He spent his childhood at sea without an address. He spent his career building marketplaces. Now he runs the one where collectors trade the cards they grew up loving.
Point your phone at a stack of Pokemon cards and Rare Candy will tell you what each one is, what it's worth, and whether the set is complete. That scanning tool is called Tally, and it has now read more than five million cards. The company behind it is run by Chris Knape, who treats a hobby most people abandoned in middle school as serious infrastructure.
Rare Candy is a marketplace, an authentication service, and a tracking app for trading card games - Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Lorcana, and Gundam. Collectors buy through live auctions, timed drops, and always-on listings. They verify what's real. They watch their collections fill in, card by card. Knape is the CEO and co-founder, and his job is less about cards than about the people who can't stop chasing them.
The numbers move fast. The community grows by roughly half again its size every month. The catalog spans the games that define modern collecting. And the through-line of Knape's pitch is stubbornly un-cynical: collecting is a community, not a commodity. The cards are the excuse. The people are the point.
Knape did not arrive from the toy aisle. He came through some of the most demanding growth machines in tech: an early seat at YouTube, business development at Google Play, supply growth and partnerships at Thumbtack, head of product at Tempo. He learned how two-sided markets actually work - how to get sellers and buyers to show up at the same party - and then pointed that knowledge at the cards he'd loved since he was a kid.
"More than 5,000,000 cards have been scanned on Rare Candy. We're beyond grateful to have each of you on this journey with us." - Chris Knape, on Rare Candy crossing five million scans
Knape was born in the US Virgin Islands and lived on a sailboat with his three younger brothers until he was almost 13. Most founders open with a garage. His opening scene is a deck and an ocean - a childhood measured in tides instead of addresses.
He came ashore for Dartmouth College, where he studied government and international relations, interned at the US Embassy in Paris, and graduated in 2008. The first job was The Boston Consulting Group. The second job changed everything.
The set-up that pays off: a kid who grew up trading and sorting on a boat ends up building the place where a generation sorts and trades. Some hobbies don't leave you. They just wait for you to come back with a product team.
Starts out as an associate after an internship at the US Embassy in Paris.
Joins as a strategy analyst and rises to one of the youngest managers at the company, eventually Global Head of Business Intelligence.
Leads business development for the app marketplace.
Product manager at the on-demand parking startup - his first taste of building a marketplace from the inside.
Product Lead of Supply Growth, later Head of Partnerships - learning how to make both sides of a market show up.
Head of Product. Off the clock, the pandemic pulls him back to his childhood card collection.
Co-founds the company with Pokemon YouTuber Leonhart and raises a $4M seed led by Lerer Hippeau.
Rare Candy passes 5M cards scanned and ships Tally plus master-set tracking.
Strip away the nostalgia and there's real machinery: scan a card and get its identity and value, buy through auctions and drops, verify authenticity, and track entire master sets toward completion. The games it covers read like a collector's wishlist.
More than 5,000,000 cards have been scanned on Rare Candy.
We're beyond grateful to have each of you on this journey with us.
Building the best collector community in the world.
He grew up largely without a fixed address, sailing the Caribbean with his family - three younger brothers in tow - until nearly 13.
His co-founder partnership started at Night Labs, the studio better known for MrBeast Burgers. They left the burgers and built a card marketplace.
When he isn't running Rare Candy, he works as a startup advisor and angel investor. His Instagram handle, fittingly for a former YouTube hand: @cjksnaps.
The collectibles world is full of speculators treating cards like stock tickers. Knape is building for the other crowd - the people who want a verified product, a community to share it with, and a way to see their collection grow. The aspiration is plain: make Rare Candy the place collectors go to buy, track, and connect, and build the best collector community in the world.