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Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin: Success Story of Fanatics’ Billionaire CEO

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Michael Rubin is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He serves as the executive chairman of Rue Gilt Groupe, the top off-price e-commerce portfolio firm, which comprises RueLaLa.com, Gilt.com, and ShopPremiumOutlets.com, as well as the CEO of Fanatics, the largest retailer of officially licensed sports apparel in the world.

Michael Rubin
Image Source: cnbc.com

In 1998, he launched GSI Commerce, which he later sold to eBay for $2.4 billion. In order to fund $60 million to combat food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rubin created the wildly popular “All In Challenge,” in which famous people, influencers, and corporations gave priceless items or once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Success Story

After selling his ski stores and using the money from his chance overstock deal, he founded KPR Sports, a company that bought and sold overstock name-brand athletic equipment.

Michael Rubin acquired 40% of Rykä, a maker of sporting shoes for women, in 1995. Global Sports Incorporated, a clothing and shipping business founded by Rubin in 1998, subsequently evolved into the multibillion-dollar e-commerce giant GSI Commerce.

Rubin began working on strategies to move GSI online in 1999. Even before going online, the wholesale sports equipment shop never had any physical retail storefronts; instead, it sold to other retailers directly. Rubin’s company was acquired by eBay in 2011 for $2.4 billion.

Rubin held little under 10% of the company at the time. He repurchased Shop Runner, a retail rewards program; Rue La La, a flash seller; and Fanatics, Inc., a licensed sports merchandiser.

Michael Rubin is the CEO of Fanatics and the executive chairman of the board at Rue La La.

The partnership between Simon Property Group and Rubin to bring their mall inventory online and their $280 million investment in the project was revealed on CNBC in 2019.

FedEx bought ShopRunner in December 2020. Rubin arranged partnerships between Fanatics and more than 300 professional sports leagues, teams, and organizations.

These partnerships included agreements with Nike, the National Football League, and Major League Baseball, which gave Fanatics exclusive rights to design, produce, and sell all Nike fan gear for the two leagues. Rubin purchased a minority stake in the Philadelphia 76ers in October 2011.

Michael Rubin belongs to the investor group that successfully offered $280 million for the team.

Two years later, Rubin invested $320 million in the administration of the Prudential Center and a part of the New Jersey Devils hockey team as a part of the same investment group. In 2013, the NHL approved the agreement and made the announcement.

Due to potential conflicts between his position as CEO of the expanding Fanatics company and the regulations governing sports club ownership, Rubin surrendered his shares in both franchises in June 2022. At its Philadelphia Visionary Gala in 2011, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) recognized Rubin for inspiring its students and embodying “the true spirit and determination of an entrepreneur.”

He was one of the “20 Most Powerful CEOs 40 and Under” in 2011, as per Forbes. Rubin was included in the first Bleacher Report “Power 50” list of the most important sports figures in 2018. Between 2015 and 2019, Rubin was listed among the “Top 50 Most Influential People in Sports Business” list published by Sports Business Journal.

Chris Sacca

Chris Sacca: Most Successful Venture Capitalist

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Chris Sacca is an American venture capitalist, business counselor, entrepreneur, and attorney.

About

He is the owner of Lowercase Capital, an American venture capital company that has made investments in seed and early-stage technology firms like Instagram, Uber, Twitter, Twilio, and Kickstarter. As a result of these investments, Forbes ranked him No. 2 on its Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017.

Chris Sacca
Image Source: forbes.com

Chris Sacca engaged in acquisitions and mergers while holding a number of positions at Google, where he oversaw alternate access and cellular operations. He made several “Guest Shark” appearances on ABC’s Shark Tank between 2015 and 2017.

Sacca announced his retirement from venture capital investing at the beginning of 2017. Sacca declared in 2021 that he was returning to venture investment with a focus on environmental issues.

Success Story

Chris Sacca, who was born in May 1975, attended Georgetown University to study law.

Chris Sacca began trading equities at this time using the money from his college debts.

He used leverage to turn $10,000 into $12 million, but he lost it all and wound up $4 million in debt which he eventually repaid. Sacca started his career in Silicon Valley in 2000 as an associate at Fenwick & West, where he managed venture capital, mergers, and acquisitions, and licensing transactions for clients in the technology industry like Macromedia, VeriSign, and Kleiner Perkins.

