All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's $56B Plan to Take Over eBay
23 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Everyone hates GameStop and it seems like everyone in the media basically wants us to fail and wants them to succeed.
Chapter 2: What did Ryan Cohen learn from building and selling Chewy?
And you've got a board that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They don't buy stock with their own money. They end up showing up to a handful of board meetings and they're making a fortune. You've got a management team that is grossly overpaid. There's nothing more American than basically risking your own capital. So why does everyone want us to fail?
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Chapter 3: How did Ryan Cohen transition from Chewy to GameStop CEO?
The platform finds buyers and optimizes for profit. You set the target, it does the rest. A cookware brand doing $4 million tried Applovin ads, hit 16 million, turned profitable, and they're on pace for $80 million this year. Visit applovin.com slash all in to launch your first campaign today. Ryan Cohen, welcome to the All In interview. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me.
I think it's been like a decade, which is crazy how old we get since you and I last had dinner in New York. This was before several chapters of your life unfolded. And it's great to be talking with you today. You're doing something really interesting right now, trying to acquire and run eBay, which obviously is a big story right now that takes us back 25, 30 years to the start of the internet.
But I want to talk a little bit about your story first, if that's okay. And I'd love for folks that are watching this or listening to this to learn a little bit about you. and the journey you've been on that brings you to this moment. Maybe we can go back to the business you started, Chewy, if that's okay.
Chapter 4: Why does Ryan Cohen want to acquire eBay for $56 billion?
Yes, definitely.
Yeah, well, maybe tell me why you started Chewy. How'd you get that idea, and how'd you get into building this business from where you were coming from at that time?
We wanted to build something online, and we were about to launch an online jewelry website. did not know anything about jewelry, went to a bunch of trade shows, bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory, built the website, had the distribution, and then I was shopping in a neighborhood pet store. I had a poodle and I was going every few weeks and
just hit me on one of my trips that i understood the product much better it was a recurring revenue purchase the market was still fragmented the fact that there was still neighborhood pet stores at the time and they had not been disrupted by petco and pet smart was fascinating to me and then you had to eat you had amazon which was established and had pet products
since the 90s but they hadn't really achieved real scale in the category so the vision was to replicate the same experience that i had at the neighborhood pet store but do it online and do it at scale and i looked at amazon's best practices when it came to supply chain so fast shipping having a great selection being competitively priced and then the experience at the neighborhood pet store
of knowing the products really well. And it was easy to be passionate about the category because I'm a pet owner and everyone we hired were pet owners. And it was all about market leadership as a low margin business. Hindsight, not necessarily the best idea to go head to head against Amazon selling 30 pound bags of pet food, but we executed really well and we grew really quickly.
And we had negative working capital. And so it was a business that was able to get billions of dollars in revenue and not consume a lot of capital.
How did you learn to execute well? So at the time, you had little business experience prior to that. How did you learn those skills?
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Chapter 5: What is Ryan Cohen's three-part vision for eBay?
What were the principles and the values that made you excellent at operating that business?
I understood from the beginning that... The real competition was always Amazon, and they were world-class when it comes to supply chain. So negotiating... very fiercely with suppliers to get the best product costs. And that meant getting to scale and going from buying pallets of dog food to truckloads of dog food and moving from distribution to direct and buying.
Chapter 6: Why has eBay rejected Ryan Cohen's acquisition offer?
Generally, the more you buy, the lower the prices are going to be operating efficiently in the warehouses. And so labor optimization, warehouse management optimization, getting competitive prices with shipping carriers, it was a game of pennies. And the goal was to grow quickly and establish market leadership.
And the difference between failure and success was pennies in the red is failure and pennies in the black is success. So We had to operate hyper efficiently and there was a lot of competition in the space. It wasn't a novel idea. It was going head to head against Amazon and pets.com was in the backdrop. So it made it very difficult to raise capital.
But I'd say at a high level, the market underestimated not the size of the addressable market, but our execution.
You know, as a customer, I've had lots of dogs.
Chapter 7: What challenges does Ryan Cohen face in acquiring eBay?
It was always such a great consumer experience. Did you personally put your finger on that? Or did you bring great people around you that understood consumer, apart from the supply chain optimization, the labor optimization, getting the cash flows to work right? Was there a lot on the consumer product angle that you spent time on with that business?
When we looked at the cohorts, you could see the customers were very sticky. And the I looked at it, the reason why I moved from jewelry to pet food was because it was a recurring item. So I love the fact that it was consumable. And when we started chewy for the first few years, we just focused on food, treats, litter, all of the things that people are buying all the time.
So the the vision and the idea was, if we treat our customers, well, they're going to continue shopping with us. And that's what we did.
Chapter 8: How does Ryan Cohen plan to improve eBay's operations?
And so it was everything from the handwritten holiday cards to the pet portraits to 24-7 customer service. And if there was ever an issue, we took care of the customer. And that's what happened. And the customers continued shopping with us. And the best referrals are word of mouth. And pet owners love to... to tell their friends and fellow pet owners if they have a great experience.
So the thesis ultimately played out.
So for those who don't know, you built and sold the business in 2017 for $3.35 billion. Subsequently, there was an IPO and that business continued to trade up in value. So you clearly executed well. But help me understand, how did you build and manage the leadership team, the management team and the people around you to execute so well? What did you learn as a manager, as a CEO, as an operator?
when you were building Chewy?
Staying on top of everything. Just, it's 24 seven, watching all of the numbers. I mean, I would stay in Google AdWords till four or five in the morning, managing campaigns myself. I was negotiating directly with all of our major suppliers. I had a supplier that told me during one of our negotiations, actually said it was like a one or one year contract. And he's like, I'm so happy this is over.
I never have to talk to you for a while. It was basically another year. He's like, I don't have to speak to you next year. It's like that was a compliment I would. And anytime someone else was doing the negotiation, I mean, it's counterintuitive. They want to build relationships with suppliers. The reality is, is It's mostly transactional.
And so if our suppliers are sending us gifts in the mail, that's a really bad sign. It means we're overpaying. If our suppliers are telling us they never want to speak to us again, it means we're getting the right price. But getting people into that framework is not easy because the... The path of least resistance is basically to get along and to be nice.
But unfortunately, when you're building a business and you're losing money, you got to focus on on sustainability. So just being on top of everything.
And what about on people? I'm just trying to understand your, your skill as a manager of people, because clearly you did something right, continue to execute a GameStop, which we'll get to in a minute. And I'm trying to understand, how do you find great people? And how do you hold people accountable? And what are management techniques that you've developed for building a team and running a team?
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