BOARDROOM: Michael Rubin on Building Fanatics into a Billion-Dollar Empire

Michael Rubin lives a life. Take a few swipes down your Instagram feed, and you’re likely to see him chopping it up with Hall of Fame athletes or Grammy Award-winning musicians. He’s seemingly everywhere all the time. Every big game, the most exclusive parties.

But none of that really excites the 52-year-old. Spend enough time talking to the the mercurial Philly-born businessman and you learn that the thing that occupies the majority of his mental is Fanatics, the company he’s grown since 2011 from a small offshoot of GSI Commerce, which he sold to eBay for $2.4 billion, to a sports merchandising and gambling empire unlike anything we’ve seen before. 

The journey has taken immense vision and risk tolerance, forethought and confidence, and, above all, steadfast leadership. But, to let Rubin tell it, that success can be traced back to what he believes are two of his core strengths: Sizing up a company or opportunity and figuring out whether or not it’s even a good business to be in. “I think one of my strengths is [being] able to size up what’s a big and interesting business,” he says from his palatial Westside headquarters. “Two, can we do something to make it better? And then also, is it a good business to be in?”