for this, this is what I can offer. Maybe that’s minimum wage, plus I’ll give you all my
services free for a year or there’s a million ways to hack. I think that we in our modern
society across the globe outside a very rural part pockets in parts of the world that you know, I’m not educated enough to know this. We are really in a flat
out currency exchange game and I’m a big believer
that over the next 50 years because the internet shrinks the middle but there will be an
opportunity as a matter of fact I’m gonna make another
prediction, Staphon, that there will be a major
platform in the next 15 years that is a major top 50 start-up that is infrastructure for us to trade. Like, straight up like
Ebay, Craig’s list, mobile you know centric where it’s just like, you know I have this coat laying around and someone’s like, “Cool,
I’ll mow your lawn.” Like just, there is so
much inefficiency and stuff and services provided I think you should go that
route maybe make a video maybe take the momentum of this answer go really do something the other thing is to
really pound the streets meaning just like know,
no rock unturned right, just ask a lot of people there is a lot of people out there and I think in our
society not paying in cash feels taking advantage I think I’ve consistently
been on the offense in nuances of like border exchange I just think there’s a
lot that can be done maybe maybe you have a collection
of rare baseball cards that somebody wants. Or, you know you’ve 14
pairs of awesome Nikes maybe you could’ve six. You have assets around you,
your time, your services a crap load of stuff in your house trade that for what you need. Or go with do your when
good enough of a name to make a promise that hey I can pay this but I promise you as soon as we get going I’m gonna make you the full time person I think the one thing that I promise you that you need to make sure you do. is a lot of people
promise and don’t deliver and I highly recommend you
don’t make that promise unless you feel like you can deliver and the reason I make so many promises I always say to myself,
even if I fail business wise I’ll go to my own bank
account and close the gap. If you’re willing to go to that level and I don’t know your
personal finances, but anyway, barter, barter, barter. Hey Gary Vaynerchuk this is
Colin AKA Dj Veaux here

– [Voiceover] Christopher
asks, “What are your thoughts “on employing friends?” – Christoper, this is a great question for a lot of people who watch my stuff. They make that connection on
the family business thing. I get enormous amounts
of, excuse me, email from people that are
the sons and daughters of business owners because
they knew my narrative now that I’m running Vayner with AJ, I’m getting some more
brother and sister stuff, and I’m getting a little older. I’m even getting some of the perspective from the dads and the moms. I have employed friends at both Wine Library and VaynerMedia. VaynerMedia was started with
five of AJ’s dear friends that I think the number
one advice I’d say is you should absolutely. I’m emphatic about this, and you guys know I’m big on, you know,
do what works for you, but I’m a huge fan of hiring friends, especially early on, to establish culture, to have those teammates in the trenches, especially if you’re willing
to practice meritocracy. So the key to friends is that,
here we are five years later, and AJ’s five to six high
school and college friends that started the company with us are in different places
within the organization and not really treated any
differently at the highest levels than anybody else, and very honestly, I hope they’re not listening
or watching the show, they may even be treated
slightly harder and worse than everybody else because
I’m so sensitive to it in the other direction. I expect the six of you not
to hit me up for a raise. I think that I’m a big fan of it. I recommend it. It is risky. I have fired my friends in the past. Brandon was my best friend growing up. He runs Wine Library. Risky. You know, it really comes
down to, here’s my belief. My belief is very simple. If you loose a friendship
from somebody working for you and not working out and
you having to fire them or them leaving, then your friendship wasn’t as strong as you thought. That’s the bottom line.

