Throughout his life, Gary Vee has stayed on top of the latest and greatest technologies.
Vee has learned how to use technology to the advantage of his businesses and has managed to make millions by doing so.
What started with his father’s liquor store has become a network of successful business ventures for Vee to use.
Through his success as an internet celebrity and popular businessman, Gary Vee has amassed a devoted crowd of fans who are always eager to learn how he earned his riches.
What Is Gary Vee’s Net Worth?
Gary Vee has a net worth of $200 million, which he has earned through multiple business ventures including Resy, VaynerX, and Empathy Wines.
Some of his most recent business ventures include making his mark on the world of cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Gary Vee, or Gary Vaynerchuk, was born in Babruysk, Belarus on November 14th of 1975.
When he was only three years old, his parents, Tamara and Sasha Vaynerchuk, brought him and his younger brother to the United States in search of a better life.
During his early childhood, Vee grew up in the borough of Queens in New York City.
However, his family would eventually move out of the major city and relocate to Edison, New Jersey.
His parents taught him the value of hard work, starting with his first job at his father’s liquor store when he was only 14 years old.
This gave him plenty of hands-on experience with running a business and inspired him to learn how to do business more effectively.
Vee would eventually leave his hometown to go study at Mount Ida College in Massachusetts.
His time in college gave him the vision he needed to improve the family business.
It was important to Vee to modernize his family business and contribute his own worth to the business.
The Vaynerchuk family would make millions from the improvements that their elder son had made.
He has continued to explore his love of wine and good food through his investment throughout his career so far.
Vee isn’t just popular on social media and in the business world, but he is also a major contributor to the world of technology.
From starting the restaurant reservation application Resy to becoming a leading professional in the world of cryptocurrency and NFTs, Vee never stops exploring technology.
Starting With The Family Business
The first business that Gary Vee had his hand in was the same business he worked at when he was only 14 years old.
His father had opened Shoppers Discount Liquors when they moved to Edison, New Jersey.
Before Vee started working for $2 an hour at his father’s store, he ran several different lemonade stands.
Vee got a thrill from the money he managed to make from these stands and even earned enough to purchase himself a Big Wheel.
As soon as Vee became old enough to work at his father’s store, his father took him away from his lemonade business and put him to work at the liquor store.
Although he wasn’t making as much money, he was able to form a passion for wine when he was 16 or 17.
His passion for wine has served him for decades and inspired him to want to open up the largest wine store in the United States.
After graduating from Mount Ida College, he felt that he knew exactly what his father’s business needed.
A common thread throughout Vee’s life has been that he always liked to stay ahead of the technology curve.
In 1997, he launched WineLibrary.com to help his father sell his wine to a larger range of people.
To match the name of the website and give the storefront a new feel, Gary Vee and his father decided to change the liquor store’s name to Wine Library.
The business was able to get a major increase in sales thanks to their early accessibility on the internet, but Vee knew that he needed a better way to spread the word about his family’s business.
Gary Vee created a daily webcast on YouTube in 2006 called Wine Library TV, which was what the business needed.
Using Social Media To His Advantage
Although Gary Vee’s Wine Library had one of the most modern and dedicated websites of the time, Vee was determined to spread the word of his wine business further.
Since he was already paying for a website developer to constantly update his online storefront, Vee had to get creative about the way he was going to advertise his business.
A new media site called YouTube had started only a few years earlier, but Vee instantly saw the potential that the website had.
Rather than having to pay for traditional radio or television advertisements, Gary Vee began marketing his family’s business through his wine-based YouTube channel called Wine Library TV.
From an early age, Vee had learned that he was an excellent storyteller and was able to captivate his audiences while talking about anything he was passionate about.
He knew other people wanted to discuss wine on the same level as him.
Vee began recording Wine Library TV in the second story of his family’s liquor store and the business’s popularity began to boom, which made Vee the face of entrepreneurial YouTube at the time.
During his time on the popular daily webcast, Gary Vee was able to work alongside many different wine companies and expand his palette towards wines he had never heard of.
This period in Vee’s career helped him become the marketeer he is now known for being.
Sadly, Gary Vee’s time on Wine Library TV would come to an end in 2011 after the 1,000th episode of the liquor-focused series.
Although his time on YouTube as an internet entertainer may be over, he continues to work on his family’s business.
Despite the other businesses that Gary Vee has been a member of, Wine Library is still his crowning achievement.
