JOEY ABDELATIF
Founder, Chief Business Officer | rareOS
Joey Abdelatif is an entrepreneur with over a decade in gaming and buy-sell-trade. After launching his first retail store in 2019 during COVID, he scaled it into a 4,000 sq. ft. flagship operation. He’s hosted over 100 tournaments, founded The Rare Collective, and launched the Rare Swap Meet to bring store owners and collectors together. Today, Joey is also the co-founder of a software company with the former CFO of GameStop, focused on solving key challenges in the retail and gaming industries.
GDEX 2026 Presentation: How Two Game-Store Operators Learned Everything They Didn’t Know to Build a Technology Company
Two brothers started by buying and reselling games and collectibles, then opened their own game stores. What came next forced us to learn a completely different side of business. This session is the story of what we had to figure out along the way: social media, buy/sell/trade, partnerships, contracts, managing developers, networking, trade shows, pitching, fundraising, and finding the right mentors and advisors. We’ll share the mistakes, failed ideas, bad partnerships, and relationships that helped move us from behind the counter to building technology for the industry we already lived in. rareOS is part of the story, but this is not a product pitch. It’s about everything we had to learn to get here.
