Fanatics: Michael Rubin

24:27It was in New York? It was in Atlanta called the Super Show. And I think it was Xavier McDaniel. He was a basketball player. Yeah, Seattle Seahawks, Supersonics. Yeah, so he had a shoe called X-Man Shoes. Yeah. 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. Okay? I remember going to the payphone, and I called this guy, Dennis Wasilewski. 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.

25:06He's like, what are you talking about? He says, yeah, I just bought, you know, 300 ,000 pair of X-Men shoes for nine bucks a pair. And I'm going to, you know, get them all sold to Models and TJ Maxx and Marshalls and Ross stores. And we get like 15 bucks a pair. So we're going to make like six bucks a pair on, you know, 300 ,000 pair. I'm going to make like a million eight. 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. He's like, to pay for the shoes. Yeah, I got to pay for the shoes. He's like, so you bought the shoes without me agreeing to lend you the money?

25:36I said, yeah, but you're going to lend me the money because I'm going to 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 when banking was done on Honor back in the day. This is totally young. He said, no problem. They lent me the money. I sold all the shoes and probably made$1.8 million. Wow. 18 years old, maybe 19. But then you're talking about places like TJ Maxx. You're talking about other retailers, Marshalls. I mean, these are today, at least, they're huge retailers, and I think they were pretty big in 1990.

26:09How did you even get into those places as an 18, 19-year-old just calling and asking for a buyer? Like, how did you even get into those places? 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. And that's what you did. If you hesitate, if you don't take your shot, how do you get a chance to win? Did you grow up a crazy sports fan? Medium. Ish. A Philly sports fan. Yeah. But it wasn't like you lived and died. I did not. Yeah. But it was business that you lived and died by. Yes.

26:48So 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 have the cash to back up these purchases or was it this kind of arrangement where you would – I had a bank. Yeah. I mean by the time I was 21, I bet you I owed the bank$50 million. Wow. Because I had a business that was doing 120 million bucks, buying and selling clothes. I always had to finance the inventory and finance the accounts receivable. That's kind of crazy. Yeah. And it was because you had this relationship.

27:28They knew you and they had seen what you had done before. 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 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 going to buy this. I'm going to sell this to Y. Here's 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.

28:04I go and see that same person and like, hey, I'm going to 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. How are you staffing your growing business? By 1993, you're doing a million or more in revenue. 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 Kyle Reardon has been with me 33 years. Wow. She started with you way that day. She started with me in the Abington ski shop called the Ski and Sport Emporium and then came to my first office that I had where KPR Sports was.

28:47By the way, named after my mom and dad, Ken and Paulette Rubin. Yeah. All right. So you got this office and it's just growing very, very quickly. and I guess at a certain point, 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 did they, I mean, was it athletic shoes, running shoes, fashion? So I had an issue. My issue was I built this incredible business buying and selling closeouts. Nine figure business, right? Over$100 million. I'm now 21. And was it profitable? Very profitable. But I didn't like it because I felt like I was living off of other people's mistakes.

29:29That's why I decided to get in the brand of footwear business. You wanted to make your own stuff. I wanted to make my own shoes and build my own brands. And I ended up with three footwear companies. That got me to about$180 million in revenue. 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. You were running a publicly traded company. I think you were like 23, 24. I think I was the youngest person ever run a public company at that point, I think, in the world. And you had designers. It was everything.

30:02Yeah, we had two divisions, the clothes-out business. Yep. And then we had the brand and footwear business. And how did the brand and footwear business – I mean, the clothes-out business to me seems like a great business. It was. Because you know you're buying low. You're going to sell high. You've already got the people who have committed to it. But making and selling your own brand is a different beast. yeah you know it was a 23 year old competing against nike and reebok and converse that was an uphill battle but i did what i wanted to do and yeah when i was building my own footwear brand the number one thing i like to do i would just walk around look at people's feet like it was crazy i would literally go out for for for for hours at a time just look at what people are 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 early 20s kid in the footwear business.

30:54How 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, we're going to make more and more and more? 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 satisfaction was by winning.

