#5: StockX, ghostwrite, and Economics Behind The Hype Economy
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And then I realized that I just make what I like and maybe sometimes other people also like it. And at the end of the day, like that's what we're doing here is like I make what I like and the team and I found some people that have similar sensibilities, particularly our designer, and then hopefully other people like it as well. Welcome to Divot, a community for people trying to make their mark on the world, where each week I'm interviewing the best minds in business, in tech, sports, entertainment to learn how they've made their mark.

Go to divot.org to see all the episodes or you can watch us on X, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. Divot. This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud and Notion. Whether you're a sneaker enthusiast or a tech guru or just a collector, you're in for a fascinating ride with this week's chat. Josh Luber is the co-founder of Ghostrite. It's a project aimed at transforming digital art and collectibles using toys called ghosts to tell stories.

He's also the co-founder of StockX, which revolutionized sneakers and collectible trading. He's also the co-founder of Fanatics Collectibles, which owns trading card exclusives for all the major sports leagues. There's virtually no one in the world that knows more or has been more involved in the collectibles world over the last decade than Josh. He also invited us into his home, into one of the coolest spaces I've ever been in. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Appreciate you having us. Thanks for coming.

Where did it start? GhostRite is a collectible toy. The collectible toy space is extremely popular. It's been growing a lot in the last decade. This is sort of like the intersection of art and commerce. Starter art. But there's a brand called Bearbrick, which is made by Medicom, which is

the longest running, most successful collectible toy franchise. And this is the evolution of that. Ghostrite is what we call a blank canvas collectible, meaning that the shape is the brand. It could look like a basketball. It could be Ghostrite branded. You know, we've done releases that are different characters, that are different figures. But the idea is that a ghost is not a character. It doesn't have a face, doesn't have a gender. The ethos of Ghostrite is a brand. These are toys. These are collectibles to tell other people's stories.

And which is, by the way, exactly the same way every other important collectible is. A trading card, the physical trading card is the same every single time. It's about who's on it. Is it Wemby or the backup shortstop for the twins, right? Same thing with sneakers. Is it a Jordan 6? Is there a big difference between Jordan 6 infrareds or just a random one, right? And that's the same thing for Ghostrite. We get to create a brand, create a collectible toy.

That is the culmination of 10 years of being in the hype economy and working with sneakers and trading cards and all these great products. And now you can make toys. Do you, when you talk about it being like a blank canvas to tell stories, is that like, is it all other people's stories? Is it, I mean, you have your own course, but is your sort of vision for it that like, there's so many great stories out there. Like, let's just go tell, let's just be an extension of the existing great stories. When, if you look at, if you look at the really great,

collectible products that exist. Sneakers, trading cards, you know, they're all based in the stories. They're all based in something beyond just this, whatever this visual representation is in front of you. Paintings, right? Art, all great art has an extraordinary backstory to what it is. And we spent a lot of time, we spent eight months designing the shape of

And this is a true, true number. I worked with 14 different toy designers to come up with a shape that would work, that could take on skins. This is a basketball. You know, we did a release with Astro Boy recently. You don't see Astro Boy in any way whatsoever. This is a basketball, right? And so that then gives us the ability to tell those stories because trading card is easy. A trading card is a...

piece of paper is that big, it literally is the definition of a canvas, right? A blank canvas. And so for us to be able to be in a position, that's how you get to work with all the most important brands and artists and companies. And, you know, like that's the important part, right? The intersection of culture and commerce only matters if culture actually wants to work with you and be a part of it. I have a ghost that sits right by me at my desk. And it's like, even just the shape and I don't know, it's...

it's really unique. I wonder how did you come up with just the form? Is this the first iteration? Did you wake up in the middle of the night and sketch it out? Or did you iterate? There were many, many iterations. There's a whole bunch of boards over there. There's many older ones on there. The first one

I had this idea, I had this picture of my daughter wearing a hoodie and the hood was up and her hair was kind of hanging out and it just, it was really cool and we tried to create a figure that was based on that for a while. But no matter what

And the toy designers that worked on it created a phenomenal toy, a phenomenal figure. But no matter what you did, you couldn't not see a girl wearing the hoodie. Yeah. And so we had to get to a place where, and a lot of it is trial and error, but a lot of it is also taking a look at those that have been successful. Bearbrick, which is basically a human body with a bear head, has been so successful and for so long

And so you look at it and like, what are the things that really make it stand out? Well, it's got a lot of big flat surfaces that you can, you know, put designs on it that you can put skins on it. You know, bare bricks, legs and arms. They don't, they're not human arms, but you can tell it's a human. Yeah. Right. But they're, they're bigger and wider so that you can have the space in the same way that like, you can tell a ghost house has arms and hands, but human arms and hands don't look like that. Right. That it's for that reason. And then the last part was, um,

we needed a head that was iconic. We needed a head. And if you walk into a store and you see a Bearbrick all the way at the end of the store, you can see those ears. You know that's a Bearbrick. So at one point, we literally made a list of everything you could possibly put on the top of a toy. A fedora, a crown, a hat, whatever, a feather. I mean, there was probably a list of...

200. And then by process of elimination, got to something that worked and got to a crown. And then someone has to design it. And like, it's a lot of, it's a lot of, a lot of give and take a lot of just trial and error. How do you, how do you take a collectible from zero to one and make it something that feels scarce and desirable and that, that people want to hang on to?

Yeah, I mean, look, that's kind of everything, right? That's the heart of creating any brand within the hype economy, right? We have this industry that has evolved that we use the term hype economy for that has all these products that are not Cheerios and soap and right. They're all the products that are supply and demand driven that sit at the intersection of culture and commerce that have the ability to have really strong brands and to develop fan bases around them. And look, part of it is we...

by the very nature of having a blank canvas collectible, we get to work with brands that give us a cosign. Every time they do that, the fact that we have an NBA license, the fact that we did an Astro Boy, the fact that we did a ghost with Rocky's Matcha, which is this uber cool LA drink brand that maybe a lot of people don't know about, but those that do know what that means. And so that's a starting point. But

We talk about Ghostrate as the first true collectible. And I don't mean that in any way as derogatory towards these other brands that have had phenomenal collectibles like Supreme or Topps or Nike. But none of those brands started last year. None of those brands from the beginning thought through, like, what is it?

matter to make a true collectible toy. Every ghost from the bottom of the foot tells you exactly how many exist. So like transparency of supply is a huge part of it, right? Every ghost 400% that we sell is in packaging that is clear,

that's and it's you can keep it sealed, but still display it, right? So you've all these things around what a collectibles mean, what a collectors want in their products. And like, that's just the baseline, then you got to actually build the brain on top of it. But like the baseline is, is that we know what collectors want, because

I mean, I'm a collector. We're all collectors. Everyone on the team is collectors, right? We know what matters. And so from a brand standpoint, I was listening to an interview with Mike Posner, who has had a really up and down music career. And he said, you know, for a while I was making music for other people. And then I realized that I just make what I like and maybe sometimes other people also like it.

