Tim Sherman

Fanatics runs 1,000 websites on a single platform. When a team wins a championship, tens of thousands of orders hit within minutes. We spoke with Sashanka Vishnuvajhala, SVP of Engineering at Fanatics, about how AI changed his engineering org. His team introduced three-person triads where a PM, an engineer, and a designer or quality lead ship complex projects through rapid iterations. "Coding was never the hard part. It is everything around. AI is helping everything around by improving the context for this to work," Sashanka told us. The increased speed also exposed bottlenecks in CI/CD and code reviews that had gone unnoticed. Watch the full episode for how Fanatics organizes triads and handles code review at AI speed.

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They are building the Biggest Sports Ecosystem in the World. On the first day of National Retail Federation’s Big Show, Michael Rubin, Founder and CEO of Fanatics, joined Sara Eisen to explain how the company evolved from a $250M licensed merchandise business into a $13B global sports ecosystem, built on three pillars: Commerce, Cards & Collectibles, and Betting & Gaming. 1️⃣ Commerce remains the foundation of Fanatics and now represents a ~$7B business. Originally focused on licensed merchandise, the company evolved into a largely direct-to-consumer platform, with DTC accounting for roughly 75% of operations. Instead of competing head-on with Amazon, Fanatics differentiated by creating a digital sports platform centered on licensed products, rigorous category management, and long-term expansion of the $25–30B global licensed retail market, all while preserving a “scrappy startup” mindset at scale. 2️⃣ The second pillar, Cards & Collectibles (~$4B), shows Fanatics’ ability to reinvent legacy categories. Moving beyond the pandemic-driven boom, the company built Fanatics Collect, a marketplace that scaled rapidly, reaching ~$2.5–3B in GMV by its third year. By combining content, commerce, and community, collectibles became a durable, core business within the ecosystem rather than a cyclical trend. 3️⃣ The newest pillar is Betting & Gaming (~$2B), with the ambition to become Fanatics’ largest vertical by 2030. Entering a duopoly, the company differentiated through ecosystem leverage: FANCash as a cross-platform sports currency, fan-first features like injury protection on player bets, and access to a 140M-strong customer base that significantly lowers acquisition costs. Built with disciplined capital deployment, Betting & Gaming is designed not just to compete, but to redefine fan engagement in sports. #offbounds #nrf2026 #fanatics #nrf #retailpodcast 

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AppLovin Q2 2026 earnings: a rare earnings miss "AppLovin’s Q2 results do not invalidate either of the pillars of AppLovin’s growth narrative that I outline above, but they do expose the timing risk embedded in both. Gaming growth remains dependent on model improvements that management cannot schedule precisely, while eCommerce is constrained by data density, creative format misalignments, and a go-to-market strategy that may be stuck in a Goldilocks dilemma." https://lnkd.in/dAtdVgG2

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Unsurprisingly, AI dominated conversations at GDC '26 while everyone got treated to an absolutely gorgeous week in SF ☀️. I caught up with colleagues across the spectrum from the world’s biggest gaming publishers and platforms to founders building new startups. My takeaway: Larger game companies are struggling to unlock real leverage from AI. All have top down mandates to use AI, but I heard consistently that retrofitting AI into big, pre-AI organizations has been hard to operationalize. Meanwhile, new AI-native startups and smaller teams are seeing massive gains in speed and output. By GDC ’27, I expect we’ll have many success stories emerge from this cohort of new AI-native teams.

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For years, social platforms have competed to keep us scrolling. But could play be the next big driver of engagement? Gary Knight, CEO of WOLF, explores how casual gaming is helping social platforms build stronger communities, reduce churn and create more meaningful interaction. Head to NODE for his take on why the future of social may be less about passive feeds and more about shared play: https://lnkd.in/ePYgDsp6 #SocialGaming #GamingIndustry #SocialMedia #CommunityBuilding #MobileGaming

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The Return of the Generalist: A collapsing org chart, the power of chaos, and the value of range AI is collapsing the execution layer that justified decades of specialization. Writing copy, building email flows, running paid, and analyzing data are all getting cheaper and faster every day. So what's left? Point of view, taste, and the ability to look across an entire business and know which lever matters most. The pattern recognition you can only build by working across functions, not within them. In this week's piece I wrote about the return of the generalist: a specialist can optimize a funnel, but a generalist can tell you whether you're optimizing the right funnel in the first place. Why context switching is a learned skill, why range compounds the same way brand does, and why the next era rewards the people who can see the whole board. Full piece here: https://lnkd.in/eRgdt4Cn

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"For games in my genre, there is no stronger rocket fuel." That's Josh Chandley, President and COO of WildCard Games, on what AppLovin has done for their business. Mobile gamers aren't a niche. They're everyday Americans: the 45-year-old software engineer playing cribbage, the mom on Candy Crush, the commuter on Solitaire. They buy shoes, cosmetics, apparel, and hardware. They just happen to also play games. For WildCard, that's meant stronger performance, lower retention costs, and as Josh puts it, the ability to "serve their users better."

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Many truly great leaders are trauma-informed strategists. That is why in the middle of chaos, they are calm and able to cut through the noise to solve the problem. It's not some skill you can go out and learn, but one earned through pure survival. It makes them resilient and able to shrug the things that don't matter off while recognizing the tiniest signals in others. Emotional Intelligence with the IQ to process it. I'll never forget a job many years ago where my boss after the first month said "This place is an absolute $h*tshow and it doesn't phase you at all. You're just out here solving one problem at a time." Me - " I told you this is nothing new and not the worst I have seen. We can work through this."

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A big part of my job is figuring out where AI can actually improve how we work, beyond vibecoded HTMLs and beautified trackers. If this technology is truly transformational, we need to raise the bar on what we expect it to deliver. Data connectivity sits at the center of the solve - the nice thing is at a company as large and complex as Fanatics, the data usually exists. The hard part is getting the right context to the right person in time to make a decision. That's where our work with Summation comes in. Its AI analyst is already delivering real ROI across Fanatics: we've seen it in planning, saving millions by putting it to work across key workflows. What excites me is the opportunity to make deeper analysis part of how more people run the business every day. More questions explored. More decisions informed by the data we already have. More time for talented people to act on what they learn. Check out more about our work together in the comments!

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