It's 2026. Buying a token takes 10 seconds. To place a prediction trade, I need my laptop, click through 7 screens, and patience of a monk. Smartest idea in crypto is stuck inside cluckiest product on earth. So, I built my own. Meet @tradeonpear 🍐 1/8

One thing building Pear has taught me: You don't always know what the problem is until you start building. You can have the thesis. You can have the research. You can talk to users. And you can still be wrong. That's why I like building quickly. Not because speed is everything. Because every version of the product gives you information the previous version couldn't.

I don't think founders need to become influencers. Some of us genuinely don't like social media. I'd rather spend my time building, talking to users, and thinking about the product. But I've also realized something: If nobody knows you're building, it doesn't matter how good the product is. You don't have to become a content creator. But you do have to learn how to get people to care.

I don't think the future of prediction markets is one platform winning everything. I think it's one place where you can access every market. Different platforms. Different events. One interface. That's what we're building Pear toward: The single access point for prediction.

I got phished. I got hacked. And I learned the lesson the expensive way. Security advice hits differently when you've actually been the person who fucked up. Now I think about security very differently. Not as a checklist. As something that can go wrong in one stupid moment.

At 18, I've already: Worked in robotics at NVIDIA. Built algorithms for a private equity fund. Led engineering at a startup. Owned a B2B SaaS company. Built QDash. And now I'm building Pear. And somehow I still feel late. Maybe that's just what building does to you. You keep moving the finish line.

Crypto is oversaturated. I actually think that's a good thing. When every obvious opportunity has already attracted ten teams, you have to look harder. The interesting opportunities aren't always where everyone is building. They're usually where everyone has decided there's nothing worth building

Someone asked me: "Why should anyone trust Pear?" I didn't have some perfectly rehearsed answer. Then i thought about what we're actually building. We don't touch your money. We're non-custodial. That's the answer. Sometimes your strongest positioning isn't something you invent in a branding meeting. It's something that's already true about the product.

Founders see low product usage and immediately think: "We need more users." Sometimes that's completely backwards. If people aren't using your product, ask: Why would they come back? More distribution doesn't fix a product people have no reason to use. It just gives you more people who won't use it.

One of my favorite parts of building a company is meeting people I'd probably never meet otherwise. founders investors operators People from completely different industries and backgrounds. You learn how they think, how they communicate, how they make decisions, how they carry themselves. A lot of my learning has come from simply being around people who are operating at a different level..

We redesigned Pear. Not because hundreds of users complained. We didn't have enough users for that to even be the case. We just didn't like it enough. Early on, you don't always have enough data to make every product decision analytically. Sometimes founder taste is the signal. If you know something isn't good enough, you don't always need a survey to tell you.

I left NVIDIA after a few months. Not because it was a bad job. I just wanted to be my own man. Now I work 24/7. What an upgrade

We had 700 users. Then went six days without a single trade. It would've been easy to call it a distribution problem. It wasn't. There just wasn't enough incentive for users to trade yet. So instead of pretending everything is going great, we're tracking the data, testing campaigns, and figuring out what actually makes people want to come back. Building in public means showing the parts that aren't working too.

Crypto volume is dying. If you haven’t noticed it yet, you’re not paying enough attention. A lot of that volume is moving toward betting platforms, prediction markets, and fantasy platforms. Web3 loves speculation. that’s one of the reasons you love memecoins so much. But when you bet on a token, you don’t really hold the power. The project does. and when 99% of tokens eventually go to zero, people start looking for better ways to speculate. They just don’t want to do it through a token that goes to zero.

prediction markets have a product problem. nobody plays fantasy football because they love statistical modeling.  they play because their friends are in the league.  social layer is the product.  When I first used prediction market, i loved it because of the infinite markets but with biggest gap, NO social layer. that's when i decided to fix it prediction markets built excellent markets and forgot that trading alone against maxis is not something people want to do twice. that's gap i’m fixing with Pear.

a year ago you could say "prediction markets" in a room and get funded. that time is long gone. every investor conversation now ends the same way: launch, show us the data, then we'll talk. honestly it's a good filter. sorts people building a company from people building a pitch. but if you're raising into this category right now, you're being measured on traction, not what you think your product can be. plan accordingly

I worked on the robotics team at NVIDIA. left because i wanted to work for my own company instead of someone else's. now i work 24/7 and answer to investors. what an upgrade

I was on a meeting last week with another founder asked him to explain his product pitch He goes like: "we're a complicated non-traditional oracle for high-tail markets" bro what u doing??? no need to use fancy words, i get it…using fancy words makes it sound like you're hiding something. feels sketchy tbh if you can't explain what you built in one sentence to a normal person, you probably don't understand your own product well enough yet.

Prediction markets don't have a house. platform doesn't set the line. and it doesn't profit when you lose. that's what makes prediction markets different. but If you build the experience like a sportsbook, retail can still lose the same way. Bloomberg found retail is down a net $294M on Kalshi's combo bets this year. not to the platform. to the people on the other side of the trade. One of them, a 26-year-old former FanDuel employee, reportedly makes seven figures a month doing exactly that. removing house doesn't remove the fact that someone else can become the house

everyone ranks liquidity as the #1 problem in prediction markets it's not, not even close here's the actual order, from what I've experienced: ~UX: most platforms make you click 5-7 times and log in just to place ONE trade ~market discovery: you open the app and genuinely don't know what you're even looking at ~onboarding: getting someone to join AND place their first trade is its own mess ~liquidity: Polymarket has plenty of it and people still don't come back after their first trade how would u rank it based on your experience?

alright... this is big. @Fanatics agreed to buy their own exchange. right now they run prediction markets through a partner... all the listings on Fanatics is controlled by the partner. that's a tough situation to be in. It's a company with 100M sports fans. So, they're buying the whole infrastructure to establish their edge. doesn't necessarily give them an edge but it removes dependency.