And at the end of the day, like that's what we're doing here is like I make what I like and the team and I found some people that have similar sensibilities and particularly our designer. And then hopefully other people like it as well. What are the early indicators that you're seeing to like get you excited? And you, you know, you do have quite a bit of authority in this space. Are there little things that you're seeing like, oh, this happened or this happened or this happened that like makes you feel like it's starting to work?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. For the longest time at StockX, we didn't know if anybody cared about

the brand if anyone cared like cared what we were doing we knew that people like sneakers right um but then we saw people starting to use our tag and wear the shoes with the tag on it um and the reality was people like sneakers so much that they like stock x

And we see some of that same thing here as well, that we hit a nerve and we create a ghost that somebody really likes because they're a huge fan of Astro Boy or East Side Golf or whatever. They become like uber fans of Ghost Rite. And so and then you have the flip side of it, which is in our Ghost Rite collectors. And that's what was always interesting.

interesting about blank canvas collectibles. So I'm not a particularly a bare brick collector, but I have a, I don't know, a half dozen and dozen. One in particular I have is Garfield because I like Garfield. My kids like Garfield. So we have a Garfield bare brick, right? It doesn't mean I'm necessarily a bare brick collector, but we like Garfield. And so that gives us two shots at the apple, a ghost, right? To be able to do that and to be able to hit people in different things. And so we see that it is

all anecdotal from one guy and two guys and this comment and that comment, right? It is very small. If you go to our Instagram page, we have a relatively small number of followers compared to some big brands, but they're all real followers. None are bought. And they're all like true, like Uber fans. And I think at this point, all of us entrepreneurs know you'd much rather make a product that a thousand people love than a million people kind of like. Yeah.

Tell us about the Dutch auctions. Where did that come from and how is it different from what the market's been doing? Yeah, the idea of market-based pricing, the idea to let the market set the price for your product rather than us as a brand having a fixed price, that is the through line of everything that I've created. StockX, FinanX Collectibles, GhostRite.

All products within the hype economy are fundamentally products that are supply and demand driven. They have finite supply. And we didn't make this up, right? This is Econ 101 at its most basic. It's supply and demand. If there's finite supply, then the price is a function of demand. And for basically eternity...

All brands don't use that. All brands have a fixed price because that's how it's easy to sell something. It is complicated to have auctions and have different pricing and variable pricing. The only real example of variable pricing in our day-to-day commerce are places like Uber or airline tickets, things that are algorithmically driven behind the scenes. And they're essentially digital products.

And so it's this idea of taking the efficiencies of those markets like Uber and ticketing, the efficiencies of financial markets and trying to apply it to physical goods. That's what StockX is. The business at StockX is the pricing model. It is not sneakers. Happens to be that we started with sneakers. And so this is very much carrying through all of it. This will very quickly, you know, end up in an economics lecture. I've sort of become an accidental economist on this topic. How long have you studied this for?

For the last 10 years, right? But it's not like I have any real background. You're like a heart surgeon of Dutch Oxford.

I am an accidental economist, right? This was a function of we had a business we thought was a good idea as we learn more and more. But we spent years talking to economists and professors and market makers to try to figure out how do you move from the secondary market, from stock X to the primary market, right? Stock X.

StockX, I don't want to say it was easy, but it was easier because the secondary market has always been based on market price. Even go to eBay, go to any auction, you're going to pay what that thing is worth. The primary market has always been what the brand is selling it for. And so that has been the question through all this. We considered everything we're doing at GhostRite, we considered before we even launched StockX. There's a million reasons why we didn't.

Anyway, there's a lot of ways to go here, but we can focus on the actual function. We decided that Ghostrite, any ghost that we sell, we will not set a market price for it. We will let the market set the price. We will not have a fixed arbitrary retail price for the product. Could be any price. Yeah. Regardless of cost. Yeah. And there's ways to...

mitigate against disasters, but fundamentally we want to be have a fair price for our products. And if we do our job on the brand side and we work with great brands and we create a great product, we build a great brand, then the value should should should follow. And it doesn't mean that we take all that value. There's still value that's out there for the market to have. There's still hype left in the system. But this is the big idea behind Go Straight. And

Today, what's really important is that we create great products and we have great packaging and manufacturing and customer service and all that. But underneath it all, right, we want to be able to show that this is how hyper-economic products should be sold. And so far, so good. You know, we've done half a dozen Dutch auctions. They've all, blind Dutch auctions, they've all worked exactly the way they're supposed to work. So we'll keep going. I was reading that Dutch auctions, like, started in Babylon.

And, and I mean, I didn't research it, but like, that's a crazy idea that this, this method that's kind of like you're, you're sharing it because none of us have ever heard of it. And no one's, no one's really ever used it. Maybe, maybe you did kind of by, you know, sort of indirectly through some other product, but not really. And this is something that's been around for thousands of years as a way to like appropriately price a product. And these products, which are so expensive,

It's so hard with collectibles to actually price. What's it worth? Well, what is it worth? Whatever the market says it's worth, that's what it's worth. That's right. That's right. Your point on the history is right. We didn't make up any of this. StockX, we didn't make up any of this. We've just been taking how pricing efficiency has worked in other markets and apply it to physical consumer goods.

The emergence of the hype economy over the past decade has made it such that people very clearly understand that that particular product is worth more or less than whatever it is being sold for. Right. This is, by the way, for forever, the way that brands manage this was through chaos. It's like, oh, let people line up and camp out and have riots. I mean,

You know, you're wearing Jordan sixes, right? This is 1991 Sports Illustrated, cover Sports Illustrated, your sneakers are your life, right? A pair of Jordan, like this. And because there was no, there was no other way. By the way, none of this can happen, obviously, without the internet. So that's a starting point of selling products digitally. But we didn't make this up. And to your point, it goes back to Babylon. People have always been trying to figure out an efficient way to price scarce goods. So you came up with the idea in fall of 2022, right?

You launched your first Ghost fall of 2023. We're now early 2025. If everything goes the way you hope, what will Ghostrite be in the next five or 10 years?

Well, there's two parts of that. There's the Ghostrate, the collectible toy brand, and then there's this concept we've been talking around, around market-based pricing and where that can go. Putting the bigger idea apart for a second, you can look at Medicom as a pretty good starting playbook for Ghostrate, right? That Bearbrick has evolved and we have the same three sizes as Bearbrick.

