pokemon
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Nicolas le Jeune and the card that never leaves the vault
He left Google and YouTube to build Courtyard with Paulin Andurand. His wager: a collectible could change hands around the world while staying exactly where it was.
Collectors Put a Price on Trust. Now Comes the Waiting List.
The company behind PSA and PCGS turned expert judgment into a business spanning grading, storage and sales. A 9.9-million-item PSA backlog shows why scaling trust takes more than software.
Every Pokemon Card Runs Through a Belgian Town You've Never Heard Of
The name on the box is Pokemon, Hasbro or Disney. The company that actually prints, cuts and packs the cards is a 250-year-old Belgian manufacturer most players have never heard of.
CollX
CollX is a Philadelphia-area startup whose mobile app lets collectors snap a photo of a sports or trading card and instantly identify it and see its current market value. Built around AI visual search trained on a database of more than 17 million cards, CollX has grown from a quick valuation tool into a full collection-management platform and peer-to-peer marketplace where over 3 million users scan, organize, price, buy, sell, and trade cards. The company monetizes through Pro and Gold subscriptions, marketplace commissions, and referral revenue from hobby partners like PSA, Whatnot, and Fanatics.
Pat Flynn
Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster best known for founding Smart Passive Income (SPI), a platform where he openly documents the strategies - and the income numbers behind them - that power his online businesses. Laid off from his architecture job in 2008, he turned an e-book about the LEED exam into a career-defining pivot, eventually building a media company with 60 million+ podcast downloads, multiple Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestselling books, a Kickstarter-funded tripod product, and a Pokémon card YouTube channel that became its own standalone business. His signature move: publishing every dollar earned and spent, monthly, in public.