GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's $56B Plan to Take Over eBay

The conversation opens on a note of grievance. GameStop is described as a company that "everyone hates," with the media cast as wanting it to fail and its rival to succeed. The comments contrast this with criticism of incumbent governance: a board described as earning "hundreds of thousands of dollars a year" while not buying stock with its own money and attending only "a handful of board meetings," and a management team called "grossly overpaid." Against that, risking one's own capital is presented as the most American thing a person can do.

The interview is introduced as a conversation with Ryan Cohen about trying to acquire and run eBay, a story the host links to the start of the internet 25 to 30 years ago. Before getting to eBay, the discussion goes back to Chewy, the business Cohen started.

In the first-person account given, the original plan was an online jewelry store. The founders knew nothing about jewelry but had gone to trade shows, bought "hundreds of thousands dollars worth of inventory," built the website and set up distribution. The switch came during regular trips to a neighborhood pet store with a poodle. The speaker found pet products easier to understand, saw them as a recurring purchase, and noted that the market was still fragmented, with neighborhood stores that Petco and PetSmart had not displaced.

Amazon is described as having sold pet products since the 1990s without reaching real scale in the category. The plan was to recreate the neighborhood pet store experience online and at scale. That meant copying Amazon's supply-chain practices (fast shipping, wide selection, competitive prices) while adding product knowledge and enthusiasm from staff who were all pet owners. The business was framed as a low-margin bid for market leadership.

The account admits that going "head to head against Amazon selling 30 pound bags of pet food" was not necessarily the best idea in hindsight. It credits execution and negative working capital, which let the business reach billions of dollars in revenue without consuming much capital.

Asked how operating skills were learned with little prior business experience, the answer centers on Amazon as the real competitor and on supply-chain discipline. The account lists fierce supplier negotiation for the best product costs, scaling from pallets to truckloads of dog food, buying direct instead of through distribution, optimizing warehouse labor and management, and negotiating with shipping carriers.

It was a game of pennies.

The margin between outcomes is put in those same terms: "pennies in the red is failure" and "pennies in the black is success." Competition was heavy, the idea was not new, and pets.com was "in the backdrop," which made raising capital very difficult. The speaker's conclusion is that the market underestimated the execution, not the size of the addressable market.

The account also describes hands-on involvement: tracking the numbers around the clock, staying in Google AdWords "till four or five in the morning" managing campaigns, and negotiating directly with major suppliers. One supplier is quoted as being glad not to have to talk to the speaker for another year, which was taken as a compliment. The broader claim is that supplier relationships are "mostly transactional" even though people instinctively want to build relationships.

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.

The account acknowledges that getting a team to work this way is hard, because "the path of lease resistance is basically to get along and to be nice." A business that is losing money, it argues, has to focus on sustainability.