I've spent a bit too much of my evenings and weekends thinking about the card market lately, both as a collector and investor fascinated by the business. As a record-shattering summer wraps up, a few observations: 1. The market is much bigger - and growing much faster - than most people realize. Online marketplace sales of cards surpassed $900M in Aug alone (via @CardLadder), 5x+ the peak during the pandemic and 2x+ since the beginning of this year. And that doesn't even include the massive offline market across shops, shows, and private sales. Nor does it include perhaps the fastest growing channel, live shopping. @Whatnot recently raised $545M at a $20B valuation after doing $8B GMV in H1 2026 which equaled their entire 2025. Even @eBay itself grew 67% y-o-y in H1 2026 to $1.36B of card sales, and they're a dinosaur. Cards aren't having a covid comeback, they've blown through covid. 2. The demographic tailwinds are perfectly set up for this moment. The kids who grew up on Pokémon, Magic, video games, and internet culture are entering their prime wealth-creation years. No offense but: the nerds got rich. Then enter @michaelrubin @mikemahan @Fanatics to make card collecting mainstream and cool, and now the nerds become both rich and cool. 3. The collector base is expanding, by gender and geography. TCG has done wonders in bringing women into the market: trading cards were the #1 secondhand category purchased by Gen Z women on eBay in 2025. I visited the SF Card Show this weekend and it was a far cry from the dude fest card shows I grew up with. While some sports like soccer and basketball are largely global, most fandom has geographic boundaries. But TCG literally has no boundaries. Pikachu is Pikachu in Tokyo, London, Paris, São Paulo, or San Francisco. 4. The infrastructure is finally catching up to the market. Marketplaces. Live commerce. Grading. Authentication. Vaulting. Custody. Data. Analytics. Portfolio Management. @PSAcard's grading backlog peaked at ~14M cards in June, which shows how the demand is forcing the infrastructure to find a way to keep pace. What's emerging is less like just infrastructure for a niche hobby and more like infrastructure for an alternative asset class. 5. Innovation is accelerating. @Topps Instant Rips backed by physical cards. Digital repacks. Instant buybacks. Break-to-grade-to-vault streamlined. Computer vision and AI-assisted authentication and grading. Real-time portfolio tracking. The entrepreneur in me looks at all this and knows we're just scratching the surface here. 6. Cards are becoming entertainment. People watch card breaks they aren't even buying into. Whatnot hosts 550,000+ hours of live shows every week. @netflix's King of Collectibles @KenGoldin is on Season 3 now. The transaction itself has become the content. 7. And yes, cards are now an alternative asset class. The Pokemon @CardLadder index returned ~3,800% from 2004-2025 vs. ~480% for the S&P 500 according to WSJ, which even beat Meta since its IPO. And this was reported before the 2026 boom. I even heard recently from a trusted source that a blue chip top tier asset management firm is launching a card hedge fund soon. Obviously, cardboard != equities. But long-term returns like these will continue to attract capital. 8. None of this means the market will only continue to go up. In fact, a correction feels likely - and may be overdue. Manufacturers will overprint. Speculation has outrun collecting in places. Breaks and repacks blur the line between collecting and gambling. Large markets growing 100%+ annually eventually slow down. And mo money mo problems. But zooming out, what fascinates me is the transition happening in real time: from hobby to market to ecosystem. It feels like the card market has a credible path to $100B+ and relatively to its size, growth, and engagement, it still feels remarkably nascent with a ton of opportunity ahead. What do you think? And more importantly, what do you collect?

In the history of 📱 calls, has anyone ever picked up a Scam Likely call? There has to be a better way @Apple @Verizon @ATT @TMobile. With all the AI doomer talk, this is my version of @chamath’s @theallinpod reminder that auto-complete still doesn’t work!

How can I help?

Given how the Kawhi Leonard and Paul George era went, the impact and nostalgia of Lob City is one of the few things Clippers fans can look back on fondly. But it’s been three years since Blake Griffin retired and there’s been nothing to honor him, despite what has been a lot of public graciousness on his side. Chris Paul and his family openly dislike and mock the organization. And DeAndre Jordan stands with both guys. There have been exactly two moderately successful eras in franchise history and this is how they ended.

