Ryan Cohen

In its last year before PetSmart bought it, Chewy sent about two million handwritten holiday cards to customers, roughly $940,000 in postage alone. Ryan Cohen built the company on gestures like that, deliberately uneconomical by ordinary retail standards, on the reasoning that larger competitors could not profitably copy them.¹

Cohen is the co-founder and former CEO of Chewy, an online retailer of pet food and supplies he built into an $8.7 billion public company before selling its predecessor business to PetSmart in 2017. He later became the controlling shareholder, chairman, and eventually CEO of GameStop, the video game retailer, and in 2026 used GameStop as the vehicle for an unsolicited bid to acquire eBay.

Background

Cohen was born in 1986 in Montreal, Canada, and grew up mostly in Coral Springs, Florida. His father, Ted Cohen, imported glassware and ran the household on a strict discipline of tracking every expense, from power bills to gasoline prices to the cost of individual products, and reinvesting savings into the stock market every year. Ted's guiding rule, as Cohen has recounted it, was that a business should sometimes accept a worse margin on a given sale to keep the customer: "if you take a carload of that, you'll make less money, but you'll keep the customer."¹ Cohen has cited this principle as the direct source of the customer-service philosophy he later built into Chewy.

Cohen showed an early aptitude for making money online, building websites for his father's business at 13 and moving into affiliate marketing at 15, reportedly earning thousands of dollars a month while still in school. He enrolled briefly at the University of Florida but dropped out with his father's support, reasoning that a degree would be a detour from a business he was already running.

Getting started

Cohen met his eventual Chewy co-founder, Michael Day, in an internet chat room for web design and programming; Day left the University of Georgia to build the company with him. In 2011 the two put roughly $150,000 of their own money into an online jewelry startup in Florida and were weeks from launching it when Cohen went to buy food for his five-pound poodle, Tylee, at a local pet store. The errand became the pivot point of his career: he realized he was far more passionate about the pet category than about jewelry. He and Day sold off the jewelry business, recovering most of their capital, and rebuilt a website, distribution arrangement, and logistics partnership within three months.¹ Chewy launched in June 2011 out of Dania Beach, Florida, chosen partly for family ties and partly because customer service was far cheaper to build there than in a major city. The name came from Tylee's nickname.

What he built

In its earliest days, Chewy was three men and a phone line. When there was no inventory, Cohen bought products himself and shipped them from a local copy shop; he and Day took no salaries and answered phones around the clock. Revenue reached about $26 million by the end of 2012.

Cohen built Chewy's identity around customer-service gestures that made little sense by conventional retail economics: hours-long calls, hand-drawn portraits of customers' pets made from submitted photos, reimbursement for customers who had to buy an item locally in an emergency, and the annual run of handwritten holiday cards. Raising money proved difficult: more than 100 VC meetings went nowhere, working against the perception that Chewy was fighting Amazon head-on with no-degree founders in a category that had already failed once, with Pets.com. The first institutional check came from Volition Capital's Larry Cheng, who stopped by the Dania Beach office in late 2012 and called back six months later with $15 million; other investors followed, and Chewy eventually raised about $236 million.¹

In late 2013, three third-party logistics providers Chewy relied on broke down simultaneously under the company's growth. Against a board expectation that a fix would take about eighteen months, Cohen brought fulfillment in-house in under six, leasing a warehouse in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.¹ Revenue climbed from about $200 million in 2013 to $900 million in 2016 and $3.5 billion in 2018, on roughly $130 million of total invested capital, with most 2018 sales from automatic-shipping subscriptions. PetSmart acquired Chewy for $3.35 billion in April 2017, then the largest e-commerce acquisition on record, netting Cohen roughly $1 billion before taxes. Chewy went public in June 2019 at an $8.7 billion valuation; Cohen had stepped down as CEO in 2018.¹

How he operates

Cohen's method across both companies has been to treat himself as the largest risk-bearer in the business rather than a hired executive: no salary at Chewy in its early years, and at GameStop compensation structured entirely as equity that vests only if market capitalization first doubles and later grows tenfold. He contrasts this with "professional management," boards and executives paid fixed sums with limited personal ownership, saying that when equity is handed out "like candy," recipients have little reason to fight for the business. At GameStop he cut SG&A by roughly 47 percent, about $800 million, mainly by curtailing marketing spend he views as an entrenched, low-return habit.² He has consistently underpromised financial results to investors and then exceeded them, from Chewy's first funding round through its sale.

Where things stand

Cohen became a GameStop director and chairman in 2021 after RC Ventures, his investment vehicle, built a stake approaching 13 percent, and was named CEO in September 2023. In May 2026, GameStop submitted a non-binding proposal to acquire all of eBay for $125 per share in cash and stock, a roughly 46 percent premium to eBay's price before GameStop began buying.² Cohen framed the approach as ownership rather than activism, saying he wanted to run eBay as if it were his own company, and pointed to GameStop's store network as a potential authentication layer for collectibles sold on eBay's marketplace.² eBay's board rejected the proposal on May 12, 2026, calling it neither credible nor attractive; Cohen indicated he was prepared to take the offer directly to shareholders, and as of mid-2026 the outcome remained unresolved.

Key facts

• Born 1986 in Montreal, Canada; raised in Coral Springs, Florida.
• Co-founded Chewy in 2011 with Michael Day after abandoning a nearly-launched jewelry startup, following a pet-store epiphany buying food for his poodle.
• Chewy's revenue grew from about $26 million in 2012 to $3.5 billion in 2018 on roughly $130 million of invested capital.
• PetSmart acquired Chewy for $3.35 billion in April 2017, then the largest e-commerce acquisition ever; Chewy went public in June 2019 at an $8.7 billion valuation.
• Became GameStop chairman in 2021 and CEO in September 2023, cutting the company's SG&A by roughly 47 percent, about $800 million.
• In May 2026, led a $125-per-share, roughly $28 billion non-binding bid through GameStop to acquire eBay, which eBay's board rejected as not credible.