Everyone Is An Investor

Future-minded startups are capitalizing on this rules change. Maven, a platform for cohort-based courses, opened its seed round to the public

As Jarrod Dicker puts it, why subscribe when you can invest? If Substack lets you support creators by subscribing, Mirror lets you own a financial stake in their work.

People are investing in themselves. This is especially true for younger generations, who view traditional careers as anathema. Red Bull wanted to work with Bryce Hall and Josh Richards, 21-year-old and 19-year-old TikTok creators each with 20 million followers. In a previous era, Hall and Richards would have been thrilled. Instead, they decided to ... See more

At the same time that investing became more accessible, crypto went mainstream. About 20 million Americans—14% of the population—own crypto, with 100K “Bitcoin millionaires” out there. Many Americans (and especially many young Americans) learned to think like an investor through crypto.

Startups are beginning to formalize this. Stonks, which comes out of beta today, bills itself as Twitch + Kickstarter + Shark Tank. Anyone can watch entrepreneurs pitch their startups over livestream on Stonks, and then invest in the round.

Being an investor is bleeding into new forms of work. Online, capital and labor are both borderless. You can earn income on Axie Infinity, or turn a profit by investing in certain player cards on Sorare. The intersection of crypto and gaming is our closest modern analogue to the future jobs of the metaverse.

New technologies and business models have made investing accessible. Anyone with a smartphone, for instance, can use Robinhood. Robinhood also popularized zero-fee trading, which forced the hands of brokerages like E*Trade and Charles Schwab. Commission-free trading is now the norm.

Young people don’t want to rent their time to corporations—they watched their parents and grandparents get burned during the Great Recession and again during the COVID pandemic. Why work within “the system” with capped upside when you can use your hustle and savvy to dictate your own fortune, and have equity upside?

What’s groundbreaking about crypto is that it shifts the web from social currency to economic currency. When I like your Instagram post today, I grant you some social capital; what’s the equivalent for the cryptomedia age? Me “liking” your content may mean me financially investing in your success and sharing in future income. Maybe Spotify’s Year i... See more