Aakash GuptaLead source
Three friends who met in a sneaker reselling Facebook group in middle school just got Sequoia to value their company at $5.1 billion. Sequoia actually turned them down the first time. Today it led their $200M round, and Doug Leone, the guy who used to run the firm, picked it as his first deal since coming back to investing. The company is Whop, and it started as a way to sell sneaker bots. Steven, the CEO, figures that whole market was worth maybe $20,000 a day. That's about $7.3M a year, which is the kind of number that gets a pitch killed in a VC partner meeting in five minutes flat. What he saw was that there were something like 70,000 other markets just like it. Trading groups, sports picks, clipping gigs, paid communities, weird little software tools. Each one is way too small for…Read original on X