The Art of Building Billion Dollar Businesses

In today’s episode, I sit down with Josh Luber, former CEO of StockX and Fanatics Collectibles, to discuss how his latest venture, Ghostwrite, is transforming collectible toys into alternative assets. Josh shares how his experience building billion-dollar businesses helped him recognize patterns, navigate bottlenecks, and create a new marketplace for collectors. We talk about the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people, applying lessons from previous ventures, and understanding the challenges that come with building a startup. Josh also explains the growing mainstream appeal of collectibles, the value of scarcity, and why solving problems is a never-ending part of entrepreneurship. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Office Hours. I'm David Meltzer. We're here live at the Sirius XM Studios at the Wind Resorts in Las Vegas, and I'm blessed to have friends like Josh Luber. He's probably one of my favorite entrepreneurs because when you think about an entrepreneur, we look at people that actually have been able to exit at a large opportunity. And very humbly, he's had two billion dollar exits in a space that I know very well. So it's uncommon to have one that big, but it's even more uncommon to have two exits that large. There's no mistake. One of the things that I enjoy about losing everything was the fact that it meant something, that I could do it again.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  And I think a lot of people seek my advice because I was able to do it again. You feel as if it wasn't an accident or a coincidence, and it's uncommon. And it's no doubt why Josh Luber, the former CEO of X, StockX, and former CEO of Fanatic Collectibles, is now creating a business around uncommon toys. And what's uncommon has a lot of value, and we see that with his newest project called Ghost Right. I just want to welcome you, Josh, and thank you as well for coming back on Office Hours.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. This is, this is the best.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  When I think about you, bro, I think about situational knowledge. You know, with AI, there's knowledge. We both went to law school. I think you have a JD MBA.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  I do. And so we have a lot of knowledge, and probably because our parents made us and told us that knowledge would be power. But the truth is with AI, these guys could answer legal questions far better than we could with their phone, with all the years and money that we spent in education. But wisdom, situational knowledge, of being able to build the companies that you've built, have evolved into a really great bet called Ghost Right. What were some of the bigger knowledge points that you took from StockX in that marketplace, took from Fanatic Collectibles in that marketplace to create this extraordinary marketplace around uncommon toys?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  That's actually a really good sort of like intro question to Ghost Right. Thank you, you know, for having me again here. This is always a blast. It's great to sit with you guys and talk. I know it's not, I don't, I don't take it for granted based on just our friendship. I know the, the quality of the people that come through here. You know, Ghost Right, the first time that I showed you this business was almost two years ago now. In fact, it's probably about almost exactly two years ago, where we brought you what was a ghost that we didn't even sell. It was a friends and family ghost. It was about 11 inches high and it was Ghost Right branded. And that was the, the first one that, that we created. And it wasn't until almost a year later that we created the first product,

• 2:58Speaker 01

  that we started to have some product market fit. But we started working on this business in 2022. Look, StockX and Fanatic Collectibles were both unbelievable runs and, and, you know, yeah, there were big numbers and, and big companies. But this is the first one that I built from my, by myself, from scratch. And about six months ago, so we started Ghost Right in the summer of 22. About six months ago, I swear to God, I woke up one day and I, I had this like very, very clear feeling. And I said, oh, I think I'm good at my job. Like I had this like, like I had this like, I actually think I like understand like what.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Michael Jordan woke up one day and said, same thing.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Halfway through my MVP season.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the difference is, right? Like it's very clear to identify talent in athletics. It's much harder to your point of like, is it, is it, is it an accident? Is it circumstance? Is it luck?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Partnerships.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Totally. And, you know, but it is about that repetition and you start to, to see those, those problems and those decisions ahead of time. You know, I am first and foremost an operator and we've been running this company from the ground. And, but the, this industry, these products are all the same. Ghost Right is a collectible toy. We will, after everybody has a chance to ask questions, we'll, we'll do an unboxing. Everyone gets to open their ghost.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  This is a toy that functions exactly the way that trading cards did. All we did was try to replicate how trading cards worked at Fanatic's Collectibles in the trading card business and apply it to a different form factor that we had seen across all the different categories at StockX. So this is very much a, you know, a function of a decade of my career of all these things coming together because they're all the same thing. And it was really interesting was I've done one, I think, one other of these between the, the episode where I gave you the, the first one and now. And at that time, we started to have this conversation of like, oh, there's something much bigger here than just a toy company.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  We are this close, we are this close to Ghost Right being on the same level and the same conversation of trading cards, art, watches, handbags, you know, like true alternative assets. And like, that's the idea. And once you flip over to that, that next, that next level, all of a sudden, I mean, trading cards are selling for millions of dollars every single day.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  And just last week, the, the most expensive Ghost Right sale ever happened. And as you can see, these are two inch pieces of plastic. The Victor Wembanyama from the first set, the one of one Victor Wembanyama sold for $52,000 last week.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Wow, that's pretty awesome.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  So it's starting to work.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  You are smart.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  I'm keeping them out of my box.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Keeping them in the box now. Look, I'm so excited to talk to you because I actually listened to your TED Talk a long time ago, your one and only one, which I didn't know that was the case, actually. I just had heard that one. And you changed the game for people who thought about shoes at the time, right? And so shoes were disposable. They were something that was not considered even an investment. It was actually considered garbage right after the, after you used them. And so you, you look at how you change the space for like the investments on shoes. And that really defined the urban community more so than any other community. How do you think, you know, Ghost Right's going to do that for, I don't know. Is it the urban community? Is it everyone this time? Is it, is it going to kind of span globally?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  There was a moment during the pandemic when the Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, came out that today, a lot of people sort of look back at the, the moment that trading cards became mainstream. And obviously there was a lot of growth that had to happen between then and now, and there still will be. But we're well past that. I mean, you see at the NBA draft, the number one draft picks walking off stage with Adam Silver and sitting there and signing their trading cards live. You know, Knicks won the, the NBA Finals. The, after, after OG's tip in, in game four, literally before the interviews were over,