But the first major deviation is how we manage blind boxes, how we manage the 100% size. And we did one release so far, which is the WNBA that we did in December of 24. And if the 400%, the 11-inch size, are generally very scarce, 20 units, 50 units, 100 units, the blind boxes are less so, where you have a case that looks like this, where you have

One box, inside the box are 12 individually boxed ghosts.

and you don't know the ghost you're going to get. This is WNBA, so you have the players from the set. You have Caitlyn Clark, Asia Wilson, Angel Reese. And very much like trading cards, you're hoping that you're going to pull a Caitlyn Clark or one of the better players. And then very much like trading cards, there's variants. So there's a version number 10 and a version number 5 and a 1 of 1. I mean, this is exactly the way trading cards work. And so this allows us to scale the quarterbacks

core business in the same way that trading cards are scaled because in the same way you can have different sets. You can have high-end, low-end. You can have different quantities, different designs. But keeping the core business scarce, limited, and still all of it is based on market-based pricing. So I say...

often that we get to take everything that we learn from sneakers and trading cards and apply it to collectible toys but this is most like this is direct this this doesn't get any more direct and so you know if bear brick is a starting point uh take a look at at tops and panini as you're bringing in these things throughout the collectibles universe you're kind of the things that you liked and your team liked and you've kind of brought them into sort of one place with

with Ghost Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and in a lot of ways, um, you know, I think we have the, one of Virgil's books around here, right? Virgil says it takes what, 3% change or 2% change to create something new. Um,

I don't even know if we're changing that much. I guess it's a different figure. What all we're doing is taking the best of this and the best of this and the best of this. Like, you know, we, we know how, how collectors work. We know how collectibles work. And, um, you know, look, I'm obviously extremely biased, but I think,

so much of the work was just trying to get a shape that was a true blank canvas. And now we get to go ex-fueling into playbook that Nike and Tops and Bearbrick have been running for decades. Yeah. We're going to break these at the end. Is that right? Absolutely. Break them whenever you want. All right. All right. On that note, like, I mean, it is kind of funny that we're wearing shoes from the 80s and 90s, right? Like, they're... And the sneakers, like...

There's been some innovation, but there's been a lot of non-innovation too. We're just like recycling the same stuff. Like, why is that? Why aren't there more cooler new ideas coming out of sneakers? Why are we just, and who's the guy, who's the guy that came up with re-releasing the retro? I mean, that person should have a statue. Yeah.

at Nike. Do we know who that person is? Is there a person that did that? You know, I don't know who came up with the actual idea to re-release them, but clearly, you know, MJ's got a statue there, right? Yeah, fair enough. There's, you know, the innovation in the sneaker industry or lack thereof in some cases, the whole thing is unbelievable. I mean, not to sort of pitch myself, I mean, I'm in the middle of writing a book about it because I

What happened, what has happened over the last

a little more than a decade now. Really, 2008, 2009 is when it started. And then 2012 was kind of the starburst with the Galaxy foam release and Instagram. But you have this, the way the hype economy and with sneakers at the center of it have evolved over the last decade has been extraordinary. And part of it is around the idea of how do we create scarcity? And one of it is re-releasing. Because, and again, this is where we're going to end up

as deep down the economic side of this, but if you just start with the premise that it's all supply and demand. So, okay. So supply is a fixed number. A brand can choose how many to make. Okay. So put a supply side. So demand is what really matters, right? Well, at the core of it,

Jordan's, like Michael Jordan, Air Jordan, there's so much just historic demand around these shoes, this person that has existed for so long, right? Because he existed at a time as the most popular athlete and person in the world before social media, where it was just him. It was like- It was all organic. Yeah. And we all liked him. Today, even if you loved who's the most famous, I don't know, Ronaldo or Messi or, you know, the most famous athlete in the world is-

There's still so many other people that you could choose to follow at the time. It was just, it was so organic to the time and everything else. So you just have this built in demand around that. So then the other part of it is how do you then create new demands? Even if Nike goes out and creates the most amazing new shoe, and there's been plenty of new technology and new shoes that have come out, right? You just can't compete with this historic demand. It's all part of it. And so, you know, it's a really fascinating thing.

case study in how consumer companies build products around that. Because at the end of the day, they need people to want to go and buy it. By the way, there's another part. We sort of talk about this as true demand, people that really love Jordans or Michael Jordan for whatever reason. There's the, we call it sneakerhead demand or this sort of alternate demand, which is the people that only want it because it's cool or because it's rare or because it's valuable, right? Which is to say that

I mean, I'm obviously wearing the Carhartts here because we're doing this in my house. Tell us about your shoes.

How many pairs exist? Where did you get them? It is such an unbelievable, perfect example of all this. Okay, so it's obviously it's an Air Jordan 4. It's a collaboration between Carhartt and MM. It was released in 2015 or 2016. I forget at this point. But there were only 300 pairs made, but there were only 10 pairs released to the public, and they were released as an auction on eBay. They sold for an average of, I think,

when they first came out at $30,000 each or $23,000 each. And for the time, because this was the biggest, highest, most expensive shoe right before it all changed, right before StockX and GOAT, right before Yeezy, right? And then you have this sort of edge of Eminem still being the most popular rapper in the world.

So all this sort of comes together. There were actually 300 pairs made. Most people don't know that. I think 290 of them went into Paul's closet and the other 10 were sold there. And- Two to Nike kids and Paul. Yeah, yeah. And so when we started working with Eminem and Paul Rosenberg, Eminem was an investor in one of the first round that StockX, Detroit, Eminem, you know, it was a, as a,

Growing up as a, you know... Did you get to meet him? Yeah. I mean, it was like, you know... Actually, you did. There's like a meme or something, right? The video we did with Eminem and the meme that was out there, it was amazing. Look, through this whole process, I got to meet many famous people. That was the only one that I was like legit nervous for. That I was like...

Yeah, but he was so nice and it was great. And it was a blast. We made this video. But when we first signed those guys, Paul gave me a pair and I put them on right then. I'm not going to go resell these. I've only worn them a handful of times. I usually wear them on stage. But the point is like, look at this. There's nothing outwardly extraordinary about the shoes. It's a black shoe with some white and some silver. Right. But because of supply and demand, because of all these things, there's only a couple that exist.

