It's a long time ago. $2.4 billion dollars is a ton of money. So, I just want to understand how do you manage to get away with the bit that ends up being 25 worth 2 billion?
Well, two things later. It would be wrong for me to not say when I sold the company to eBay for $2.4 billion, I think I had screwed up a lot of pieces of the business and I had actually been a better CEO then. I think the company could have been worth hundred billion. Like if you think about what we built. We built one of the first e-commerce technology engines. Think about what Shopify is worth today. We built an incredible email platform. Think about what Exact Target that was bought by Salesforce was worth. So, if you go through each of the pieces of what I built, I didn't do a great job. So, I actually think I failed up by selling it for $2.4 billion.
But I think you're actually giving way too much credit to me. In 2011, Fanatics was nothing. Okay? It was a completely undifferentiated e-commerce site of licensed sports merchandise and eBay didn't want it because they're like look we don't want to be an inventory owned business. It wasn't a good business. It was nothing business. When I bought it and it's the only thing I focused on that allowed us to think about how to really build a strategy. So the only thing I really thought when I bought the business I had one giant fear which is there's this little company in Seattle called Amazon. I don't know if you've heard of them. You've heard of them? Yeah. Amazon. I thought if I didn't completely differentiate ourselves against Amazon, we would be dead. So it was really when I bought it was like how do I differentiate the business and then the strategies kind of evolved as we've gone. So yes, I know we had to be highly differentiated or we wouldn't be in business because I watched what Amazon did to us and Sports Authority and all these other retailers we worked with. So that fear was very helpful. But I think the reality is no, I didn't know what I was going to do with the business. I bought it and just like it was just that natural compass like I'll figure it out.
But it's so interesting to me that you had this thing and you were going to figure it out and because to me I look at Fanatics as such a differentiator in the marketplace, right? You own your space. You own the relationship with sports fans across all of the leagues and their purchases bar none. It's not like you have like so much competition. It's like Fanatics, Fanatics, Fanatics. And indeed when I, you know, was partnering with Christine Yuzchek and we were going to start Offseason, all roads led back to Fanatics. If you want to be in the team sports business, if you want to sign with a league, you have to come back to you guys. And so I'm so interested in how you've been able to ring fence this incredible kind of company and you've been able to keep everybody else out when seemingly it doesn't feel like it was this big strategic part of your plan. And it was like essentially what you were left with and you had to focus on that.
Yeah. So, first I don't think what you're saying is accurate at all.
Oh, good. All right. Tell me.
Like I feel like... cuz you feel like you're constantly under attack. I there's so much in our entire business across the board. Collectibles business, trading cards, sports betting, merchandise. There's tons of competition. What our job...
We are number one. Every day everyone's coming to kill number one.
Well, listen, that's just your mentality. Like that's unbelievable.
That's not my mentality. That's the truth. Okay. And the second I get confident is when it's over. Like I really feel like the second you like that's why you're so they kill you. And so I feel like I want to run this business like we're a startup. Like 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 Offseason. Talk about Kristen. 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 dressed Taylor Swift. I saw it all over. I started following her back. I'm like, wow. I love what she's about. I love this. And then small world, I find out that she's partnered 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? Right? 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 a star? And you know, I was like, I loved it cuz 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 all the changes that are happening in the apparel and 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, yeah, like we actually we had, 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 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 wanted 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 Fanatics took the brunt of most of it and there was a lot of consumer noise, hey these pants are see-through, 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 had been talking about brand purpose for the last year, and I was like, what is this brand purpose? Like, is this just 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 if 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 requesting everything we've ever done to say how do we be better.
So you feel like everything is anchoring back into that brand.
Everything has to go into that brand purpose of relentlessly enhancing the fan experience. So when we started the sports betting business, we said hey if we give you back money in every bet that you make that you can use anywhere in 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? Fanatics is the most rewarding sports book. And by the way, they're the fairest sports book. Why? By the way, we've picked up as of this month, I just saw this morning, we have about 7, 8% 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. It's 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 two billion dollar 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, kind of walking you through how my brain thinks.
But I think it's so interesting to think how your brain thinks because there'll be so many people listening to this podcast who want to start a business or have started business and your mentality is what makes you so interesting. It's your approach and the idea like it kind of makes me laugh that you still feel like you're being constantly chased and I get it and for you I get listen I believe you you're being constantly chased but I think it's really interesting that you've orientated all of these businesses around this mission and when you're starting out do you think it's really important for young people or for people that are just like getting into something is it important to orientate yourself around a mission because I feel like we hear so much about purpose about mission, about purpose-driven companies, like and what does that even mean when you're beginning?
Yeah. So, I would say if I had the chance to start over again in 2011 with Fanatics, I wish I had that brand purpose then cuz I think we'd be a better company today. 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 Fanatics business where 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 didn't care about you 5 years ago and all of a sudden they want to kill you?
Right. You right now when we're doing this podcast together, you got people out there looking at what's Emma doing? what Jen's doing, you know, what's Kim doing? What are you guys doing? How do we kill these guys? Because you guys are winning. That's you're lucky to be in that position. But if you don't stay on your A-game, you're gonna be dead.
And how much do you look at the competition? Cuz I am always looking at the competition.
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.
Do you think everyone should do that? Cuz I don't think many people are honest about that, right? The entire fashion business works on the premise. Everybody cross shops, everybody's brand, everybody looks at everything that's happening and yet we all pretend that we don't. So, I'm so interested in you just going, you see a feature on someone's website, you're like, I'm putting that in tomorrow.
