Over the past ten years or so, I have been relatively early to three highly nascent, wild wild west style industries: online poker, daily fantasy sports and bitcoin. In two of them – poker and bitcoin – I experienced significant professional and financial successes. In the other, daily fantasy, I lost my shirt. With bitcoin’s recent rise I figured it could be instructive to briefly explore the analogies between the three and develop a framework for spotting the emerging markets of the future.
Jeremy Liew, General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners has repeatedly said that if one wants to spot emerging modes of communication and behavioral change, look to the products and services teen and tween girls are adopting. Similarly, I would argue that when it comes to emerging professional industries or financial markets, one should look towards how college aged kids are spending their time as well as the long-tail of the internet’s forums (including Reddit).
I believe this is the case for two primary reasons: (a) college aged kids have a substantial amount of disposable time and some variable amount of disposable income and (b) they are highly incentivized to increase their amount of disposable income – at a time in their lives when losing what little they have is not a significant loss. This combination pushes college students towards higher risk, higher return opportunities, some small percentage of which will materialize into mainstream markets and industries.
For example, although I’d played poker with my friends in high school, I found my way into online poker in a professional capacity my Sophomore year of college as the World Series of Poker was beginning to expand. It was the ideal format for a college student: success demanded thousands of hours of gameplay and continual learning and discussion via online forums. Very few adults with either part-time or full-time jobs could afford that much disposable time. My first startup, Cardrunners, where I ran marketing, had thousands of college students as customers, and many of the site’s pros were poker players who had made their millions during college.
You’re seeing a similar evolution in the world of professional gaming, or eSports; except that in eSports, the pros are often even younger, some still in high school. It is for the same reason: an adult with a full-time job, even one who loves gaming, will struggle to put in the tens of thousands of hours it requires to become great. These industries that demand obsessiveness are highly biased towards youth.
I discovered bitcoin in 2012 after the poker industry’s Black Friday as it was one of the few mechanisms to deposit and withdraw money from online poker sites. From there, I gradually became more interested in the technology, and began actively writing about bitcoin in 2014 in publications such as the WSJ and Recode as well as attending and speaking at Bitcoin conferences. I was also the first mainstream writer to publicly predict Mt. Gox’s insolvency, although, by that time, it was largely too late for most customers to withdraw their money.
During my poker years, I spent hours each day learning and communicating through the Two Plus Two Poker Forums. I still frequent them occasionally although only lurk at this point. They have a thread, over 850 pages long, all about bitcoin (there is an additional long thread about altcoins). You can watch the discussion evolve throughout the years. If you’d been paying attention to the forums back then, April 2011, and made even a small investment in bitcoin, you’d surely be a millionaire by now. [I love the first response given that it’s the same thing, verbatim, that bitcoin minimalists say now, even though it’s now trading at $3,400.]
There are other gems of niche industries and markets hidden throughout the Two Plus Two forums, although none have become as mainstream as bitcoin. You’ll likely find similar insights if you scour Reddit. We all know that one day another technology market will emerge that rivals or leapfrogs the attention and excitement given to cryptocurrency. I have a strong suspicion that early adopters will discover it through forums such as Two Plus Two or Reddit. I do worry that if that discussion moves to Slack or Telegram that it will be harder for the average person to find. I wrote about that concern here.
Daily fantasy sports, where I struck out both professionally and financially, was an industry where I simply wasn’t as personally passionate. In retrospect, I feel that my interest was a bit opportunistic. I still remember discussing at length with my friend Chris, who at the time was building the first ever Daily Fantasy site, Instant Fantasy Sports (in which I invested), about how we could port the functionality from the online poker sit-n-go format into fantasy sports and make an equivalent sit-n-go draft. I thought there were a lot of parallels, but I ultimately wasn’t excited by watching sports games all day nor obsessing over player statistics. This made it difficult to be credible either as a player (gamer) or an operator. I suspect that’s the reason I failed.
When it comes to being early and being right, I believe that passion is the ultimate insight. We humans have a lot in common. If you are passionate about an emerging industry, odds are that many other people are equally as passionate, or have the potential to become passionate if awareness is raised. Not all passions will materialize globally like bitcoin, but niche industries matter – even cosplay has developed into a $5-10 billion market. These emerging interests, industries and professions will continue to accelerate as the internet increasingly democratizes communication and awareness. It’s a fun time to be alive, and if you bet on your passions, odds are that you will discover others who feel similarly.