It's a $30,000 shoe. I don't know what it is now, a $50,000 shoe, right? It's crazy. It's still just rubber and leather and glue. It's made no different than the $110 shoe sitting over there. Okay, this is a good contrast to let's go to my shoe. And then let's talk about what's happened. When I was nine years old, eight years old, maybe, my grandmother took me to a mall in Tampa, Florida. We went to Foot Locker. I begged, begged, begged her to buy these shoes.

the Jordan six infrareds and the salesperson who was definitely getting commissioned, definitely told me how great I looked at him. All the people that were sitting there, they all told me how great I looked at him. And my wonderful sweet grandmother who only shopped at TJ McNamara Marshalls, like,

bought these shoes and grabbed my hand, squeezed so hard and got us out of the mall as fast as she could and didn't talk to me for like the next, the rest of the day. And I wore them into the ground. And then when they re-released in 2010, I went to Foot Locker at five in the morning, waited for the shoes to come out, got the shoes. And, and when I wear them, I think of that time. Yeah. Right. But the other thing is like, it's like this with, with people that were, that were buying Seekers before that time, you said where things started to change. It's like,

One of the big reasons for having them is that other people didn't have them. Right? Like that's the whole thing is like, I'm doing something unique. I'm part of this culture. When you see somebody,

wearing cool sneakers, which I still do today, but it's like great kicks, right? And it like pumps you up. Now, when I walk in the, like after all of this, whatever happened over the last 15 years, like when I walked through the airport, every, I can't say, I would only be saying that if I was, if I still did that, I'd have to say it to everyone, say to little kids, grandmas, everybody. And it's like, there's this, like this, this feeling of like what made it special and cool is,

in some ways it's kind of like sucked that air has gotten sucked out of the room. And so I don't know, maybe that's just me. But when I, you know, anecdotally, when I talk to people or my friends, like, you know, we still talk about like,

going to the Vegas outlet in the early 2000s and finding some Jordans on the wall. And like, there's, we're still talking for 40 bucks or, you know, it's like that, like, it was almost like thrifting, you know, it was like this, like in some ways, like, like I found this pair and like, it was really special. Let me tell you the story about it. Right. And now that like, it's totally accessible and you get any shoe you want, as long as you have money, like it,

some of the magic has been taken out of it for old grumpy people. Hey me. I mean, and that's our fault, right? Like, sorry, not sorry. Like that's what, that's what StockX and Goat, right? That's what StockX and Goat did was they made it all accessible. That it was, all you had to do was go and buy it. So it was just about money. And look, that's,

Was going to happen anyway. It was happening. It was happening before the apps came before. Yeah. But it was still even before, like, you know, in, in right before in, in 2015 with eBay, you still had to know how to navigate through eBay. So to figure out, you know, look in 2015, in 2015, I would get, I don't know,

Two emails a month, maybe three or four from friends who'd say, hey, remember those Jordans we used to want? Can you help me buy them? Can you help me buy them? Right? Because it wasn't easy for anyone to navigate through eBay or to find a consignment shop, right? You could walk into Flight Club. The reason why Flight Club is so iconic is because they were there a decade before anyone else where all you need to do is walk in there with money and buy. You knew it was real. You didn't have to deal with the bull...

Right. And it was way overpriced. If you were in the sneaker industry, you knew that it was more expensive, but that was the service they were offering. And what StockX and Go did was all they did was move everyone down the access curve. Right. There's four really important moments in sort of the history of sneakerhead. Right. Which is 85, the first Jordans, but each one of these.

is just moving us farther down the axis, right? It's just making sneakers more accessible and more mainstream. So 85, the first Jordans, right? But in 85, pre-internet, it's still very local. 99, 2000, eBay started the internet. So now you didn't have to have it being released down at your store. You could buy it anywhere. You said to know what you're buying. It was still an underground sort of thing, but at least you could buy it globally. 2012, Instagram,

Now you have complete transparency of, of those shoes that exist. Right. To your point, you know, you, we used to all walk around with our heads down and you know, the, the seminal book in the, uh, in the early two thousands was, but Beto Garcia is, where'd you get those? Right. It was called, where'd you get those? Because you'd see someone with you, but yo, where'd you get those? Right. Well, nobody asked that anymore because now once you're at, yeah. Right. And,

And what happened with Instagram was all Sneakerheads ever wanted to do is see what other people have and then show off their shoes. And now Instagram allowed everyone to do that at scale. Right. And then 2015, 2016 StockX and Goat. Now anyone could buy them. You can go on StockX or Goat and buy any pair of shoes you want as easy as going to Foot Locker and buying a GR pair. And that's what changed. And that's when we talk about the business at StockX.

It is the single product page. It is having one single product page where every, you know, you go to eBay, you look for those shoes. There's a thousand listings. You buy this guy or that guy. Like, that's ridiculous. That's not how commerce works. You go to StockX, there's one product page and everything is right there. And everything leads in that authentication, that ask, like all this stuff leads to, and all the differences between StockX and Goat

The one thing that is identical is they both have one single product page. And I haven't been at StockX for five years, so I don't know the numbers. But my guess is they sell about the same amount of sneakers every year. They sell a load of sneakers every year, but it's about the same.

Stock X is a much stronger brand, but they sell the same because it's about the single product page. Right. And that's what it was and all of it. And like I say, like, sorry, not sorry. It made it so that everyone at the airport can now have a pair of Jordans. Yeah. So then what's left, right? What's left is understanding the nuances of how do you get a pair of these without having to pay $30,000. You have opened up like those products did open up.

uh things for a lot of people and it opened up a lot more people to take take part in right in um in something that is really special to a lot of people yeah um and you know the other thing like the first you talk about ebay the first pair of uh shoes i ever bought on ebay was in 2004 and um it was jordan 11s and i was like so stoked i went and played with them and literally my

when I finished playing, my ankles were bleeding. And I was like, well, when did I buy? And, you know, like that's, you know, we, my friends and I was just like, we should have, you know, we should have started StockX in, in 2004 and say, well, you know, like we weren't smart enough to do that, but those were problems that a lot of people experience and you solve those problems. Right. Yeah. And look, a lot of it was also just timing, right. You know,

Stock X couldn't have been started until after Instagram. Yeah. Oh, interesting. I always thought it was just mobile, but you're saying it's after. After social media and the growth of the sneaker community, the core underground community got so much bigger. It created the larger demand.

