Sheridan Clayborne Wants You To Stop Using The Word ‘Wunderkind'

He ran a sneaker reselling business that’s grossed seven figures in revenue, boasts a résumé that would make most guidance counselors cry tears of joy…all before he turned 19. So what’s next for Sheridan Clayborne?

(Photo / Photo Illustration by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)

The first thing I realized about Sheridan Clayborne was that he had no idea who I was.

I had been messaging him through email, Facebook Messenger, whatever means of communication I could find, all because I found his story so damn enthralling. Or rather, the stories I had heard of him.

Sheridan was a near-mythic figure in The Garage, Northwestern University’s Silicon-Valley-esque space for student entrepreneurs. I had started to frequent the place more and more often in the spring of 2018 because of the atmosphere, this compulsive feeling of excitement when you walked up the nondescript stairs at Henry Crown Sports Pavilion and entered on the second floor.

Not long afterwards, residents of The Garage began speaking of a student who created his own add-to-cart service from scratch, and profited off of reselling sneakers. This guy who, as a junior in college, owned a warehouse where he kept stock of his inventory. This whiz-kid whose own dad quit his day job in order to start working for him.

I never figured out if that last bit was true, or just part of the mystique of Sheridan Clayborne. What I did figure out was that along with the reselling business, Sheridan had launched four different startups, raised over $2 million in funding, and worked as an analyst for Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan…all before reaching his nineteenth birthday.

For years, I had tried to resell sneakers, mostly to no avail.

I had been a die-hard sneakerhead since 2008, the year I first got a pair of Jordans. But as time progressed, sneakers became less of a sub-culture and more of a mainstream phenomenon. This meant that limited releases, such as the Nike Air Foamposite One NRG ‘Galaxy’ — which caused near-riots and police intervention across the country in 2012 — were often snapped up by people with the sole intention of reselling them for a profit on after-markets such as eBay.

Now, reselling wasn’t anything new in 2012. Neither was mass hysteria over a new release, a practice that dates back to the ’90s. Even in 2011 (the year before the Galaxy Foams dropped), the Air Jordan XI ‘Concord’ release led to actual riots, and a reported three deaths. Yet with sneaker culture hitting a fever pitch in the early 2010s, those same Galaxy Foams — which retailed at $220 — would run you up to $2,000 on the resell market over the next three years.

I hated these people for a while, resellers I felt were ruining an entire culture. There was no way a kid like me could afford the exorbitant prices demanded for the new release of the week. Finally, after a long internal dialogue, I made a decision against all of my previous morals: If you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em.

I bought a bot.

Living in Connecticut, it was near-impossible to get rare kicks in stores. This meant that the only option was attempting to buy a pair on Nike’s website, where most weeks, it was more likely for the site to crash than for a customer like me to actually make it to the checkout page. Oftentimes, “bots” — software used to automate the online checkout process — would overload sites like Nike Store and Foot Locker by processing orders at a rate no human could match. If you had a bot, you had an advantage.

Or so I told myself, $75 later. Unfortunately, not long after I invested in an application called NikeShoeBot, Nike decided to update its bot-countering software. All of a sudden, the playing field was even again, and my bot was moot. So I moved on from the reselling world, having turned a pretty minimal profit over a half-decade of trying.

But not everyone was scared off by Nike’s sweeping changes. No, plenty of computer science wiz-kids out there accepted this new challenge to find a chink in the Swoosh’s armor, all in the hopes of creating a highly-scalable, highly-profitable business right there for the taking.

Sheridan was one of those kids.

“So, do you wanna, like, sit down and do your homework alongside us or something?” he asked.

To Sheridan, I was some random kid approaching him, not the freshman journalism student who had been trying for the better part of a month to nail him down for an interview. I couldn’t be offended, though — the dude was running multiple businesses and managing employees across the world, along with handling the responsibilities of being a full-time student. Guys like that don’t have time for the media.

