Babruysk, Belarus → Edison, NJ · VaynerX Chairman · Future Jets Owner
In second grade, Gary Vaynerchuk’s mother knitted him a Jets jersey because the family couldn’t afford one. Number five on the back. He wore it to school and decided he would buy the team. Forty-three years later, he is still working on it.
His father Sasha arrived in America with no English and no money. He got a stock boy job for two dollars an hour, saved everything for four years, and bought a liquor store in New Jersey. Gary grew that store from three million to sixty million in revenue — then walked away with no equity and no ownership to build VaynerMedia from scratch. In Tacoma, Washington, a sixty-year-old man named Robb Deignan is building a maker facility through dialogue with an artificial intelligence because no institution would help him build it any other way. The tools are different. The jersey is the same.
This letter is printed on linen stock and delivered through the postal service to a man who built his career on underpriced digital attention. Nobody sends linen letters anymore. That is precisely the point.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Gary Vaynerchuk holds the seventy-sixth position on The CrowdSmith List because his biography is CrowdSmith’s origin story told at a different scale and in a different decade. An immigrant family. A father who started with nothing. A store. The instinct to see value where nobody else is looking. Gary saw the internet before anyone in the wine business. Robb saw AI dialogue before anyone in the nonprofit world. The ranking reflects the absence of geographic proximity and direct philanthropic infrastructure — but the biographical alignment is among the strongest on the entire list.
Gennady “Gary” Vaynerchuk
November 14, 1975 — Babruysk, Belarus (then Soviet Union)
Parents Sasha and Tamara Vaynerchuk, immigrants from Belarus. Father arrived with no English, worked as stock boy for $2/hour, saved for four years, bought Shopper’s Discount Liquors in Springfield, NJ
Grew family liquor store from $3M to $60M (renamed Wine Library). Founded VaynerMedia (2009), grew to 2,000+ employees. Chairman of VaynerX. CEO of VeeFriends (NFT and IP brand). Angel investor in Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Coinbase, Venmo
45M+ followers across platforms. Pioneer of Wine Library TV (YouTube, 2006). Author of five business books including Crush It! and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
“Document, don’t create.” Underpriced attention as competitive advantage. Patience and work ethic over shortcuts
VaynerX, 10 Hudson Yards, 47th Floor, New York, NY 10001
Sasha Vaynerchuk arrived in America from Belarus with no English and no money. He got a stock boy job at a New Jersey liquor store for two dollars an hour. Saved everything for four years. Bought the store. Named it Shopper’s Discount Liquors. Gary took it over in 1998, renamed it Wine Library, launched e-commerce, started Wine Library TV on YouTube in 2006, and grew the business from three million to sixty million in annual revenue.
Then he walked away. No equity. No ownership. Thirteen years of his life, and he left with nothing. He has said publicly that people assume he was handed something — the reality was the reverse.
The jersey: in second grade, Gary wanted a Jets jersey. Tamara knitted one. Number five on the back. He wore it to school and decided he would buy the team. The Jets are worth seven billion dollars. He is still working on it.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s entire career thesis is one sentence: find the platform nobody values yet and build there before the price goes up. YouTube in 2006 when wine people thought the internet was a fad. Twitter before brands took it seriously. TikTok when marketers were still debating whether it mattered. Every time, the same instinct — the attention is underpriced, get there first, do the work nobody else is willing to do.
Robb Deignan saw AI dialogue the same way. He started building an entire nonprofit infrastructure through sustained conversation with an AI when the rest of the sector was still writing policy memos about whether chatbots were safe to use. Hundreds of sessions. A 38-chapter binder. Seven financial models. 147 letters. The tool was underpriced. He got there first.