So you have that as the starting point. And then, look, we also got so lucky that we started working on StockX the same year as Yeezy. We launched StockX in February of 2016, which is when the first 350 comes out. So the timing of how this thing all happens is

in retrospect, you know, it sort of had to unfold this way. Yeah. But, you know, a lot of it is just the mainstreamification of sneakers. And you look back now, you know, I think, you know, I did a TED talk about sneakers in 2015. It was September of 2015. We launched StockX in February of 2016. So this is before Yeezy, before StockX, before any of this. And

That talk, you can see the people in the front rows laughing as if they think this is a joke. By the end of it, all of a sudden, you can see they flipped and like, oh, this is super interesting and super smart. But in the beginning, they think it's a joke because, oh, sneakers. That was the idea back then. The irony is the retail sneaker industry is

I don't know, $100 billion? Like, how many people wear shoes? Like, all of them. So, like, in retrospect, it was silly to sort of poo-poo this. It's a little different. It's a lot different than, say, collectible toys, where...

look, code players are never going to be what sneakers or trading cards are, right? It's just the core business is so much bigger. But the fact that the sneakerhead world and the mainstream retail sneaker world has converged, like that's such a no-brainer. Like that, it had to happen. It was just a question of when and how. Yeah. You were, you originally, you were at like,

working in corporate America, you're at IBM as like a data analyst or something. And then you were like, if I remember, like you're blogging about sneakers and about, were you sucking out data from eBay? Like what was, how did it all start? Yeah. So I'm a, I'm an entrepreneur. I've started and run, I don't know, four or five businesses before StockX, but in between every business, there was always some corporate job.

first startup I ever started, I was single. Second, I was married with no kids. Third, married with one kid. Fourth, married with two kids, right? And in between each one, there was always some corporate job. You know, every time your risk profile changes, you have to sort of like regroup. But... You're just doing it at nights or on weekends and stuff? Or would you work on it for a while and then like have to go get a job because you ran out of money? Yeah, basically, right? You know, I went to Emory University as an undergraduate. I worked. I had a startup. Went to...

went down. I went back and got my JD MBA at Emory. I worked at Alston Bird, which is one of the largest, most prestigious law firms in the world. I was a bankruptcy attorney there. I was working on a startup the whole time on the side. I left to do that. That company went down. I've always been in and out. And after my last startup crashed, after the crash of 08, I ended up taking a job at IBM

And at that point, I had been through multiple crashes, multiple kids. And I had now had one kid. We moved to New York. I'm like, I kind of...

in the back of my mind had like given up these like pipe dreams of like being an entrepreneur. You know, now like we'd had one kid, we're about to have a second. But. You know, you failed on, I mean, I don't know, like on three companies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the first one we didn't raise money, but the second one, one after grad school, you know, I raised money from friends and family. I mean, I lost, I don't know, $250,000 of, of money from my friends and family. So,

So, you know, we'd raise money and it comes in the angel town. Yeah. And so now, but I'm back, you know, at IBM, I'm a strategy consultant, you know, good job, good salary. You know, there's a very clear career path there. And I was kind of like, okay, like be smart. Like, you know, I left my job at Alston and Byrd, you know, I mean, I, you know, I had to finish as the top of my class to even have this job. I was getting paid more money than I ever got paid. I left after eight months.

And I didn't hate my job. I liked my job, but I think I was the first one in my law school class to leave their big firm job because I wanted to start this startup. So anyway, but the short version is I go to IBM. I think I'm sort of like done. I'm going to be a corporate guy and just have it make a nice career.

But if you're really an entrepreneur, you can't help but start doing shit on the side. And so I had a number of different side projects. And in 2012, after the Galaxy's phone release, I was in New York. I went down there that day. I left an IBM meeting in the middle of the meeting. I was on a phone call. I was like, oh, emergency, got to go. Click. Because Nike store tweeted that wristbands were being given out at 21 Mercer. I got in a cab. I went down there.

I was down there for hours and the line didn't move and we all knew we weren't getting shoes, but I stood down there for hours, just kind of like part of the scene. And I've cried the sneakers all my life, but none of my other businesses had anything to do with sneakers, almost intentionally. So almost intentionally separating like business and pleasure. And so now I'm down here and I'm like, this is pretty much the biggest release in the history of Nike ever.

This is the most like, and this is how it runs, like the chaos, but like the energy. And like, there's no technology, there's no process, no systems, but like just the energy of everyone down there. And I was like, there's a business here. I think there's something here. And I was at IBM and I was doing a bunch of data work. And so I started thinking, I wonder if I get a hold of some sneaker data just to play with my own music and just kind of see what I could do with it. And we started scraping eBay data and there wasn't like a price guide for sneakers at the time.

And so I decided, can I build a price guide? Because I'm a trading card guy and I have stacks of Beckett from when I was a kid, right? Like, you know, price guide is the core to all of it. And I was just doing this data work that I liked and was good at. It was interesting. And so we figured out how to create a price guide and we called that Campless. And Campless, we got all this data work, but then we had to figure out how to get people to pay attention to it.

So we created a blog that was kind of like Freakonomics for sneakers where we were taking the sneaker data, mainly just eBay sales data. Were you getting that through APIs or were you just like scraping the site or how were you getting it? Yeah. I don't know how it works today, but eBay has a...

businesses like eBay have affiliate marketing programs where, you know, you can pull eBay auctions onto your site. If someone goes and buys it, you get a cut. So sort of by tapping on an API, we can get a hold of sales data. There was a lot of work. All the work actually was in cleaning the data because eBay, the listings are written by humans. So it will say, you know, Air Jordan 6, you know, infrared, but then it'll say, you know,

Yeezy, Kobe, Shaq, Carmine, all these other keywords. So all the work was in cleaning the data. I spent 18 months where all I did was every night, every day, just writing queries and doing shit I never even knew I knew how to do. I taught myself how to do it because it all kind of created price guide. We need to clean data. I mean,

This was like the definition of just... This is not making any money. This is why you're still working at this job 40 hours a week. Yeah, I mean, way more than that, right? I had two full-time 60-hour-a-week jobs between being a consultant at IBM and then building Campless. And it started by just getting the data, and then we were writing these posts trying to get people to pay attention. And Campless led to StockX. We eventually sold Campless to Dan Gilbert and turned it into StockX, which...

is a longer story but that was the it was just a side project just to see what we could do with it but it became a lot more yeah it I was just the only one doing real analytics around the sneaker industry at that moment in time

And that attracted other people that were interested in sneakers and data. And so people started coming out of the woodwork and wanted to be involved and help me. And so we built Camper. I saw like, just looking back at Camper, I just found tons and tons of links and tons of people like, oh, Camper said this, Camper said this. It was like, you, you,

the data that you create in the way that you packed it up, you became kind of a thought leader in the space without really like coming from anywhere. You just kind of like, Hey, I'm here. I'm at the table. And I've seen that in lots of other places. Like if you, if you parse the data differently and you do some interesting things around data that people haven't seen it, you can like, you can get the attention of really people at the very top, very fast. Yeah. I mean, look, people care about numbers and people care about data and you know, the,

There were a couple of different moments that mattered. But the most basic level, the reason that I got the attention of Dan and ended up meeting those guys was at some point we sized the market and no one had ever really tried to size the retail market before. How'd you do that?

I just taken the eBay data and we tried to get a hold of as much other data as we could from Flight Club. And I had somebody go through, you know, Facebook groups and try to count how many posts and estimate. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of estimates and, but, you know, there was a fair amount of real work. I mean, there was a lot of real work that went into it. And we decided that at the time, the resale sneaker market, at least in the U.S., was worth around $1,000.

on average about $1.1 billion. That was what the data said after spending a lot of time doing it. And by the way, there were 17 people that worked at campus with me.

