GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's $56B Plan to Take Over eBay
Episode publishedPodcast: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sa...All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Everyone hates GameStop, and it seems like everyone in the media basically wants us to fail and wants them to succeed. And you've got a board that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They don't buy stock with their own money. They end up showing up to a handful of board meetings, and they're making a fortune. You've got a management team that is grossly overpaid. There's nothing more American than basically risking your own capital. So why does everyone want us to fail?
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Thank you for having me.
I think it's been like a decade which is crazy how old we get since you and I last had dinner in New York. This was before several chapters of your life unfolded and it's great to be talking with you today. You're doing something really interesting right now trying to acquire and run eBay which obviously is a big story right now that takes us back twenty five, thirty years to the start of the internet. But I wanna talk a little bit about your story first if that's okay and I'd love for folks that are watching this or listening to this to to learn a little bit about you and the journey you've b
Yes, definitely. Yeah.
Well, maybe tell me why you started Chewy, how'd you get that idea and and how'd you get into building this business from where you were coming from at that time?
We were, wanted to build something online and we were about to launch an online jewelry website. Did not know anything about jewelry, went to a bunch of trade shows, bought hundreds of thousands dollars worth of inventory, built the website, had the distribution, and then I was shopping in a neighborhood pet store. I had a poodle, and I was going every few weeks. And it just hit me on one of my trips that I understood the product much better. It was a recurring revenue purchase. The market was still fragmented. The fact that there were still neighborhood pet stores at the time and they had not
How did you learn to execute well? So at the time, you had little business experience prior to that. How did you learn those skills? What were the principles and the values that that made you excellent at operating that business?
I understood from the beginning that the real competition was always Amazon, and they were world class when it comes to supply chain. So negotiating very fiercely with suppliers to get the best product costs, and that meant getting to scale and going from buying pallets of dog food to truckloads of of dog food and moving from distribution to direct and buying generally, the more you buy, the lower the prices are gonna be, operating efficiently in the warehouses and so labor optimization, warehouse management optimization, getting competitive prices with shipping carriers, it was a game of penn
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