Fanatics: Michael Rubin

If you’ve ever bought sports merch or bet on a big-league game, you’ve likely spent money on Fanatics. It’s a massive one-stop-shop for sports, founded by a guy who could barely read growing up. What Michael Rubin did know was how to spin a deal: by 15, he was making thousands of dollars trading in closeout sporting goods, and by his early 20’s, he was CEO of a public company. Since 2011, when he acquired Fanatics, Michael has focused his relentless energy into building his $25 billion sports branding business. Michael says he’ll run the company until he dies, but first has to figure out how to sleep. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research by Chris Maccini. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected]. Sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com/. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Look, this is no secret. We went through a tough experience earlier this year in our partnership with Major League Baseball and with Nike, where Nike redesigned a jersey that we'd been making for eight years. And there was a really negative reaction to it. And with Major League Baseball for the uniforms. It was the official Major League Baseball uniform. And some of the players complained about it. Players complained, fans complained relentlessly. They didn't say a little bit, they said a lot. They spoke loudly. They could see through it and all this stuff. Yeah. And for us, that was actually an incredible moment. We embraced the ass-whipping. We said, "We need to be a lot better. You know what? We gotta speak up louder. We gotta be stronger. You can't just go along for the ride."

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So that's why I'm so excited about this business, because I get to learn every day. If you like action, this is the job for you.

• 6:20Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:32Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Michael Rubin started his first business at age eight, made his first million in his teens, and then built Fanatics into a massive one-stop-shop for sports.

• 6:51Guy Raz?

  We've had hundreds of brilliant entrepreneurs on this show over the past several years. And in each case, I've learned a lot from their experiences, and I imagine many of you have as well. But every once in a while, we tell the story of a founder who was a true entrepreneurial savant, a prodigy of Michael Rubin. Michael Rubin was not a good student. He barely finished high school and only attended college for a single semester. So it's safe to say that, as far as academics go, he was close to being a failure. But when it came to business, he was a superstar

• 7:30Guy Raz?

  already at age 12. That's when he opened his own ski tuning shop. By 15, he had a brick-and-mortar ski shop on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Before he graduated high school, he had five of these ski shops. And before he turned 20, Michael was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year buying and selling excess sporting goods and footwear from big brands. As you'll hear in this conversation, what Michael lacked in academic prowess, he more than made up for in instincts and street smarts. He figured out how to take big, but calculated, risks, risks that would eventually lead him to the business he's probably best known for today: Fanatics.

• 8:15Guy Raz?

  If you're a sports fan and bought an officially licensed hat, or jersey, or collectible, or even bet on a game, you have likely spent money on a Fanatics product. Today, the brand is worth roughly $25 billion, and it's still privately owned, though there are rumors it could go public in 2025. As for Michael, he's become something of a brand himself. More than a million people follow him on Instagram, where he posts videos and photos about his life and his business. For the past several years, he's hosted an annual celebrity-filled party, The White Party in the Hamptons, a party, by the way, not to be confused with another white party,

• 8:57Guy Raz?

  the infamous one hosted by the now disgraced rap mogul Diddy. And Michael's net worth, it's estimated at around $10 billion. Now, not surprisingly, to fuel all that success, Michael has a restless, driven nature and a confidence so powerful that it can feel like a physical force, a force I certainly felt when I met him in the studio in San Francisco. And by the way, if you're listening with kids, Michael is pretty liberal with his salty language, so just a heads up. But unlike some founders I've spoken to who prefer to remain stoic about their struggles, Michael is pretty generous when talking about his personal challenges, his anxieties,

• 9:40Guy Raz?

  and the sacrifices he's made over the years to build his businesses. And we'll hear about all of that a little later on. For now, what you need to know is that Michael grew up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 70s and 80s. And back then, he had trouble doing the things that came naturally to other kids, like reading.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  People don't believe me when I say this. The last book that I read was the book called The Swoosh, The Unauthorized Story of Nike. I read it, I think, when I was in eighth or ninth grade, so it probably came out in 1986, 1987.

• 10:14Guy Raz?

  It's hard for you to concentrate on the page.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read a page and I have to, I read two lines, then I have to go back.

• 10:20Guy Raz?

  We read it.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and today, you know, again, since I haven't read a book since ninth grade, you know, my reading comes in very short, you know, like, kind of pieces. If someone sends me an email that's, you know, three or four paragraphs, I'm 99% not reading it.

• 10:38Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Certainly 40 years ago was a lot less common than it is today.

• 10:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  To tell you about all the learning disabilities. But when you have a mother who's a psychiatrist.

• 10:45Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Father's a veterinarian, both go very education-oriented, and you have a kid who's just not kind of doing well in school, you know, they worry and figure out, like, how do we help him? What do we do?

• 10:56Guy Raz?

  Did you get in trouble at school?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I was not a good student. I was not a good kid in school. I wasn't like a bad kid. It was more like I just didn't connect with school. So did I get in trouble? Yes, absolutely. Was I still well-liked by everybody at school, including all the teachers and everything? Absolutely.

• 11:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So it sounds like you didn't feel like you were, or did you? Did you feel like, God, I'm failing my parents? And do you remember feeling bad?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I don't think, you know, I grew up in a family where they told you what you couldn't do, and then that just provided motivation to me of what I could do.

