First year at VaynerMedia. It’s awesome.

Be warned that this is one of the only posts I write that’ll be focused on me, not on You. So if you’ve no interest in Neil Sarkar or VaynerMedia, a better use of your time would be watching one of yesterday’s Old Spice videos.

What’s the significance of that tweet? It was from my first day here. July 14th was a year ago. Put ‘em together, I’ve been working here for a year today. Seems like an appropriate time to take a look back.

2009

I’ll never forget the day I got this job.

The moment Gary reached across the table to shake my hand, I knew my life had changed. The rush I felt that summer evening was unparalleled, but I’ll tell you about that when you’re older.

Intuitively, I was right. A year later, working at VaynerMedia has changed my life to the extent I thought it would. But I was wrong about how.

Sure, we almost doubled in size and are making exponentially more revenue. But from an external standpoint, we haven’t come very far.

To anybody who’s not one of us, one of our clients, or a fan of Gary’s, we’re still just another nameless Internet startup in Tribeca that a bunch of kids bike to from their Brooklyn apartments.

We’re still a forgotten byline on the 12th page of an online magazine. We haven’t hit primetime, we haven’t entered the mainstream conversation.

Frankly, if you told me a year ago after that we would be where we are now, I would have been surprised and disappointed. “Surely we’d be a household name, at least in New York!”. “Surely we’d all be making six figures, on a clear path to getting Gary his billion to buy the jets”.

I was wrong. I wasn’t handed extravagant success, and neither was VaynerMedia. It’s OK though. The two things I’ve been instilled with the most over the last year have been patience and faith.

I see now that I was given something far better than automatic, trickle-down success: an opportunity to learn the blueprint for creating success out of nothing. Enrollment in my own personal business school with one of the most fascinating families in business.

2010

Teams win championships.

Gary and AJ have excellent DNA for creating a team, and they’re putting on a clinic on how to inject global perspective and purpose into a group of individuals, how to unite disparate personalities into a cohesive whole, and how to create an environment of mutual support and trust that allows everyone to work beyond their individual capability.

Everyone here is trying to drink their own ocean. Every single person here is underqualified on paper for the responsibilities and tasks they assign themselves every day. If there wasn’t an atmosphere of trust, support, and friendly competition, people would quit.

At the last place I worked, the whole was less than any one of its individual parts. Sounds extreme but it’s true. This is already an organization where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it has been that way from the beginning.

Seems simple. Should be simple. It’s not. The default approach of humans to one another is a distrustful “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. It takes honest dedication to establish a culture of trust, familiarity, respect and love in a group of unrelated individuals.

How few companies can say that they’re truly operating as a team?
How many organizations have degenerated into a cesspool of unchallenged and unutilized minds and hearts, festering and decaying in their cubicles right now?
How many startups are powered by aggrandized ego and selfish greed?? It’s tragic.

Creating a culture is done through direct and transparent communication. That’s certainly been a theme here.

The manifestation of that culture, though, is in what’s not said. Actually that makes it sound like censorship…it’s about what’s not even *thought*.

When you can trust that everyone you’re working with has their self-interest tied to yours and is here to help you rather than harm you, that frees up a lot…a LOT…of mental power.

2011

So where are we headed? Honestly, I have no idea. We’re still young as hell. Bonds are still being forged. People are still gaining competency and skill in their individual disciplines. For example, a year ago I was working with wordpress…now I’m working with redis, node.js, and edge rails.

There’s more to it than individual development though. We’re a wolfpack in training. There’s a collective, palpable, group-wide focusing. Every individual is leaning a little further forward every day.

There have been peaks and valleys, I don’t want to paint a picture that everything is unicorns and flowers here. There have certainly been points over the past year that I’ve had doubts.

But at the end of the day, I always come to the same conclusion. I’ve escaped the lonely, selfish corporate world. Each trough is higher than the previous one. Most importantly, I’m finally part of a team that I genuinely believe in and care about.

All in all I can say that globally, I’ve wrapped my head around the fact that the team I’m a part of is headed in the right direction, and it’s going to be fun to see what the future will bring.