MICHAEL DUBIN HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

He said goodbye over Zoom to his billion-dollar idea, closed his laptop, and ... he was gone. So what’s the founder of DollarShave Club to do now that he’s already shaved the world?

- ALEX BHATTACHARJI

"Not sure what that says,” Michael Dubin swirls his finger at a scribble of graffiti on a pair of garage doors. “But, anyway, this is it.”

It’s late March, and the co-founder and longtime CEO of Dollar Shave Club has brought me to an alley in Venice, California. To the place where it all started. In January, Dubin announced his departure as CEO of the company he’d sold to Unilever for $1 billion in 2017. A week later, he signed off on an all-hands Zoom, closed the laptop, and entered the life of an entrepreneurial empty nester. “I was like, ‘So, good luck, everybody,’ ” Dubin recalls.

Now he stands before padlocked doors, behind which lies not some industrial-chic office space or bustling warehouse, but an actual two-car garage that was once, a decade and a lifetime ago, Dubin’s home. It was here, inside this technically illegal rental, that Dubin, after being fired from an ad agency, parked himself and plotted the launch of a revolutionary direct-to-consumer razor company—a billion-dollar baby conceived on a concrete floor, and then nursed on a well-worn lounge chair and picnic table outside.

“So that was the first one,” Dubin says, nodding slowly. “Not that I spent tons of time thinking about Dollar Shave Club landmarks, but ….” He shrugs and nods again, his expression brightening. “There’s no office to go to right now. So I figured, let’s be out in the world.”