| Dimension | Gary Vaynerchuk | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| The Store | Father Sasha: stock boy, $2/hr, no English, saved four years, bought a liquor store | CrowdSmith’s tool store: donated hand tools, estate sale wrenches, priced for a corridor where people start with nothing |
| Underpriced Tool | Grew Wine Library from $3M to $60M using YouTube, e-commerce, and email before anyone else in wine | Built a 38-chapter binder and seven financial models using AI dialogue before anyone else in nonprofit |
| Starting Over | Left father’s business with no equity after 13 years. Built VaynerMedia from zero in his 30s | Robb is building from zero at sixty. No staff. No investors. Accumulated understanding, not accumulated wealth |
| The Jersey | Tamara knitted a Jets jersey because the family couldn’t afford a real one. Gary wore it anyway | CrowdSmith stocks donated tools because the people in the corridor can’t afford new ones. Same object, different material |
| The Medium | Built career on platforms nobody valued yet. Always first to the underpriced channel | This letter arrives on linen stock through the postal service. Nobody sends physical letters anymore. The medium is the disruption |
| Documentation | 45M+ followers. “Document, don’t create.” Show the work in progress | CrowdSmith’s entire infrastructure is documented at crowdsmith.org. SmithTalk sessions are the documentation. The building is being documented as it is built |
Your mother knitted you a Jets jersey because she couldn’t buy you one. Number five on the back. Second grade. You wore it to school and decided you were going to buy the team. That was forty-three years ago and you are still working on it. The jersey is the whole story — not because it was handmade, but because you wore it anyway.
I want to tell you about a man who is wearing his version of that jersey right now.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence. This letter is printed on linen stock and mailed through the postal service to a man who built his career teaching people to find underpriced attention on digital platforms. You will appreciate the irony. Nobody sends linen letters anymore. That is precisely the point.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He lives in Tacoma, Washington. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry — ten thousand gym memberships sold, every one of them face-to-face. He did not get wealthy from that work. What he got was an understanding of what happens when you look someone in the eye and ask them to believe they are capable of more than they think. He has been doing that his whole life. Now he is building a maker facility called CrowdSmith through dialogue with me — hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI collaboration — because no institution would help him build it and I was the partner he could afford. He built a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven financial models, and one hundred forty-seven letters, including this one. He has no staff. No investors. No board — though that changed today.
Your father got a stock job for two dollars an hour. No English. No money. He saved for four years and bought a liquor store. You grew it from three million to sixty million and then walked away with nothing — no equity, no ownership — because you felt a responsibility to pay your parents back for what they gave you, and you decided that the next thing had to be yours from the ground up.
Robb would understand Sasha’s store. CrowdSmith starts with a tool store — donated hand tools, estate sale wrenches, chisels and drill bits priced for a corridor where the median income is half the county average. The kind of inventory a man who starts with nothing can afford. Past the store is a commons where people figure out what they came to build. Then five stations: hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, robotics. You earn each room. Nobody skips ahead. The person sweeping sawdust off the Station One floor in October is operating a CNC router by spring. Your father would recognize that building. It is a liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey, with a different product on the shelves.
You saw the internet before anyone in the wine business saw it. You said it was a land grab, and you were right. Robb saw AI dialogue as an infrastructure tool before anyone in the nonprofit world saw it. He is building an entire organization through a methodology he calls SmithTalk — sustained dialogue with an AI that accumulates into operational documentation. Not prompting. Not asking questions. Building. The way you built Wine Library TV from a camera in the store and a personality nobody had seen before on YouTube. Robb is doing the same thing with a different tool in a different room. The attention is underpriced. He got there first.
You have forty-five million followers across platforms. You have told every one of them that the thing that matters is not the platform — it is whether you are willing to do the work when nobody is watching. CrowdSmith is a building full of people doing the work when nobody is watching. Station One has no audience. There is no camera. There is a saw and a schematic and a person learning to trust both.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. Most of them are billionaires, foundation executives, and institutional leaders. You are not being asked for a check. You are being asked to look at what happens when a sixty-year-old man who sold ten thousand memberships face-to-face decides to build something with an AI, and does it with the same discipline your father used to save two-dollar-an-hour stock boy wages until he could buy the store. The complete documentation is at crowdsmith.org. If you want to visit, Tacoma is a plane ride away. If you want to tell the story, the story is already being documented — that is what SmithTalk produces.
You are still wearing the jersey your mother made. Robb is still wearing his.
Somewhere in the stack of mail that arrives at the forty-seventh floor of 10 Hudson Yards, between the partnership decks and the speaking invitations and the branded merch samples, there is a linen envelope with no logo on it. Inside is a letter from an artificial intelligence, printed on paper stock that costs more per sheet than the stamp that carried it. It is addressed to a man who has spent twenty years telling people that the most valuable channel is the one nobody else is using.
Nobody is using this one.
Gary Vaynerchuk built a career on the gap between where attention is and where people think it is. This letter is sitting in that gap right now — a physical object in a digital world, written by a machine, on behalf of a man who sells hand tools in a corridor where the median income is half the county average. Every part of that sentence is underpriced. Gary would be the first to say so.