31:32When 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.

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35:00Hey, 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. 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.

35:42I'm like, what do you mean? I didn't even know. Like, I couldn't at this point. I couldn't work. Email 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 LA. Hey, what are you doing about this internet thing? And everyone said the same thing to me. 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.

36:18I wrote the plan for GSI Commerce. What was the plan that you wrote? The plan was to go out and get all the sporting goods retailers to 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. So you'd go to Dick's Sporting Goods and Sports Authority and whoever? 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, Tottenham Sports, and MC Sports to give me all their internet rights.

36:52And 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. Even though it was basically a fraction of a fraction of a percent of their business initially. Right. But by the way, by 2001, so we did it from 99 when we launched until 2001. I think we did$100,$200 million in online sales of sporting goods 22 years ago. 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.

37:31Yeah, 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, you know, 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. So, all right.

38:12Let'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're like 23, which requires leadership abilities and some people have them and some people develop them. Yes. How do you – what do you remember about just being a manager of people and like just knowing how to organize and interact with people? Did it come easily to you or was it hard? 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.

38:59And so I think it generally worked well. And what about operationally? Did you? I was always a shitty operator. So what did you do for that? How did you? Found great people to support me. Yeah. 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 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, how do we make the trains run on time? That wasn't what my strength was.

39:30You 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. But still, from the way you remember that time, you felt like it was going to be fine? I remember having the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi's son, tell me in 2000 that we weren't losing enough money. Wow. That we weren't being aggressive enough. That we weren't moving quickly enough.

40:20Because you had raised like$80 million from them. 80 the first time, but then we raised more. And, you know, I mean, 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, 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. All right. So I guess sort of through the early 2000s, you guys continue to expand, right? You do all these different partnerships and then you also acquire the e-commerce rights for the major professional sports leagues, right?

41:02Which was massive. What did that mean? Yeah. So we kind of ran the e-commerce businesses for the NFL. Right. The NBA, Major League Baseball, and the NHL. You were doing all the back end. You were doing the buying and the selling. 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 repaid them a row to. We licensed those rights from the leagues. But you weren't making the products. Not at that point. We were not. Got it. Okay. Right. So now let's focus on one thing that we most know you for today, right, which is Fanatics.

41:42And Fanatics was actually founded by two brothers. It was a brick and mortar store in Jacksonville, Florida. Yeah. 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? Yeah. So our strength was in pro sports and fanatic strength was in college sports. And we thought it would be great to put the two businesses together. So the purchase goes through in 2011. But later that year, GSI sells to eBay. Yep. All of the brands, everything goes to eBay,$2.4 billion. Yeah, well, what happened was eBay came to us and said, look, we want to acquire GSI Commerce.

42:33They 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 wanted 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.

43:10That would help facilitate the deal. And so we bought back Fanatics, including the licensed business that GSI had for 330 million bucks. 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? 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. And what was it going to be? It was going to be— 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.

43:51And so it was a small business. They were just getting, and they weren't, it was not vertically integrated. It was not. They were just like outsourcing their designs. That's right. They bought merchandise from many third-party vendors, whether it was a new era, 47 Brands, a Majestic, Mitchell and Ness, whoever it was, they bought from lots of other brands. And you wanted to do something different. 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.

44:35And 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. 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. Yeah, if we're selling merchandise that's readily available, you know, at other places, what makes it special?

45:13What we said is we wanted to do something that would be special. So we want to have a broader assortment of merchandise. I think what we want 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 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.

45:45So put in perspective, when we started, it might have been 1 % or 2 % of business would 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. How did you get the leagues to agree to work with – 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 – 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.

46:21In 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. So I guess from what I understand, one of the differentiating factors was also this ability to respond and react quickly. Yeah. Right? To like the stories in sports. 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. Then he does something nobody else had done.

46:57He 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 respond and handle that consumer demand will probably service just in North America just this month. Between now and the end of 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. Yeah. 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 with myself is, man, I've been doing this stuff for 40 plus years.