After being let off in September 2001 after working for roughly 13 months, he spent the following months going to networking events and “surviving” in Silicon Valley by creating contracts and working as a freelance voice actor.

He founded the consultancy company The Salinger Group in order to network, and in May 2002, he was hired by Speedera Networks According to Sacca, moving to the mountain hamlet of Truckee near Lake Tahoe in 2007 was a defining moment in his angel investment.

Sacca subsequently bought the house next door to entertain various visiting entrepreneurs after entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick and Sacca would spend hours exchanging ideas when visiting the residence. He spent time practicing law and working for Google before launching his own venture capital business, Lowercase Capital, in 2007.

Returns are not disclosed in Lowercase. But according to records that were leaked to the media, Lowercase’s primary fund returned 447% of investors’ money in cash between 2010-2015, and it also claims to have unrealized holdings in digital companies that would have increased returns to 7,600%.

One of the most prosperous venture capitalists in history, Sacca’s early investment in Uber may have increased total profits to 216 times the original investment. When Twitter went public in 2013, Sacca used $1 billion in outside funding to purchase more shares from employees after making his initial investment of $26,000 in the company in 2006.

When the stock price was roughly double its current levels in 2015, he sold the majority of the shares. In total, he and his investors profited $5 billion from the business. In 2020, Sacca and his wife co-founded Lowercarbon Capital, a fund dedicated to combating climate change.

In August 2021, the company revealed details of its initial $800 million outside investment round. As of August 2021, the company had invested in about 50 businesses, many of which were start-ups devoted to eliminating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Robert Herjavec

Robert Herjavec: From a poor immigrant to a millionaire ‘shark’

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Robert Herjavec is a Croatian-Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and TV personality.

About

Herjavec developed the Canadian Internet security software integrator BRAK Systems, which he later sold to AT&T Canada (now Allstream) for $30.2 million. He established The Herjavec Group in 2003, which currently has over $200 million in yearly revenue and is one of Canada’s leading IT and computer security organizations.

Robert Herjavec
Image Source: inc.com

He has appeared in episodes of the CBC Television program Dragons’ Den and the ABC program Shark Tank, in which he is an investor. He has published books on how to succeed in business as well.

Early Life

Robert Herjavec was born in Croatia in 1962. The nation was then a part of Yugoslavia, a socialist one-party state ruled by Communists. Herjavec’s father was a strong and courageous man who was determined to speak forth against the ruling system and its unjust form of government.

Unsurprisingly, his father’s outspoken opposition to communism frequently resulted in imprisonment. And his father eventually had enough after being arrested over 22 times. He so managed to get away from his captors and left the nation with his family. The family of Robert Herjavec moved to Canada for just $20, but his father ultimately got a job in a factory.

Although it wasn’t much, there was just enough money to support a family. Herjavec was only 8 years old at the time, but the authoritarianism back at home, as well as the poor economic circumstances and the pessimism that his father railed against, had a profound effect on his mental makeup.

Herjavec, who grew up close to poverty, decided to make improvements to his family’s and his own lives at the age of 14. He finally find his way to college and graduated from the University of Toronto with degrees in political science and English literature, and then entered the professional world with a heart full of ambition and a head full of optimism.

Success Story

He created BRAK Systems, a corporation that specialized in security integration, after becoming familiar with the ins and outs of the computer industry. Herjavec’s company flourished quickly becoming one of the leading security integration businesses in North America.

And luckily for Herjavec, AT&T was interested in purchasing his business, which he quickly sold for $20 million. Following that, Herjavec landed an executive role with a corporation called RAMP Networks. He grew the business as the VP of Sales for one of the initial VPN technology providers, which Nokia eventually purchased for $225 million.

Later he founded the Herjavec Group. Similar to his earlier business, he quickly expanded this one into a major force in the IT sector. His company, which is now renowned as Cyderes and is among the biggest in Canada for cyber security, merged with Fishtech Group.

He attracted the attention of a writer for the National Post when he stated that he had paid more than $10 million for a property in the early 2000s. And it was because of this media coverage and publication that he eventually attracted the attention necessary to get a role on Dragon’s Den, a predecessor to Shark Tank in Canada.