• 11:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  I had great, two incredible parents. They just, you know, it was kind of like, they told you, they told you all the things you couldn't do, all the things you couldn't accomplish. And to me, it's like, fuck that. Like, I can do anything I set my mind to. But as bad as a student as I was, and as much as I struggled in school, and even though it wasn't diagnosed at that point, real ADD issues, I think I was equally as bad as an athlete. Okay? So I wasn't just failing in school. I was failing in sports.

• 12:05Guy Raz?

  And that meant that socially?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. What that meant was I was always last to be picked on a sports team. You're going to pick, you know, 10 people on each team. I'm 10. You know, what that, I believe what that makes you do is you figure out, well, what are you good at? Where can you win? And to me, business and working was a place I always excelled. I loved doing it. It's a place where I could be number one. I could be the best that there was.

• 12:31Guy Raz?

  How did you, how did you figure that out? What was the, what was the moment, the first time you thought, God, this is really fun. I'm good at this?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  I think I was born with it.

• 12:40Guy Raz?

  But what hap, tell me, because you know, already at like age eight, you started selling, I mean, a lot of kids do lemonade stands, a lot of kids do, you know, car washing things. What was the thing that you started doing?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Eight years old, when it would snow, I would go around door to door, sell the snow shoveling and then hire, you know, six kids to, you know, five bucks an hour to shovel all the driveways.

• 13:04Guy Raz?

  You would go door to door, you would say, hey, well, I'll shovel your...

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Hey, would you like, would you like your driver to shovel? It's 20 bucks.

• 13:11Guy Raz?

  And then you'd go find the kids to do the work and pay them.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I had them following me around and I was, you know, paying them five bucks an hour.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  Do you, do you remember how you even thought about doing that?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  No, but I do, I'll tell you one story that I do remember. When I was 12, I really learned how to tune skis and a friend of mine said to me like, hey, you love skiing and you love business, why don't you start a ski tuning shop? And that's a great idea. And, you know, like an hour later, I had the Mike's Ski Tuning Flyers made with the prices of, you know, you know, all the different things you could do for, for ski tuning.

• 13:46Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so age 12, you start a ski tuning shop. I guess you learned how to tune skis at like a ski camp you went to.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53Guy Raz?

  And so you're in Philadelphia, or outside of Philadelphia, and you opened, you opened a ski tuning service. But I guess after your bar mitzvah, you made a little bit of cash and you were able to use that cash to actually open a storefront, like a location?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  They had the ski swap every year where all the ski retailers in the Philadelphia area would bring their excess inventory to a ski swap. And I worked that swap the whole weekend, you know, just trying to help out the other ski shop owners. And then I said to one of the guys, this guy Brett Baumann, who owned something called Baumann Ski Shop, I said, hey, you know, I live 45 minutes from you, so there's no competition. Why don't you lend me some of your excess equipment and I'll pay you for it as I sell it? And he did exactly that. And that year at 13 years old, I did $25,000 in revenue.

• 14:40Guy Raz?

  Selling it from where?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  From my basement of my parents' house.

• 14:43Guy Raz?

  How did you get the word out? You would just tell people, I'm selling skis?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, school flyers. You know, I actually, I remember, it's a great story. I don't think I've ever told this before. There was a ski shop called Ray Pinella Ski Shop in the Plymouth Meeting Mall. I buy these flyers I put on all the cars, thousands of cars in the parking lot. And I get home and my dad says, you know, hey, Michael, I need to speak to you. He says, I said like, Dad, what's up? He says, well, Ray Pennella, who owns Ray Pennella Ski Shops called to say that you were trespassing and that he was gonna call the police and have you arrested for trespassing because you were putting flyers out in the mall's parking lot and he has a ski shop in the mall and he thought that you were unfairly competing. I said, well, what'd you tell him? He said, I told him my son was 13 and if you need to worry about competing against a 13-year-old, you got bigger problems.

• 15:31Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you basically take out a lease on a location, on a brick and mortar store.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:39Guy Raz?

  In your town. Was it Lafayette Hill?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Ridge and Butler Pike's Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania.

• 15:45Guy Raz?

  Okay. So it meant that your dad had to co-sign that, right? And you get to take a lease out. First of all, how did you operate that business? I mean, you were a 14, 15-year-old kid. Like, you had to go to school during the day. So how did that work? Did you, how did you manage that business and also go to school?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that school thing definitely got in the way. And I definitely focused on business. You know, I actually had a, they had a co-op program at my school you could get out at 11 o'clock if you had a co-op program in 12th grade. Somehow I talked our school into allowing me to do that in 11th grade.

• 16:18Guy Raz?

  Getting credit for having, like, work experience.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yes, and so my landlord just had to, so I just had to pay the rent on time and he gave me an A for my co-op program and that was like half of my curriculum.

• 16:28Guy Raz?

  Michael, how are you, first of all, at 15, were you, like, were you fully grown or were you still growing? Like, were you, were you short? Were you tall?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I don't remember.

• 16:40Guy Raz?

