GameStop has ‘yoinked’ over 250 tech-experienced hires from the likes of Chewy, Amazon, and Microsoft since Ryan Cohen’s digital-first takeover. 

In May, GMEdd.com published GameStop Poaches Talent From The Best – Amazon, Chewy, Facebook, Google, and More, revealing that public profiles on LinkedIn indicated over 30 new hires at the gaming retailer who brought experience from a cross section of high growth e-commerce stars.

Now, GameStop has more than octupled that number, recruiting over 250 quintessential go-getters to aid in the transformation.

Per an agreement with GameStop Corp. in January, Ryan Cohen’s RC Ventures was granted 3 seats on the company’s board as the Chewy co-founder had been urging the brick-and-mortar to adapt to changing times.

Ever since, the public corporation has operated largely in silence while building the foundation for a digital-first technology company that can compete with the likes of Amazon.

Ryan Cohen’s secret to accomplishing this? Finding talent. And lots of it.

GMEdd.com has been tracking GameStop’s tech hires since the appointment of Matt Francis to CTO in February.

Can’t stop, won’t stop, GameStop.

When Ryan Cohen was asked how he finds his management teams during a 2018 Miami Herald interview, he gave his endorsement for the professional networking platform LinkedIn.

We use a special proprietary tool called LinkedIn and we look for people with very relevant experience at companies we respect and we shoot them a message. … We handpicked these people. They are the best of the best, the Navy Seals of management teams.

By scouring LinkedIn, we can discover some motivations as to what would compel someone to make such an unconventional career move from a blue-chip to GameStop.

Brian OKeefe’s post on LinkedIn in October of 2021.

Take Brian OKeefe, an Amazon veteran who had operated as a Global Finance Lead for the e-commerce giant for over four and a half years. 

On LinkedIn in September, OKeefe stated that he has left Amazon to “pursue a new challenge,” and that he is “energized by the team, the mission, and the story here,” at GameStop.

OKeefe isn’t the only GameStop recruit that has shared this same bullish sentiment on social media. In fact, GameStop’s mission and startup-atmosphere seems to be part of the pitch.

Jeremy Martin joined GameStop in July 2021.

Jeremy Martin worked at Amazon for over 8 years prior to starting his next adventure in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, at GameStop HQ. 

Martin wasn’t a small fish, either. Having served as Amazon UK’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), he designed, staffed, and led high performance finance, sales, and UK operations for the multi-billion dollar e-commerce company.

GameStop Headquarters’ floor plans are available online, dated July 29th, 2021.¹

GameStop’s Grapevine Headquarters’ floor plans reveal Jeremy Martin’s importance to the scrappy startup, with an office positioned right by the CEO and Executive Suite.

The gaming retailer’s newly-appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Matt Furlong, previously worked as Amazon’s Country Leader for Australia, indicating GameStop’s interest in these high-ranking players.

Vinay Patel has not yet announced his new employment, but we can safely guess.²

Amazon employees have begun to notice how GameStop has been poaching all of the company’s talent, with Vinay Patel, a 5 year Amazon vet, stating that he “had an opportunity that was very hard to walk away from.”

Please don’t tell me we lost another teammate to GameStop!

What’s the plan?

Although it seems that GameStop’s recruits are being asked to keep their tasks on the down-low, some can’t help but share their enthusiasm, and it’s in-part to help recruit for their own teams.

Stacey Ferreira is ‘building the experience of the future’ at GameStop.

Meet Stacey Ferreira, who has taken the role of Director of New Formats at GameStop. In fact, you may recognize her name, since she’s founded and sold two technology companies, been recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30, co-authored the best-selling book 2 Billion Under 20, and spoken at a number of prestigious events including TEDx, Singularity University, Inc. Women’s Summit, among others.

Now, she’s focused on building GameStop’s “store of the future,” and working to bridge digital/physical into a seamless customer experience.

Revitalizing retail should not come as a surprise, considering in July individuals with first-hand knowledge on Ryan Cohen’s strategy stated that the Chairman was ‘infuriated with dusty shelves’ and had plans to revive retail stores.

That’s not all

While the public has not yet been informed what GameStop’s tech-centric roadmap entails, through chatter amongst hires on LinkedIn we can now speculate that the future includes forward-thinking improvements across the board alongside new offerings.

GameStop employees have hinted towards building new mobile apps, an NFT marketplace, a new customer service team, the evolution of the PowerUp Rewards program, new private label products, new supply chain systems, new fulfilment centers, a new website UX, expansion into PC gaming and eSports, revamping GameInformer, a new affiliate and partnership program, and improving the associate training program LevelUp.

After stealthily expanding from Texas to South Florida and Seattle, GameStop is now going for the home run.

While all eyes are on GameStop’s expansion into the metaverse, it’s still important to keep tabs on the physical world, where GMEdd has been tracking GameStop’s corporate footprint for months.

In order to understand GameStop’s forward-looking expansion, it’s important to refresh with some background.

Rapid Expansion

Per an agreement with GameStop Corp. in January, Ryan Cohen’s RC Ventures was granted 3 seats on the company’s board as the Chewy co-founder had been urging the brick-and-mortar retailer to adapt to changing times.