Before entirely ending his tenure with The Dragon’s Den in 2009, he also negotiated a deal with ABC’s Shark Tank. The rest is history, as they say. Since then, he has been a constant part of the program, and he has continued to gain fame and recognition.

Herjavec was given the 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal by the Governor-General of Canada for Outstanding Service to Canada as well as the 2012 Ernst & Young Ontario Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Technology.

Max Levchin

Max Levchin: A Visionary Tech Founder of Affirm

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Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and entrepreneur. He co-founded the business that later became PayPal in 1998. Levchin contributed to PayPal’s attempts to combat fraud and co-developed the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the initial commercial applications of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test. Max also co-founded Affirm along with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, and Alex Rampell.

Early Life

Max Levchin, who was born into a Jewish family in the USSR, immigrated to the US with his parents as refugees when he was very young. Levchin talked about overcoming obstacles as a child in interaction with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. Doctors questioned his prospects for survival because of his respiratory issues.

Max Levchin
Image Source: forbes.com

To increase his lung capacity, he started playing the clarinet with advice from his parents and grandmother. He decided to earn his degree in computer sciences from the University of Illinois. Soon after receiving his degree, Max partnered with Peter Thiel to establish what they referred to as “the digital wallets” through their company, Confinity. Later on, the pair transformed this into Paypal. Hugely successful PayPal was quickly acquired by eBay.

Success Story

Since the late 1990s, Levchin has started or co-founded a number of technology businesses. His first business, Confinity, merged with Elon Musk’s X.com to form PayPal, adding Levchin to the group of popular investors and businessmen known as the “PayPal Mafia” who previously held executive positions at PayPal. He also created Slide.

The slide was an app that allowed users to post photos on Facebook and Myspace. It was later acquired by Google, which shut it down after a while. Levchin also served as the CEO and Chairman of HVF, a startup lab centered on extracting insights through recordable information,” according to Crunchbase.

In 2011, he established HVF, which represents “Hard, Valuable, and Fun”. Levchin co-founded Glow, a data-driven fertility startup, which is owned by HVF. The business provides a female fertility tracking iPhone app. As a part of the inaugural portfolio of startup studio HVF, Max Levchin, Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, and Alex Rampell established Affirm.

Affirm is a publicly listed financial technology firm with its headquarters in San Francisco, USA. The business, which was established in 2012, provides installment loans to customers at the time of sale to help them fund purchases. He also made investments in numerous other companies, including Yelp and Evernote.

He still makes consistent investments in new businesses through SciFi VC.SciFi VC is a venture capital firm founded by Levchin. The firm was started through HVF Labs. It makes investments in early-stage organizations whose viability is based on challenging technical achievements, network effects, and intricate, highly regulated sectors.

From 2012 until 2015, Levchin served as a member of Yahoo’s board of directors. Levchin became the first executive from Silicon Valley to be selected for the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) advisory board in 2015. From 2006-2016, he also served on the board of Evernote. Levchin’s projected net worth in 2021 was just over $3 billion.

Andrew Grove

Andrew Grove: Man behind the success of Intel Corporation

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Andrew Grove was an American entrepreneur, engineer, and novelist who was born in Hungary. At the age of 20, he fled communist-run Hungary and relocated to the US, where he completed his education. Later, he was appointed CEO of Intel Corporation, where he played a key role in building the business into the largest semiconductor producer in the world.

Andrew Grove
Image Source: cnbc.com

Early Life

Andrew Grove was born in Hungary and spent a significant portion of his early years evading the Nazis by using a false identity. Grove fled the 1956 Hungarian Revolution for Austria and immigrated to the USA together with thousands of people from Eastern Europe.

Andrew Grove came to the United States in 1957 with very little money and minimal English language proficiency. While attending City College of New York to study chemistry, he had a job as a busboy. He did well in every other subject but English, in which he received mediocre grades.

At the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in California, a group of disgruntled researchers led by William Shockley included Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, and Andy Grove. But Shockley’s poor leadership style led to discontent among his research group. They ultimately disbanded and started their own business, Fairchild Semiconductor.