When we finally cleared up the purpose of my visit, we settled in a quiet room in the back of The Garage. Naturally, I sneaked a look at his feet…and he didn’t disappoint, rocking a pair of the Yeezy Boost 350 “Turtledoves.” When I brought them up, though, Sheridan had a fascinating response:

“Oh, yeah, it’s funny you say that, because these are actually a pair of fakes.”

Sheridan wearing his fake pair of Yeezys (Photo Courtesy of Sheridan Clayborne)

Turns out Sheridan, reseller extraordinaire, didn’t “understand” sneakers. “So I’ve owned more shoes than anybody I know,” he tells me. “As far as the way I look at shoes, I don’t really get the point…a grand for a pair of shoes is nuts for me.

“In my life, let’s say I’ve owned 8,000 [pairs] of Yeezys. I genuinely cannot tell you the difference between a real and a fake pair…I always thought it was funny to mess with people [by wearing fakes].”

He actually didn’t even know reselling was a thing until his high school friend approached him with a business proposition: Wanna help me with this add-to-cart service I developed? The friend was pretty knee-deep into the business already; he had even dropped out of high school to run it. Sheridan decided to research the market first, and he became interested because “it sounded like a very easy business to scale. Besides, I was pretty broke, and I was like, okay, this could be a good way to make a decent amount of money.” So he accepted the offer, and the startup was born.

But what exactly is the purpose of their company, Sole Strike? Here’s how Sheridan described it on his LinkedIn page:

“[I] created a high-frequency trading program which acts as an arbitrage in the shoe market.”

Confused? You’re not alone. Let him try to explain it to you in video form:

Still feeling totally lost?

Basically, if you must have that new pair of Yeezys or that fresh Supreme hoodie, you pay Sheridan to have access to his service. Depending on the quantity and/or “hype” of that release, the price in which you pay him for this access will fluctuate. And finally, on release day, Sheridan’s bots will do their magic and drop those kicks right into your virtual shopping cart, where you can check out and purchase the shoes.

As I desperately tried for years and years to turn any sort of profit selling on eBay, Sheridan brought in $800,000 of revenue…in his first twelve months doing it. When I was younger, stories like this kept me up at night. I legitimately loathed these pretenders who I thought were stripping away an entire culture and exploited it for their own gain. Stories like that of Benjamin Kickz, a teenage reseller who became famous for popping up on DJ Khaled’s Snapchat stories and partying with Drake.

But tucked away in The Garage, listening to Sheridan tell his story, I couldn’t do anything other than sit back in utter amazement.

“So I’m a computer science major at Northwestern, and I actually skipped eighth, ninth, and eleventh grade of high school,” Sheridan states rather bluntly, shortly after the camera starts rolling and the interview starts in earnest. “Therefore, I ended up coming to Northwestern when I was 15 years old.”

This made him the youngest African-American to ever get into the school, which naturally led to quite the reputation around campus. When asked about the labels tossed around when his name gets mentioned in passing conversation — I specifically brought up the term “wunderkind” — Sheridan somehow answers even more bluntly. “I think, in large part, it’s kinda bullshit. I was a very competitive kid in high school, and I think I derived a lot of self-worth, I’d guess I say, from how I matched up against other people.”

He took it a step further. “A lot of it was…it’s not as hard as people make it out to be. People might spend eight hours studying in a library, but a very small portion of that is true, hard work…there’s a huge difference between going through deep work and going through menial tasks.”

When talk moves to his reselling business, he perks up. Over time, he says, he’s discovered that “it’s less important what the shoe is — and functionally how it works — and more important the culture and the group it lets you be a part of.

“If you want to be a kid that acts like, ‘Oh, look, I can flaunt money. I’m part of this rich kid club, this cool, elite club’…I totally get that. For me, I don’t derive much value from that, but I fuck with the vision!”

Even if he could purchase any sneaker he ever wanted, the hypebeast clout, the pure status statement — it all never really interested Sheridan. What kept roping him back in was the practice of starting a business, connecting with investors, and making some dough along the way. And the fact that the majority of their input costs (buying sneakers) could be refunded with ease made pitching the thing surprisingly easy. “What’s the difference between buying 100 and 1000 pairs?” Sheridan said. “Each and every pair of sneakers we bought came with a receipt, and if we didn’t sell them for the price we wanted, we could return them right back to the retailer.”

