Josh Luber
Appearances
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
At the end of 21, after we got our licenses, we did a round that valued the company at $10 billion, and I was the only employee of the company. When I left StockX, we had 1,400 employees. What? Yeah. I've been in this industry now for 10 years. I mean, all these things are the same, right? Sneakers, trading cards, watches, handbags, toys.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pre-pandemic, it took me about a year. So back up. The summer of 2019, we do our billion dollar round. I also stepped down as CEO. We bring in a professional CEO to start moving the company towards an IPO and growth. And it took me about a year to realize that just because I started the company doesn't mean I can't leave. Sure.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And so that whole next year, which obviously then leads in the pandemic, you know, I was sort of feeling my way around. I'm still looking for other products, other categories. And I really wanted to try to grow sneakers, excuse me, trading cards at StockX. But it just wasn't a priority for the sort of crazy ideas that I had about, could we go out and get licenses? Could we make trading cards?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Like I just, it was clear that that industry was going to be something more. Pandemic happens. Everything, you know, obviously, you know, changes. And during that time, I just started having conversations with everyone else in the trading card industry. And I left, partnered not with Michael Rubin, but with another organization who were going to fund me to go after the licenses for trading cards.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And currently running the newest and what I hope will be the longest 10-year business, which is Go Straight.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I just thought that was where the opportunity was. We spent about, I left in September of 2020. We spent two months together. And this group said, you know what? Michael Rubin's probably a better partner than we are. He's been asking about trading cards. Maybe you should meet with him. And we met right before Thanksgiving of 20. And I sat down. I told him what I thought this thing could be.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And he's like, I can get the licenses. Let's go. And we spent all 2021 going after licenses. It was extremely organic. There was never any plans to end up on the other side of that. I mean, at the end of 21, after we got our licenses, we did a round that valued the company at $10 billion. And I was the only employee of the company. There was no company. It was me, all the licenses, right?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And then we had to go and run it. I was like, holy crap.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
It's so much more fun. The more pain is sitting in like budget meetings and trying to.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Yeah. And look, big companies have to be run a certain way. And I get that. But, you know, it doesn't mean that I need to be the ones doing it. What was great, and it's crazy, you look back on the serendipity and the similarities between working with two different billionaire MBA owners, Dan Gilbert and Michael Rubin, and being at the center of these two industries, which is very fortunate for me.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
GhostRite is a collectible toy company, not dissimilar to Bearbrick. We'll get into a lot of the details, but the idea is that I've been in this industry now for 10 years. All these things are the same, right? Sneakers, trading cards, watches, handbags, toys. So now, after having run a marketplace, after having run a brand and licensing, I get to create a brand myself.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
But what Rubin understood when we started was that I'm an entrepreneur, and if that business got as big as we thought it might be, then... He didn't need me running it. I didn't want to be running it. And so we were we were 100% on the same page. So once we acquired Topps and ingested their 800 people and we hired some other people, including a CEO, he and I were on the same page.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
He's like, Yeah, if you want to leave, great. And and so I, I planned the whole time. And so like October of 2022, I left specifically to make Ghost Right because it was the same idea. At StockX, at Fanatics Collectibles, the through line of all this is what we call market-based pricing.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
The idea that these are all products that aren't arbitrary retail price, but they're products that are driven by supply and demand, by the community, by resellers, by collectors, right? The market sets the price for these products. They're products that are equal parts consumer good and financial asset. But all the sort of big, crazy ideas that you might be able to do with that concept
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Sort of gets stymied when you have to deal with the biggest companies in the world. Sneakers, you have Nike and Adidas and Foot Locker. Trading cards, you have the NBA and NFL and Fanatics. So trading cards, excuse me, collectible toys were this like Goldilocks industry where it was big enough to matter. It was big enough to work with all the most important brands and artists and companies, right?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I mean, you know, Chanel has done Bear Bricks, right? But it was not so big that you have these monoliths in the space. In the collectible toy space, you have Funko, you have Medicom, which makes Bearbrick, and that's kind of it. And both of those are relatively small companies. Hasbro and Mattel and Lego, that's different, right?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
