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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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