My entertainment company, VeeFriends, is dedicated to creating a better world through its universe of more than 250 characters.
I’m building the next Pokémon in people’s faces. If you don’t know what VeeFriends is, it’s my Pokémon, Marvel, Disney, Harry Potter universe of 250+ characters trying to build positivity, practicality, and accountability to the world. I’m calling my shot. I’m going to build a very substantial intellectual property. There will be movies and pajamas and video games and cartoons.
Now, I’m building the business in public because I’m also the human being that made a piece of content that went viral years ago, called Document, Don’t Create. Now I believe everyone has the opportunity to live the documentary in real time. Because no one was filming every moment before. Now they can. Our ability to create content at scale has no friction anymore. I also believe Walt Disney would have built Disney in public many years ago if social media and the phone and technology existed the way it does now. Could you comprehend watching vlogs of Jim Henson building Sesame Street right now? I would watch the crap out of that.
We’re excited about people discovering our world. We’re proud of what the characters stand for, helping parents really parent out there. But we have humility. We know we have a long way to go.
Where This All Began: 1980s New Jersey
The origins of VeeFriends are a series of many little moments in my life. The origins are definitely the fact that I grew up in the ‘80s, where Transformers, GoBots, ThunderCats, He-Man, Max Headroom — and then I have an eleven-year-younger brother, AJ, so he was very affected by Pokémon. I grew up at a time when an extraordinary amount of intellectual property was invented from scratch. Whether it was video games or cartoons after school or trading cards like Garbage Pail Kids — I’m sure that had an impact on me, and was a very big thing I collected. So I think the actual origin for VeeFriends is my 1980s childhood.
Two, my personal brand getting bigger in my life: me, as GaryVee, becoming popular. The fact that I was spreading love and accountability, and just the stuff I talk about, was very impactful on me, because I realized when I started VeeFriends back in 2021 that I had enough popularity and awareness to know I’m not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m a white male in my late 40s at the time. I’m not the vehicle for spreading love to every person. I’ve been able to get 50 million people to care, but there’s 8 billion people, and I don’t speak their language. I curse, so maybe people don’t like that. I knew I couldn’t spread positivity and accountability to the world at the level I wanted just through me. So our characters Patient Pig and Patient Panda allow me to spread patience’s virtues at a level I can’t reach just by myself.
And then just my own entrepreneurial ambitions, looking at AI and blockchain, the trend of collectibility, I believe there was an opportunity to build something very meaningful. At first I thought I was going more Disney, Pokémon, but as I went through my journey, I realized I was building more of a Jim Henson-like business — yes, I’d like it to be commercially successful like The Muppets or Sesame Street, but I do want to make a positive impact and help parents navigate this challenging parenting ecosystem. So those are all the emotional, historical things that went into probably me having that early-2021 eureka moment of: “Wait a minute, I can start a world, a universe. Let me get to doodling, ‘cause I’ve always done that.” And here we are, five years later. And we’re really just beginning.
So it will be everything. It will be video games. It’ll be animated films. It’ll be social media content. And sometimes God just smiles down on you — it’s not lost on me that at this moment, when I was prepared to go on the biggest journey of my career, AI finally hit critical mass, where I can leverage that level of technology to compete with some of the biggest Hollywood studios in the world. It’s just navigating the game of entrepreneurship.
As I started going through this journey, I became a lot more aware of the depths of Jim Henson. Do you know what Fraggle Rock is? Do you know that the brief to create Fraggle Rock — the written documentation given to the creative team about what they were trying to figure out — normally, these things run ten pages, fifteen pages, five pages. This one was literally two words. Jim Henson wrote two words to his creative team. It said: “End war.”
It’s incredibly ambitious, and it inspires me tremendously. For me, VeeFriends’ brief is: “Bring balance to the world.” That’s why we have Empathy Elephant and Compassionate Catfish, but also Tenacious Termite, Competitive Clown, and Kind Warrior — a character that probably sums up our world quite a bit.
My version of Jim’s paper to the creative team would also be: make the world better. The end. GaryVee has made the world better. I believe that to be true. How do I know I have done that? Last night, I was at Flyfish Club for four hours, and nineteen people came up to me with stories — deeply emotional to slightly solid — of how much I’ve helped them. That’s what this is all about.
I Appreciate the Pressure of It
I’m also building VeeFriends publicly because I appreciate the pressure of it. When you talk big game, like Muhammad Ali did and other people do, you’re putting yourself into a pressure situation. This is the psychology element to how I move. I like when I’m putting pressure on myself.
I don’t accept pressure from others. I play for myself. So I don’t fear putting it out in public, like other people do, because if I fail, I will not struggle with the cynicism, the heckling, and the jokes about me. I don’t care about others’ judgments of how successful VeeFriends is and will be. I’m playing for myself, and if I fail, I’ll have that conversation with myself. That’s why I think most people don’t build things in public — they know they will struggle with the scrutiny if they fail.