So it was really this sort of perfect place to go after this idea that we'd always had around the different ways that you could buy or sell these products, these sort of hype economy products. And so it really was this perfect transition for me to be able to do this.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Look, today we have to make collectible toys, and it's a toy business, but underneath it, it's this idea of how the hype economy grows, these toys, collectibles that are our financial assets. So there's a lot to it, but the short version is it's actually the same idea for me as an entrepreneur, the same big idea that I've always wanted to go after, and now I get to do it on my own.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I don't have a billionaire MBA owner as a partner. That's good. Maybe that's bad. We'll find out. But anyway, I get to go after it. And most importantly, I get to work with exactly who I want to work with. It's me and 10 other people. They're all people that I've worked with before at one or both the other companies. And a business is just people, man, like that's it.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And so I get to work with the people I want to work with.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Well, I actually tried to buy Bearbrick. I tried to buy Medicom. I had heard they were a sale. Yeah, yeah. I really think that Bearbrick has this sort of perfect product that they've been making. Medicom, the Japanese company that makes Bearbrick, they've been making for 25 years. And, you know, Bearbrick, the whole rest of the collectible toy industry, it's all IP. It's characters.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
It's Spider-Man. It's Astro Boy. It's Cause. You know, it's Iron Man. But Bearbrick is just a shape. It's a blank canvas. It's a human body with a bear head. And so because of that, it gives them this much wider aperture to work with all the most important brands, right? You could put Iron Man on a Bearbrick or it could be a Warhol painting or the American flag or whatever.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And so, you know, and by the way, that's what a trading card is. A trading card is a blank canvas. It can be Wemby or it could be the backup shortstop for the twins. And the value of that is dependent on who is on that blank canvas. So I always thought there was all this you could do with Bearbrick, but they are a very Japanese company. They've stayed very much in their ways.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
They've done the same thing for 25 years. And so I thought, I was like, you have this iconic brand, you know, maybe I could sort of, and you know what? They just really weren't interested in having that conversation. So great. So then we had to figure out how do we create our own blank canvas. I left Fanatics Collectibles in October of 22, and we spent eight months designing the shape.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And then take all the learnings from sneakers and from trading cards and apply it to collectible toys. I love it. That's it.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
A ghost, like a bare brick, is a blank canvas. There's no face, there's no gender. The ghost itself is not a character. It's about how it takes to skins. And it took a while to get to a shape that wasn't too much of a character, but also really took well at the skin.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Um, so yeah, so I, I absolutely, you know, considered it, but like, this is the better path to, and you, and you get to start all this from scratch, right? You get to build a company from scratch, taking everything we've learned. And you can look at 25 years of Medicom, things they've done well, things they've done, done poor, and you don't have to correct it. You can just start new.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
So that's pretty great too.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Well, also under the category of funding the company yourself and not having to answer to investors or billionaire MBA owners is we started making Ghosts in August of 23. Wow. So we spent a year, all we did is make goes to give them away. So we ran a company with 10 employees making products in China and all we did was give it away. So under the money part of this.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And I thought that was important from a brand standpoint, from building the credibility within the industry of partners who might wanna work with us. And we finally started selling Ghosts in August of 24. We've done four releases so far. We've actually done three. The fourth one is currently ongoing. And this was the first one.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Everything, all the Ghosts, same three sizes, bare brick, which is you have a... I have a... This is actually a gift for you. This is a sample of 100%. This is one of the first 3D printed samples. It looks like drugs. It's not drugs. So this is 100%. This is usually for blind boxes, and we can talk more about that.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
But this size, which we call the 100%, the 400%, which is this size, and then the 1,000%, which is about 28 inches tall, And here, this is for you. Thank you. These basically don't exist, by the way. These were internal samples. Only one has been sold. We sold it at VCon live with the VFriends guys and went for $510. Nice. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
and then so the third size is 28 inches so the three they released all this size which is 11 inches all sold on stock excuse me on ghost right as a blind Dutch auction which means that we don't set the price the market sets the price this one there were 20 units sold sold for $1,026 a piece the second one which was with Rocky's Matcha which is a local matcha company here in LA there were 20 excuse me 30 units
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
It sold for $500 with a clearing price. And the third was Eastside Golf, which there were 30, and that one sold for $300. And so this is what we do. We get to make ghosts, and the flagship and the core is this size, 11 inches. But then as we evolve on, the 100% size, the blind boxes, that will really be the future of the company. What is a blind box? So blind boxes are trading cards.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
You open a pack, you open a box, you don't know what you're going to get inside. um this is the first time that i'm showing the wnba blind box uh we have licenses with the nba with the wnba uh with um uh major league baseball and all three players associations and this is the wnba blind box is going to come out in december There are 16 players.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
You know, like you, I have the privilege of getting to speak at a lot of different places for a lot of different reasons, and one of the talks that I give is the everything but, all the ones that failed before StockX. We'll do the short version of that. But the short version is that I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and early on, you don't know how to.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Here's a checklist that I'm not showing on camera, but it includes people like Caitlin Clark and Asia Wilson. And then it has parallels that have all different color crowns, the same way that, say, Prism works, where you have your base color and then you have gold numbered to 10 and you have black one of one and all the different things. I mean, we get to take everything.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
