When Michael Rubin was still in high school, he opened a ski shop near where he grew up in Lafayette Hill. And within two years, the now-billionaire owner of Fanatics and the 76ers was about to file for bankruptcy — at age 16, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “I tell that story to show that growth comes from failure,” he said. Rubin said he hated high school. He was the son of a veterinarian and a psychologist, but “I was a terrible athlete. The only sport I was good at was skiing.” So he opened a ski shop and was pulling in $125,000 in revenue his first year of high school. Then, he said, he got cocky. “I had $200,000 in bills and $100,000 in inventory, and a Porsche I bought when I turned 16,” but that year, “there was no snow. I had to hire a bankruptcy attorney." The lawyer told Rubin he wasn’t technically old enough to have to file for bankruptcy, so he ended up settling with creditors for $38,000. He had promised his father that he would try college, but Rubin dropped out of Villanova University after six weeks and went into the resale-closeouts business, starting with athletic footwear and expanding into apparel. The business grew to $100 million in revenues and $10 million in net profits by the time he was 21. By 1998, Rubin began hearing about the internet, but dismissed it. “I knew nothing about it, and I thought, ‘Screw these internet people, they lose a lot of money.’ Then I asked some of my biggest accounts and vendors, like Sports Authority, and they told me e-commerce was a big opportunity. They said, ‘You’re young, you’re 25, can you solve this problem for us?’ So I started GSI Commerce.”