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Fanatics had created trading cards of that tip, including a piece of the net from the game and the signature from OG of that card before the game, before people left the building and were selling it, right? So like we've, we've crossed over into that, that chasm for trading cards. And trading cards are special for a ton of reasons, but, and which is why we've tried to just copy what trading cards are for, for, for Ghost Right. And so all of these categories, we'll call it collectibles generally, are at that level. And we're now seeing this where, you know, Ghost Right, we get to just frankly, just ride the coattails of the larger, of the, of the larger conversation around it. And we also get to be the first ones within the collectible toy space of, of doing that, of sort of bridging that gap.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Because collectible toys are like starter art, you know, you're sort of like in this space where you're in between art and, and toys, where they, they sit on the shelf and they, they have a, a way to, to do something with them besides just sort of sit in a drawer. So yeah, the, the short answer to your question is like, it's mainstream at this point. And it's only going to become more mainstream now that you have these big companies that are. By the way, the, the key to Fanatic's collectibles, there's a lot of them, but fundamentally was getting the NBA, Major League Baseball, NFL as equity partners in that business. So now all of the, the biggest brands are behind all of those collectibles businesses. We're like, we're not going back the other direction from that.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  I'm always fascinated by guys like you that make these strong exits that go and get back into something. So I'm always curious, when you went and got back into something, what was your criteria that said, okay, if I'm going to do this again, all the pains, all the building? Did you have different criteria than when you did the previous companies? And what was that?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's, um, it's a, it's a great question to sort of tee up for the general public. We all understand that there is no choice, right? What, you know, I'm 48 years old. What am I, I go like?