47:42I 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 fangirl 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 has grown from$250 million when I bought it back from eBay to this year, that division is 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?

48:08What 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. I still feel like a startup. 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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50:55Hey, 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. Yeah, I mean, look, we have three businesses today. Our first business is the one you've been asking me questions about Fanatics Commerce. And that includes, you know, today 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.

51:35We own Lids, which has 1 ,400 headwear stores. We operate the college bookstores for the apparel. We own Mitchell Nest, 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. Wow. Look, I think we've become a decent-sized company. We haven't become beloved. and I want to be beloved by sports fans and we need to be better to be beloved by sports fans.

52:15So 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 biggest sports properties in the world. That business, we bought it. And then we just got into the sports betting business where everyone's betting against us. And I love that. I love being underdog. Because DraftKings has been the dominant player. FanDuel and DraftKings are the dominant two companies. And for me, people are like, oh, you're the leader in fan gear. You're the leader in trading cards. Why are you getting into that? You're the underdog here.

52:46Guess what? If you want to ask me what gets me most turned on, being the freaking 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. Where do you, I mean, presumably, I mean, 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 in particular to that part of the business?

53:18No, my head goes to we're just getting started in all of the businesses. Even in our finance commerce,$6.7 billion in revenue this year. Yeah. So right now we are so focused. Like we had, look, this is no secret. but 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.

53:55Fans 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 because we could sit there and say, hey, 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 the situation. Or you could say, you know what? 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.

54:28We 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 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 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.

55:09And 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 oversaturation with content, sports, it's just moving in this like hockey stick direction. 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?

55:52What are all 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. 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. Forever. Forever. Forever. I'm never sorry of this. You are going to be at the helm of this thing. Till I die. Till you die. Yep. 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.

56:26It's 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. Yeah. 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 going to – they're not going to 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, like you were working.

57:04Look, 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, 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 didn't win more. So that's my mentality. What about as a parent? Did you have to – presumably had to sacrifice time with your kids? I have and I do. But what I try to be there is for the things that really matter.

57:42And no, I'm not – like, you know, look, I have 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 going to 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, 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.

58:14And, you know, but I'm there when it matters. And I'd say with my older daughter. Who's now 18. Who's now 18. This is from your first marriage. Yeah, yeah. And we have, our relationship is spectacular. If I go and get my phone right now, she will have called. Yeah. You know, it's like we just, we make it work. You kind of figure out what you got to do and you kind of make it all work. And, you know, it's, you know, 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.

58:44But like I'm doing what's best for me and I love doing what I'm doing. Given that your mom was a psychiatrist, I imagine that she encouraged you to talk about things on your mind. Did you – have you ever benefited from therapy? I have gone to therapy off and on 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. Did you hate it when you were a kid? 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.

59:37Do you ever remember feeling anxiety or depression? not depression but anxiety yes anxiety about what i need to get done pressures that could be on me yes never depression anxiety that would like cause sleepless nights well i have one of the worst i mean so look there's something in my in my um like a tube in my chest chest yeah where it keeps enlarged every year it's enlarging over the past um five years has enlarged about four about 40 bips and they said if it goes another 50 bips you have to get open heart surgery 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 if you average the last 20 years it's probably four and a half hours a night and now i 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.

1:00:42Do you grab your phone? Always. And I know I shouldn't. You shouldn't sleep. It can't be in the room. Yeah, well, thank you, Mr. Obvious. 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 compete better? How do I do better for our fans all the time? You know, you mentioned 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. 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 – I don't listen to them either.

1:01:13Talk 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 I kind of accept my brain is – like my brain, 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. Yeah. So, all right. How much of this, of all this, do you attribute to just the grind? And how much do you think has to do with getting lucky?

1:01:53Well, 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. You need luck and time. They're a very important ingredient. in. 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 going 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.

1:02:31And so, like, why would I ever give that up? 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 Hamptons 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.

1:03:12So he's decided to focus more on charitable events in the coming years. 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 gyros.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Devin Schwartz with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Chris Messini. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon.

1:03:49And our production staff also includes Alex Chung, JC Howard, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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