Today, Gary Vaynerchuk’s third book ‘The Thank You Economy‘ came out. And while I have not yet read the whole thing, I wanted to share a little story about Gary Vee that has a lot to do with the thank you economy and the kind of person that Gary is.
On May 12th, 2008, Gary appeared on the Late Show with Conan O’Brien. So he had a little party for the release of his book ’101 Wines that bring the Thunder’ and to watch the show.

Looking back on these photos I didn't even realize that AJ was there that night
When I first showed up to the small bar that the event was being held in I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. But my friend and I asked the hostess and she kindly informed us that there was a small group of people waiting for Gary in the front table.
Seeing as how we didn’t really know anyone else, we sat at another table and ordered a glass of wine. Soon more people began to show up but it wasn’t an overwhelming amount of people. After all, this was a very late event seeing as how the show aired at 12:30am.

Cheers!
Finally Gary arrived and he had brought with him cases of wine for everyone. This was still a very small event compared to other events of Gary’s that I’ve attended since but it was still very generous of him.
Before the show started Gary went around saying hello to everyone. When he came over to our table I introduced myself and Gary just looked at me and said “I know who you are”. I must have smiled from ear to ear because at the time I had only been video blogging for a few months but to think that Gary had seen my stuff was the biggest ego boost in the world (in a good way). Â It really validated what I had started doing and encouraged me to keep doing it.

This is a horrible photo of me but just deal with it ok
Over these last few years Gary has been a big supporter and a huge mentor to me. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be where I am in my career right now if it wasn’t for him. So in the spirit of his new book, I wanted to say Thank You Gary!
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