As co-founder of StockX and Fanatics Collectibles, Josh Luber is one of just a handful of entrepreneurs who has founded two different multi-billion dollar companies. In 2016, Josh co-founded StockX with Dan Gilbert. The company reached unicorn status in less than four years and is now the leading global marketplace for sneakers, streetwear, collectibles and other current culture products.
In 2021, Josh co-founded Fanatics Collectibles with Michael Rubin, securing the exclusive, long-term licenses to make NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball cards. Following the acquisition of Topps, Fanatics Collectibles quickly became the industry leader in trading cards and reached a $10B valuation in 2022. Josh is now hard at work building a third company – ghostwrite – in the burgeoning collectible toy space.
Over the past decade, Josh has become one the foremost thought leaders of the new ‘Hype Economy’, which sits at the intersection of business, fashion, and culture. In 2015, he delivered the first (and only) TED Talk about sneakers as investments, which has garnered over 3 million views to-date. In 2019, he was named among Business of Fashion’s BoF500 – a widely respected list of the most 500 influential people in fashion. Josh has spoken at the biggest conferences and most respected universities in the world, and has appeared widely across media, both on television and in print. He is currently writing a book, titled “Building The Hype Economy”, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025.
Josh is a lifelong entrepreneur, having founded and run 10 companies over his two-decade career. He received his undergraduate BBA and joint JD/MBA from Emory University. Born and raised outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he now resides in Austin, Texas with his wife and two children.
Selected Public Speaking:
- TED: “Why Sneakers are a Great Investment” (2015)
- SXSW (2019)
- SXSW (2020)
- Business of Fashion BoFVoices (2018)
- Collision Conference with Steve Aoki (2019)
- Collision Conference (2022)
- Web Summit (2018)
- Aspire Tour (2023)
- VeeCon (2023)
- Hypebeast Hypetalk
Selected Media:
- CNBC Squawk Box (2019)
- CNBC Mad Money with Jim Cramer (2019)
- CNBC Make It (2020)
- ESPN SportsCenter (2017)
- ESPN SportsCenter (2015)
- ESPN w/ Kevin Negandhi (2021)
- Inc. How I Did It (2020)
- The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (2016)
Selected Press:
- The New York Times, “A Nasdaq for Sneakerheads? StockX Aims to Tame ‘Chaos’ of Luxury Market” (2018)
- The New York Times, “Buy Low-Tops, Sell High-Tops: StockX Sneaker Exchange Is Worth $1 Billion” (2019)
- GQ, “StockX founder Josh Luber’s tips for success” (2020)
- Bloomberg, “This Sneakerhead Made a Stock Exchange for Shoes” (2016)
- Forbes, “How Josh Luber And Fanatics Are Making Trading Cards Cool Again” (2022)
- Inc Magazine, “The Founder of StockX Turned His Hobby Into a Billion-Dollar Business in 3 Years. Then He Turned Over the Reins. Now What?” (2020)
- Fortune Magazine, “The founder of a billion-dollar sneaker empire is betting that trading cards are the next NFTs” (2022)
- CNN, “This billion-dollar startup is turning sneakers into a ‘stock market’” (2019)
- Techcrunch, “How StockX became the stock market of hype” (2021)
