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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
And then we had to go and run it. I was like, holy crap.
It's so much more fun. The more pain is sitting in like budget meetings and trying to.
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.
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.
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 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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
And so I get to work with the people I want to work with.
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.
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.
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