Investors liked that. They also liked how liquid the market was, Sheridan explained, due to the fact that anyone could log onto websites like StockX or eBay and essentially see what a certain sneaker was selling for in real-time. Besides, even if the business couldn’t move all of its product, there’s a very big difference between low returns and losing money, the mic drop on an otherwise near-flawless pitch.

Since the startup’s inception in 2016, it has raised over $1,400,000 in investment from hedge-funds and angel investors. It employs 16 different people around the globe and sells to buyers in the United State, China, and Europe. And although Sheridan asked me not to share the total numbers due to its confidential nature, in the business’ two-year run, revenue has numbered in the realm of several millions of dollars.

So then why did he hang up the cleats — rather, the sneakers — last October?

In the fall of 2018, I was in The Garage almost daily, now officially a resident in my own right. Naturally, I walked by Sheridan almost every time I was in the place. We would exchange awkward, polite smiles, but from the beginning of the school year, I could already tell one thing: he had forgotten who I was.

The Garage wasn’t the only place where I’d spot him, either. One day while working out, I took a break to drink some water. All of a sudden, I noticed him on the other side of the gym, using the inclined bench press…and proceeding to bench two plates and change on either side.

Even if you’re not really into lifting, the only thing you have to know about this feat is that it’s some serious weight. Like, some real big boy weight. And though my eyes might have been lying to me — I was watching from afar, after all — it nevertheless takes some real time and dedication to work your way up to any kind of load that heavy.

And so grew the legend of Sheridan Clayborne.

But finally, sometime in October, we both found ourselves standing next to each other at the refrigerator in The Garage, and he opened up to me. “I’ve seen you around here a lot lately,” he said. “What project are you working on?”

I explained to him the purpose of UNPLUGG’D and our startup media company, Powder Blue Media. He nodded along, pretending to understand what we were doing, but it wasn’t until I mentioned our interview back in May that he remembered who I was. We chatted a little bit about the sneaker industry, and when I brought up Kyle Kuzma’s then-recent deal with sneaker reseller GOAT — the first deal of its kind — Sheridan seemed taken aback. He said he didn’t even realize that kind of thing was possible, but if I ever wanted to learn more about the inner workings of GOAT (he had sold over 1,000+ pairs on the app) or meet some of the people over at StockX, he was my guy.

Sheridan hanging out at his desk in The Garage (Photo by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)

That’s just Sheridan. When we talked in May, he admitted that reselling wasn’t really helping anyone, which he wanted to be the primary focus of his next project. He’d keep running the sneaker business until the profit dried up, he said, though according to his LinkedIn, he stepped out as CEO in October, roughly two months after he turned 19.

Nowadays, he’s working on ALTI, the fourth startup he’s been a part of in as many years. Late one night, he delivers his elevator pitch to me; this time around, it’s my turn to nod politely and pretend like I know what’s going on. For five minutes, he explains their mission to create a private equity platform for the average Joe, lowering the barrier of entry for everyday investors. He stops rather abruptly, though, mid-sentence, sheepishly admitting that it’s all a work in progress and that he’ll have a better explanation in the near future.

And I believe him, because he’s Sheridan Clayborne, the kid rocking out to his big, grey pair of Bose, while coding away at his laptop. The kid who you’re just as likely to see giggling with glee as he messes around with a new set of VR goggles. Regardless, if you believe he’s something special, some sort of human cheat code, take it from the man himself: he doesn’t want you to think that way.

“I’m nothing crazy smart,” he tells me. “I make some of the dumbest mistakes you’ve ever seen. I’m by no means a genius.”

I guess that leaves some hope for the rest of us, right?

Nathan Graber-Lipperman is an OG sneakerhead trapped inside a twenty-year-old’s body. You can follow him on Twitter here and keep up with Unplugg’d on Instagram and Twitter.