card grader bought for $700M
Sports-card grader PSA did about $80M in revenue and $20M in profit as a public company before Nat Turner and Steve Cohen's group acquired it.
“I looked it up, they're doing about $80 million in revenue, $20 million in profit, publicly traded company. And then this guy named Nat Turner alongside Steve Cohen.”
Jack's bear case on NBA Top Shot: the producer itself declares the assets scarce and runs the trading, whereas in physical cards an independent grader like PSA certifies scarcity, separate from whoever makes the cards. Self-declared scarcity is no more meaningful than valuing every YouTube clip.
“The reason that I wouldn't be bullish on this is because they are the ones claiming that the assets are valuable and facilitating the trading. Like, in the basketball or the collectible world, it kind of works because the grading authority saying how scarce something is is independent of the producers that are making the basketball stuff.”
Shaan notes that PSA, one of the two big trading-card grading companies (via parent Collector's Universe), was just acquired for $700 million by a group led by Flatiron founder Nat Turner.
“So there's two big grading companies, one of which is PSA. PSA just got bought yesterday for $700 million by a group led by this guy Nat Turner.”
Shaan predicts the future of e-commerce is TikTok-style livestream selling (as already happening in Asia) — sellers running stores from an iPhone, holding products up live and answering questions — which he says will make Shopify's grid-of-images stores look like a dinosaur.
“That's what I think e-commerce is going to look like. And I think it's going to make Shopify look like a dinosaur in the past.”
Steal thisBuild livestream-native commerce tooling for solo sellers running a store from a phone.