– Gary, my name is Zac. I’m the CEO and lead designer here at Power Labs, which
is a website design company, and my question for you today is: when you’re faced with two
equally qualified candidates, how do you choose which one to hire, assuming you only need
to hire one employee? I’m asking because I
recently needed to hire on a lot of new employees for 2015, and I appreciate your answer. Thanks, man. – Zac, so many things are
running through my head, all of them are gonna razz
you, which pisses me off, because I really appreciate
you watching the show, and you seem like an awesome dude. A couple things. No such thing as ‘equally qualified’, make a goddamn call, right, just make one. Number two, it seems like
you’re growing pretty well. There’s a weird part of me that’s trying to tell you to hire both of them. The only rationale is
that you can’t justify in any shape or form
within the first six months of 2015, you needing, there’s both so narrow,
back to the last question, great way that worked out, that you could never see you using them, because if you both, if you
love both of them so much, that you should absolutely hire them both. I’m a big fan of hiring
ahead of my growth. A lot of people are always like, how did you grow this so quickly? It’s because I am on the offense and I’m hiring ahead of my growth because I’m not worried about my margin. I’m not hiring enough that
I couldn’t make payroll if something weird happened, you know, and in a week I couldn’t make payroll, I’m leaving a cushion for practicality because I’m an immigrant
and I care about people and I wouldn’t want to have layoffs, but I’m always on the offense. So, the two big things
that pop off for me are, one, you know, are you indecisive or was it, like, the best thing to figure
out how to ask a question for the show, or if you really mean it, as a CEO, and, you know, and this is where, if you’re
CEO and lead designer, you need to put your CEO hat on and make a decision, and then, number two, as a CEO, you’re hiring a lot of people, there’s something weird,
I can’t tell you why, but there’s something weird that tells me you should hire both. – [Voiceover] Courtney asks,

– [Voiceover] Andrew asks, “On
your team, is it better to have employees who’re
specialized in one thing, or people who can wear many hats?” – Andrew, I think the answer is both work. I think you need both in an organization of size, but I, you know, in a world of not trying
to be politically correct on this show, and, like, trying to draw some
real lines in the sand, I’m a huge fan of jack of all trades. Tons of people will tell you
that means you’re not good at any of them. I don’t agree. I think I’m really (beep)
awesome at 19 different things, and I’m watching even
the people in this room and this room get better
at different things. I hate when people use the excuse of I’m great at this,
and I go deep in this to not try to get better at other things. So, to make a 51-49 call,
which is what this is, which is, like, both matter,
both really do matter. DRock’s not good at basketball, but he doesn’t have to do
that for what he’s doing here. This one has a shot at being a meme. Makes Staphon so happy. But I won’t do the DRock, I’m gonna find something on somebody else. I’m gonna go with having multiple skills. I think it speaks to agility, and I love that. – [Voiceover] Anthony asks, “If
given an opportunity to swap

“I saw a discussion via Linkedin “about Klout scores on a resume. “What are your thoughts on them?” – Terri, this is a question. I’m glad everybody’s gonna
get to hear my answer and this has nothing
to do with my feelings towards Klout itself. These kind of scoring systems that try to prove your social
equity in the marketplace are not things I’m a big fan of. They’re super gameable. Let me say something really interesting. Pssst. Psst. A lot of you have hit me up on Twitter because if I replied to you, you knew that your
Klout score would go up. Now this is more of a 2012 move and has become something less and less of you have done, but you know, if you look
yourself in the mirror right now, you knew that you were trying to game me for more Klout scores and I was thrilled to give it to you because I know how
little it actually meant. And because I love you and that you even know who I am and I wanted to give you some love, but people who literally tweeted out, like oh, got some Klout juice, because they engaged
with me on that platform. Look, my answer is very simple, and very, very hardcore, which is, I never signed
up for a Klout account while I had one of the
bigger scores up there, so that’s kind of called eating your own dog food, right? Taking your own medicine. I believe in it so little that I didn’t even want to acknowledge it by signing up, even though it was probably
in my best interest both personally, and too, professionally to just understand how it worked. So again, has nothing to do with Klout. I feel the same way about
a million other things. It is not something, the big data version of your worth is not something I’m super pumped about. You obviously might have seen my own last Medium article about empathy and the hidden truths of people. I’m so much more into the grey, intuitive and EQ of people than I am the black and white, which is what Klout is. It’s just raw data dumped and figured, if like, it’s high school math. And when I mean high school math, go deeper with me, it’s the math of how high school works. The popular girl decides that she likes Steve and
she goes out with him. Well, his Klout score
went through the roof because he was in the band before that. You know, so it’s that kind of thing. – [Voiceover] Dan wants to know