  Because 15 is young, man. Like, how did you have, how were you able to get people to take you seriously?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Because I didn't have fear. I just went for it. And I think, you know, so many people have ideas and they talk about what they want to do, but they don't do it. I was just always more a person, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out and fucking do it and if it works out, great. And if it doesn't, you know, all, all good. And so. So. I mean, you could go back to nineteen eighty-six, nineteen eighty-eight, you know. I remember after coming to, you know, ski in the summertime. I said, well, why don't I build a, a ski mountain in the middle of the summertime? And I went out and bought forty thousand pounds of ice cubes, set up in a ski slope at fifteen years old. Where did you set that up? Outside of my ski shop. So I had a ski shop. Yeah. In Conshock in Pennsylvania, um, Ridge and Butler Pike's.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And you set up an ice. I remember I came back and I remember waking my mom and dad up at like. Two o'clock in the morning, I'm like, I got the greatest idea on the planet. They're like, what? What? I'm like, sorry, I'm gonna set up a ski mountain in the middle of the summertime. Like. Go back to bed. What are you talking about? Sure enough, a month later, I went out, it was like twenty-five hundred bucks. I bought forty thousand pounds of ice cube, cubes, Brandywine Ice Company. I don't know how I remember this. I set these up and every news outlet covered that this fifty-year-old entrepreneur had set up a ski mountain outside of a ski shop and that was my marketing. Just a pile of ice? With hay on both sides, hay on each side and hay at the bottom. How do you ski down though? Ice. You just ski on ice? Yeah, amazing.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Wow. So how, how, how was business? I mean, were you making money? So the first year I had the ski shop, we did great. We did like a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in business. I made about twenty-five thousand dollars profit.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Second year, very good. I think we got up to about five hundred thousand dollars in business. And maybe made a hundred grand. You know, again, I'm fifteen years old. This is pretty spectacular. But all right, think about this. This is also going back thirty-seven years ago. Yeah. So half a million dollars in business, a hundred thousand dollars profit when you're fifteen, thirty-seven years ago? Kind of insane. Well, the next year, um, we had a little bit of an issue. It didn't snow. If you're in the ski business, it doesn't snow. That's not like an ingredients for like really killing it. But I also made a mistake. I got a little bit cocky, okay? And I was, I was now fifteen, turning sixteen, but I went out and I bought a Porsche. Then I went fifty fifty with a neighbor. I wasn't old enough to drive the Porsche yet, but I bought and kept that, kept it down the street for my parents.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  So now the season ends and I have two hundred thousand dollars of bills, eighty thousand dollars of inventory and half of a Porsche. And um, by February, all the ski vendors that had shipped me inventory, shipped me skis on open credit, wanted to get paid.

• 19:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  But I didn't have the money to pay them. And I started getting sued. I'd say, the spring of the year that I was sixteen, I probably got sued a hundred times. The sheriff became my friend. She'd come before I went to school and she'd drop off each day's lawsuits to me. And um, I thought I was complete failure. It was over. I'm never gonna be able to be successful in business.

• 19:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  You know, I prepared to go bankrupt. And so I um, hired a bankruptcy lawyer and, and they said, hey, let's have a meeting with the creditors, the all the people you owe money to. All these people came around and one of the creditors says, hey, you know, Mr. Rubin, how old are you today? I guess I just looked older than my age and you know, it's, at this point, everyone assumes you're older. I said, I'm sixteen. And the room went dead silent. I didn't know, you know, you weren't allowed to incur debt legally until you were eighteen.

• 20:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I, I think, I think you were eventually able to settle your debts. Partly because you made a deal with your parents, I guess, where they, they agreed to lend you some, some of the money if you agreed to, to go to college. Uh, and you kept up your end of the deal. You, what you started at Villanova.

• 20:42Guy Raz?

  But you barely lasted a semester, right?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  That's right. I'd say the reason I went to college was because I gave my mom and dad my word that I would go to college. It was important. My mom's like, look, I'm a psychiatrist. I know what's best for you. You're not a normal kid. You need to be a normal kid. Go to school, play sports, have friends. Why are you obsessed with this business thing? But I never got out of business, like, you know, never shut the shops down. And then I basically became very big at buying and selling excess footwear, sporting goods inventory, skis, buying and selling excess inventory, you know, primarily footwear and clothes. So by the time I got into college, the biggest memory, if you say, what do I remember about college? I remember cell phones at this point. You're talking about 1990. Cell phones were

• 21:30Speaker 01

  gigantic.

• 21:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  And I remember always sitting in the parking lot of Villanova on this giant cellphone, buying and selling things, always like, knowing that I had to get to class, but having no interest in getting to class because I was making deals. And, you know, I can remember times where I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in a trade, you know, in the parking lot of Villanova, you know, before I go to school. So that was very difficult. And finally, after, you know, kind of part of semester, I'm just like, I'm done. This is it. College isn't for me.

• 22:01Guy Raz?

  What do you, when you started doing these things, right, and succeeding and selling stuff, what is it that you feel that you had? I mean, was it, because it wasn't like, you know, this, you know, this accounting ability or, you know, or, you know, this mathematical knowledge, but, but there was something that you had that clearly worked? What, what do you think it was?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Common sense, street smarts, work ethic. I would always work harder than that. I would always outwork my competition. And,

• 22:40Speaker 01

  The ability to really build authentic and strong relationships.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  And like, nothing dissolves me. You could say anything to me.

• 22:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  You know, look, you can't, being sensitive, you know, and by the way, you would, you know, a lot of people in my family would disagree with this.

• 22:57Guy Raz?