Ever since, the company has operated largely in silence while building the foundation for a digital-first technology company that can compete with the likes of Amazon.

In May, GMEdd speculated that GameStop would be soon opening a new Florida location in a piece titled GameStop Hints at New Florida Office, which was later confirmed by GameStop in September.

Two months later, GMEdd published that the gaming retailer was also expanding out to the windy city of Seattle, which was later confirmed by a GameStop employee on Twitter in October. 

GameStop has yet to officially announce the offices in Seattle, but Rukari did.

The first clue to these expansions? Public job listings for remote positions with these cities as the location. 

While these positions can sometimes be considered remote work, GameStop still utilizes a central office to foster a community atmosphere amongst the team.

we’re hiring

In order to catalog GameStop’s latest filings and job postings, GMEdd.com has created the #gme-tracker bot, available for public viewing on the GMEdd Discord Server.

Recently, GameStop Careers has been flush with job postings for Boston, Massachusetts. There are currently multiple active openings in HR, marketing, finance, and tech categories. 

A Global Corporate Controller position is available at GameStop’s four hubs: Boston, Seattle, Grapevine, and South Florida.

Currently, GameStop Corp. has 31 positions listed in Boston, ignoring 71 additional retail openings.

GMEdd’s GameStop Tech Hire Database also includes a handful of public employees already located in Boston, many of which came from Chewy’s Boston office.

GMEdd’s full Tech Hire Database is located on our Report and Models page.

GameStop’s available job listings include 14 Marketing positions, 8 Human Resources positions , 6 Information Technology/Ecommerce Technology positions, and 3 Accounting And Finance positions.

One job listing in the Human Resources category, searching for a Data Generalist in Boston, Massachusetts, states that the selected applicant would become an integral part of the Boston office.

This one screenshot could be the whole story, but that wouldn’t be fun, would it?

This person will be an integral part of the HR Business Partner team for Field and the Boston office.

With the Boston office confirmed in a simple HR job listing, we can begin to speculate why the aspiring tech company is so interested in New England’s oldest city.

Mirroring Chewy… Again

In July, Reuters published a story citing three anonymous sources from GameStop:

 Three people with first-hand knowledge of his strategy said he plans to breathe life into the stores by investing in what customers want and improving how employees can serve them.

See Ryan Cohen to Revitalize Retail, an Inside Look for more on this piece.

The article goes on to say that Cohen, who co-founded Chewy in 2011, is planning to turn GameStop into the “Chewy of Gaming,” which should not be surprising to anyone who’s followed his actions thus far — some of the first big moves by GameStop under Cohen’s leadership were opening two new fulfillment centers in the same locations Chewy started. 

Cohen is undaunted. He is seeking to repeat his success with online pet supplies retailer Chewy, which he sold to PetSmart for $3.35 billion in 2017. He wants to turn GameStop into a gaming and entertainment retailer or the “Chewy of gaming”, with lower prices, better selection and faster delivery times on online orders than its rivals.

With this year’s expansion, GameStop will retain their original corporate location in Grapevine, Texas, along with now adding the growing business-hubs of South Florida, Seattle, and Boston. 

GameStop’s own Game Informer, the company’s in-house publisher of the latest in video game news, reviews, previews, podcasts, and features, is headquartered in Minneapolis. 

Chewy, on the other hand, refers to itself as “dual-headquartered”, with headquarters in South Florida and Boston. It also has two other corporate locations: Seattle — which opened recently — and Minneapolis.

See an interactive version of the Chewy and GameStop Offices map here: Google My Maps.

Chewy’s primary headquarters are in South Florida and Boston, paired with new offices in Minneapolis and Seattle. Both companies have fulfillment and service centers across the United States.

It’s possible that GameStop has observed what’s worked for Chewy and is following in their footsteps. Expanding to the same locations as Chewy also makes poaching top talent from the pet food retailer easier.

So Why Bawwston?

It is worth noting that Boston is home to the first investor in Chewy, Larry Cheng, who has since joined GameStop’s board following an announcement in April. 

On Twitter, Larry Cheng has advocated for Boston’s tech and veture capital community.

Cheng is passionate about the Boston tech and venture capital community.

Four years after Cheng’s investment in Chewy in 2013, when Ryan Cohen was asked by the Boston Globe why Chewy was expanding into Boston, the Chief Executive shared his interest in Boston’s talent.

Boston is an amazing technology hub and startup hub, with dozens of universities. There’s just a ton of talent. We looked at all of the major US cities when we were planning this office, and Boston was the most competitive — either equal to or better than anywhere else.

Ryan Cohen was interviewed by the Boston Globe in 2017.

Ryan Cohen also said that a small team was already working in a temporary space, and the company would move into a lease of a 20,000-square-foot office. It’s likely that GameStop has similar plans.

With GameStop already opening up two “Amazon-sized” fulfillment centers, rumored offices in Seattle and Boston, alongside hiring up to 500 employees at the newly-leased customer service center in South Florida, the company has expanded beyond the expected and GameStop’s next trajectory might just be the moon.

Toast and Jenna researched and contributed. Toast edited and contributed. 

Sources: GameStop Careers, GameStop on LinkedIn, Chewy, Boston Globe