everything we learned about scarcity and collectability and creating brand and creating demand and trading cards and apply it to just a different blank canvas. We didn't make any of this up. All we do is just copy how the stuff works great over here and apply it over here.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
So we're fortunate to have the licenses with these three leagues because of my history at FinanX Collectibles creating the trading cards there. And when this comes out in December, we think this is going to be a big deal. We're going to have, well, We think this is going to be a big deal. So we'll see what happens. We've got to actually run the company and grow it. I think I have.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And so now, after having run a marketplace, after having run a brand and licensing, I get to create a brand myself and then take all the learnings from sneakers and from trading cards and apply it to collectible toys.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I think I have one of the others here to show you. This is because we're in L.A. This is the first time I'm showing Lisa Leslie. Oh, cool. There's a Lisa Leslie ghost. So there's 12 stars. There's three retired players, legends. And then there's one actually famous fan that we'll surprise people with later. But anyway, so this is Lisa Leslie, the first star. of one that we're sharing here.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
That's really cool.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
You sound exactly like James Earl Jones right at this moment. They got the golden arches. We got the golden arches.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I graduated college in 1999 when the word entrepreneur barely exists, the internet barely exists, there were no apps, there were no iPhones. No smartphones. And so all the businesses that I started before, none of them had anything to do with sneakers. Almost intentionally so. Almost like intentionally avoiding trying to create a business that was just an excuse to play with sneakers.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Well, let's just talk about the company first of all. I think too much is put on the sort of obligation to have that. If there's not something actually that's core to the founder or the company itself, it's pretty obvious when it's just sort of tacked on at the end.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
were part of Dan Gilbert's organization in Detroit. We live the revitalization of Detroit. Everything that we did was Detroit focused. Still today at the bottom of StockX website, it says, you know, made in Detroit or whatever the language is, right?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
so um all of the the charity components were tied in to to dan and the things that he cared the most about and he's put his money where his mouth is for decades and so um that was a very um obvious one for us at the next collectibles to be honest i don't know if they ever got there i don't know um we were so new and it was so fast and i was so you know i was such a brief part of it um i can't even tell you what that is so
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Again, like every part of running a business, right? It just has to be authentic to what you're doing and why. On a personal side, there's a moment when you're gaining wealth that you look yourself in the mirror and you're like, this is just...
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Like not from a dollar amount, but from like a distribution wealth, because no matter how rich you are or where you come from or who you hang out with, there's always people that you know that you grew up with or family members or whatever that that have significantly less and are in a different place. And so if that doesn't happen, we can put that aside if that doesn't happen.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
But at some point that happens and you're like, oh shit, like, okay, I need to start thinking about this. And you have to think about strategically because what happens is the flip side of that is as soon as people know that you have wealth, everybody comes out. And I'm not just talking about like people that are like, give me money, but you know, like the schools that I went to.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
They send me more emails and then they call me more often than they used to. I spoke at Emory this past week and there were meetings that were put on my calendar with different people in the organization there that wanted to talk to me about that. So it's important that if you don't have your own thing, then people will make their thing your thing. And that's important for it.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I met my wife in law school. My wife is the first person in her family born in America. Her family is from Chile. And we met in law school and I went to work for the largest law firm in Atlanta and she was an immigration attorney, family based immigration attorney, which is basically one step above a pro bono. And she doesn't work now. She stopped working when we moved to Texas.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Her mother lives with us and they take care of her mother. But what we're trying to figure out is can we create some sort of organization for Hispanic immigrants that she can spearhead? That is something that is personal to us that we're trying to figure out how to do. But I never had something that was as personal to me that made sense for otherwise you're just doing it to check a box.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
But in between everyone, I had a corporate job. You know, the fact, I mean... Money Monday is like this is the place to talk about the fact that you have to still be able to pay your bills and take care of your family. And I started my first startup when I was single, second married with no kids, third married with one kid, fourth married with two kids.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
