GameStop announced Wednesday that it has hired Matt Francis in the newly created role of Chief Technology Officer, who was recently an engineering leader at Amazon Web Services.
Video transcription
MYLES ABROAD: Of course, if we look at the shares of GameStop, it continues to trend here on the site, it remains one of the most, if not the most, discussed stocks among retailers, actually among all who follow the market. Yesterday we saw that GameStop shares fell by 60%. They closed right at $ 90 a share. And we see that the stock has risen about 12% this morning and is trading just over $ 100 per share on news that it is never going to move the shares of any company that much.
But GameStop announced for the first time this morning that it has appointed Matt Francis as chief technology officer. Matt comes to GameStop from AWS, but does have a bit of a crossover with some of the leadership team – or excuse me, they also announce that they have a senior VP for customer service, Kelli Durkin. And she’s had a crossover leadership team since her time at Chewy.
So, Brian Sozzi gets the whole group back together here. But I think a 13% rally over hiring a CTO and a VP of customer service definitely shows that this thing still stays in the funny region, even if it was lower – was 70% lower since closing Friday.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yes, I think GameStop really buried the lead here. They just needed this press release, “We hired a bunch of former Amazon employees, titled,” because that’s what you get here in their new chief technology officer, Matt Francis, who has a lot of experience as an engineer at Amazon Web. Services.
And a very important point you made, Myles, about Kelli Durkin, Chewy’s Vice President of Customer Service. Of course, it would not surprise me if their largest shareholder, now Ryan Cohen, had anything to do with it. But Chewy is known for its customer service, and neither is GameStop. This is not good. The customer service is not good.
And also the other mercenary is Josh Krueger. He holds the fulfillment roles in Amazon, Walmart and QVC. These are now three companies that know what they are doing in terms of fulfillment, which GameStop again does not. So just the fact that they’re GameStop, which’s been a dying retailer for five years – we’d been beating it in the last few days – that maybe they can attract this kind of talent here is a kind of turnaround. But again, I do not see it.
JULIE HYMAN: Brian Sozzi’s review of GameStop customer service is not good. But for me, the more interesting developments that are taking place today have nothing to do with GameStop itself, and that has always been a story for me. The development around it is more interesting than the company itself. First of all, of course, we have Janet Yellen, who is calling a meeting of regulators this week to talk about the volatility surrounding GameStop. Who knows what they are going to do? This is allegedly a discussion at this stage.
But it should be interesting at the same time that Vlad Tenev, who, as we know, was everywhere, talked about his business, Robinhood, and their role in it all, he came out with a blog post yesterday and said that the settlement, the clearing process for transactions must be shortened. It should be immediate, he said. Because instead of removing the risk, as it was designed, he says it has increased the risk to the system.
Now I do not know what regulators are going to do on that front. One would think that this would at least be part of the discussion. But I must also mention at the same time that Robinhood had not had enough yet, and they also released a Super Bowl ad that they would be running during the game on Sunday. But you can already see the whole thing on YouTube. Here’s a little piece of it. That’s a nice thing – it’s a pretty serious ad here.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yes, they should have – yes, I mean, it should have been a whole – they should have just taken that money and kept it internally. Myles is really very happy – you have to create a Substack. It needs a newsletter.
MYLES ABROAD: Yes, you know, the thing from that ad that stood out to me was the last bit at the end of the “we are all investors.” Because it’s – the funny thing about – you know, Julie, about Vlad’s blog post yesterday and his tweet storm about how it should be T plus 0, that’s the marketing copy.
Just as the issue addressed by Robinhood is issues regarding plumbing of financial regulations, which are deeply considered, deeply discussed, deeply debated within the industry, within other financial firms. I’m sure there’s a whole team at a business like a Virtue, like a Citadel, thinking about where we should spend our lobby dollars. Should we try to get it to reduce T plus 2 to T plus 1? Should we think of something else?
And Robinhood is coming off the top line here with an argument for limiting any T plus 2 based on their own marketing materials for democratizing finances. It’s not really based on how the market works and why we came here. So, I mean, we’re apparently going to hear from Tenev during a Senate hearing on February 18, so not too long for all of us to wait to hear it from the man himself.
I’m just amazed that a week in the saga is still surrounded, how we want to place our brand, rather than where we fit into the financial system and what we do and are not able to do decisions we make in this line must take. I find the attitude that we are outside finances and better strange at a time when you have raised billions of dollars of capital because you are required by the same system for which you pretend not to be a part. So I think it’s–
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, and by the way, I do not think you’ll have to wait until February 18th to hear from him, do you? I mean, as things go, we’re going to hear a lot more from him. One of the – of course, one of the other narratives surrounding this whole affair is the kind of conspiracy theories that are being boiled up by some people on Wall Street Bets and elsewhere.
And to feed on that, the idea may be that Janet Yellen had to get an ethical pardon to call this regulatory meeting because she took hundreds of thousands of dollars of speaking money from Citadel. Citadel was one of the kind of villains who portrayed Wall Street Bets in this situation because they were one of the main buyers of orders from Robinhood.
As usual, the story is in fact probably much more complicated than it would be painted, that there is a kind of cabal of regulators and Wall Streeters working together to fix the market. But that does not help the narration that it may be a small detail of it.
MYLES ABROAD: Yes, and I know we do not have time to pay attention to this. I mean, I actually feel no sympathy for Janet Yellen being in a strange place here. But we do not have to go into the ethics of who it should be – you know what the revolving door should look like. I mean, Donald Trump was just the president.
It is therefore clear that the average person does not care about conflicts of interest. But it does matter, and I think maybe – not maybe. This is not the best look for Yellen, not even for someone who has done a lot again – spent much of her career in the civil service. It’s hard. It is therefore difficult to obtain an ethical pardon for the first important event in your term of office as Secretary of the Treasury.
Originally published