Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Babruysk, in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Belarus, in 1975, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1978, arriving in New York at age three. He grew up in Queens and later in Edison, New Jersey, and by his early teens was already working in his family's small liquor store. He took that store, rebuilt it as Wine Library, and grew it from a few million dollars in annual sales to roughly $60 million over about five years, becoming one of the earliest people to sell wine seriously online. In 2006 he launched Wine Library TV, a near-daily YouTube wine show that ran for five years and made him one of the internet's first video-native personal brands, well before "content creator" was a common phrase. In 2009 he co-founded VaynerMedia with his brother, AJ Vaynerchuk, betting early that social media would become central to how brands market themselves. That bet paid off: VaynerMedia has grown into a full-service global advertising agency serving Fortune 500 clients, and was named to Ad Age's Agency A-List as recently as 2024. Around 2017, VaynerMedia expanded into media and publishing, forming the holding company VaynerX, where Gary serves as Chairman, and which today also includes Gallery Media Group and, as of 2026, a third agency, Tamara Group, named for his mother. Along the way he has co-founded and exited several other businesses, including the restaurant reservation platform Resy (acquired by American Express in 2019) and the wine brand Empathy Wines (acquired by Constellation Brands in 2020), while also building an early-stage venture fund, VaynerRSE, and a sports representation agency, VaynerSports. In 2021 he founded VeeFriends, a characters and intellectual-property business that also runs the annual VeeCon conference, and he is a multiple-time New York Times bestselling author, most recently for Day Trading Attention (2024), his framework for building brand and sales in a social media landscape that keeps changing faster than most companies can react. Today, whether the topic is AI, attention, branding, or leadership, Gary Vaynerchuk brings the same instinct that built his career: a current, contrarian, unusually early read on where business is actually headed next.