– [Voiceover] Jelle asks, “what
came first at VaynerMedia: clients or employees? And did you ever do
stuff without employees?” – So let’s get into this question. First, I actually don’t
know how to pronounce this, so let’s go to India, who I
thought helped us with that, DRock, how – ? – I don’t – “yell”? “Yelle”? I don’t know. – [Gary] Got it, alright. Steve? What’s your shot here? – “Yella?” I don’t know. – You know.
– [India] It’s very pretty. – It’s gorgeous. Yeah, don’t worry, you’re not hurting feelings anyway. India’s going to be very
sensitive on this show. (laughter)
Alright, you know, we started Vaynermedia, two
things happened in parallel. We got out, I got ahead of
it, AJ was graduating college and we were gonna start a company in May. In March or April I got ahead of it and got us a big project
with a big client. So I guess customer came first. I kinda used, I did something clever. I made that person pay the
entire project up front and then used those dollars
to pay the first 3-4 employees who were all of AJ’s homies, who are all still here,
hence the foundation. So I guess client, right? I got an upfront campaign
that I used those dollars, and then the official first day we had those five or six employees, so but we never did anything without them, though actually me and AJ
did some of the early stuff for that project by ourselves, so that’s the answer. I don’t know how you wanna look at it. I will say this: any time you can sell
ahead of your expenses, you do it. One of the biggest reasons so many people go out of business, and many of you who watch this
show will go out of business, is you do not know how
to manage cash flow. You think in terms of, you know, accrual versus cash basis,
if we wanna go hardcore, you know, CPA-style here, oh, we’re gonna make 80k so
I can have 70k in expenses, but if you don’t get paid
properly or if there’s a hiccup, or, you know, no buffers, no practical knowledge
of that vulnerability, and then a bunch of you
who are tech-driven, you raise too much money, you
don’t keep your burn in check, you assume you’re gonna raise more money, it doesn’t go as easy
or as well as you think, because once you actually become a company people are looking at what you’re doing versus what you promise you’re gonna do, and those are the vulnerabilities of how you go out of business. – [Voiceover] Gabii asks, “Do
you have any bucket list items

– [Voiceover] Vernon
asks, “What’s one question “you ask in interviews?” – Vernon, I really like this question. I’m really excited to take a stab at it. I don’t do it every time. I’m not one of these guys who’s like, this is my go-to question, like “When you were 13 and you
went through a forest, and you pick–” I don’t have any of these weird things, but I do always, especially
I think if there’s a lot of momentum in the interview, I love to ask people to tell me, at this moment in time, what they see the professional career becoming. I wanna get into the psychology of what their ambition is and I pretty much spend most of the interview trying to get somebody comfortable enough to tell me the truth to that question. Because I don’t care if
you want to be the CEO of VaynerMedia. If you wanna just be, move a couple levels up and have great work-life balance. I
don’t care if you even want to come here and
work for me for two years, suck out my IP and then
go start your own agency. I don’t care what your agenda is, I just wanna know what it is so
I can help us get there. Because the truth is,
I wanna keep people in my ecosystem forever and the best way to do that is to deliver
to them what they want. And so the quicker I can
get into that insight, are you work-life balance,
are you money hungry, are you title hungry, are you entrepreneur and just coming in here for learnings. I don’t care, I just need to know. The quicker I know and the
quicker it’s the truth, the quicker we can do
things forever together. And so that is usually the essence of the interview question for me. Can I tap through, can I
feel that I’m getting there? Because that gives me a blueprint, a map. Not only that, I have the
self-awareness, and I try to talk to them about this,
that that will change. You know, being a 24 year old dude, 26 year old female, it’s gonna change. You’re gonna fall in love,
your life’s gonna change. Are you gonna start a family? When you make a little bit more money it becomes less interesting. There’s so many different
things that are going on in one’s life. When you make a little money it becomes way more interesting. You get the bug, the blood’s in the water. I don’t care, I just need
the communication funnel and I want it to start from day one, five minutes in to getting
to know each other.