Grove began working for Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher after receiving his Ph.D. in 1963. By 1967, he had advanced to the position of assistant director of development. He became acquainted with the early stages of integrated circuit research through his work there.

Success Story

In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel, after they and Grove left Fairchild Semiconductor. Grove started off as the business’s director of engineering and assisted with setting up its early manufacturing processes. In 1997, he subsequently take over as chairman and CEO of the business, helping Intel along the road to becoming one of the key players in the information economy and a billion-dollar firm.

Even though Intel invented the majority of the memory types in use at the time, including EPROM, Grove was forced to make significant changes in 1985 as a result of declining demand for their memory chips caused by the Japanese “dumping” of memory chips at prices below cost.

As a result, he decided to stop making DRAMs and concentrate on building microprocessors. Grove and Earl Whetstone, Intel’s sales manager to IBM, were instrumental in convincing IBM to only utilize Intel microprocessors in all of its new personal computers. In 1979, Grove was named Intel’s president.

He later became the company’s CEO in 1987 and its chairman of the board in 1997. In its first year, the company’s revenue was $2,672; and in 1997, it increased to over $20.8 billion. Grove is recognized for transforming Intel from a memory chip manufacturer into the leading global manufacturer of microprocessors for personal computers, servers, and general-purpose computing.

Andrew Grove oversaw a 4,500% gain in Intel’s market value from $4 billion to $197 billion during his time as CEO, elevating Intel to the seventh-largest corporation in the world with over 64,000 employees. The majority of the corporation’s profits were put back into R&D and the construction of additional facilities in order to create better and faster microprocessors.

Jonah Peretti

How Jonah Peretti built a billion-dollar company Buzzfeed?

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Internet entrepreneur Jonah Peretti is co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, the company, which was formerly renowned for online quizzes, “listicles,” and pop culture pieces has developed into a global internet and technology organization that covers a range of subjects, such as politics, Crafts, animals, and business. He was the co-founder of The Huffington Post, and creator of the “Reblog” project, which pioneered reblogging.

Jonah Peretti
Image Source: theverge.com

Early Life

Jonah Peretti’s life appeared to be fairly typical until he founded the billion-dollar media giant BuzzFeed. He earned an environmental studies degree from UC Santa Cruz and found work as a teacher in New Orleans.

His passion for viral media was then kindled following an email argument with sportswear giant Nike. Before going to MIT to acquire his master’s, he spent over three years instructing computer science. During his time at MIT, his email conversation with Nike regarding a request to print “sweatshop” on specially ordered shoes became viral.

Read More: The Success Story of the Founder of The Huffington Post

Nike continued to cancel the order after several emails back and forth, so Peretti copied the emails together and forwarded them to a select group of pals. His idea became an initial email forward and eventually reached millions of people at a time when the idea of “going viral” hadn’t yet been coined.

Success Story

In 2005, Jonah Peretti co-founded the Huffington Post with Arianna Huffington after meeting her through the widely circulated Nike email. Peretti founded BuzzFeed as a side gig soon after HuffPost was acquired by AOL for $315 million in 2011. In November 2006, Peretti launched the “Internet popularity contest” website BuzzFeed.

After quitting HuffPost, Peretti started a full-time job at BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed began as an Instant Messenger bot. The bot distributed links to groups of buddies after identifying trendy content online. Although the website was initially recognized for its blend of listicles and internet memes, it was the first to report that John McCain will support Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican Primary.

After then, the website kept expanding and the following year raised over $35 million in capital from investors. The website received an additional $50 million in funding from the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz in August 2014, almost doubling its prior fundraising rounds. According to Peretti, BuzzFeed’s audience has roughly doubled every year since its start.

Over 400 employees now work for the website thanks to Peretti, who Business Insider once dubbed “the web’s king of viral content.” Over a short period of time. Ben Smith, a well-known political journalist, was even hired by Peretti in 2012 to help develop Buzzfeed’s more serious journalism.

By 2021, BuzzFeed News had invested years into developing its investigative reporting, and it had been awarded the National Magazine Award, the George Polk Awar, and been nominated for the Michael Kelly Award. BuzzFeed news crew was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in the foreign reporting category in 2018. In 2021, BuzzFeed received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for a series of investigations into the Xinjiang detention camps.