  They would say what?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  They would say like, you know, it's okay to be sensitive. I'd say like, that's bullshit.

• 23:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Now, for some people, and you know, and interesting thing about managing people, leading people is what works for different people? You may go in a sports team to one person and you can beat the shit out of them and that makes them play better? You may take that same approach with somebody else and they're going to be dejected in the corner of the locker room. I was the person you could beat on that would do better through the beatings and it didn't bother me.

• 23:25Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Other people, I think, get dejected by that.

• 23:27Guy Raz?

  I actually think in, in the hundreds of interviews I've done on this show with founders, I think a superpower of many founders is they, they don't get offended, that they also don't hold grudges. There's like, they're desensitized.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I, I think that's accurate of a lot of good leaders and entrepreneurs and much easier for a founder than for higher CEO. Now, grudges are different because there could be somebody I may not like.

• 23:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Somebody who's done me dirty. I may have no problem working with them, but I'll always remember.

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  But you'll still work with them if, if you know that there's a value.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  If it's in the greater interest of the greater good, I'll a hundred percent work with them. But I got a long memory for people who've done me wrong and that, that, I think that makes me smarter, that makes me better, that makes sure I don't, you know, get screwed multiple times.

• 24:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, let's get back into the story here because we're, we're sort of in around 1990, so it's, it's, this is still pre-internet and, and at this point, you're, you're sort of, you're buying sports equipment and clothes and sneakers and then reselling it. Uh, so, so first of all, how did you even get connected with the people who had this stuff to sell?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  So I remember doing my first big deal.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  My first big deal was I owned, when I was graduating high school, I had five ski shops at this point. I remember going to one of the ski shops and they were selling these Umbro sneakers for, they were like soccer cleats. Yeah. And they were like sixty-five bucks, they were on sale for twenty-nine ninety-nine. I said to the manager of the store, I said, "Oh, you know, these not selling well." They said, "No, we bought them as clothes outs." I said, "Oh, how much did you buy them for?" They say eleven fifty a pair. I said, "Wow, so we're selling them for twenty-nine-nine at half off, bought them for eleven fifty a pair. Can you find out how many pair they have?" So they called the person at Umbro and they said they had twelve thousand pair. So I just got on the phone with the person right then, I said, "Hey, you have twelve thousand pair? How much can I buy them for?" They're like, "You know, you can buy them all for eight fifty."

• 25:32Speaker 01

  I said, "How about I give you four bucks?" They said, "How about six?" I said, "Can we agree at five?" I bought the twelve thousand pair for sixty thousand dollars that day, okay? That was the first time I got in the shoe business, buying some shoe clothes outs. And you were gonna sell the shoes at the ski shops? Nope. I went to the Yellow Pages, because that's how we found people then. I found this company called Boskov's Department Stores. I just cold called him. And I get this meeting with this guy, Albert Boskov, who owns Boskov's Department Stores. He said, "Michael, how much do you want for these?" I said, "Fifteen bucks a pair." He said, "I'll take them all for eleven fifty." I hadn't even got them in yet and I made six fifty a pair on twelve thousand pair of shoes. So now I'm eighteen, it's like seventy or eighty thousand dollars.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  But I haven't even paid for the shoes I bought yet. I got them resold to somebody else. So it was just, it was that instinct to hustle, that instinct to keep asking, to never have fear that worked for me. You know, that was my first big bulk deal, was buying all the shoes at five bucks a pair and selling them for eleven fifty to Boskov's Department Stores. It must have been such a rush. It was. For me, who sucked in sports. Who sucked in school to know, hey, on one day, I could see these shoes in a ski shop that I owned, find out that they were clothes out and make 70, 80,000 dollars, you know, overnight without ever touching the shoes? That was pretty spectacular.

• 26:53Guy Raz?

  And that's it? And that's the beginning? Okay, so now you've got this shoe experience, but again, this is like pre-internet, right? It's all Yellow Pages and relationships and big block cell phones, right? How are you going to the next? How are you getting the next connection? How are you finding the next place to buy bulk stuff?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  It wasn't even big block cell phones all the time. It was still payphones, okay? Because I remember one other quick story, I'll tell you, that's a great story, and I bet you this guy's still alive. I remember being at something called The Super Show. It was a big show in the sporting goods business where all the big retailers went to the show.

• 27:30Guy Raz?

  It was in New York?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  It was in Atlanta.

• 27:31Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Called The Super Show. And I think it was Xavier McDaniel. He was a basketball player.

• 27:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah, Seattle Seahawks, Supersonics.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he had a shoe called X-Man Shoes.

• 27:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  They didn't sell very well. So I bought 300,000 pair. I would have been 18 or 19. Bought 300,000 pair for nine bucks a pair, so 2.7 million dollars, okay? I remember going to the payphone. I called this guy, Dennis Wazaluski, okay? He was the banker from Continental Bank, my banker. I said, hey, from the payphone, like, you know, I said, hey, Dennis, I got great news. I just made like a million and a half, 2 million dollars. He's like, what are you talking about? I said, yeah, I just bought, you know, 300,000 pair of X-Man shoes for nine bucks a pair, and I've got them, I'm gonna, you know, get them all sold to Modells and TJ Maxx and Marshalls and Ross Stores, and we get like 15 bucks a pair, so I'm gonna make like 6 bucks a pair on, you know, 300,000 pair, I'm gonna make like a million eight.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  He says, well, that's great, why are you calling me? I'm like, well, how the fuck do you think I'm getting the money? You're a bank, I need the money.