“Can anyone create good micro-content? “How can you make sure
your team consistently “creates good content?” – Joe, great question. First, for everybody who’s
watching and/or listening, I want to talk about the
term “micro-content.” It’s something I started
using three, four years ago. Hasn’t really caught on. I myself don’t know how often I’m gonna use it going forward. But the notion was
content made specifically for the platform. You know, the videos and the pictures, the quotes, the written words
that worked on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
Instagram, Snapchat, Vine. It was the context of the book
“Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.” DRock, throw it up there. Throw it up there, show it. They got it? – [DRock] Mmhmm. – [Gary] You got it, ok.
– [DRock] Mmhmm. – [Gary] So, you know, how do you
make good micro-content? How do you consistently
get your team to do it? First of all, content
is subjective, right? Steve likes “Game of Thrones” shows. I don’t, not that I don’t like it, I just haven’t even seen it yet. Some people watch “Game of
Thrones” and don’t like it. Very few, I think,
’cause it’s very popular. But you know, it is
still clearly subjective, that’s number one. Number two, how do you get a
team to be good at anything when you’re scaling your
kind of P.O.V. on the world and marketing to a 400
person, and downstairs, lot of comments about
downstairs, we’ll get there, um, organization. It’s about education,
but I would actually say that for me scaling and
getting my team to get there has a lot to do more with osmosis, right? Like putting it into their water stream, versus having a class that teaches it. Sure you can write a book. Sure we have lunch-and-learns
and learn-ups within the new organization, but they’re not attended that well. Need to talk about that, by the way. Um, what’s happening more here is that people are doing
and people are smart. You know, it starts with hiring
good people, smart people. And then when you realize
that you’ve hired somebody who’s not capable of learning
through that process, well then you gotta make some decisions. But to me, making good content takes a couple core pillars. Number one, you’ve got
to respect your audience. Meaning, you’ve gotta
respect the psychology of what they’re doing when
they’re on the platform. I know a 40-year-old woman
is in a different mindset when she’s on Facebook versus
when she’s on Pinterest. And that is how I try
to story-tell to her, because I know on Pinterest,
she intent to shop, aspiration to shop, and on Facebook, she’s keeping up with her
world or consuming information. And I strategize around
that, the psychology and the platform itself. Number two, when I say respect, I put out content that
I think she will like versus what I’d like to accomplish. Yes, I’d like to, give me a bottle of wine. Yes, I’d like to, a little faster, Alex, I know it’s early. Yes, I’d like to sell this,
but if I put it in a way that is more interesting to her, five under $10 bottles
of wine that, you know, help you get through the day when you have eight-year-old kids, and then you’re targeting
eight-year-old-kid moms, you’re going to start getting into a game that gives you a better chance. You know, 12 wines somebody
who’s 38 will like, and then you target people
from that were born in 1975. These are all strategies that will work. Again, very heavy Facebook. Or Instagram, taking a glamour
shot of it, in an angle, and it’s just like cool and nice. It’s like it’s all the kind of stuff. Respecting the audience,
respecting the platform, taking your agenda and making it third. – [Voiceover] James asks, “What are your thoughts on
podcasters and YouTubers

“when hiring creatives?” – Kartik, great question. Creatives are really interesting
hire here at VaynerMedia because in the agency
world, the creative process is very romantic, by my point of view. Meaning that, a lot of people
care about winning awards, a lot of people want to
make movies and TV shows, and for whatever reason they are now in the advertising
industry, and they’re caring more about the craft than they are about the agenda, which is to sell coffee, to sell whatever this thing is. To sell phones. And so to me, what I’m
looking for in creatives are people that are very
creative, and still want to make the greatest creative
that they’re capable of but also something that’s
grounded in the fact that we’re here to sell stuff. And if we don’t ultimately move product or inspire people to donate, or make them aware about a cause,
we are not going to be fulfilling the duty at hand. And so I’m looking for
a level of practicality and a little hint of
2015 data understanding from my creatives, which
I think is a little bit of a different spin.

what role does internal culture play in the company’s success? Can you give one concrete
tip on building that culture? Ekaterina, how are you doing? It’s always great to hear from you, I’m glad you’re on the show. Company culture is actually the only, you know what’s funny,
it’s funny this question’s coming up today, I actually
on the way to work today said, “you know what, the
book that I’m gonna write that’s really gonna like,” you know, I always think is Crush It!,
ooh, Thank You Economy’s gonna sneak up on people.
I know, as I sit here today, the book that I write
on culture and how to build an organization through humans, not CFO cash tactics, is
gonna be my book legacy, so whenever I get to that,
so it’s everything to me, as an operator I’m all E.Q. over I.Q., the one concrete tactic I have is way too many people make
decisions on who they fire or hire based on money. “Oh, we have the budget
to hire another designer, or camera person, or” like
it’s a financial decision. All my decisions on hiring
and firing are emotional. What is it gonna do to
the collective community? You know, if I fire this
person, who’s so popular internally, because they
have great people skills, will that hurt everybody else, and can I can I push that person
into another direction to help them get another job over 90 days instead of firing them
abruptly in one day? That costs me a lot more money, but does a hell of a lot for me in the culture. And so, that is my one concrete kind of curve ball haven’t heard a lot of
people talk about that kind of stuff, example.