The Hunter Economy

Many people want to be the first person to discover a new trend, a new brand, or a new artist (“I liked them before they were cool”). Why not seed-invest, but into things other than tech startups? Think scouts, spotters, agents, A&Rs, VCs, etc.

This is the Hunter Economy: a series of products that will enable people to gain status as hunters and curators, gaining social and financial capital in their favorite people, businesses, and ideas in the process.

So angel investing is a category where people earn economic and social rewards for their curation, and also build their identity around it in the process. And yet angel investing is just one form of curation, so why not extend these benefits for other forms of curation?

Receipts could be an interesting data set that has a lot of signal around what you care most about. Imagine all purchases tied to how early you were to buy something relative to other people. Or imagine an AngelList profile, but instead of your startups it’s your travel destinations, your music purchases, the charities you donate to -— it’d be a mo... See more

In a world of abundance, scarcity evolves. While pre-internet scarcity was about a physically constrained, or otherwise limited, number of resources, post-internet scarcity is about separating signal from noise.

Enter “The Hunter Economy” — a whole class of startups that'll be built to incentivize & reward early adopters both economically & socially. They'll exist for discovering new products, new people, and new ideas.

Similarly, signaling pre and post-internet evolves too. Pre-internet signaling was all about IRL flashiness (a Louis Vuitton bag) while post-internet signaling is about digitally-native flashiness (a Cryptopunk NFT).