Pros
This place is totally bananas.
Cons
This place is totally bananas – like witnessing a bus collide with a banana truck bananas. I've freelanced at over a dozen NYC shops in the past decade. I've collected a modest sampling of the various flavors of agency dysfunction over those years. I only freelanced at Vayner for a number of weeks. And. Wow. I thought I knew what I was getting into. After all, Gary Vaynerchuck – the insufferable narcissist and noise machine who relentlessly floods his social channels with vapid maxims – owns and runs this joint. So I was prepared for his shop to be a vague extension of his vanity. But I had no idea the degree to which Gary's vacuous talking points had been dutifully absorbed and enthusiastically propagated by his young disciples with a religious zeal reminiscent of Heaven's Gate. Everyone frequently peppers their vernacular with VaynerBombs®. It's hard to go a few minutes in this dense sea of millennials without registering a "Crushing it!" or a "Jab, jab, right hook!" They toss these out in any context. Whether in any of the (many) superfluous meetings or boasting about weekend exploits in the hall – they're CRUSHING IT. Speaking of young employees, I felt old. But you'd feel old if you were in your mid-twenties. On top of that, the youth aren't all juniors. There are 25 year old ACDs who have no experience – managing or otherwise – outside of the Vayner womb. They, like most 25 year olds, are extraordinarily thin-skinned and puerile. The only grown-ups are at the exec level. From what I can tell, those jokers are content to phone it in, collect their checks, catch the 5:15 back to New Rochelle and leave the writhing millennial mass to bumble over each other in a hysteria akin to factory farm chickens. When Gary's in the office, he hangs out in his glass cube and gets his cronies to video him bark about the virtues of "The Hustle." Sometimes Gary's entourage sits around the office on late afternoons getting wasted and burping loudly about who they'd like to get with in the office. VaynerMedia's bread n' butter biz strategy is to take established above-the-line campaigns from other agencies and regurgitate them into social posts. Simple, brainless stuff, right? Wrong! "The Hustle" actually translates into wasting weeks compiling a silly amount of decks and navigating a sizable bureaucracy of blabber to eventually craft three disposable social media jpegs from already determined creative. Seriously people. The most hilarious (sad) thing about "The Hustle Summit" – writ large on a welcome sign that adorns the entrance of the main floor – is that there is little hustle. Oh yes, the young, gullible slave labor work long hours. But that's not hustling, that's a self-defeating hamster wheel of nonsense. I've worked in difficult environments. Egos are aggravating, but they're easier to navigate when you can focus on making decent work. When the work is as demoralizing as the office culture, then you can only be at one place. Welcome to the hustle summit!