Josh Luber
speaker
555 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 22 Jul
Josh Luber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's like you either, you know, and, and same thing for, for, for alligator, but it was not going to have the word poker in it anyway.
So anyway, alligator blood go straight.
Those are the two main businesses.
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.
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.
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.
And currently running the newest and what I hope will be the longest 10-year business, which is Go Straight.
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.
And then take all the learnings from sneakers and from trading cards and apply it to collectible toys. I love it. That's it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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?
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.
Showing 461–480 of 555 · page 24 of 28
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