For those that have been living under a rock and don’t know, let’s spend a few minutes talking about who Gary Vaynerchuk, aka Gary Vee is.    

Gary Vee is an entrepreneur at his core.  From franchising lemonade stands and selling baseball cards as a child to now owning VaynerX: a media and holdings company Gary has always had a fundamental understanding of people’s attention and how to leverage that to grow his brand and businesses.    

Gary was one of the first people to see the true business potential of the internet and leveraged it to grow his father’s business from a $3M a year liquor store into a $60M a year wine business. He is one of the godfather’s of business content generation amassing over 12 million followers his social platforms. He is a 5x NY Times best seller and angel investor in popular startups like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, Snap and Venmo.  

That resume speaks for itself and is why I am extremely excited to see him present at Imagine.  I know that most conferences look for the biggest celebrities they can find to draw in excitement for the event. However, I’m much more excited for Gary than I was for Drew Brees, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling at Adobe Summit.    

There is a lot to learn from those celebrities, no doubt. However, most of them have figured out the promotion and attention side of growing a business and then bring in business folks to help monetize their platform.  

Gary, on the other hand, has a deep understanding of the business side and then went out a built the promotional engine he enjoys today. I’m at these conferences for networking and education. I really feel that the audience at Imagine will relate more to Gary than some celebrity that leveraged their fame to grow a business. I know I will.

With that, I want to invite you to grab your tickets for Imagine and I look forward to seeing you there.   

Oh, and Gary, if you happen to watch this and want to jump on a stream and talk with the Magento community, I’m not that hard to find.