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Play golf.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Take up golf or something.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  By the way, the only hobby I have and hobby is poker. And the only reason is because you can be on your phone at a poker table. I'm basically at work. So, you know.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  But the answer to that question is, is, is people. And the opportunity to create Ghost Right in, when I did was to work with exactly who I wanted to work with from Finax Collectibles, from StockX. And, you know, there's 15 people at Ghost Right today. I think 11 of them worked with me at either one or both companies. And by the way, I know the next 10 people that I'll hire for this role and that role. And like, at the end of the day, like, business is just people. And so the work with the people that you, first of all, to know that they're great people and who they are. But you gotta show up and spend all your time with them. And so that was the criteria to be able to work with them. And, and frankly, it's phenomenal to be in a post-COVID world where we can have a fully remote company. I don't, I spent six years just trying to convince people to move to Detroit.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And so, and so that, the short answer to that is people.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  So you're basically saying, okay, these are my favorite people in the world. Give me a reason to hang out with them more.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  And give me a, like, and/or to build the business around their talent.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, there you go.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I, I created, so Ghost Right is, is the core business. There is a related business to Ghost Right that will launch later this year. Uh, and then I started a poker-related company, um, that I'm in the middle of launching. And, uh, this was a business that has nothing to do with Ghost Right. It was purely, uh, a personal passion that I couldn't not do because I spent so much time at the poker. But it was also because I'd become friends and business partners with so many people in the poker community, including the most famous poker players in the world, like Phil Hamuth and Doug Polk and Alan Keating. So it literally was, how do we build a poker business around the people that I know? That one was purely like reverse engineered around that because we had access.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Because Phil's been an investor in three of my other companies, including Ghost Right and a trading card company. So, uh, you know, again, it, it really is about those people.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Just because you lost your money to Phil doesn't make it an investment.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll give your 100 grand back. Give me some shares.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  I, I think if it, for the, we got 60 seconds or so left. My question is going to be for the operators, right? The operators watching, the people watching, listening. You mentioned when we first started the episode that, you know, there were, there were patterns of success. Things that you noticed that were pattern recognition, or you discovered those after a couple of exits and then launching these new business endeavors. Have you also seen patterns and bottlenecks? Ones that you would be happy to share with the audience for them to keep an eye out for as well?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly not a 60-second question. But look, the, and this was, this was frankly, some of the, the realization, this sort of day I woke up. I was like, I understand what I'm doing. Like, I always understood the culture and the, you know, the interpersonal part of it. But to start seeing, um, you know, those, just the, frankly, the bottlenecks in the process and to understand that here's where we need to have our resources, or here's the people. And frankly, that comes back down to hiring as well. At every moment of a startup, you're asking the question of, how much money do we have? You know, where do we need to deploy our money? Where do we need, and I had a, a young person on the team come to me, uh, I don't know. It was maybe like four or five months ago. And he was very distraught about the, this, this system that wasn't working. It was broken. We didn't have the technology for it.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And he was like, we, he was, we have to fix it. We have to fix this. You know, as I'm spending all this time in manual work doing this. And I said, well, what happens when we fix that? He goes, oh, well, everything, I said, everything won't be great. I was like, you'll spend all your time fixing some other problem, whatever the next one is. Man, I was like, that's the business. I was like, we work on the hardest problems at whatever time. We fix them, then we move on to the next hardest problems and you fix them by whatever means necessary. And you just keep moving like that. And I think that part of it is what people don't understand about a startup.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Dude, that's, that's wisdom right there. Cause I, bottlenecks, bottlenecks, but it's the same thing. Fire, fix, anyway. Back to you, Dave.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so impressive, you know, when I first met Josh, I wanted to meet him because I'm like, what does it take for Dan Gilbert to invest in you and partner with you? Like, think about that. Someone, and, and I'm around owners, uh, a lot. And been offered different things and thought to myself, that's one thing. But then to go from Dan Gilbert to Michael Rubin and not let them down. You know, both will speak the world of Josh Luber. And I know all the presidents of the leagues that he works with. And they have great deals with NBA, WNBA, Eastside Golf and many more, uh, to get these great collabs and licenses that will create the marketplace. And I can't wait to find out about the poker.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Deal as well. And, uh, man.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  We need to open the, before we go. All right.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  All right.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  So what we have is, so two of you guys each have one from the last NBA set. And the two of you each have one from the US Men's National Team World Cup set. So, um.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  A little messy.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  This works exactly like trading cards, which is you want your favorite players. You want to get LeBron or Luka or Wemby or whomever. And you guys are looking for Christian Pulisic or Baligan or, but what you really want are the rare variants. So they'll have a shiny crown. There's numbered to 50, 25, 10, 5, or the fire crown, which is one of one. Now, this is truly like, it could, could be random. There's only four, so the odds are that there probably won't be a rare variant because there's usually one per box. But we should open them and see what we get and.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  I'd like to already make my first trade. Can I trade, I'm NBA. Can I trade for NBA?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll trade.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  You'll trade?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  I think this is a messy, so.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, I only had two.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  We'll see what I lost out on here in a second.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So I, I'll show you.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Cause I got the big one that's already worth a hundred grand.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  So this is like, this is an example. This is, uh, from the US Men's National Team. This is Baligan. This one's numbered to 80, so it's got a shiny chrome, uh, crown. But, so, uh, I will open one with you guys.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  All right.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  And we will, we will see what, but this is the business. We sell most of our products to the trading card breakers and hobby shops. And, uh, the same way the trading cards work. So when you open it up.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Come on, Crown, come on, Crown.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And you get the foil package. On one side, there'll be a little notch that'll make it easy for you guys to, to open. And when the breakers do it, you know, they're, they're, they're very good at putting on a show. They open it like this.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  All right, here we go.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  And then it's like, it's like, what crown is it? And then it's, what player is it? And it's super exciting. So. So I, I happen to get, uh.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I have a non-parallel, um, this is actually.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  I love mine. Oh, man. Harper from the Spurs.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  So David, you lost in that trade.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  That's a Dylan Harper rookie ghost. So on the shoulder, it have an R, just like, so it says it's a rookie card.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  So even though that one's not rare, because it's Dylan Harper and because it's rookie. Those sell for about 50, 60 bucks as just a.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Christian Pulisic, who's best player on the, on the team. And that's, but, and you got Young Hansen, who's also a rookie and, uh, a favorite of all of Asia.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  American favorite.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And then what number is that? 21.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  21.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  So, uh, who's that? Um, what's the name on the back?

• 16:16Speaker 00

  It's going in my collection.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  I still can't read it.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Well, we had the first break here of Ghost Right with one of my favorite entrepreneurs and dear friends. We are blessed to have Josh Luber in the house once again. I'm David Meltzer. Make sure you get your ghosts right here on Office Hours.