• 28:31Guy Raz?

  To pay for the shoes?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gotta pay for the shoes. He's like, so you bought the shoes without me agreeing to lend you the money? I said, yeah, but you're gonna lend me the money because I'm gonna make this much money and pay you back and be a great customer of yours. And sure enough, Dennis lent me the money. This was a different day, this was like, this was when banking was done on like honor back in the day.

• 28:50Guy Raz?

  This is totally, yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  He said, no problem. They lent me the money, I sold all the shoes and probably made a million eight.

• 28:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Eighteen years old, maybe nineteen.

• 28:58Guy Raz?

  But then you're talking about places like TJ Maxx. You're talking about other retailers, Marshalls. I mean, these are, today at least, are huge retailers. And I think they were pretty big in 1990.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:12Guy Raz?

  How did you even get into those places as an eighteen, nineteen-year-old? Just calling and asking for a buyer? Like, how did you even get into those places?

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Sometimes you'd know somebody that could introduce you. Sometimes you'd just cold call and get the person on the phone. Sometimes you'd meet them at a different trade show.

• 29:32Guy Raz?

  And that's what you did?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  If you hesitate, if you don't take your shot, how do you get a chance to win?

• 29:37Guy Raz?

  Did you grow up a crazy sports fan?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Medium.

• 29:42Guy Raz?

  Ish, a Philly sports fan?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Guy Raz?

  But it wasn't like you lived and died?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  I did not.

• 29:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But it was business that you lived and died by?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:51Guy Raz?

  So your business really, I mean, when you essentially realized college is not for you, you are in the business of buying overstocked goods. And you could do this, presumably in a pretty short period of time. You had the cash to back up these purchases. Or was it this kind of arrangement where you would?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I had a bank.

• 30:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I mean, by the time I was twenty-one, I bet you I owed the bank fifty million dollars.

• 30:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Because I had a business that was doing one hundred and twenty million bucks, buying and selling clothes. I always had to finance the inventory and finance the accounts receivable. That's kind of crazy.

• 30:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And it was because you had this relationship. They knew you, and they had seen what you had done before.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there were times I would need to go in. I remember there was a guy above Dennis, who was like, I think he was the CEO of Continental 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 gonna buy this. I'm gonna sell this to Y. Here's some of the purchase orders from some of the customers. So I could show you what I'm doing. I need this. Okay, great, deal. Let's go. And by the way, there were times when I got in trouble with the bank. When I got, you know... Overleveraged, too much debt. I go and see that same person and like, hey, I'm gonna come through and you know, 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.

• 31:20Guy Raz?

  How, um, how are you staffing your, your growing business? By 1993, you're doing, you know, a million or more in revenue?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And the crazy thing is, I have an assistant today. So we have a, you know, group of incredible assistants. One of my assistants, Michelle Reardon, has been with me 33 years.

• 31:40Guy Raz?

  Wow. She started with you way back then?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  She started with me in the Edmonton ski shop called the Ski and Sport Emporium, and then came to my first office that I had, uh, where KPR Sports was, by the way, named after my mom and dad, Ken and Paulette Rubin.

• 31:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you got this office, and it's just growing very, very quickly. Um, and I guess at a certain point, from what I, from my research, I guess it was around 95, you buy a big share of a women's shoe brand called Rika. And I don't remember this brand, but what, what did they, I mean, was it athletic shoes, running shoes, fashion?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  So I had an issue. My issue was, I built this incredible business buying and selling closeouts.

• 32:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Nine-figure business, right? Over a hundred million dollars. I'm now 21.

• 32:26Guy Raz?

  And was it profitable?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Very profitable. But I didn't like it because I felt like I was living off of other people's mistakes. That's when I decided to get in the branded footwear business.

• 32:34Guy Raz?

  You wanted to make your own stuff?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I wanted to make my own shoes and build my own brands. And, you know, I, I ended up with three footwear companies. That got me to about a hundred and eighty million dollars in revenue. Call it like we maybe added another 60 or 80 million dollars in revenue to the closeout business. And that's what the business was in 1998. By the way, we were a public company.

• 32:53Guy Raz?

  You were, you were running a publicly traded company. I think you were like 23, 24.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I think I was the youngest person to ever run a public company at that point, I think, in the world.

• 33:01Guy Raz?

  And you had designers, you, it was everything under one?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had two divisions, the closeout business.

• 33:06Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And then we had the branded footwear business.

• 33:09Guy Raz?

  And, and how did the branded footwear business, I mean, the closeout business to me seems like a great business because you know you're buying low, you're gonna sell high, you've already got the people who have committed to it. But, but making and selling your own brand is a different beast.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, as a 23-year-old competing against Nike and Reebok and Converse, that was not a battle. But I did what I wanted to do. And 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 and 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, you know, early twenties kid in the footwear business.

• 33:57Guy Raz?

  How much was money a motivator for you? You were already making a lot of money, $10, $15 million a year at such a young age. Were you looking at that and saying, okay, I'm gonna get, we're gonna get, we're gonna make more and more and more?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  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 loved because that's how I got my satisfaction is by winning.

