On Wednesday, GameStop announced that it had appointed Matt Francis to the newly created role of Chief Technology Officer, who was most recently an engineering leader at Amazon Web Services.
Video transcription
MYLES UDLAND: With an eye, of course, on GameStop’s shares, it remains in trend here on the website, it remains one of the most, if not the most discussed actions among retailers, really among anyone who follows the market. Yesterday, we saw GameStop’s shares drop about 60%. They closed at $ 90 a share. And we see that the shares were up about 12% this morning, trading just over $ 100 a share in some news that will almost never move any company’s shares so much.
But GameStop announced this morning for the first time, that it appointed Matt Francis as its chief technology officer. Matt comes to GameStop from AWS, but has some crossover with some members of the leadership team – or excuse me, they are also announcing that they have a senior vice president of customer service, Kelli Durkin. And she has a cross-leadership team from her time on Chewy.
So Brian Sozzi is bringing the whole band back here. But I think a 13% rise in hiring a CTO and a customer service VP certainly shows that this thing still remains in the fun zone, although it has fallen – it has fallen 70% since closing on Friday.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yes, I think GameStop really buried the lead here. They should have titled this press release, “We hired a group of former Amazon employees,” because that’s what you’re getting here with your new chief technology officer, Matt Francis, who has a lot of experience as an engineer at Amazon Web Services.
And a very important note you made, Myles, about Kelli Durkin, vice president of customer service for Chewy. Obviously, I wouldn’t be surprised if its biggest shareholder, now Ryan Cohen, had something to do with it. But Chewy is known for his customer service, and GameStop is not. It is not good. Customer service is not good.
Also, the other contractor is also Josh Krueger. He held fullfillment positions at Amazon, Walmart and QVC. Now, these are three companies that know what they’re doing in terms of compliance, which, again, GameStop doesn’t know. So, just the fact that they’re GameStop, which has been an endangered retailer for five years – we’ve been hitting hard for the past few days – that they’re capable of attracting that kind of talent, maybe there’s some kind of twist here. But then again, I don’t see that.
JULIE HYMAN: Brian Sozzi’s analysis of GameStop’s customer service is not good. But for me, the most interesting developments that are happening today have nothing to do with GameStop itself, and that has been the story for me all along. The developments around it are more interesting than the company itself. First, of course, we have Janet Yellen, who is calling a regulators’ meeting this week to talk about the volatility surrounding GameStop. Who knows what they’ll do? It is supposed to be a discussion at this point.
But it must be interesting at the same time as Vlad Tenev, who has been, as we know, everywhere, talking about his company, Robinhood, and his role in all of this, he published a blog yesterday and said that the liquidation, the process compensation for negotiations, should be abbreviated. It must be instantaneous, he said. Because in fact, instead of removing the risk from the system, as it was designed to do, he says it increased the risk to the system.
Now, I don’t know what the regulators are going to do on that front. One could imagine that this will be at least part of the discussion. But I have to mention also, at the same time, as if you don’t have enough of Robinhood, they are releasing a Super Bowl ad as well that they will be running during the game on Sunday. But you can already see everything on YouTube. Here is a small piece of it. It’s beautiful – it’s a pretty serious commercial here.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yes, they should have– yes, I mean, really, it should have been a whole– they should have just taken that money and kept it internally. Myles is really happy – you must create a Substack. You need a newsletter.
MYLES UDLAND: Yes, you know, the only thing about that commercial that really stood out for me was the last part at the very end, “we are all investors”. Because this is– the funny thing about– you know, Julie, about Vlad’s blog post yesterday and his storm of tweets about what it should look like T plus 0 is, this is marketing copy.
For example, the issue that Robinhood addressed are issues of the type of financial regulatory plumbing, which are deeply thought out, deeply discussed, deeply debated within the industry, within other financial companies. I’m sure an entire team at a company like Virtue, like Citadel, is thinking about where we should spend our lobbying dollars. Should we try to make it reduce T plus 2 to T plus 1? Should we be thinking about something else?
And Robinhood is coming off the tightrope here with an argument for a limit of any D plus 2 that is based on his own finance democratization marketing materials. It’s not really based on how the market works and why we got here in the first place. So, I mean, apparently we’re going to hear from Tenev at a Senate hearing on February 18, so not much, much time for us all to expect to hear from the guy himself.
I’m just surprised that another week after the start of the saga, it is still being shaped around how we want to position our brand, rather than where we fit into the financial system and what it allows us to and does not allow us to make and any decisions that we must take accordingly. I find it strange that we are outside the financial sector and are better at it, at a time when you took on billions of dollars of capital because you were forced to do so by the same system you pretend not to be part of. So I think …
JULIE HYMAN: Yes, and by the way, I don’t think you’re going to have to wait until February 18th to hear from him, right? I mean, the way things are going, we’re going to hear a lot more from him. One of – obviously, one of the other narratives around all of this is the kind of conspiracy theories that are being invented by some people at Wall Street Bets and elsewhere.
And fueling that may be the idea that Janet Yellen had to obtain an ethics waiver to convene this regulatory meeting, because she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in lecture fees from Citadel. Citadel has been one of the types of villains painted by Wall Street Bets in this situation because they were one of the main buyers of Robinhood’s order flow.
Now, as always, in reality, the story is probably much more complex than it would have been painted, that there is this kind of conspiracy by regulators and Wall Streeters who are working together to fix the market. But the fact that it may be a small detail of it will not help the narrative.
MYLES UDLAND: Yes, and I know we don’t have time to get into that. I mean, I really don’t have any sympathy for Janet Yellen being in a strange situation here. But we don’t have to get into the ethics of who it should be – you know, what that revolving door must be like. I mean, Donald Trump was just the president.
So, clearly, the average person doesn’t worry about conflicts of interest. But they do matter, and I think maybe – maybe not. This is not the best look for Yellen, even for someone who, again, has done a lot – has spent much of his career in public service. It is hard. It is difficult, then, to obtain an ethical exemption for the first major event of his administration as Secretary of the Treasury and I do not think that anyone favors this situation.
Originally published