No matter how successful I had been in my career — even five years ago, no matter how many followers I had — I knew with VeeFriends that I was signing up for a twenty- to thirty-year journey, not a twenty- to thirty-week journey.
I Want to Inspire
The other reason I’m building in public is I want to inspire. I am a human that believes most people don’t dream big enough.
When I say out loud that I am trying to build the next Marvel, Disney or Pokémon, it’s not lost on me that I’m talking about enormous, multi-billion-dollar companies. Household names worldwide. It’s silly, almost. I don’t know if I can put this into words in this article. It does not feel silly to me. I’m trying to do it. I have not accomplished many things I’ve tried to do, and I’ve accomplished a lot.
There’s no embarrassment in having confidence in yourself. There’s no downside in dreaming big and putting pressure on yourself. But it requires a relationship with oneself that has enormous self-love and grace and good intent toward you and your audience.
I am not trying to convince anyone whether VeeFriends will be great and a massive company. I just have conviction that it’s going to be.
IP is one of the things that is going to be the big winner. This is a huge moment for us. VeeFriends’ number one mission is to bring more positivity, accountability, kindness, and warmth into the world. You think I’m naive? I’m not naive. I know people think it’s a GaryVee money grab. I listen, but they’re wrong. The biggest thing I wish for you is to dream big as you can, and then watch it unfold, because you actually worked for it, not because you hit the lottery.
I aspire one day to have people care about VeeFriends even half of how much they care about Pokémon. Pokémon is a hundred-billion-dollar intellectual property. It’s the biggest intellectual property in the world, and it’s obviously had a thirty, forty-year head start. The one thing I do feel will become obvious over time is that there’s more meaning in VeeFriends than so many other brands.
I’ll give you an example: we have a character called Reliable Rat. Being a rat is not a good thing — that means you’re stabbing someone in the back, doing the wrong thing. But I also know that “reliable” is one of the most admirable words. So in VeeFriends land, I’m desperate to change that perception. Here’s a good one: When a kid falls in love with one of our characters, Authentic Anaconda, when a seven-year-old goes up to their mom and says, “What’s authentic mean?” — I’m providing emotional value to a family, allowing a mother or father to have a conversation around authenticity and why it’s important. So I think the one advantage VeeFriends will have, and it’ll become much more clear over the next decade, is its purpose.
I Have the Emotional Framework to Build in Public
Again, I’m building in public because I have the emotional framework to build in public. I’m building in public because I think, oftentimes, I’m the preview, and that’s what my career’s proven to be, and I believe many people will be building big companies in public in the future, on the back of their personal brand. Me, MrBeast, Steven Bartlett, and so on. (I’m writing a book about this very topic as we speak.)
I am also building in public because I have a large audience, and I have the verbal and communication skills that serendipitously inspire people. So look, VeeFriends is a success to me if we’ve helped one person. One. If one person achieves great things because of our public storytelling, then this is a success for me on a human level.
I get three to five, sometimes ten, messages a day — DM or email — from girl dads thanking me for creating a brand that lets them include their daughters. It’s basically the same email every time, just written differently: “I’ve got a son and a daughter, or two sons and a daughter, or three daughters and a son, and I’m really into card collecting. My son and I go to the shows or the card store every Saturday, and my poor daughter has to get dragged along with us, ‘cause we’re letting mom do X, Y, and Z. Thank you for creating VeeFriends— and especially thank you, Gary, for creating Ambitious Angel and Fearless Fairy. It’s given me something to start collecting with my daughter.” It feels good to be part of something like that.
Me and a wonderful young man on my team, Adam Ripps, spend months and months on our VeeFriends sets. This was the second year we’ve done it. This spring, we were off and running, already making the 2027 set. A few months ago, I was flying back from San Antonio to New York, even on the day before our 2026 drop, and when we should have been working on promotion, marketing, and demand creation, Adam and I spent an hour on that flight working on 2027 instead.
I’ve never, in my thirty-year professional career — and I’ve built multiple family businesses, worked with my father, my brother, my best friends — had more fun building anything than I have building VeeFriends. And for a kid who grew up on trading cards, having the ability to create a trading card set is truly a blessing.
P.S. - Here’s a little preview of some more content you’re gonna see from me. We might go in-depth on a character in future articles.
For example, with Resourceful Robin, I named it after my mother. We were so poor, and my mom used to make my sister’s dresses out of our kitchen curtains after she wanted to change them out. That’s resourcefulness.
I think resourcefulness has been lost in our society. People want to be so fucking bougie, and they don’t realize how entitled we are. Humility is gone, and nobody wants to drive a used car. Resourceful Robin is really about always making the most of what she has. Inspired by generations of resourceful women, she approaches every challenge with creativity and ingenuity. She’s a whiz at finding clever solutions, repurposing old items, and turning limitations into opportunities. Whether she’s sharing life hacks with friends or transforming discarded treasures into something new, Resourceful Robin tells us that with a little creativity and a resourceful spirit, we can overcome any obstacle and live a more sustainable and fulfilling life.
So stay tuned for articles like that!