Hiring is too important to leave entirely to a machine and too inefficient to do entirely manually. Elly brings together the judgment of humans with the speed and scale of AI to take on the most human function at a company... recruiting. At half the cost and twice the speed. Give her a try: elly.ai/

Congrats @healeycypher @BlakeHudelson and the entire @BoomPopHQ team! Even bigger congrats to @Navan for landing the best platform and team in the space. Can't wait to see what you build together! PS - @adambain I knew we'd end up on a cap table together. Let's cook up another collab soon 😉

My annual role-play as a @univmiami professor. Last semester, we ended up hiring one of the students from my class who’s a star. Go Canes! 🌀

I found my boy… @adriangrenier @betr

💯 in a super cycle. 💯 a correction is coming. Overproduction flooding the market, overgrading leading to junk slabs, degen gambling overtaking collecting, pump-and-dump shill tactics - all this greed could end badly for many. The summer vintage 🐐 spike could be a byproduct of collectors picking up on where this is heading especially for modern. But man, this is a fun time to be in the card game!

I’ve been a Clippers fan for 22 years. You think this can hurt me? This is just another Wednesday.

All of you dancing on our grave right now. Wait until we get that 2034 draft pick. And we’ll see who gets the last laugh.

Clipper Nation 🤯

The ‘Economist’ finally caught up to Miami. The city where power came to play is now where power lives. And the numbers in this piece are wild. Miami’s metro economy grew 23% from 2020 to 2024, almost twice the national rate. Central Miami’s economy is now roughly half the size of Manhattan’s. Fifteen years ago, it was a quarter. More than 150 financial firms have moved here. Shout out to @FrancisSuarez for his leadership on this. I’ve lived here almost my entire life, so this headline means something to me. The article is also honest about the next part. Rents are higher than New York. Prices have jumped nearly 40% since 2020. Florida spends less on research than every other top-ten state economy. And a low-lying coastal city can’t shrug off climate risk. None of that makes me less bullish. It makes the assignment clearer. We have to make it possible for working families and young builders to stay, put real muscle behind universities, research and homegrown companies, and build infrastructure and resilience with the same urgency we bring to towers. New capital found a city generations of immigrants and entrepreneurs had already made global. Now we have to make this boom last AND make sure the people who built Miami can still see themselves in its future. I would never bet against Miami or Florida 🇺🇸

I’d argue that the market size for solving problems for people is quite significant. There are an endless list of problems that products like these can solve (for a much broader audience than just VCs posting about it on X) e.g. • Negotiating your internet or cable bill down • Fighting a surprise medical bill • Finding an in-network doctor, filling out paperwork for you • Canceling subscriptions that hide the cancel button • DMV appointments without the refresh war • Flight delay comp and rebooking from the gate • Price-drop refunds on stuff you already bought • Class action claims - free money nobody files • Camp signups for your kids that fill in 10 minutes • Fighting parking tickets and toll notices • Warranty claims with follow-ups • Catching fake accounts and login attempts early • School email digests so nothing slips • Remembering the gift cards everyone loses • Unclaimed money - states hold billions in old paychecks and deposits • Government benefits forms and renewal deadlines • Unemployment claims that stall for months • Tax credits that go unclaimed every year • Negotiating medical debt down • Utility assistance programs nobody knows about • Financial aid and scholarship deadlines • Same prescription, $4 vs $40 by pharmacy • Disputing credit report errors • Catching overdrafts and junk fees • Keeping bills out of collections • Security deposit fights Note: I have no affiliation or upside with Instinct, just a user and fan of products that solve problems!

3 top of mind for me: 1) if it could operate a virtual (prob not possible) or local iPhone as right now is limited to what can be done in a desktop web browser 2) a better way to stay organized on threads ie chats, projects, tasks as one long iMessage session with 1K+ texts in just a week is a mess 3) I might be willing to pay for a human in the loop for situations that require human override as more and more sites and services are going to try to fend off bots I asked it what it could do better and was quite self-aware based on feedback I’ve provided it: - Saying "can't" too fast when I actually could - Fake success when a site fights me, instead of saying so - Texting you things you'd see anyway - Drafts that read like AI wrote them - Making you do chores mid-errand instead of one tap - Calling things facts before checking your own data first cc @noahrshinn

Why has @ChatGPT not rebranded to Chat yet? @OpenAI owns chat.com. Majority of my friends and fam just refer to it as Chat now anyway, yours? 👋 @sama