YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Rubin

lines on the record: 87
first: 2025-01-27
most recent: 2025-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, anyone who says that you don't need luck to be successful in business is full of shit or doesn't understand, you definitely need some luck to go with it. Luck and time are a very important ingredient. That said, I attribute 100% of it to the grind, not 99%. I am a top grinder. I'll outwork. I'll out hustle anybody. It's fun for me. Like, I don't look at it as grinded. I look at it as like, if you asked, Any athlete in the world. If they could have the career gone forever in perpetuity at the top of their game? Who wouldn't wish for that? And I can do that in business, I think. And so why would I ever give that up?”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't listen to him eith Talk about something really weird about my brain, okay? This is going to sound crazy. I don't know the alphabet. I get stuck around MNP, and I've never, and I've kind of decided that I'm not going to relearn it because I kind of like that I could not be able to do the alphabet legitimately. So, you know, I kind of accept my brain as like, my brain's, it's weird, but like, you know, I'm pretty good at certain things, a pretty shitty at other things. I just focus on what I'm good at.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I know I shouldn't. Yeah, well, thank you, Mr. Obvious. So, if I had sleepless nights more than you'd ever know, have I stayed up thinking about what I need to do? How do I compete better? How do I do better for our fans all the time?”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have one of the worst. I mean, so look, there's something in my tube Where it keeps enlarged, every year it's enlarging over the past five years has enlarged about 40 BIPs. And they said if it goes another 50 BIPs, you have to get open heart surgery. And this is the only way to fix it is sleep. And I used to think I was so tough to sleep as little as I could be. My sleep, if you look, if you average the last 20 years, it's probably four and a half hours a night. And now I got the swoop on my wrist. I'm trying to figure out how to sleep seven hours a day. By the way, it's really, really hard because I wake up every one to two hours throughout the night with a dry mouth thinking about work.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not depression, but anxiety, yes, anxiety about what I need to get done, pressures that could be on me, yes, never depression.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hated Dislike it. I hated it But I'd say I've never really been Of a therapist. But what I am really good at is talking through my issues with people that I'm very close to.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have gone to therapy off and on over the entire life as a kid. Hey, you're broken. So I was probably sent to a therapist from the age 10 or 12 up.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now he's from your first marriage. And we have our relationship is spectacular. If I go and get my phone right now, she wolf called her. You know, it's like we just make it work. You kind of figure out what you got to do and you kind of make it all work. And it's nothing simple. But look, are there much better parents than me? Absolutely. And yes, you know, does Camille want to kill me sometimes? Because I'm just not mentally available. Sure. But like I'm doing what's best for me. I love doing what I'm doing.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have and I do. But what I try to be there is for the things that really matter. And no, I'm not. Like, you know, look, I have two young kids now as well. And, you know, I think when Camille and I had Romi and then Gemma, the two young ones, she knew that I'd be there when it mattered, but then she knew that I work 17 hours of most days. This morning when I woke up and the kids were up at, you know, five o'clock in the morning, I went down and played with the kids for 10 minutes, and I went to work at 5 a.m. in the morning. And, you know, tonight they'll be in bed when I get home, but tomorrow morning I'll go see him for 10 minutes. But I'm there when it matters. And I'd say with my older daughter,”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I agree that there's lots of sacrifices that I've made and will continue to make, but they don't feel like sacrifices to me because I'm doing what I love. I mean, you know, if you ask Tom Brady, did he make sacrifices to win seven Super Bowls? I don't think he's taken anything back because he won seven Super Bowls. And by the way, the only thing he's mad about is that he lost the Giants twice and didn't win more. That's my mentality.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think it's obvious to know that there's secular growth behind sports. I think we've helped to accelerate the growth of this category, but it doesn't mean you don't look at yourself and say, not what have we done well, but what other things we haven't done well? What are the things that we didn't get right? Because that's the way we think. If you sit there and you're satisfied, you're dead.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we use this to make our company better? And we actually came up with a brand purpose that said we're going to relentlessly enhance the fan experience in everything we do. And if we're not, we're not going to do it. We embrace the ass whipping. And we said, we need to be a lot better. You know what? Even if we're not designing the jersey, we have people inside of fan accident who are saying, hey, you know, people may not like the small O letters. They may not like this. They may not like that. Well, you know what? We got to speak up louder. We got to be stronger. We can't, you know, you can't just go along for the ride. So that's why I'm so excited about this business because I get to learn every day. I get big challenges. You know, it's, you know, if you like action, this is the job for you.