Timing Your Investments: GaryVee Says It’s as Crucial as Finding the Right One for Maximum Returns

Photo By Willo Sano on Flikr

Full disclosure, I admire Gary Vaynerchuk (Garyvee).

I know he’s brash, swears a lot and rubs people up the wrong way when he’s talking about parenting or arguing against 8th-place trophies in a 10-second Instagram clip.

Short video clips on the internet don’t give an entire perspective of him.

He’s kind and humble, which is every trait I look up to in a human.

He’s the reason I started writing at age 35. My writing was an itch I wanted to scratch, but like most people needed that nudge of encouragement which I got from one of his videos.

Watch here — Video

Garyvee is a serial investor with an obnoxious record if you’ve ever looked under the hood.

He specialises in investing in start-ups which are as risky as it gets as a Venture Capitalist. He has a knack for finding companies and people who deliver results.

His first three investments ever were in Twitter, Tumblr and then Facebook. (Source)

Tumblr sold to Yahoo for over a Billion Dollars, and Twitter got bought out by Elon Musk for four times what it was worth making good on these two investments.

After getting close to the initial 25-person team on Facebook, Vaynerchuk bought shares pre-IPO from Mark Zuckerberg’s parents, the most significant investment he’d ever made.

Vaynerchuk says understanding consumer behaviour and predicting it is crucial to success. He believes that predicting behaviour and its timing, and hitting that cross-section, is extremely difficult, but those who can do so win big and achieve their financial dreams.

He says that the people who don’t pick up consumer behaviour and societal trends will miss-time everything.

GaryVee — Source

“Now I spend most of my time calibrating what I know people are going to do, but I’m trying to figure out the timing.

It’s predicting behaviour and predicting its timing and hitting that cross-section.

That’s extremely difficult, and that’s why the people that do it tremendously win and get movies made about them and make lots of money. Live their dream because it’s that rare to understand it.

I think so many people have ideas, but they lack the ability to understand consumer behaviour, macro trends, and what’s happening in society.

Timing is everything.”

You Might Be Thinking There’s an Element of Luck When You Invest.

Not everyone has the luxury of picking up the phone with a billionaire’s parents and buying their Facebook shares from them.

For your everyday person, these types of investments are off-limits.

I consume a fair bit of Garyvee’s content, and the luck question is something he gets asked a lot.

How much of what we do comes down to luck?

Vaynerchuck says that success is not solely based on luck but on making informed decisions about what to say and do.

He says his painstaking strategy of saving money for a decade in his 20s and spending it all in one year on social media platforms was being mindful of investment opportunities and didn’t feel anything like luck.

He recognises luck differently in that he could have been born in the 1920s or not been able to immigrate to America as a kid, which would have impacted his outcomes.

Gary Vaynerchuk:

“In America as an entrepreneur, I would argue that my entire life is luck in that scenario.

Had I not been Jewish or had that situation not happened, I would have probably come to America maybe when the Berlin Wall fell in 1991 and I would be a totally different human being.

So that is luck.

Me working hard, staying curious, staying up late at night, reading the internet, finding out about social media, flying to London to attend Future of Web Apps, going to South by Southwest in Texas to learn, putting myself in a position to meet companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, putting in the hours to provide value to those people, and becoming a friend rather than just hanging around, feels less like luck.”

Timing Is Everything.

One of the newest emerging technologies is the Metaverse.

It’s so significant Facebook have changed its name to Meta.

We are all becoming more digitally native, and there’s this idea that we’ll be in a world with mixed or virtual reality for large sums of our day.

Garyvee says this outcome is obvious because you only have to look at how much time we’re spending on our phones which is the Metaverse but just not as immersive as a headset.

He talks about this technology which he’s very bullish on but believes that people are underestimating the time it will take to become a large-scale consumer-adopted trend.

If you invest too early, you could get in some hot water.

Garyvee — Source

“I think the most interesting conversation is how many people are investing in the Metaverse when the Metaverse is very far away.

When people are buying up land in many places, I caution them, not that it’s a bad idea. Sandbox and Decentraland are great operators, and a lot of good stuff is happening.

But for me, it’s timing.

I’ve got to see 100,000 or a million people spending at least three hours daily in VR before considering it an investment.

Betting the farm on it to get consumer money from it will be dangerous.

Is a ‘Ready Player One life possible?

I sure do, but we have a long way to go.”