So, again, I think it's an organic thing that happens naturally. But, again, if you don't have something structured yourself, then people will put it on you.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I mean, obviously the smaller the numbers, the higher, the higher the percentage, right? I mean, that's just, it's just math. Um, I think it's pretty small. I think it, I think it's probably in the, like, I don't know, 10 to 15% range. You know, there, there's something that's there. There's some sort of like nest egg, but they're already fiercely independent. They're 12 and nine. And, um,
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
I'd be pretty shocked if, if they grew up to a place where they either expecting or want that money. Um, so I don't know, but I mean, there's no way that you're not going to create some sort of, uh, some sort of, of nest egg and some sort of, of, of way to do that. Um, so I don't know. So let's say like 15% each. So 30% and then, you know, 70% is, is not to them.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
In fairness, my kids are 12 and 9. I think if you ask me when they're 24 and 27, I might have a much different answer, right, of we're at a different stage of our life and seeing where they're at in their life and what they do, whether they're married, what kind of career they have, what they've chosen to dedicate their lives to. But, again, it's so early to even think about that for – but –
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Every time the risk profile changes, your obligations change, And I was very fortunate that that fourth one was StockX, and then it changed the financial profile afterwards. But I was at IBM. I was what I thought might end up being my career, as now I have a kid, and just trying to figure out how to make ends meet.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Well, it's not changing, right? Who was it? Alexis Ohanian, who's been on the soapbox about that sports are basically the future of business because of AI and the other things that will change so much other parts of business. I mean, it's not wrong, right? You look at Fanatics and look at just the state of Fanatics business today versus five years ago and how it's evolved.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And we still have a long way to go. Yeah, I think that it's only going to become a bigger part of the economy, bigger part of... Culture? Yeah, of culture and content. I mean, it just is. I also think, by the way, this is why, and you probably know a lot of these folks as well, there's a lot of people trying to create large organizations around sports other than baseball, basketball, and football.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Right, for sure. I have a friend who is trying to...
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Well, not even that, but like I have a friend who's trying to create a real organization around track and field. How do we make track and field matter other than once every four years? Because those athletes are extraordinary, right? And so I do think that those sort of areas of sports will also continue to grow and become more prominent. Very cool.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And I started working on on campus on the side campus was the sneaker price guide that would become stock X But that never happens if I don't go take the job at IBM if I'm not there as a consultant learning about data You know in the weeds and then on the side, you know trying to find projects and being in the sneakers, you know personally So those things came together my work and my personal passion came together at IBM which led to creating campus which led to stock X and
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Yeah, first of all, I agree with everything you just said a thousand percent over. That is exactly true. I mean, StockX, I started working with Dan Gilbert and moved to Detroit in the summer of 2015. We launched in February of 2016. I was living paycheck to paycheck until 2019. Wow. So everyone sees the public success of StockX and the business blew up in holidays of 2017.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
So 18 months in, the business blows up and StockX becomes what everyone knows. But internally, VCs are putting money into the company, not into my pocket. And it's still about growing the business and you make those decisions. And it's only truly because of the generosity of the VC community and Dan Gilbert,
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
people that understand entrepreneurs that you get to a certain point and they say hey we're gonna do this next round but we are gonna carve out 10% of this for the early employees to take money off the table so you can stop living paycheck to paycheck right and you can have a little bit of you know yeah and so you know and that's what you know obviously things have continued to go well and that business has been great but yeah it's it's not even remotely overnight in fact it's it's you know years later that your life changes
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Yeah, I mean, look, when I left StockX in the end of 2020, we had 1,400 employees. What? Yeah. And you got to remember, StockX, in addition to the core business, we also had, I think maybe they're up to maybe nine or 10, but at the time, I think we had seven authentication centers around the world. Each of those has a couple hundred employees in it. So- So yeah, it was massive.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And in the beginning there were five of us, we sat right outside of Dan Gilbert's office. And then there were seven and eight and you slowly build and all of a sudden you gotta get a different part of the office, you gotta have your own floor. And you look up one day and the only way to manage that size of a company is in theory, right?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
You can't know everybody, you can't touch everybody, you can't know everybody's job, you have to hire people to run it. And it's just a much different business than, like at GhostRite right now, it's me and 10 other people. And by the way, they're all people I've worked with before, they're all people that I know personally and have worked with many times over.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
But at that point, you're learning on the job how to run a large company. And frankly, that's not what I was interested in. I never thought that I would be in that situation. And one day, then you are. Right.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
What's interesting about being a part of a startup, whether you're a founder or an early employee, everybody takes a haircut. Everybody takes less than what they could go make if they were working at Facebook or IBM or whatever. When I hired, I brought in the guy who would become the CTO at Finax Collectibles and then CTO with me at Ghostrite.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
