Michael Rubin
speaker
330 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Michael Rubin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's not my mentality. That's the truth. And the second I get confident is when it's over. I really feel like the second you get confident- That's why you're so successful. They kill you. And so I feel like I want to run this business like we're a startup. I'm only looking and saying, what are all the things we're doing wrong? And I got to tell you something.
In each business, we have things we're great at. We have things we suck at. We have so many things we need to do to be better. We think, you know, our biggest thing we need to do is keep growing the categories that we're in, keep innovating. Let's take the example of the business that you and I are partners in. Okay. Talk about off-season. Talk about Christensen.
Kristen reached out to our company for years and she couldn't get anyone to kind of respond to her, give her the love because we acted like a big company. Okay. Then one day she did something. She put, she, you know, she dressed Taylor Swift. I saw it all over. I started following her back. I'm like, wow. Like I love what she's about. I love this.
And then small world, I find out that she's partnering with you. And by the way, at that point I had to chase her and chase you to say, let's partner together. That didn't bother me. I didn't mind saying, hey- Quite the opposite, right? You were like, what can I do for you guys? How do we partner together? How do we do something great for sports fans?
So like, you know, a lot of people would say like, is the CEO of a 22,000 person, you know, $11 billion revenue company next year going to chase- That is literally what we said. And, you know, I was like, I loved it because I had so much respect for her vision, so much respect for you. I'm like, these guys are killers. Like, what could the three of us do together?
And what could we do for sports fans? So the second you get comfortable and think like, look at like all the changes that are happening. in their parallel footwear business today. And you say like, nothing's forever. And you know what? We have to keep figuring out how to do what we do better. And there's so much that we can be better at. And so, you know, one of the mistakes I think I made
you know, in the first decade of the business, we were so worried about competition. We weren't focused enough on how's everything we do going to make it better for the fan. And now, like, we actually, I'll tell you, talk about turning a failure into a success. We had, obviously, it's well known at this point, we had a pretty, you know, tough experience in baseball last year with the jersey.
And, you know, as everyone knows, we're partners with Nike, we're partners with MLB. We make the jerseys together and, you know, everyone in the desire to innovate wants to kind of change the baseball jersey. And it's not what fans wanted. And during that period of time, and by the way, we got, you know, Fanatics took the brunt of most of the, and there was a lot of consumer noise.
You know, hey, these pants are C3, these jerseys suck, this, that. And what did we do? Number one, we listened and we reverted back together with Nike, baseball, and ourselves. We got to revert back to what fans loved. Number one. Number two, how do I use that to make my company better? And literally, we'd been talking about brand purpose. for the last year.
And I was like, what is this brand purpose bullshit? Like, is this just like, you know, consultant noise? And then it hit us. It's like, we need to relentlessly enhance the fan experience in everything we do. And if you ask us, when you go to do things and we do a lot of things, is this going to relentlessly enhance the fan experience? If the answer is no, don't do it.
Well, I could look back to a bunch of things we did in the past where it didn't. Relentlessly enhance the fan experience. And now we're going back and we're saying, we're re-questioning everything we've ever done to say, how do we be better?
Everything has to go into that brand purpose of relentlessly enhance the fan experience. When we started the sports betting business, we said, hey, if we give you back money in every bet that you make, you can use anywhere on our platform. The other thing we do is players get injured in sports all the time. If a player gets injured in the first quarter of a game, we cancel that bet.
We're the only person that does it. So what are people saying? FNAX is the most rewarding sportsbook. And by the way, they're the fairest sportsbook. By the way, we've picked up, as of this month, I just saw this morning, we have about 7%, 7.5% of the market. We've been live for two years.
Okay? And we're now the distant third, but we're the third biggest online sports betting platform. From people telling me two years ago, I had no chance. Now, talk about sports betting. We made a gamble, my biggest gamble ever. I had no idea whether it would work or not. Still not 100% sure it's going to work or not. I said to people, hey, I'm making a billion and a half to $2 billion gamble.
I think I'm going to be right, but I don't know. But you have to have the confidence to say, is this a big enough business I want to go after? And am I comfortable with what happens if it doesn't work? And so I know I'm a little all over the place in this answer. No, but you're not. I'm kind of walking you through how my brain thinks.
Yeah. So I would say I had the chance to start over again in 2011 with Fanatics. I wish I had that brand purpose then. Right. Because I think we'd be a better company today. Fair enough. I think in our online sports betting, iGaming business, we started with that mission. In the collectibles business, we started with that mission.
In the fangirl business, we started in 2011, we didn't have that mission. And I think now that we have that mission of everything we do has to relentlessly enhance the fan experience. We keep going back and saying, well, what doesn't and how do we change it? And so I think that's the fun part of building a business. Like, let me ask you a question. Skims is roughly how big today?
Okay. It's big. How many people, how many people didn't care about you five years ago and now saying they want to kill you? Oh, a lot. Right. Right now, when we're doing this, this podcast together, you got people out there looking at what's Emma doing? What's Jen's doing? You know, what's Kim doing? What are you guys doing? How do we kill these guys? You know, because you guys are winning.
So that's, you're lucky to be in that position. But if you don't stay on your A game, you're going to be dead.
I look at everything. And let me tell you something. When I see something I like, I copy it as well. Okay? I'm proud of that. I'm so happy that you are honest about that. When I see a great feature, we're not doing that. Fucking do that.
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