They were all volunteers. There was some of them I never even met in person because what happened was once we started doing a little bit of the work for that small Venn diagram overlap of sneakers and data, this was like nirvana. They were like, I love, and I interviewed probably over a hundred people to get to these people that all wanted to be involved because they love sneakers. It really just the community. Yeah. There was no business. There was no business. There was no revenue. There was no money. No, but there's no contracts, no head equity, no head. But when I sold Campo Sedan,

Years later, I paid out 17 people where I tried to figure out how much money. But there was no contracts. It was just people that were doing it because we all just liked the side project. So there was a lot of work going into it. We sized the sneaker market. And no one had sized the sneaker market before. So now this gets picked up by everybody, by complex, by that, in the newspaper, whatever, online. And when Dan and his team were starting to work on a somewhat relatively similar business,

They can't let you. They're like, how big is the industry? Oh, this guy has written, you know? Yeah. And that was sort of what led them to it. So, you know, a lot of it was just, you know, doing something that no one else was doing at that time. Well, it was doing what you were passionate about, doing it. You're working hard on it in your off hours.

And I mean, that's a, that's a lot of, you see this a lot, right? Like people were just, Hey, like, I don't need to get paid to do this. Like, I just, I want to do it. And so you create this great work and you can spend hours and then you stay up all night working on it. Cause you're just like, you're stoked about it. Yeah. And, and then sometimes those can turn into some of the most interesting businesses. Yeah. Yeah. Um, how, how big, how big is the market now?

uh it's a also a very hard number um it looks like the last estimate was from a group um cowan and associates did that and some work a couple years ago and they said it's about six billion us yeah um wow but you know i said i haven't been at stock x where i don't know what the data is but i think it's somewhere in that range but here's the thing what what what doesn't

What doesn't get taken into consideration when people try to size it is whether it's 6 billion or 4 billion or 10 billion, the global retail sneaker market is a hundred billion. And the convergence of primary and secondary markets, it's not complete, but it is so much farther today than it was when we started StockX than before. And then you go on StockX today and you look at the top shoes that are sold,

Almost all of them are essentially retail shoes. It's not $30,000 Jordans, not even $1,000 Travis Scott Jordans. It's a Air Force One that is $110 a footlocker, and there's four colors of footlocker, but you can get everything.

every color ever you wanted on StockX and it's 105 or it's 115, right? They're essentially, it's just sneakers. And so that's where like the, the recent market almost doesn't matter anymore because we shouldn't be nearing a place where, and this gets back to a ghost ride, blinded auctions, releasing products into the market. We should be at a point at some point in the future where there's just one market for all of it.

And that's really the underlying idea behind all of this. How big do you think the fake industry is? Oh, man, I've long since lost my data on that. But at one point early on before we launched StockX, when we were analyzing this at Camp List, at the time, one out of every three Yeezy sold on eBay were clearly fake.

Wow. And that is, when I say clearly fake, that means from the data we can tell that it's definitely fake. But if you were pricing your fake Yeezy within the standard deviation of where the value of a real Yeezy, then we couldn't even tell that. So the number is probably two out of every three Yeezys on eBay at the time were fake. Now this is pre-StockX, pre-Goat. A lot of them moved on eBay many years later, added authentication. So-

Who knows, right? Like I've really, I've lost this, but it just, that stuff doesn't happen in the same places anymore, right? It just happens completely different. So you leave StockX, right at sort of the peak craziness of the pandemic, I think like fall of 2020? Yep, September of 20. And then you do what? I mean, this is crazy. This is not, like you've already had this crazy 10-year run and then you go to do

what ends up becoming Fanatics Collectibles. How did that start? So, yeah, you were talking about the story of getting Jordans as a kid, right? We all have that same story. You know, we all, like we all were your first pair.

My first pair was a Concord 11 that I bought the year that I started working because in 2000, 1999 or 2000, when I graduated college and after my first job. Because growing up, my mom would never buy me a pair of Jordans, right? We all had the same story. If we wanted to be Jordan, our moms wouldn't buy us Jordan. Like, you know, somehow you got your grandmother to buy you a pair, but like most of us wouldn't get that. Yeah. Right?

And so, but we all grew up the same thing. We were buying trading cards. We wanted Jordans. Like we all have the same story. Yeah. And so I, there was nothing more important to me than trading cards from like

I don't know, third grade to ninth grade, right? Like that was like my whole life. And I still have all my cards as a kid, like all of us do from that age. And so in 2017, 2018, you know, StockX really blew up at the end of 2017. So 2018 was really spent trying to figure out what other products can we put on StockX.

And as part of that led me to look at trading cards, it led me to get back in the trading cards again myself personally. And I was like instantly like re-hooked. And I was very lucky because that was basically the start of trading cards coming back. And it was very clear that what was going to happen was going to happen in terms of the trading card market blowing up. Obviously, we didn't know the pandemic was going to happen and these other things that helped expedite it. But I was like instantly hooked, trying to get stock X, trying to get

cards back on StockX, but I was buying cards every day. And so as we then evolve over the next two years, running StockX, go through the pandemic,

Once I stepped down as CEO in the summer of 2019, then I was really focused on sort of like moving to what's next. And I wanted to try to acquire the licenses. I thought that the core of the trading card industry fit exactly with the core of StockX, which is this idea of market-based pricing. You know, sneakers, at least you can wear them. There's some function.

There's no function of trading cards other than being a true collectible. It's a store of value and the value is a function of who's on the card. So all these ideas around market-based pricing and blind attractions and how you get fair pricing for cards for any products, I thought trading cards were a more perfect product for that. So then you get into, well, who makes cards? How do they sell them? And the trading card industry, because...

It had basically been a lot of people thought cards went away. They didn't. It just became this much smaller market. And it was so clear that the brands running the trading card industry at the time were relics of the 80s and 90s from a business standpoint, technology, all that. And I was like, oh, man, I was like, if I could somehow buy one of these companies or get the licensing, like I could all these ideas I had around market based pricing, I could do that for cards.

So I tried to sort of figure out, can we do this at StockX? And, you know, big innovation within big companies doesn't really happen. And so I left in September of 20 to figure out if I can go after and get the licenses. And I was partnered with some other people. And eventually I got partnered with Michael Rubin and met him. And we went out and we got all the licenses for trading cards.

I mean, you said that last part in like five seconds, but I mean, that was crazy. It was like all of a sudden these licenses that have been owned and operated by these other companies, these other brands for decades. Yeah. In some cases, you know, five decades, like longer, seven decades. Topps is making baseball cards since 1952. So like, and you get all of a sudden like Fanatics Collectibles like has the license.

