A CEO explains what it's like to grab dinner and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg

pulse

May 5, 2017 4:26 PM

On an episode of Business Insider podcast "Success! How I Did It!" CEO and investor Gary Vaynerchuk describes meeting Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg

In 2008, Gary Vaynerchuk made a Youtube video called "Facebook should be worried about Twitter."

"I'm like, 'I'm going to Palo Alto next week' — which I wasn't," he told Shontell.

He continued:

"I gave a talk about consumer behavior. I didn't even know but Mark was in the audience. He came down. He was like, 'You want to have dinner tonight?'

"I'm like, 'Yep.' I had a flight that night. I clearly canceled that.

"We hit it off and in 2008, a lot of times when he came into New York, he would hit me up and we got to know each other. Somewhere in that year, Mark and [his sister] Randi emailed me and they're like, 'Our parents are selling a bunch of Facebook stock. Do you want to buy in?'

"I said 'Yep.' That was life-changing."

Vaynerchuk remembered that he went into the dinner thinking "

Vaynerchuk had always prided himself on his emotional intelligence — "I'm not the smartest. I just know what people are going to do" — and was surprised to find that Zuckerberg had similar traits on top of technical know-how. "He knows how to build it," Vaynerchuk told Shontell. "I can't build stuff. I'm not an engineer. That's not what I'm in to, but I'm like, 'He understands what I understand.' That was it. I was just bought into him from day one. He's super smart."

He continued:

"We're a funny match in the 10 or 15 times we've interacted because I only want to talk and he only wants to listen. That's why he'll probably end up with a hell of a lot more money and be successful, but he's extremely bright. I like him a lot. I think he's kind, but most of all he just understands people.

"That's weird because people look at him as introverted and quirky and all that but I don't see it and I never saw it. Obviously, he's more media trained and grown into himself. I can't speak to how he rolls now because I haven't spent time with him but I can definitely tell you there was no confusion from those initial meetings for me, and I mean none."

Listen to the full podcast interview:

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