• 34:35Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Michael moves into e-commerce and why one of his investors actually tells him that he's not losing enough money. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 34:56Guy Raz?

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• 35:44Guy Raz?

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• 36:27Guy Raz?

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• 37:11Guy Raz?

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• 37:56Guy Raz?

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• 38:07Guy Raz?

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• 38:30Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1998, and Michael is running a successful business buying and selling other people's brands and thinking of starting his own. And then, one day, a market analyst calls him up to ask about the internet.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And he says, 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. And I hang up on him, okay? 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 he put it in my head, I went and I called the CEO of the Sports Authority, and the CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods, and the CEO of Sports L.A. Hey, what are you doing about this internet thing? And everyone said the same thing to me.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  They said, you know, we get a lot of pressure from our boards to figure out how to handle this. But if you have any great ideas, call me. And literally, I went away. That holiday break of 1998, I wrote the plan for GSI Commerce.

• 39:51Guy Raz?

  What was the plan that you wrote?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  The plan was to go out and get all the sporting goods retailers to give me all of 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.

• 40:05Guy Raz?

  So you'd go to Dick's Sporting Goods and Sports Authority and whoever?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  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 L.A., Thomas Sports and MC Sports to give me all their internet rights. And then within the next year or two, I got Dick's 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.

• 40:35Guy Raz?

  Even though it was basically a fraction of a fraction of a percent of their business initially.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:50Guy Raz?

  And then the bubble burst, the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. What kind of impact did that have on the business? Because from what I've read, there were many years where it was operating at a loss.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  So, all right, let's kind of drill down on this for a moment. I mean, you were a really young CEO for the first time, right? When you were like 23, which requires leadership abilities. And some people have them and some people develop them.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:58Guy Raz?

  What do you remember about just being a manager of people? And just knowing how to organize and interact with people? Did it come easily to you or was it hard?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it was somewhat natural for me because I was fortunate 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.

• 42:31Guy Raz?

  And what about operationally? Did you?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  I was always a shitty operator.

• 42:35Guy Raz?

  So what did you do for that? How did you?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Found great people to support me.

• 42:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Like I was never, like I could never add value and I still couldn't today 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 like 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.

• 43:00Guy Raz?

  You know, it's amazing to me because, you know, when you look back on this period of time, right? Like now, I think most people say, wow, that was a really smart way to think about how to run your business. Acquire other companies at lower prices, build up the portfolio, but like you guys lost like $150 million in a four-year period. Like, but still, you, you, from, from the way you remember that time, it wasn't, you, you felt like it was going to be fine?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I remember having the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, tell me in 2000 that we weren't losing enough money.

• 43:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  That we weren't being aggressive enough, that we weren't moving quickly enough.

• 43:50Guy Raz?

  Because you had raised like 80 million from them.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Eighty the first time, but then we raised more and, you know, I mean, we raised hundreds of millions of dollars in, 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, you know, 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.

• 44:16Guy Raz?

  All right, so I guess sort of through the early 2000s, you guys continued to expand, right? You do all these these different partnerships and then you also acquire the the e-commerce rights for the major professional sports leagues, right? Which was massive. What did that mean?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we kind of ran the e-commerce businesses for the NFL,

• 44:41Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  the NBA, Major League Baseball, and the NHL.

• 44:46Guy Raz?

  You were doing all the backend. You were doing the buying and the selling.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  We were doing everything. We were kind of the licensee that ran that business. You know, we were kind of the owner of the e-commerce business of the four leagues that we paid them a road to. We licensed those rights from the leagues.

• 44:59Guy Raz?

  But you weren't making the products.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Not at that point, we were not.

• 45:02Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So now, let's focus on one thing that that we most know you for today, right? Which is Fanatics. And Fanatics was actually founded by two brothers. It was a brick and mortar store in Jacksonville, Florida.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Guy Raz?

  And then it grew into an e-commerce business, I think, especially mainly for college sports initially. Anyway, you, GSI Commerce, you wound up acquiring them for about $277 million, right?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our strength was in pro sports, and Fanatics' strength was in college sports. And we thought it would be great to put the two businesses together.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  So the purchase goes through in 2011, but later that year, GSI sells to eBay.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:51Guy Raz?

  All of the brands, everything goes to eBay. $2.4 billion.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  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 want to have a third business that 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 the GSI owned that owned inventory. They said, hey, Michael, we'd like to buy GSI overall, but we'd love, you know, you to buy this back if you wanted to. That would help facilitate the deal.

• 46:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And so we bought back Fanatics, including the licensed business that GSI had for 330 million bucks.

• 46:49Guy Raz?

  You basically buy this back from eBay. And what was the vision that you had at that point? I mean, this is 2011. What did you think you were going to do with it?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:09Guy Raz?

  And what was it going to be? It was going to be?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Well, you got to realize, when you think back to Fanatics, 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.

• 47:24Guy Raz?

  They were just getting, and they weren't, it was not vertically integrated. They were not, they were just like outsourcing their designs.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  That's right. They bought merchandise from many third-party vendors, whether it was a New Era, 47 Brands, a Majestic, Mitchell Ness, whoever it was, they bought from lots of other brands.

• 47:39Guy Raz?

  And you wanted to do something different.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  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, to 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.

• 48:23Guy Raz?

