Ryan Cohen

Origins and early life

Ryan Cohen was born in 1986 at Montreal, in Quebec, and the sources state plainly that he was born to a Jewish family, the son of a teacher and of Ted Cohen, an importer of glassware whose business he watched his father run through his childhood.

Work and career

He founded Chewy in 2011, at the age of twenty-five, under the name MrChewy, selling pet food and supplies online at a time when Amazon was thought to have settled the question of who would sell everything. He built it instead on service that nobody else was offering: handwritten cards to customers, flowers when a dog or a cat died, telephone lines answered by people, and it became the largest e-commerce pet business in the United States.

PetSmart bought Chewy in April 2017 for 3.35 billion dollars, the largest acquisition of an e-commerce company at that date, and he stayed on as chief executive and took the revenue to 3.5 billion dollars by 2018 before stepping down that year. He joined the board of GameStop in January 2021 and became its chairman on 9 June 2021, then its chief executive on 28 September 2023, cutting the company's expenses from 1.7 billion dollars to about 910 million and returning it to profit.

He has also held large positions in Apple, Alibaba, Wells Fargo and Netflix. His career is one of the clearest recent demonstrations that an outsider with no retail pedigree can still build a company against the largest incumbent in the market.