Vestible Co-Founders Parker Graham and Yves Batoba join Wealth! to discuss how their startup partners with athletes — from professional to college-level — to allow investors to buy and sell shares based on the trajectory of their careers.
"We're looking to work with really high-level athletes who are kind of stuck in a contract that they're outperforming right now. And so the alpha here for the investor is we're finding athletes that you can invest in earlier in their career, and then you're making your return when they go to that next contract and the next contract the next contract," Graham explains.
Batoba adds, "Parker and I being former athletes ourselves, we've been told for a long time that, 'Hey, you are a business. You are a business. Conduct yourself as a business.' So we actually created a way that athletes can monetize their career the same way that a company would."
Graham explains as an alternative asset marketplace, Vestible has "buyers and sellers on both sides of those trades to provide liquidity." If a player ends up making more in another contact, buyers will try to get a piece of that, which he explains "is where the market will have some liquidity, where people who already have the shares are able to actually sell to those new entry investors."
He continues, "You're going to have their early investors, early believers, and then when they do have that big liquidity event for the athlete themselves, that's when you're going to see people start trading shares. And those shares start trading hands."
This seems to be the latest alternative investment trend as new platforms emerge, such as JKBX ("Jukebox") — which allows people to invest in its catalog of music — and dub — which sets investors up to participate in "copy trading" and buy into portfolios mimicking top traders like Warren Buffett and Nancy Pelosi.
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This post was written by Melanie Riehl