🆖 tweets on founding/funding companies as GP @JoinAtomic. We make Exowatt, Golden Child, $HIMS, Homebound, Replicant, etc. Also ❤️🏀 cards & #ClipperNation
Miami 🏝
Joined August 2007
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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?
Chester Ng 🆖 retweeted
AI is a great co-pilot. But it’s a terrible salesperson. So we’re going old school, with a twist.
Yes I have assistant burnout. Yes I'm trying Hark. Yes I actually like it at first blush.
Slick interface, fast, organizing by Projects is nice, browser agent works and I like the visual, Panels (mini apps) are cool too. But I haven't found yet something it can do that the others can't. In fact it already failed at one head to head task for me vs. Instinct.
Wdyt so far?
Introducing Hark Pro
Hark Pro is now live on web, iOS, and Android
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It's been a month since I wrote some words here about cardboard. I explained why the card market had just wrapped a record-shattering summer and how the transition from hobby to ecosystem was accelerating towards a $100B+ market. I may have completely underestimated the pace and trajectory.
1. This may be the new normal. Sep online marketplace sales printed at ~$950M (via @CardLadder) which completely bucked the historical seasonal September dip. A billion-dollar month has gone from eye-popping to almost expected. And again, this is only a proxy as it doesn't include the massive offline market, live shopping like @Whatnot, digital packs (see below), private sales.
2. The collector acquisition funnel has been blown wide open. @coinbase just surprised the industry by announcing that users will be able to rip packs of physical-backed cards directly in their app, then vault, ship, or sell back what they pull. Coinbase. The platform with $246B of assets from 115M registered users worldwide. They tout that they're the "Everything Exchange" and @brian_armstrong sees cards as much an "everything" as crypto and stocks.
But if you double click here, the digital repack trend is driving this market expansion. Admittedly I didn't fully get this last month, until I tried ripping a repack (or two or ten) myself and saw some of my n00b friends quickly turn collector after getting hooked by apps like @RipsByTriumph (top 10 US shopping app now), @Trovexyz, and my friend @Duke_Chung (the 🐐)'s Heyshop.com.
But there are real risks with this trend to consider. This model leans heavily on degen gambling mechanics. The funnel expansion brings in collectors, but also gamblers, speculators, and tourists. Repacks appear to be gobbling up supply, inflating prices, jamming up @PSAcard grading lines (godspeed @natsturner) and introducing some of the similar behavior we saw inflate and pop the NFT bubble just a few years ago. Rumor has it (via @BosCardHunter) that Coinbase is utilizing a large network of vendors to buy out show inventory with an unlimited budget.
Some of the same forces making cards more mainstream can also make the market more fragile. Tread carefully.
3. Pokemon is on its way to becoming king (or maybe already is). @the27guy pointed out that the 59 highest priced cards on the @Fanatics @Collect auction were Pokemon.🤯 And the non-sports spillover is hard to ignore. None of this is for me personally (not interested in any of it), but after seeing friends go all-in on @Disney @Topps cards I noticed that a Mickey Mouse Superfractor sold just last week for $222k. What kind of Mickey Mouse sh*t is that?!
4. The physical hobby is expanding in lockstep with the digital. @CardVaultTB @TomBrady is opening stores at a furious pace, up to 19 now. Even in (what I consider) a second-tier card market South Florida, there are four overlapping shows just this weekend including the large Courtside Card Show in downtown Miami. I've been to a handful of shows and shops over the past month and they are ALL packed to the brim. For all the innovation happening online, collectors still want to see cards IRL, haggle over them, show them off, and buy/sell/trade IRL.
5. Oh, and Cooper Flagg sold for $8.04m. A 19-year-old who has only played in 70 NBA games saw his 1/1 NBA Debut Patch Auto auction for $8.04m after it was pulled in a $515 livestream break in August. The reaction was exactly as you'd expect, from @mdudas stating that nobody is paying $8m for this card organically in the year of our lord 2026 to @itsgeoffwilson arguing that if @Cooper_Flagg goes on to have a 🐐 career, this could look like a bargain compared to Jordan, Mantle, and Picasso. The real story here is how a card that did not exist a few months ago could be pulled publicly, go viral, establish provenance, find global liquidity and turn into an $8M asset almost immediately.
So what's next? This has to be top, right? Right? Many have been calling top for almost a year now. There will be a correction at some point. Since I can't predict when, the more interesting question is what the market looks like on the other side of it. If the collector base is significantly larger, the acquisition funnel is much wider, physical retail and shows dramatically expanded and cards are now an "Everything" category, then the baseline could end up in a different stratosphere than any of us ever expected.
Fascinating chronological account and visualization of how Instinct went viral here over the span of <2 weeks.
@davidrgoldberg your post played a key role - in fact I discovered Instinct via your post (but you were already out of invites so I scrambled and scored one from @jdanjohnson). And apparently my Fri 8/21 post was part of the @pitdesi-led “Wave 2” 8 days after the true OG 8/13 “epicenter post” from @ElliotComite 🙌 followed by @JasonrShuman.
Super cool to see how a great product actually spreads like wildfire in a (mostly) organic way! @noahrshinn @saranormous @scottbelsky
It involves a breakfast from 2017, FOMO created by VCs, and truly "the power of GC" as one might say.