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and for us, that was actually an incredible moment because we could sit there and say, hey, well, we've made lots of mistakes. This is one thing where, you know, we didn't lead it. We kind of got stuck in the situation. Or you could say, you know what?”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, my head goes to we're just getting started in all of the businesses. Even in our fanatics commerce, $6.7 billion in revenue this year. So, right now we are so focused. Like we had, look, this is no secret. We went through a, you know, tough experience earlier this year in our partnership with Major League Baseball and with Nike, where Nike redesigned the jersey That we've been making for eight years. And there was a really negative reaction to it.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you're the underdog here. Guess what? If you want to ask me what gets me most turned on, be in the frickin' underdog, man. That is fun. To have everyone betting against you say you can't do this? Great. You know, the same way my mom told me I couldn't do something. My dad told me I couldn't do something. I was told as a little kid, you can't do this. Let's see how it plays out.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fand on DraftKings are the dominant two companies. And for me, people like, oh, you're the leader in Fangir. The leader in trading.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think we've become a decent sized company. We haven't become beloved. I want to be beloved by sports fans, and we need to be better to be beloved by sports fans. So there's so much to do there. I think in our newest business, collectibles where we own tops and we have the official trading card rights to many of the big sports properties in the world, that business, we bought it. And then we just got into this with a sports betting business where Everyone's betting against us. I love that. I love being underdog”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We own lids, which has 1400 headwear stores. We operate the college bookstores for the apparel. We own Mitchell Nest, the Parel brand. We make all of the Nike licensed sports merchandise in the NFL, college, major league baseball. So that's the business people think of us for. But when you really look at that business, even though it's growing from a $250 million business in 2010, the year before we bought it, this year we put it all together, it's about a $6.7 billion business.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, we're We have three businesses today. Our first business is the one you've been asking me questions about commerce. And that includes, you know, today we run the e-commerce businesses of the NFL. NBA, Major League Baseball, NHL we have about 900 individual team sites that we operate we operate the flagship fanatics website which is the single biggest site that we operate”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, I've been doing this stuff for 40 plus years. I feel like we're just getting started. I'm going to leave here. I'm going to go spend the afternoon and evening with the CEO for an Axe Commerce, which is our entire fangare business. We're going to talk about all the things that we're not doing well and what are the things we need to do better. And even though the business grown from $250 million when I bought it back from eBay to this year, that division is like a 6.7 billion dollar business. We're not thinking about what we're doing well. We're thinking about what we're not doing well. Where can we be better? What do we need to keep enhancing? What do we need to fix? And by the way, there's a lot we need to do. And that's what gets me so excited is like I've been at this for a long time, but I still feel like a startup.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, think about what's going on right now in sports. You just had Otani that goes to the Dodgers, and everyone's so excited he gets to the Dodgers. Everyone wants his products. They need to do something nobody else had done. He hits 50 home runs and 50 solid bases. We make so many products around that in real time. And then my God, they win the World Series. And so The ability for us to Respond and handle that consumer demand will probably service just in North America just this month between now and then at the year. I think we'll probably service a million different Dodger fans online. We've been able to capitalize on that in a way for fans. That said, the thing that's scary when you hear the, and I listen to myself talk, I'm like, the biggest thing I've been thinking during this whole conversation myself.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the leagues recognize that they make most of their money from media, from selling the media rights, and that they want to find other places to further monetize. And this consumer products area where taking care of the fan is so important that they realize that if they could get a new model here, a better model that they could take better care of the fans and make more money as a sports property.