Josh Luber did not set out to build a stock market. He set out, he told Emory's alumni magazine, to get some sneaker data 'just to play with for my own amusement.' He was a strategy consultant at IBM at the time. It was a hobby with a spreadsheet.
The hobby had a long history. Luber has collected sneakers since childhood and may still own pairs from when he was about eight. He studied at Emory, earned his law degree there, and, he said, actually loved law school. He kept an early collection in his apartment closet, a law-school friend remembered. He started his career at the law firm Alston & Bird.
Luber has collected sneakers since childhood and may still own pairs from when he was about eight.
What almost nobody sees in the polished version is the string of attempts that came before. While holding corporate jobs he founded three startups. One profile says one of them, an online scheduling platform, went bankrupt in the 2008 financial crash. The Emory piece does not call them failures, so treat that detail with care. What it does show is a man who kept building on the side.
The data idea worked. Around 2012, Luber and a team of volunteers began scraping public eBay data and analysing millions of sneaker sales. Campless became a kind of price guide for shoes: what a pair actually sold for, not what a seller hoped.
Then, about three years in, Dan Gilbert approached him. Gilbert acquired Campless, Luber left IBM and moved to Detroit, and StockX launched in February 2016 with Greg Schwartz and Chris Kaufman. Buyers bid, sellers ask, and prices move like a ticker. Every pair goes to StockX to be inspected; fakes go back to the seller.
Growth was fast and rough. The company raised $110 million in 2019 at a $1 billion valuation and $255 million in 2021 at more than $3.8 billion. In mid-2019 it suffered a data breach. Scott Cutler took over as chief executive in 2019, and Luber left, later moving into trading cards.
Luber's own account is modest. He wanted to look at sneaker prices for fun. A closet collector, a lawyer, an IBM consultant and a three-time startup builder became the founder because he kept looking at an odd dataset until someone else saw a market. Curiosity with no business plan can be the first draft of one.