  Essentially, if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're saying is, if all we did was just sell licensed shirts or, you know, hats, and it was also available on Amazon, we're cooked. We can't compete.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  We're selling merchandise that's readily available, you know, at other places. I don't know what makes it special. What we said we wanted to do is we wanted to do something that would be special. We wanted to have a broader assortment of merchandise. Um, 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 merchandise 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 wanted 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 1% or 2% of business would

• 49:18Speaker 01

  go through the NFL or Major League Baseball or NBA's direct-to-consumer business. Today, it's about a third would go through their own direct-to-consumer business.

• 49:25Guy Raz?

  How did you get the leagues to agree to work with you? I mean, to sort of buy into this idea in 2012 when there were already other brands out there? There were already other, they were doing licensing deals with other?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the leagues recognized 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 in this consumer products area where taking care of the fan is so important that they realize that if they could get a new model, you're a better model, that they could, you know, take better care of the fans and make more money as a sports property.

• 50:05Guy Raz?

  So, I guess from what I understand, one of the differentiating factors was also this ability to respond and react quickly.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:13Guy Raz?

  Right? To like the stories in sports.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  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. Okay, everyone wants his products. They need to do something nobody else had done. He hits 50 home runs and 50 stolen 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...

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Respond and handle that consumer demand will probably service just in in North America, just this month, between now and the end of the year, I think will probably service a million different Dodger fans online. We've been able to capitalize on that in a way for fans.

• 50:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  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 to myself is, 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 of Finax Commerce, which is our entire Fangir business. We're talking 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 has grown from $250 million when I bought it back from eBay, to this year, that division's like a $6.7 billion business. Okay. 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, you know, keep enhancing? What do we, what do we need to

• 51:39Speaker 01

  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. I still feel like a startup.

• 51:48Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Michael talks about the sacrifices he's made to always be in startup mode and how he's finally forcing himself to sleep. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 53:14Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So when we last left off, Michael was saying that even though he's been running Fanatics for 15 years, he still feels like he's building a brand-new company.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, we're, we have three businesses today. Our first business, the one you've been asking me questions about, Fanatics Commerce. And that includes, you know, today, we have, we run the e-commerce businesses of the NFL, the 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.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  We own Lids, which has 1,400 headwear stores. We operate the college bookstores for the apparel. We own Mitchell Ness, the apparel brand. You know, we make all of the Nike licensed sports merchandise in 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 grown from a $250 million business in 2010, the year before we bought it, to this year, we put it all together, it's about a $6.7 billion business.

• 54:25Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  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, you know, the official trading card rights to, you know, many of the biggest 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. And I love that. I love being the underdog.

• 54:52Guy Raz?

  DraftKings has been the dominant player.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Fan and DraftKings are the dominant two companies. And for me, people are like, "Oh, you're the leader in fangear. You're the leader in trading cards."

• 55:02Guy Raz?

  Why are you getting into that?

• 55:03Speaker 01

  You know, you're the underdog here. Guess what? If you want to ask me what gets me most turned on, being the frickin' underdog, man, that is fun. To have everyone betting against you, say, "You can't do this"? Great. You know what? The same way my mom told me I couldn't do something, and 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.

• 55:20Guy Raz?

  Where do you, I mean... Presumably, I mean, the sort of the sports betting market is a massive, massive growth opportunity, right? I mean, when you say we're just getting started, I mean, is that sort of where your head goes to, in particularly to that part of the business?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  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, you know, Nike redesigned a jersey that we'd been making for eight years, and, you know, there was a really negative reaction to it.

• 56:07Guy Raz?

  And with Major League Baseball for the uniforms.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  It was the official Major League Baseball uniform.

• 56:10Guy Raz?

  And Pluma players complained about it.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Players complained, fans complained relentlessly. They didn't, like, say a little bit, they said a lot, they spoke loudly.

• 56:18Guy Raz?

  They could see through it and all this stuff.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  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, you know, we kind of got, you know, stuck in this situation. Or you could say, you know what? How do we use this to make our company better? We actually came up with a brand purpose that said we were going to relentlessly enhance the fan experience in everything we do, and if we're not, we're not going to do it. We embraced the ass-whipping, we said, we need to be a lot better. You know what? Even if we're not designing the jersey, if, we had people inside of Fanatics that were saying, hey, you know, people may not like the smaller 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.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  So, like, 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 a, you know, if you like action, this is the job for you.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  So, all right, if you think about it, it's just 12 years ago, right, where you essentially, about 12 years ago, where you really kind of, Fanatics really kind of has its rebirth, and it becomes what we know about today. And that's not that long ago, right? And yet, the business of sports and sports apparel has just exploded even more. And while so many other content and media businesses have had challenging times, and we're sort of starting to see this kind of over-saturation with content, sports, it's just moving in this like hockey-stick direction.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  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 are all the things we haven't done well? What are all the things that, you know, we didn't get right? Because that's the way we think. If you sit there and you're satisfied, you're dead.

• 58:15Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, I hesitate to ask you this question because I think I know the answer, but like, you don't see, you see yourself involved with this for the long haul?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Forever.

• 58:26Guy Raz?

  Forever?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Forever. I've never saw this.

• 58:29Guy Raz?

  You are gonna be at the helm of this thing.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Till I die.

• 58:33Guy Raz?

