We were about to launch an online jewelry website. Did not know anything about jewelry. Went to a bunch of trade shows, bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory, built the website, had the distribution, and then I was shopping in a neighborhood pet store. I had a poodle and I was going every few weeks and it just hit me on one of my trips that I understood the product much better. It was a recurring revenue purchase. The market was still fragmented.

Cohen's pivot from jewelry to pet food illustrates how founder-market fit and product insight can matter more than market size analysis when starting a business.

I understood from the beginning that the real competition was always Amazon and they were world class when it comes to supply chain. So negotiating very fiercely with suppliers to get the best product costs. And that meant getting to scale and going from buying pallets of dog food to truckloads of dog food and moving from distribution to direct. The difference between failure and success was you know pennies in the red is failure and pennies in the black is success. So we had to operate hyperefficiently.

Cohen articulates the razor-thin economics of low-margin e-commerce businesses and why hyperefficiency is existential, not optional.

It's counterintuitive. They want to build relationships with suppliers. The reality is it's mostly transactional. And so 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.

This counterintuitive heuristic reveals how Cohen measures negotiation success — supplier friendliness signals you're leaving money on the table.

I look for will over skill and I had a woman that was running customer service as an example and she came from working in like an old people's home and she applied for the job many times and we just didn't think she was qualified and she kept on applying. She was relentless. On paper, she didn't necessarily have the right experience, but she had drive, she was motivated, she wanted to work, and she ended up being incredible. In general it was finding people that are die-hards that are just willing to put everything in, go all in, and basically be as psychotic as me.

Cohen's 'will over skill' hiring philosophy challenges conventional credential-based hiring and explains how scrappy startups can out-execute larger, better-staffed competitors.

I took I went in and I had this bias from Chewy, which is basically everything that I learned at Chewy I was going to apply to GameStop. And it took me about just over a year to realize that was really really stupid. But I ended up hiring a bunch of e-commerce people from Chewy and Amazon. And I wasn't the CEO. I hired a CEO. So I didn't have day-to-day visibility on what was going on. But the strategy was to make GameStop more like Chewy. And that was the wrong strategy.

Cohen's candid admission that his Chewy playbook failed at GameStop is a rare example of a successful founder openly diagnosing the danger of overconfidence from prior success.

It was maniacal cost cutting mode, efficiency, basically focusing on what GameStop is really good at, which is the pre-owned side of things. And focused on running the retail business very very well. And then ultimately that led us to the category of collectibles which today the business is a leader in. You look at basically Chewy and GameStop you say well they're both retailers you take the same playbook but that's not the case. Totally different animal. One is you've got repeat purchases and you've got these really sticky cohorts and you know we can never over buy inventory at Chewy because we would end up ultimately selling it.

Cohen illustrates how surface-level similarities between businesses mask fundamentally different unit economics, inventory dynamics, and customer behavior.

Life is too short to do it small. And if you look at how complementary as we've gone into the collectible space, I've come to appreciate eBay differently. And if you look at how complementary these two businesses from a lot of different dimensions, the secondary market side of the business, the collectible side of the business, the ability to provide liquidity to consumers, what we're doing in stores, eBay is doing online. Authentication of secondhand items. There's so many aspects of the business that are similar except that eBay is global and has significant scale. And frankly, it's a business that I understand a lot better than physical retail.

Cohen frames the GameStop-eBay combination as a strategic vertical integration of physical and digital secondhand commerce, not merely a financial bet.

If you just look at how they've done since COVID, every important metric is down. GMV is down, active users is down by 30 million. Operating earnings is down. Revenue now is basically essentially break even. It's up a few points and operating expenses is up significantly. Their operating expenses now for a business that has no inventory — their revenues, their operating expenses are over half of their revenues. So that's a business that they're not growing. Everybody else in e-commerce is growing and they're making less money and they're spending a lot more and their sellers frankly aren't happy.

Cohen lays out a crisp, data-driven indictment of eBay's post-pandemic performance, making the bull case for operational intervention more concrete.

There are three areas. Number one is on immediately improving earnings through cutting costs and pulling $2 billion of costs out of the business on the operating base of close to 5.5 billion of expenses. And $2.4 billion spent on sales and marketing for essentially no user growth. There's a lot of money to pull out there. And then there's two growth vectors. Number one is live commerce and there's a large competitor that is completely crushing it and eBay has the users, eBay has the brand, they have a platform, but the platform sucks for a lot of different reasons. And they don't have the content creators on the platform and nobody even really knows eBay Live exists.