Founding VaynerMedia
After learning how well he was able to see the potential in different forms of marketing, Gary Vee decided to start VaynerMedia alongside his younger brother, AJ Vaynerchuk, in 2009.
Vee knew that he could help other companies make their fortunes from his innovative approach to marketing.
Without any startup money, the Vaynerchuk brothers started their business in the conference room of Buddy Media.
After nearly a decade in business, VaynerMedia has been able to expand to a company of more than 800 people.
VaynerMedia offers media strategies for companies such as Pepsi, AB InBev, and General Electric.
What has earned VaynerMedia its place alongside these major companies is its best-in-class capability in paid media, full-service creative team, influencer marketing, small and medium business marketing, eCommerce, personal branding, sound-activated technology, and in-house consulting.
In 2017, VaynerMedia purchased the women’s magazine, PureWow, under its new publishing branch, Gallery Media Group.
The two groups would later become one when they formed VaynerX and purchased their second magazine, ONE37pm.
Through the media empire he had created, Gary Vee has been able to publish multiple books.
Four of his books would go on to become New York Times bestselling business books, and people were scrambling to hear what he had to say about running a business in the modern age.
After seeing the success he had achieved as a public speaker and author, Gary Vee was inspired to create a business and advice Q&A show called #AskGaryVee.
With the interest that people still had in his life, Vee decided to start a daily vlog that followed his life as the CEO of a major company called DailyVee.
He has started a podcast called The GaryVee Audio Experience, which is also posted daily.
With the help of his media company, Vee dominates his personal brand.
Starting Empathy Wines
After decades of selling wine, Gary Vee felt it was time to make his own wine.
His goal with his winery, Empathy Wines, was to create the highest quality of wine for the most affordable price.
Empathy Wines makes its wines affordable not by cutting down on the quality of ingredients, but by cutting out middlemen like disruptors and selling to other wine shops.
\By handling these aspects itself, Empathy Wines is able to save its consumers money.
By shipping the wine directly to the consumer, the winery is also able to save the consumer gas money.
Instead, the company can focus on getting high-quality grapes from acclaimed growers, blending and aging the wine in state-of-the-art tanks, and spending less on the packaging.
A single bottle of Empathy wine costs around $27, but you can get a six-month subscription plan for $81.
When the winery first launched in 2019, it started with a rosé and a white wine.
That first rosé was described as “crispy, juicy, and mouth-watering.”
It was made from a blend of Muscat, Pinot Noir, Tannat, Syrah, Carignan, Barbera, and Grenache.
The vineyards used for these wines were located in Lodi, Lake County, and the Dunnigan Hills in California.
The white wine was from Yolo County and included a blend of Chardonnay, Vermentino, Viognier, Chenin Blanc, Albariño.
This wine has often been described as being incredibly zesty.
Empathy Wine rewards its consumers’ loyalty in a variety of ways.
Those who order three shipments of 12 bottles annually will become members of Club Empathy, which gives them free entry to any of the Empathy Wine events planned to be held around the country.
The company ships wine all over the world, including to countries such as Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Entering The World Of Applications
Gary Vee will always hunt down the latest and greatest in consumer-accessible technology.
When phone applications were beginning to turn the eCommerce world upside down, Vee was already riding the wave of innovation comfortably by investing in many popular app-based businesses such as Uber.
By 2014, Vee was ready to start his own app-based business, alongside Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, called Resy.
The app worked with restaurants to make reservations more convenient.
Too many New York restaurants were losing out on money due to empty seats, but they had customers who were eager to eat at their restaurants.
Resy allowed consumers to skip the need to place their reservation 30 days in advance while charging a fee that would be split between Resy and the restaurant.
The app started by teaming up with the popular New York City restaurants Charlie Bird and Minetta Tavern, but quickly expanded all over the country.
By placing a price on empty seats, Resy was able to bring in a more consistent and scheduled flow of seats throughout the workweek.
What Resy was doing differently from its competitors like OpenTable is that Resy focused on getting restaurant customers throughout the night.
It didn’t just want to bog down its restaurant partners with a full dinner rush, but instead, it wanted to consistently provide seats until the restaurants were closing.
In Gary Vee’s eyes, what set his application apart from all the other restaurant reservation applications that consumers could be using was all based on presentation and product.
Just as Google and Bing offer similar services, consumers choose the one they use based on their personal likes and the different features that each search engine has.
What initially inspired Vee to start Resy was Ben Leventhal’s goal of innovating the restaurant industry.