This is the instinct behind instinct.
brace.so/blog/the-instinct-b…
Chester Ng 🆖 retweeted
This was fascinating, and well done. A true 'insider's look', backed by data, in how something goes viral.
Had no idea i played a meaningful role in this. Kinda cool.
Shout out to @ElliotComite @JasonrShuman
Also saw some fun cameos:
@saranormous @chest @KatieS @sariazout +more
Fun Fact: write after posting, I DM'd @scottbelsky @saranormous to try and invest, to no avail. Would have pushed harder if I had this data!
Perhaps there's an open role?!?!?!
It involves a breakfast from 2017, FOMO created by VCs, and truly "the power of GC" as one might say.
This is the instinct behind instinct.
brace.so/blog/the-instinct-b…
Chester Ng 🆖 retweeted
Hedge-fund titan Ken Griffin is donating $2 billion to start a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami, part of the largest-ever individual gift toward higher education on.wsj.com/4AGpvMq
Chester Ng 🆖 retweeted
Ken Griffin made a $3 BILLION gift to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest individual gift in American higher education history and for a Miami, Florida campus!!!
And the centerpiece is extraordinary:
$2 BILLION to build a new 35-acre Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami.
CMU Miami is expected to ultimately serve 3,500+ students, nearly 300 faculty and 600+ staff, with graduate students arriving as early as 2028.
For those who don’t know @CarnegieMellon
Carnegie Mellon is one of the great technology universities on Earth.
Computer science.
Artificial intelligence.
Robotics.
Engineering.
Design.
Advanced manufacturing.
CMU has spent decades sitting at the intersection of science + technology + entrepreneurship + the real economy.
And that’s why this matters so much.
Miami’s next chapter cannot simply be measured by how many companies relocate here.
The real measure is whether we build the institutions that continuously produce talent, research, intellectual property, founders and entirely new industries.
CMU Miami can become one of those institutions.
The planned campus will focus on enormous real-world challenges including AI, human health, national security, energy, climate resilience and industrial innovation, with research labs and venture studios designed to connect academia, industry and government.
Think about the economic flywheel this can create:
Talent → Research → IP → Startups → Venture Capital → Companies → Jobs → More Talent.
And this doesn’t happen in isolation.
Miami already has extraordinary higher-ed anchors.
@univmiami brings world-class research, medicine and scholarship.
@FIU has become one of America’s most consequential large public research universities and an enormous engine of upward mobility and talent.
@MDCollege is arguably one of the most important workforce and access institutions anywhere in the country.
CMU doesn’t replace that ecosystem.
It makes the ecosystem more powerful.
Imagine the collaborations.
Joint research.
Faculty networks.
Shared talent.
Startup formation.
Industry partnerships.
National-security innovation.
AI commercialization.
Students moving between classrooms, laboratories, companies and venture studios across South Florida.
That is how regional economies compound.
And we should also acknowledge something important:
This will be a journey.
Buildings don’t create innovation ecosystems.
People do.
It will take years of recruiting extraordinary faculty, attracting students, connecting with existing institutions, earning trust in the community and translating research into companies and jobs.
But today the ceiling of what Miami can become just moved higher.
For years we’ve talked and worked on Miami becoming one of the world’s great centers for technology, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Increasingly, the institutional infrastructure is catching up with the ambition.
And perhaps the most exciting part:
This isn’t simply a Miami story.
It’s a Florida story.
A world-class technology university planting a major flag here strengthens Florida’s ability to compete for the scientists, engineers, founders, companies and industries that will define the next 50 years.
Capital moves fast.
Companies move fast.
But universities build civilizations.
CMU coming to Miami is a very, very big deal.
Exclusive: Major college coming to Miami with $3B boost from billionaire Griffin miamiherald.com/news/busines…
If this is Instinct, but with humans-in-the-loop + ability to GSD that you need a phone for (vs. just a computer web browser for), then I am soo in. Trying Fo now…
I led engineering at Google DeepMind.
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The most bullish thing happening in Miami tech this week wasn’t a funding round.
It was this room.
Six years ago, I had my first coffee with @chest in Coconut Grove after an intro from then-Mayor @FrancisSuarez and @jackabraham.
Chester told me he was going all in on Miami.
Not “Miami” as a trade.
Miami and Florida as a community.
And he did.
He and Jack and team showed up personally. @atomicvc planted roots. Atomic built companies here, hired here, invested here and keeps building here.
Now fast-forward to this week:
Chest is sitting with the first cohort of student founders at Link College, sharing what he’s learned with kids taking their first swings.
That’s the flywheel.
The people who came here to build are now helping raise the generation that builds after them.
Huge respect to Chest for understanding that ecosystems aren’t something you join.
You leave them stronger than you found them.
Building season never stopped.
Chester Ng 🆖 retweeted
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 😉
Navan said Wednesday it has acquired BoomPop, an AI-powered platform for planning corporate meetings and events. The acquisition is the latest move in Navan’s consolidation strategy, bringing meetings and events spending into the same platform where companies already book travel and manage expenses.
Navan declined to disclose the acquisition price.
The business travel platform partnered with BoomPop earlier this year, and the acquisition repeats an apparent Navan pattern: acquiring the partner after customer demand proved out.
hubs.li/Q04x5jPz0
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! 🌀
Chester Ng 🆖 retweeted
I found my boy… @adriangrenier
@betr