Cohen reveals his three-part eBay turnaround thesis with specific numbers, providing a rare window into how an activist operator frames a public M&A bid.

This is something that I have not spoken about before publicly but eBay today is the leader in physical items, physical collectibles as an example. And so I would extend that into digital collectibles. And essentially, if you look at all of these in-game items, AAA titles that people are accumulating, skins, weapons, all of these things, taking eBay and building a marketplace where you can provide liquidity for in-game digital items. Essentially, it's what NFTs could have, people thought they were, but ultimately they had no real utility. In-game items actually have real utility.

Cohen publicly unveils a third growth vector — a marketplace for in-game digital items — framing it as the legitimate version of what NFTs promised but failed to deliver.

I'm putting 500 million of my own money into this transaction. I haven't pulled a penny out of GameStop. I've invested a lot of money into GameStop. I've been doing it for a long time. GameStop's a much stronger business today. Everyone hates GameStop and it seems like everyone in the media basically wants us to fail and wants them to succeed. And you've got a board that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They don't buy stock with their own money. They end up showing up to a handful of board meetings and they're making a fortune. You've got a management team that is grossly overpaid with taking zero risk. There's nothing more American than basically risking your own capital.

Cohen draws a sharp moral and financial contrast between owner-operators who risk personal capital and professional managers who extract compensation without skin in the game.

I do think that the media, in order to give you credibility, and this would be my take on this, they're going to have to acknowledge that all of their takes on GameStop just being a meme stock were wrong and that there is actually a business here and that there is value being created here and that they missed that and they got the story completely wrong. And so to recognize that and to recognize your competency as an executive and as a CEO and as someone that can run eBay better than the installed management makes them wrong in their assessment. To maintain their credibility, they have to continue to make you seem less credible.

Cohen offers a structural explanation for persistent media skepticism — that acknowledging his success requires outlets to admit prior narratives were wrong, which journalists resist.

I'm going to do whatever we need to do, whatever I need to do in order to succeed.

Cohen signals an unconditional commitment to the acquisition, hinting at willingness to escalate tactics including a hostile bid.

If I'm their bankers, I get hired to run a process and maximize shareholder value. Those bankers then try and negotiate with you. But the truth is, if there's no other biders, they're just negotiating against themselves.

This exposes the bluff embedded in investment bank-led sale processes when there is effectively only one credible buyer.

It's a lot of money. It's a big premium and beauty is in the eye of the beholder and like it makes sense for me to pay this for the business because of what I could do with the business.

Cohen articulates the classic acquirer's logic: a price that looks expensive to others is rational when you have a unique operating vision for the asset.

Not just shortterm in terms of increasing the earnings, but long-term in terms of really taking significant market share in live commerce and digit building a digital marketplace for gaming. That's something an existing management team would never be able to build in their wildest dreams.

Cohen lays out his contrarian thesis: eBay's current management is structurally incapable of capturing the live-commerce and gaming marketplace opportunity he envisions.

Obviously when it comes to their large competitors, there's antirust issues in terms of them being able to to do a deal of this size as well.

Cohen identifies antitrust as a structural moat protecting his bid — large tech or e-commerce giants who could outbid him are effectively barred from doing so.

I don't know why they won't speak to me. They should cuz I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to go away.

This public statement itself is a tactical move — pressuring eBay's board by broadcasting his persistence to shareholders and the media.

People could come along and buy the shares on the open market, too, and vote in favor of your offer. So I mean this is what often happens in these sorts of situations historically is the shareholder base can turn over and if people like the premium on the stock today and they don't want to own GameStop stock tomorrow there's probably going to develop a good market for trading the shares if the market starts to believe your story.

The host explains the arbitrage dynamic that organically builds pressure on target boards: risk arbitrageurs replace long-term holders and create a shareholder base aligned with the deal.

There's a lot of different escalation paths that um we have in our toolkit and we'll see them.

Cohen deliberately keeps eBay's board guessing by refusing to specify his next move, a classic negotiating posture in contested M&A.

Are you working with bankers? Are you doing this alone? >> Yeah, we're we're working with bankers and uh highriced advisors.

Confirming professional advisory support signals Cohen is running a serious, institutionally-backed process rather than a retail-driven stunt.

I'm going all in.

Cohen's closing words frame the eBay pursuit not as a financial trade but as a total personal and strategic commitment, consistent with his Chewy and GameStop playbooks.