Justin Yoshimura - Resurrecting & Rolling Up Retail - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 35]

About this episode

Justin Yoshimura discusses his unconventional path in building a profitable retail business and his approach to acquiring brands in transition.

Our teacher today is Justin Yoshimura, founder and CEO of CSC Generation, a profitable commerce platform doing over a billion dollars in annual revenue across brands including Sur La Table, Backcountry, and One Kings Lane. As we explore what it takes to build an enduring company in a sector most investors have written off, we turn to Justin's unconventional path, one that challenges familiar assumptions about credentials, capital structure, and the future of retail. Justin shares how he stopped attending school around the age of sixteen and built his own curriculum through entrepreneurship, selling cell phones on eBay as a teenager before founding a loyalty program SaaS company that was acquired by Merkle in his early twenties. He describes the influences that shaped CSC's design, including a Warren Buffett obsessed father and the long term holding company model he watched David Williams build at Merkle, and explains why he rejected the traditional buy and flip playbook in favor of permanent ownership backed by patient, contrarian capital. This special session explores Justin's approach to acquiring retail brands in transition, the AI native operating system called Genesis that…

People in this episode

Guest: Justin Yoshimura

Topics covered

• retail
• entrepreneurship
• business strategy
• acquisition
• AI in business
• long-term investment

Keywords

• retail
• entrepreneurship
• CSC Generation
• acquisition
• AI
• long-term investment
• Warren Buffett
• David Williams

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CSC Generation, Sur La Table, Backcountry, One Kings Lane, Merkle

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