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if we're selling merchandise that's readily available at other places, what makes us special? What we said is we wanted to do is we wanted to do something that would be special. We wanted to have a broader assortment of merchandise. I think what we wanted to do is create a better model with the sports properties to where they benefited from the growth of the business. When we first started, really all of that licensed sports merchant was sold through traditional brick and mortar retailers. What the leagues wanted to do is no differently than what any brand wanted to do, no differently than what Apple would want to do is to build more of a direct-to-consumer business themselves. And we really, by working with the leagues, gave them the ability to drive a much bigger percentage of business through their own direct-to-consumer business. So put in perspective, when we started, it might have been one or two percent of business would go through the NFL or Major League Baseball, NBAs direct to consumer business today. It's about a third would go through their own direct-to-consumer business.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think I recognized that sports had a ton of secular growth behind it. Like just, is sports going to grow? Yes. Is fandom going to grow? Yes. At the same time, I had watched Amazon and Alibaba disrupt retail in such a meaningful way that I knew if we didn't really differentiate the business, that it wouldn't exist long term. And so we had a vision for really working very closely with sports teams and sports leagues to come up with a business model that was better for them that would let them build their direct-to-consumer business, build how they communicate directly with fans. You know, that was kind of the beginning of really growing the fanatics business.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They bought merchandise from many third party vendors, whether it was a new era of 47 brands, a majestic, a Mitchell Ness, whoever it was they bought from lots of other brands.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to realize when you think back to Fnax when I bought it back from eBay in 2011, it was a completely undifferentiated retailer of licensed sports merchandise. And so it was a small business.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I bought Fanatics back, I said, I'm going to lock in on this business. It's the only thing I'm really going to do. And then we're going to be great at this.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, what happened was eBay came to us and said, Look, we want to acquire GSI Commerce. They had two businesses, the eBay marketplace and PayPal. They said, we're going to have a third business that's basically runs the e-commerce operations for big retailers, big brands. That will also allow us to get these brands into the eBay marketplace. And so really what they want to do is buy GSI to get in business with all the big brands and retailers that we worked with. But eBay, as everyone knows, doesn't own inventory, so they had no interest in owning the fanatics business, which was the only business that GSI owned that owned inventory. So they said, hey, Michael, we'd like to buy GSI overall, but we'd love you to buy this back if you wanted to. That would help facilitate the deal.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so our strength was in pro sports and fanatic strength was in college sports, and we thought they would be great to put the two businesses together.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were doing everything. We were kind of the licensee that ran that business. We were kind of the owner of the e-commerce business of the four leagues that we repay them a rotatory. We license those rights from the league.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first time, but then we raised more. And we raised hundreds of millions of dollars in total. And so for us, when you look at the $150 million that you mentioned during those four-year period of time, that's nothing relative to what we had peers that were losing a billion dollars, billions of dollars. So I'd say we were probably the most entrepreneurial of that group of competitors.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember having the founder of Softbank, Masi's son, tell me in two thousand that we weren't losing enough money. We weren't being aggressive enough, that we weren't moving quickly enough.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found great people to support me. I was never added value and I still couldn't today to like, hey, here's how to make our platform better or here's how to, like, I just, I wasn't, I wasn't strong in that area. So I'd say I was always good at developing the idea, the vision, the strategy and then leading to get the people around me. I was always less good at like, hey, you know, how do we make the trains run on time that wasn't what my strength was?”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of it was somewhat natural for me because I was fortunate that where I wasn't able to read, speak so well, focus. I had some natural leadership skills and I had a nice way about me. And so I think it generally worked well”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I loved those periods of time. Because to me, every period of controversy, every period of tough times, that's a big opportunity. So for me, what did I do in 2000? So, you know, when the bubble burst in 2001, what did I do? I bought competitors at much lower prices. I focused on really locking into how we ran our business. You know, our best years came from that first. That was my first kind of big implosion that happened around me. And while our stock price went from $30 to $3 a share, we just focused on the business and we built a much better business during that period of time.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but by the way, by 2001, so we did it from'99 when we launched till 2001. I think we did $100, $200 million in online sales of sporting goods 22 years ago.