Yeah. So I met Michael Rubin two days before Thanksgiving of 2020. We had met before in passing, but I never talked to him. And he flew to Detroit to see me. We spent six hours in a room together, just he and I. Yeah. And he had been getting interested in trading cards because their core business of fanatics is legal licensed products. You know, their core business of apparel headwear. And Gary Vaynerchuk had put us back in touch. And I was...

just explaining it was like look i think this industry is going to grow a lot i think there's a lot here and we need to get the licenses and at the end of the day he's like it's like i can get the licenses he's like that's what we do and so we set out to go acquire the licenses for baseball basketball football cards uh we created a new business called fanatic collectibles separate business majority owned by fanatics um and we spent all of 21 having a lot of very private meetings with

The leagues, the PAs. I mean, some of these meetings were like me, Michael Rubin, commissioner of baseball, right? Me, Michael Rubin, head of the PA. In like a dark alley somewhere? Yeah. I mean, the best story is that he and I met with Rob Manfred, who's the commissioner of baseball, in like a boarded up minor league baseball stadium in Florida. This is also in the middle of COVID.

There were just four of us. It was two people, it was the Fisher and Baseball head of, Chief Revenue Officer, me and Michael. And part of it was the secrecy because you have these companies that already had the licenses. So we were trying to acquire licenses out from under the incumbents. And then part of it was COVID and it was just, it was crazy. It's crazy.

But the pitch to all of them, to every elite, to every PA, was everything that we did at StockX. Market-based pricing. You as the NBA, you as Major League Baseball, you should be getting a more fair price for your product. Trading cards have been sold as CPG products for decades.

And the leagues, they get a percentage of, they get royalties on it. So it's not being sold at fair price and they're not getting as much money as they should. And so a lot of it was also, you know, the innovation around how you run these businesses. But I mean, we literally, the pitch was a deck that I created that showed the first StockX IPO, the Ben Baller IPO. We've sold slides with Ben Baller as a blind edge auction that led to the Harvard Business School case study that's

in HBR that's taught at business schools right now. Like all of like, that was the pitch to all of them. And don't get me wrong. Like it was my idea. It was my business. It was my pitch. It was 99% Rubin's relationship with all of these companies and people of why we eventually got the licenses. But like the core economic theory of why these things should be sold in a certain way, like that's what we've been doing at StockX that we're doing at Ghost, right? This is the through line of all of it. And so I happen to be again,

in the right place at the right time to... It's happened to you in a lot. It happened twice, right? Like, StockX, the short version is there was one other person in the whole world trying to do the exact same thing at the exact same time, which is build a stock market for sneakers that Dan happened to be trying to do, you know, happens to be one of the most successful people. I talked to everybody in the sneaker industry. Nike, eBay, Foot Locker, Complex, Fly Club. I talked to

everybody and no one wanted to build a stock market for sneakers. But Dan had the exact same idea separately from me. And we got together and took campus and turned it into that. How does that happen? That was. No, no. I just mean like, how does it happen where some, some guy in Detroit is, has this idea. And then you're in Philly, I think at the time. Yeah. You're in Philadelphia. Like you have the same idea at the exact same time and you've never spoken and nobody else. Like, do you have, do you have a theory on how that happens?

The if you look at a lot of, you know, a lot of companies, you get same companies starting at the same time. StockX will go over and lift. Right. Because the conditions are right for for these things to happen. But for Dan and I, we're coming at it from completely different ends. Right. He was kind of coming from top down. Right. Dan's not a sneaker guy. And it's been 10 years and I literally can't even get in the wear sneakers. Right.

Dan, in 2015, sees his 15-year-old son buying and selling sneakers on eBay. And Dan's a markets guy. And Dan had always had this idea around, could you have eBay that runs like the stock market with bid-ask and could you have this more efficient market? He sees sneakers through his kid and says, you know what, that's a perfect place to start this idea, a stock market driven marketplace. So he's kind of coming top down. I am deep in sneakers, camp-less data. I'm building ground up.

And so, you know, I'm like, oh, this would be work great for sneakers. And Dan's like, no, that should be like how the whole world works, right? That should be like the future of all e-commerce. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go with that. Like, let's go build that, you know? So it was always around this bigger idea, but it just so happens. It's luck. It's serendipity. The fact that the person who has the same idea happens to be one of the most successful business people in the world. Yeah. Because he put together a team to start working on this idea. There were four other people working with Dan on this idea.

And then they were doing research in the industry and they were looking to size the industry and they find a blog post from Camp List. And they realized, well, we need a sneaker guy.

right? Who's the sneaker guy? I was on the sneaker marketplace. So they go out and do some research. They find campus, they find me. Turns out the sneaker guy is also trying to build the same. So it's this crazy serendipity, but it happened because the sneaker industry itself was now getting to an industry and boiling to a point where it needed innovation. It needed to evolve forward. And so whether it was me looking at it ground up or Dan looking at it top down, we both saw the same thing, which is that

well, it's a pretty big market and a pretty crappy market leader the way that eBay is running this business, that it should be a whole lot more and then we get together to do it. So, you know, a lot of it is market driven, but a lot of it is luck, right? In preparing for this, I talked to a bunch of different people and asked them, if you were meeting with Josh, what would you ask him? And one of your friends, Kirk, said to me, well, you should ask Josh, what would he do if he ran one of the big companies

sportswear companies, if he was running Nike or Adidas or one of these other companies, like what would he do? What can these companies do to improve or to innovate or to stay ahead? Well, have you ever thought about that? What would you do? Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty broad question. And then there's a lot of different ways to answer that. But at the most basic level, I think all these companies should be thinking about

the convergence, convergence generally, right? And we're already seeing this, right? You see, Nike did a collaboration with Dior and high fashion and streetwear and art. And Nike's already does a lot of this stuff, right? But all of the convergence, and most importantly, it's the convergence of primary and secondary markets, right? In January of 2016, so one month before StockX launched,

I gave a talk at a Nike leadership offsite. I was at the Presidio in San Francisco. I was asked to do it after they saw my TED talk and they didn't know that I was about to launch StockX. And they said, same campus. They saw the TED talk and there's 300 people in the room, all the top leaders at Nike and Jordan brand. And the,

topic the title of the conversation was essentially you should work with the resale market and this is January 2016 and and obviously there's a lot to it and there's a long presentation but I could see in the audience like one out of every three people turning their friends back I told you like this is the other like because like

They understand that it exists. They create it. They understand that their, their supply strategies and who they work with and how they release products. They understand like, and they understand that they benefit from the resale sneaker market. But,

But for a lot of reasons, most of them PR related or historically related, there's always this sort of like bright line. Oh, no, that's not us. We're not part of it. Right. And everybody loses because of that. Right. There's there's so much to gain the consumers, the brands, everybody else of just acknowledging, hey, look, it's just one market. The consumer doesn't care where they get it from. They just want the product.