Teaching Other Celebrities About CryptoCurrency
Gary Vee is one of the biggest names in cryptocurrency, after his history of finding the best in the newest technology.
After learning the advantages of cryptocurrency, Vee was quick to invest in one called Ethereum, or ETH.
Ethereum is often seen as the evolution of Bitcoin thanks to the way it solved the double-spending crisis that Bitcoin has suffered from.
Double spending occurs when a cryptocurrency is spent more than once, which was a major problem for early cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum is looking to change how businesses look at cryptocurrency.
They can be more than something you hold on to potentially increase in value, but they can also be a way to help organize people, ideas, companies, or even exclusive services.
What makes Ethereum unique from other cryptocurrencies is its strong use of smart contracts.
Smart contracts are contracts that are written in computer code on a cryptocurrency platform.
When certain conditions are met, the smart contract carries out a set of tasks defined in the contract.
These smart contracts are even able to interact with other smart contracts without human intervention.
Through Ether, Ethereum wants to allow companies to more easily manage property, contracts, and shares with their consumers.
Ether can even be used by companies to play games with consumers or build their own fan nations.
When Gary Vee approves of a cryptocurrency, you know others will soon adopt it as well.
Whether they’re one of his fans looking to change their lives forever or a major celebrity who is eager to learn about the new currency, you know they’ll listen to Vee.
At the most Super Bowl LVI, Gary Vee was spotted talking to the rap trio Migos about his cryptocurrency collection in Michael Rubin and Robert Kraft’s private suite.
It was a star-studded Super Bowl party.
Advocating And Creating His Own NFTs
Gary Vee has been a longtime advocate of NFTs, even if he believes that 98% of all NFTs will fail after the NFT gold rush fades.
Although he sees their potential downfall, Vee wanted to get his share of the money being made from this new form of currency.
An NFT is a Non-Fungible Token that is completely unique and can’t be replaced.
Its value comes from its rarity.
They’re most similar to defective baseball cards, where there’s something about them that makes them completely unique and collectible.
NFTs are a part of the Ethereum blockchain.
Through the support on Ethereum, NFTs are able to hold more information, which helps decipher what makes them unique from other files.
NFTs can be anything digital, but they are most commonly used to sell digital art.
Some NFTs may include music or even digital dioramas.
Gary Vee believes in NFTs so firmly that he spent 1,600 Ether on one of the rarest and most valuable NFTs called CryptoPunk.
This amount is the equivalent of $3.7 million.
CryptoPunk consists of tiny, pixelated mugshots that are meant to be used for avatars on your social media pages.
There are 10,000 pieces of this series, with each mugshot having unique traits that come in a variety of rarity.
Gary Vee even went on to make his own NFT series called VeeFriends.
Each piece in the collection was hand-drawn by Vee himself and included animals such as Curious Crane and Logical Lion.
However, Vee wants these characters to become more than just the subject of NFTs.
He would eventually like to see them gain the same level of popularity as Hello Kitty, Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs, or Despicable Me.
He even wants his characters to spawn toys and children’s shows.
Opening An NFT Restaurant
After the success that Gary Vee found with VeeFriends, he was ready to push the medium forward by applying NFTs to real-life situations.
He announced the arrival of the first NFT restaurant in early 2023 in Manhattan.
The Flyfish Club will be an exclusive restaurant that serves globally inspired seafood dishes that only allows entry to those who know a Fishfly NFT.
When a consumer becomes tired of owning their NFT, they will be able to resell it on the secondary market.
Flyshish Club was founded by Gary Vee alongside David Rodolitz and Josh Capon.
The NFTs were only purchasable with Ether and were originally sold for 2.5 Ether, or around $8,300.
In the first month alone, the Fishfly Club was able to sell 1,501 NFTs.
They pumped the $15 million they earned in NFTs into starting their restaurant.
The NFTs are now only available on the secondary market and are going for around 5.2 Ether, or around $14,000, at the low end.
When the restaurant opens, NFT holders will be able to make reservations whenever they want, as long as they reserve the seats 14 days ahead, and are allowed to come whenever they please.
NFT holders will still be able to pay for their food in United States dollars.
They are also able to bring as many guests as they want as long as they specify the exact number beforehand and the number of guests is within reason.
With his newest business venture, Gary Vee has once again proven his dedication to good food and innovative technology.
Perhaps they’ll serve some of Vee’s wine at the bar as well.
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