Michael Dubin

Origins and early life

Michael Dubin grew up in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, left the Haverford School in 1997 and read history at Emory University, graduating in 2001.

Work and career

Before any of the business came nine years in the New York improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, which he credits with what a crowded meeting demands: “When you’re in meetings with 20 people and decisions have to get made, it really helps to be schooled in a discipline of quick thinking.” He met Mark Levine at a party where the two of them were complaining about the price of razor blades, and in January 2011 they started Dollar Shave Club on their own money and an investment from the incubator Science Inc.; the site opened that April.

On 6 March 2012 Dubin posted “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” — shot in a single day for under $4,500, with himself walking the warehouse as the deadpan pitchman. The server died inside the first hour and 12,000 orders arrived within 48. The idea underneath was plain enough to explain in a sentence: a razor is a cheap piece of steel sold at a markup, and it can be posted to a door for a dollar a month. By 2016 the club had 3.2 million members; on 19 July that year Unilever bought it for a reported billion dollars in cash, a company that had grossed $152 million the previous year.

He stayed chief executive until January 2021, then moved to the board as a special adviser. In 2014 he had his own colonoscopy streamed live online for the Colon Cancer Alliance, which is the kind of thing the nine years of improv paid for. The Forward, reporting the Unilever sale on 20 July 2016, described Dollar Shave Club as a company “founded by two Jewish friends” and named them as Mark Levine and Michael Dubin — the stated, dated source this card rests on.

That November the same paper placed him on the Forward 50, its annual list of the Jews who most shaped American life that year.