He had been a startup engineer for a while, and then he left and he was working at Facebook mid-level engineering manager Making 1.2 million dollars a year come on swear to God right and and this is exactly right and so to convince somebody like that to give up that pay to come and work for 80% less yeah
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And sure, there's equity and maybe you'll make some more money, but it's truly about, at that point, it's truly about lifestyle. And you ask people that live that lifestyle, it's rough, it's hard. It is grueling and everything, every bad trope you've heard about startup life and bureaucracy and politics, that's that.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
That's what you're paying for and that's why you get paid that because those companies need every great engineer that exists. And so that's the extreme.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
but that's the conversation you're having with every person as you're you're convincing them to come work with you it says hey yeah i know you can make a little bit more over here but you are now going to have all this autonomy to do great work and and to do it on your own and we can go down this path but i found that more than anything Like great people, they wanna be able to do great work.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And at the end of the day, a difference of 10 or 15% dollars one way or another, they would much rather have the autonomy every day coming into work, do great work, as opposed to being micromanaged or being constrained by budgets or plans or whatever like that. So anyway, that's the conversation that you have with people.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And by the way, I spent six years where all I did was try to convince people to move to Detroit to come work for StockX. Now post pandemic, that's all a little bit different, But at the time it was important for everyone to be together because that's how we were able to have that environment to be able to do great work.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
You know, what's interesting about now being the founder of StockX and meeting people. I mean, I, you know, we're here in L.A. because I'm speaking at USC Business School later today. Last week I spoke at Emory Business School and at Georgia Tech. And every time I speak at a school, there's a line of people afterwards, and they are not there to take pictures.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
They're there to tell me, hey, I made my first $10 selling sneakers on StockX. Or I'm paying for my education because I was flipping sneakers in high school. Like 90% of them are. That is awesome. That is the coolest thing.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
We actually, at StockX, we created what we called StockX Day in our second year, where all we did was just invite people to come, our top customers, mainly our top sellers, to come to StockX to be able to have that conversation with everybody.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
It was going on well before StockX, but StockX, those companies that made it so easy to sell, and we can go down that path if you like, that's what the real business of StockX was, to make it as easy to sell a pair of sneakers as it is to buy, and that enabled it to become an industry because it became so much easier for everyone to be able to sell sneakers.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And look, people love sneakers, but most people there, to your point, are some form of a small business. Right. They are there because they can either buy or sell on one side or the other. Because you can buy sneakers at StockX. You can buy them on eBay. You can buy them in a million other places, right?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Thanks for having me. I didn't know I was doing a 200 bio. We do the 30-second bio. I am an entrepreneur. I've started and run many companies. The two that are most well-known are StockX, which we started in 2016, and I left at the end of 2020. Fanatics Collectibles, which is a trading card business with Fanatics, which we started in 2021, and I left at the end of 2022.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
It's about being a part of that live marketplace that's happening at that moment in that place. That's why they're there. It's almost like the old trading pits, you know, the New York Stock Exchange.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Yeah.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Yeah, I mean, like all of us, right? I mean, I collected cards as a kid. I am 46, so 1991 was my bar mitzvah, and as my bar mitzvah present from my parents was 1952 Topps, Willie Mays. So that was kind of like the peak of my childhood.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
But I was like everyone, collected cards during the junk wax era, et cetera, put them all away when I went away to college, and kind of always sat in the back of my parents' closet. At StockX, we launched in 2016, blew up at the end of 2017. 2018 was about growth. 2018 was about, okay, what other products can we put on this site to grow the business?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And so I was just always looking for what other products. We added collectibles that year, we added bare bricks, we added... Supreme, Streetware, and I started looking at trading cards. I started looking at cards myself, personally, and for the business.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
Being in Detroit, I had been talking to all the people in the industry, and Steve Sloan, who at the time I think was the president of PSA, says, oh, you're in Detroit? You gotta meet this guy, Jason Koontz. He lives in your backyard. And you obviously know him well. And he became my Sherpa back into the industry. You know, he'd obviously been collecting cards this entire time.
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And I was like a kid in a candy store again to just like get back into cards. I started like opening up packs of cards at my desk in meetings at StockX. Everyone thought I was nuts. And so I started collecting stuff myself. But really, it was like got serious when we were trying to figure out, can this be a real category in StockX for growth?
The Money Mondays
Why Your HOBBY Could Be the Secret to Making a Fortune w/ Josh Luber & Noah Neiman 💵 E97
And I was just very fortunate to be ahead of that curve a little bit. So then I started buying cards myself and those things snowballed.