Billionaire entrepreneur Michael Rubin might be famous in-part due to his lavish, star-studded annual all-white parties, but on Thursday evening, Rubin was gracious enough to diversify his apparel color palette, spending an hour imparting words of wisdom at the home of the cardinal and gold.
The Fanatics CEO’s conversation with moderator Jason Kelly of Bloomberg at the USC Sports Business Association’s annual summit served as the finale to an event that hosted a plethora of prominent speakers in both sports business and sports media.
Rubin’s attendance at the event took extensive planning on SBA’s part. This year’s event grew in scale and prominence, and in order to land some of the key speakers, the SBA leadership team had to be persistent.
“It took a lot of consistency and follow-ups, but ultimately his team was amazing,” said Blair Solender, SBA’s president and the director of the Sports Business Summit. “I think that the conversation spoke for itself if anyone heard it. It was unbelievable — the dynamic was awesome and he was such an open book.”
In his one hour segment, Rubin pontificated on a variety of topics, including his tips for aspiring entrepreneurs, strategies to successfully implement specialized marketing and deep-dives into the mechanics of various sport-centered markets.
He began the discussion by delving into his childhood, and some of the early signs that entrepreneurship was his calling.
“From being the littlest kid, from being eight years old, I’d love to hustle,” Rubin said. “I remember when it would snow in Philadelphia, and I would hire like six kids to work for me at eight-years-old. I would sell snow-shoveling at 20 bucks a driveway and pay the kids 50 cents a driveway. I had that entrepreneurial spirit — that’s who I was as a kid, and that’s all I ever remember. "
It was this unique drive that led Rubin to start his first business — a ski tuning shop he ran at the young age of 12. The shop began as a tremendous success — he recalled making $25,000 by the time he turned 13.
However, Mike’s Ski Shop’s success was short-lived and the business imploded by the time Rubin was 16. Rubin said he was in so much debt that he would have had to file for bankruptcy were he not underage.
In front of a crowd filled with hundreds of USC students, Rubin used this event to explain how going through that challenge helped him recognize the necessity of embracing failure.
“Every failure has led to the next success — it’s been the same way for me my entire life. I slap my face into the wall all the time. Shit goes wrong, but then you say, ‘what are you learning? How can you do better?’” Rubin said.
In the conversation’s latter half, Rubin focused on his current business strategies with Fanatics. He discussed the importance of mastering specialized marketing and also how he studies and learns from other brands’ strategies. In particular, he emphasized the importance of fearlessness when it comes to innovation.
“There’s so many product innovations that we haven’t even cracked the code on yet… people love to win, but I also want to encourage people to take chances all the time,” said Rubin. “If people aren’t taking chances, then at the end of the day, our competitors are going to put a bullet in the back of our heads because we’re not being aggressive enough.”
Rubin’s discussion resonated with many of the USC students in attendance. Jeremiah Su, a spring admit and soon-to-be freshman, reflected on some of the prevalent lessons from Rubin’s speech.
“I think my biggest takeaway is that I can’t really be scared of rejection and failure,” said Su. “You have to really put yourself out there and not worry about things not going the way you expect.”
Rubin finished the conversation by discussing Fanatic’s newer ventures in gambling and trading cards, as well as team ownership, given his status as a former Philadelphia 76ers minority owner.
But at the end of the day, Rubin continued to hammer home one core motif: being tenacious and hard-working.
“I work like 17-18 hours a day,” Rubin said when asked about his work ethic. “People will say that that’s [messed] up, that it doesn’t make sense. Like, ‘why would you do that?’ But I’m like, ‘why would I not do what I love doing?’”
As the hundreds of students who attended Rubin’s speech flowed out of the Trojan Grand Ballroom, Solender expressed gratitude for how Thursday’s event played out.
“We’ve been planning since April, and everyone just executed today. Everyone was on their A-game, everyone was on top of it, everyone was where they needed to be and everyone was offering help,” said Solender.
“It couldn’t have gone better.”