Gary Vaynerchuk strides into the room with the confidence of a man who has spent the last 15 years telling the world – often loudly – exactly where the future is heading. And annoyingly for the rest of us, he’s been right more often than not.
Today, the marketing guru is here with a message for CEOs in the Middle East: the age of the individual empire is not coming. It’s here.
What, I ask him, has changed in the past few years to make it possible for one person to build a billion-dollar business on the back of their own influence? Many executives expect a long preamble. “Gary Vee” does not do those.
“Many things, one, the attention of the world continues to migrate more and more towards social networks,” he begins, warming up. “In the last three years, social networks have become more democratised… we are now in the interest media era.”
For anyone still obsessing over follower counts like it’s 2016, he explains the new reality: “Someone who’s listening or reading this interview could literally start with no followers, and their fourth TikTok could get 13 million views.” In other words, your corporate comms department’s panic about ‘building momentum’ means very little when the algorithm plays kingmaker overnight.
This is no longer the social media era; it’s the meritocratic chaos of interest-driven discovery, where content – not clout – decides who gets seen. And in Vaynerchuk’s view, that shift is nothing short of economic dynamite.
“It’s more about how the algorithms are now written on social media, more about the individual piece of content and its relevance, and less about how many followers I have. That level of democracy of attention has created an extraordinary amount of opportunity.”
Then comes the second catalyst: commerce. Twenty years ago, you needed Noon or Walmart to nod at your product. Today? “Humans can now start brands and sell them to people in a way that was not possible 20 years ago.”
TikTok Shop, Shopify, live shopping – they’ve turned entrepreneurs into their own distribution channels and their own retail empires. Just ask Huda Beauty or MrBeast, who is rapidly becoming a FMCG conglomerate disguised as a YouTube channel.
And the third shift is more foundational: “The blockchain is here. A decentralised server that allows humans to capture more of the economics. I can sell digital products or access to me and not pay a credit card processing company or a platform in between.” Whether or not you believe your CEO should release a memecoin is another matter, but Vaynerchuk’s point is clear: the individual is now structurally empowered in a way history has never allowed.
“This is a golden era, a golden half-century of the individual capturing the lion’s share of the economics – unprecedented, and we’re here.”
Why Middle East CEOs need a brand of their own
In this region, where corporate brands still dominate public life, many CEOs remain reluctant to step out from behind their logos. But Vaynerchuk’s warning is crisp: “Missed opportunity for their business to get more awareness.”
Executives winning on LinkedIn, he argues, “are driving economic impact on their business and protecting themselves against corporate warfare.” Leadership roles can rotate faster than some football managers, so this is not a trivial point. A strong personal brand is becoming the new insurance policy. He doesn’t insist on turning every CEO into a TikTok comedian. But he does insist on visibility: “I think adding an element of Substack, podcast, YouTube show and most of all LinkedIn… it’s a missed opportunity at scale.”
Many Middle Eastern executives like privacy. Fair enough. But privacy and presence, Vaynerchuk argues, are not mutually exclusive. Share what you can, not what you can’t.
When a company of one acts like a media giant
One of his most quoted lines – usually misquoted – is that every company must act like a media company. So what does that look like for a single founder building a business? “A single person company is starting to show big companies how to do it.”
He built VaynerMedia from the ground up on the strength of his own content. Consultants, financial advisers, product founders – he believes the playbook is identical: content equals deal flow.
“I think it’s a direct correlation to how much demand you create… what I wrote about in 2008/09 has become true.”
This is the part where CEOs shift uncomfortably. Many still see content creation as frivolous. But today’s billion-dollar one-person companies – from beauty entrepreneurs to creators like MrBeast – are proof that media is no longer a department. It’s a business model.
Build your house before the storm
In a region racing to diversify economies, amplify global influence and cultivate entrepreneurial role models, Vaynerchuk’s message feels tailor-made for Middle Eastern leadership. The tools are free. The distribution is instant. The gatekeepers are gone.
Your LinkedIn posts may well influence your balance sheet. Your personal brand may outlive your corporate tenure.
And your ability to communicate at scale may determine whether your next venture is the region’s next unicorn.In Gary’s world, opportunity has never been more equal.
But the willingness to seize it isn’t.
“We’re in an era where an individual person can build a horizontal and a vertical business… This is a golden era… and we’re here.”
“This is an unprecedented time of decentralisation and merit opportunity, not predicated on what family you were born into, how much money you have. It’s a staggering time, and I’ve been talking about all of this for a long time, but now it’s at scale. It’s at real scale.”
Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur and serves as the Chairman of VaynerX, the CEO of VaynerMedia, and Creator and CEO of VeeFriends.
He is also a six times New York Times best-selling author and considered one of the leading global minds on what’s next in culture, business and the internet. “A single-person company is starting to show big companies how to do it. You know, I was a single person company and now I’m a 2,000-person company. If you’re one person, you can’t act like you’re a big corporation, and if you’re a big corporation, you can’t act like a kid – you have got to find something in between.”
Say goodbye to mobile phones
During a session titled ‘AI Won’t Wait, Neither Should You’ at the BRIDGE Summit 2025 in Abu Dhabi, the world’s largest debut media event, he said: “Six or seven of the largest technology companies in the world are pouring billions and billions of dollars to win the arms race to own these glasses. And if Meta glasses win, it’s going to be hard for the other social networks to get in there.”
“Your mobile phones will become as obsolete as a pager or a BlackBerry, and smart glasses will replace them”, predicts Vaynerchuk.
Reflecting on how gadgets are overwhelming children, he noted: “Your children are going to wear smart glasses that replace mobiles when they’re adults and be on technology 24 hours a day.
Your grandchildren are going to marry AI robots.”