  Till you die.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:35Guy Raz?

  You know, one of the, I mean, you know this, that there are a lot of sacrifices that a person makes. And one of the things that I do on the show is emphasize that entrepreneurship is not a hustle culture. This is not a hustle culture show. It's not a get-rich-quick-scheme show. It takes a long time. It's a lot of work, and there are a lot of things you have to give up.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:55Guy Raz?

  You've benefited tremendously from it. Obviously, you have massive wealth, but there are also things that you've sacrificed. And again, I don't know if people are gonna, you know, they're not gonna play a violin for you necessarily, but like, just being young, just being a young kid hanging out and doing stuff like you were working. You didn't have like a teenage college experience. You weren't in your 20s, hanging out, hanging out with friends, doing it like you were working.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  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 taking anything back because he won seven Super Bowls. And by the way, the only thing he's mad about is that he lost to the Giants twice and, you know, didn't win more. So, you know, that's my mentality.

• 59:49Guy Raz?

  What about as a parent? Did you have to, presumably had to sacrifice time with your kids?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, two young kids now as well. And, you know, I think, you know, when Camille and I had, you know, when we had Romy and then Gemma are the two young ones, you know, she knew that like I'd be there when it mattered. But I like that I'm gonna like, she knew that I work 17 hours of most days. So, you know, this morning when I woke up and the kids were up at, you know, 5 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 them for 10 minutes and, you know, but I'm there when it matters. And I'd say with my older daughter.

• 1:00:37Guy Raz?

  Who's now 18.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, who's now 18.

• 1:00:39Guy Raz?

  This is from your first marriage.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and we have, our relationship was spectacular. If I go and get my phone right now, she will have called or, you know, it's like we just, we make it work. You kind of figure out what you gotta do and you kind of make it all work. And, you know, it's, you know, nothing's simple and that. 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 and I love doing what I'm doing.

• 1:01:08Guy Raz?

  Given that your mom was a psychiatrist, I imagine that, that she encouraged you to talk about things on your mind. Did you, have you ever benefited from therapy?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Um, I have gone to therapy off and on over the, over my entire life. You know, as a kid, hey, you're broken. So I was probably sent to a therapist from the age 10 or 12 off.

• 1:01:38Guy Raz?

  Did you hate it when you were a kid?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Hated it. Didn't dislike it, I hated it. But I'd say I've never really been a great patient of a therapist. But what I am really good at is talking through my issues with people that I'm really close to.

• 1:01:56Guy Raz?

  Do you ever remember feeling anxiety or depression?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Not depression, but anxiety, yes. Anxiety about what I need to get done, pressures that could be on me, yes. Never depression.

• 1:02:10Guy Raz?

  Anxiety that would like cause sleepless nights?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Well, I have one of the worst, I mean, so, look, there's something in my, in my, um, like a tube in my-

• 1:02:20Guy Raz?

  Chest?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Chest.

• 1:02:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Where it keeps enlarging, every year it's enlarging, and over the past, um, five years, it's enlarged about four, about 40 bips. And they said if it goes another 50 bips, you have to get open heart surgery.

• 1:02:33Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  And they said the only way to fix it is sleep. Okay? 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, is probably four and a half hours a night.

• 1:02:46Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  And now-

• 1:02:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  I've got this whoop 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.

• 1:03:00Guy Raz?

  Do you grab your phone?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Always. And I know I shouldn't.

• 1:03:03Guy Raz?

  You shouldn't sit-

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  But I can't stop myself.

• 1:03:04Guy Raz?

  It can't be in the room.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, thank you, Mr. Obvious.

• 1:03:08Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Um, so have I had sleepless nights, more than you'd ever know? Have I stayed up thinking about what do I need to do? How do I, you know, compete better? How do I do better for our fans? All the time.

• 1:03:19Guy Raz?

  You know, you, you mentioned that, that the last book you read was when you were in ninth grade, and I think that's in part because it's just hard, right? It's hard for a lot of people to just focus on a page. And so some people can listen to books, some people just-

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  I don't listen to them either.

• 1:03:31Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Talk about something really weird about my brain, okay? This is gonna sound crazy. I don't know the alphabet. I get stuck around M and P, and I've never, and I've kind of decided that I'm not gonna 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 is, like, my brain's, it's weird. But like, you know, I'm pretty good at certain things, I'm pretty shitty at other things, I just focus on what I'm good at.

• 1:03:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, all right. How much of, of, of this, of all this, do you attribute to just the grind? And how much do you think has to do with getting lucky?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  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 timing 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 grinding. I look at it as like, if you asked any athlete in the world, if they could have their career go on 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, like, why would I ever give that up?

• 1:04:54Guy Raz?

  That's Michael Rubin of Fanatics. By the way, in case you missed it, back in September, Major League Baseball announced that it was getting rid of those embarrassing see-through uniforms and returning to the old ones. And one more thing, Michael recently announced that he's no longer going to throw his annual white party, the big bash at his Hampton's estate, where celebrities would dress up in white and pose for paparazzi. Michael felt like, given the notoriety around another famous white party, the one that used to be thrown by Diddy, that the whole concept has kind of been tarnished. So, he's decided to focus more on charitable events in the coming years.

• 1:05:38Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Devin Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Chris Messini. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon. And our production staff also includes Alex Chung, J.C. Howard, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.