And in the case of StockX, right, once we made it, it's so easy to buy it. They're happy to pay whatever the dollar amount is if they want that particular shoe. So at a macro level, all consumer brands that sit within the hype economy that make these products

they need to figure out how to work with the secondary markets. And it doesn't mean that they have to have their own secondary markets, right? But the more they work towards it, the better it is for everyone. The best example of this that we've been trying to do since day one at StockX, but if you buy a ghost on Ghostrate,

After you buy it, you went on a blind attraction, you get a note that says, you know, congratulations, your car has been charged $400, you won the ghost. You will get a choice. Would you like to take possession of this or would you like to resell it? If you want to take possession, you click this button, it'll be sent to your house. If you want to resell your ghost, you click this button, it'll be sent directly to StockX and you never have to touch it, right?

Why do we go through the process of having it sent to you and then you send it to StockX? All you want to do is resell it, cut out two shippings, save the gas, the packaging, whatever, just make it easier for everybody. That's how it should work from Nike. If you buy a pair of shoes from Nike, if you want to resell it, why do you have to take possession of it and flip it, right? So it's all these small examples of, and just better for the brand. By the way, the other side of that, which is if you wanted to buy a Ghost,

and it sold out, you missed the auction, you go to GhostRite. There's a link right there that will take you to the StockX product page to make it dead simple for you to buy the product that you want to buy. Yeah. By the way, you want to talk about sliding doors. This story, which very few people know, and this is as big of a sliding door scenario as you could possibly imagine. So Cavs won the championship in June of 2016, the start of the NBA season in October of 2016.

So StockX launched in February of 2016, okay? We didn't blow up until December of 2017. So we were still barely on the board, right? But Dan Gilbert's our owner. You know, we have Cavs opening day game, October of 2016. LeBron, obviously, is on the Cavs.

Every top executive at Nike, except for Mark Parker, was at the game. So Trevor Edwards, who was the number two guy and in line to be the next CEO, and about six other people, they're all there. At halftime, we meet in this private room near the locker room. It's Dan Gilbert, Greg Schwartz, who's the co-founder and COO and me. And the pitch is, when somebody goes to Nike Sneakers app and it's sold out, there should be a link right there to StockX so they can buy it.

We will share the customer. We can share the customer data. We can share the revenue. It's better for the customer. And everyone in the room agreed, yes, that is better for everybody. They said, let's pilot a program. Like, we're going to pilot a program. It's worth at least testing. And this is coming from Trev Redwards, the number two guy at the company. Okay? So we're like, shit. Greg and I spent the next month going back and forth to Beaverton to start working on how to pilot this program to have, I mean, stock eggs in the Nike sneakers app, right? Yeah, it's crazy. A month earlier. Anyway.

Yeah. I mean, this was really early in your company's success. Yeah. Right? So about a month, we're going back and forth. Yeah. Right? And then we show up to work one day and the front page of the internet is...

Nike, me too, Trevor Edwards resigns, and so did his next four people, including all the people supporting our thing. And I don't want to trivialize what might have happened and why, but the number two guy who was in line to be the next CEO of Nike had blessed this product, and now he gets outed and fired. Me too, the whole...

And so we call up, we're like, they're like, yeah, everything he's touched is off limits. It's over, you know, stuff. Yeah. Like, wow. I mean, I can't even imagine the different trajectory StockX would have had if a year and a half before we even blew up, we're in the Nike sneakers app, right? Every sneaker in the world overnight signs up for StockX, right? So, but forget about like the sort of missed opportunity for us. We did fine.

How would that have changed the way that brands work with the secondary market? And here's the thing. It's,

it's the right way to do it. It's better for everybody. It just is. Yeah. Right. So anyway, you get back to like, if I was running one of those brands, it's like, this is what you like, it just has to happen. And it will at some point, it's just a question of how long it takes and how far in the future. The other thing about that is like, what a devastating moment for you and your co-founders of like, you think like you have that meeting and you're walking out of there and you're like, this is it. This is our moment. And then

It's happening. It's like, it's everyone's blessed that it's just a matter of getting the paperwork signed, getting the development, whatever. And then it's just completely dead. And then now you're going to sleep and you're like, yeah, we have nothing. And yet if that, if that had happened, everything would have been different. I mean, there's any number of things that you could, you could guess of what, what could happen from that, but where you guys then went over the next few years, I mean, it's it, thankfully it didn't happen, but in that moment you were probably not

Thankful that that didn't happen. It was probably a really, really terrible day, week, month. Unbelievably devastating. Like, you...

you can't imagine the scenario where like we did it well you know and again not to trivialize you know any of the things that happened and and you know if Nike decided that he needed to be fired then I'm sure he needed to be fired but man like we were in this the Nike sneakers app yeah like it's not like oh man like it was blessed by the number two guy at the company like that's crazy yeah and that's just you know that's the way it was yeah yeah

Um, so to take it back to ghost, right? Like you're now back doing this again. You're starting from the beginning, which honestly, like, cause somebody looking from the outside, like I think is kind of insane. Yeah. Um, you don't need to, you've had two Uber grand slams. Um, is it hard? Do you feel like,

I mean, some ways there's more pressure because like you've done all these things. It's kind of like people, I know you don't expect this to yourself. I mean, I know you have high expectations, but it's like you remember the days when your other startups failed. You remember when nobody cared and you did it for fun. And that's, I can see like that's where you're at, but like that's not how other people perceive it. So does that, does that weigh on you? Is it hard? Does it, does it energize you? Does it make you nervous? Um,

It's not hard is, and I'm not nervous. However, I will say that, you know, these last two companies, which were both phenomenal success and, you know, extraordinary, both those companies, I was partnered with a billionaire MBA owner, right? And there's a lot of great things that come with that and a lot of resources that

The flip side of it is, you know, I never had control, right? Not for a minute. And there's parts of that that are tough to deal with as well. So, I don't know, can Josh not create a successful company without the help of the most successful business people in the world? I don't know, maybe not, right? The flip side of it is, well, at least I get to make my own decisions and go down with the ship and, you know, go after the things that I want to go after. What a...

special thing to be part of and be around and do just to be here in your home and to see uh all that you've let's say collected but just everything you built it's uh it's super inspiring and you know um yeah rooting for you this is awesome i appreciate it yeah thank you thank you give it on next week's episode

The thing that separates great players from good players remains the same. And Michael had it, and Kobe had it, and Dirk had it, and Manu Ginobili had it. And that is just an insane competitive spirit. And some guys have it, and some guys don't. And I think that's true in business too, is the people who end up being all-stars are one thing. The people who end up being finals MVPs, multiple world champions, are insanely driven human beings.