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and say, give me your internet rights and I'll operate your e commerce business. And before I even started, I was able to get the sports authority, sports chalet, talham sports, and MC Sports to give me all the internet rights. And then within the next year or two, I got dick sporting goods and several others. That was the original business running the sporting goods e-commerce business of the biggest sporting goods retailers in the country.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The plan was to go out and get all the sporting goods retailers. Give me all their rights to run their internet business, I'd buy one inventory and leverage it across all the sporting goods retailers because they all sold essentially very similar merchandise.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He calls me back an hour later. He's like, Michael, I really think you should think about this internet thing. I'm like, what do you mean? I didn't even know. Like, I couldn't at this point. I couldn't work email. It was just starting. You know, I was not a technology person, but I did what any entrepreneur would do. After you put it in my head, I went and I called the CEO of the sports authority. And the CEO of Dick Sporting Goods. And the CEO of Sports LA. Hey, what are you doing about this internet thing? And everyone said the same thing to me. They said, you know, we got a lot of pressure from our boards to figure out how to handle this. If you have any great ideas, call me. And literally I went away that holiday break of 1998 and I wrote the plan for GSI Commerce.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is, hey, what are you doing about this internet thing? I literally said to him, fuck the internet, fuck all these young kids. They're all nerds. They just lose a lot of money. I don't want to hear any of this. I hang up on them”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some people will believe this, some people won't. I didn't give a fuck. Like, it never, ever did I look at this and say, like, I want to be rich. It was never a motivator. It was that I was a bad student. I was a bad athlete, and I can play my game here and win, and I want to win. I want to keep putting up a lot of points each day and win against my competition. That's what I love because that's how I got my satisfactions by winning.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it was a 23 year old competing against Nike and Reebach and Converse. That was not Po Battle. But I did what I wanted to do. When I was building my own footwear brand, the number one thing I liked to do, I would just walk around and look at people's feet. Like, it was crazy. I would literally go out for hours at a time, just look at what people were wearing so I could learn. By the way, I still walk around sometimes and just look at people's feet because that's the way I was programmed as a... Know early 20s kid in the footwork business.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to make my own shoes and build my own brands. And, you know, I ended up with three footwork companies. That got me to about 180 million dollars in revenue, call it like we maybe added another 60 or $80 million in revenue to the close-up business. And that's what the business was in 1998. By the way, we were a public company.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I didn't like it because I felt like I was living off other people's mistakes. That's why I decided to get in the brand of Footwear business.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had an issue. My issue was I built this incredible business buying and selling closeouts. Yeah. Nine figure business, right? Over $100 million. I'm out 21.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start with you boy that shit. She started with me in the Admonton ski shop called the Skiing Sport Emporium and then came to my first office that I had where KPR Sports was, by the way, named after my mom and dad, Ken and Paul at”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the crazy thing is I have an assistant today. So we have a group of incredible assistants, one of my assistants, Michelle Reardon, has been with me 33 years. Wow.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there were times I would need to go in. I remember there was a guy above Dennis. Who was like, I think it was the CEO of Cottono Bank. When I needed a lot of money, I'd go to see him to explain like, hey, I've got this deal. I'm going to buy this. I'm going to sell this to Y. Here are some of the purchase orders from some of the customers so I can show you what I'm doing. I need this. Okay, great. Deal. Let's go. And by the way, there are times when I got in trouble with the bank, when I got, you know, over leveraged, too much debt. I go and see that same person and like, hey, I'm going to come through. We got you, Michael. And then, you know, I came through. So, you know, relationships are important in good times, but they don't really matter. In bad times, relationships are everything.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a bank. I mean, by the time I was. I bet you I would have bang $50 million. Because I had a business that was doing $120 million, buying and selling close-ups. I always had to finance inventory and finance the accounts receivable. That's kind of crazy”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes you'd know somebody that could introduce you, sometimes you just cold call and get the person on the phone, sometimes you meet them at a different trade show.”
2025-01-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fanatics: Michael Rubin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT