TRANSCRIPT
slava (00:01.346)
Welcome to another episode and we are very excited for this episode of Smart Humans. Today with Ryan Chang, he is an expert at many collectibles but really one of the best in all things sneakers. An entrepreneur, an investor, super excited for today's show. Welcome Ryan.
ryan (00:48.143)
Slava, thanks for having me. You didn't tell me the name of your podcast until now, Smart Humans. And so I will do my best today.
slava (00:55.926)
Yeah, you know, we have incredible people like you and people get to learn about all kinds of crazy things, especially in the world of alternative investments. So we always like to start with, how did you even get into any alternative investments? Like, what was that entry point into starting to invest in these interesting things?
ryan (01:15.107)
Well, alternatives for me means, it means something different for different people. For me it means mostly sneakers, sports cards, NFTs. And I started collecting sneakers about 12 years ago. I was one of those guys who stood in lines for a little bit. I was one of those guys who followed the sneaker blogs and looked for new releases and selectively chose one here, one there. I think the difference between myself and the typical sneaker head when you think about
is I don't have 200 pairs of sneakers in mom's basement. My collection is really only 65-70 pairs and I haven't sold but a few just starting two or three years ago. And so I held for almost 10 years as an investor from the early going. I've never worn any of the pairs that I've bought. Sports cards, as a kid I grew up
ryan (02:15.121)
ride my bike around and my friends and I would just trade baseball cards. And this was like the mass print era, the junk wax era where, you know, a pack of cards would cost you 50 cents and then it was really built for trading. And so some people, sometimes you would sell a card for a buck or something like that, but there was no grading, there was no grail pieces or numbered cards, and you're really just collecting your favorite player. I got into it because my older cousins did it and they lived down the block. And so, yeah, I've been collecting for a long time. I didn't mention comic
I should have mentioned that in high school I got into comic books and that Those are in my mom's basement still and they're plastic wrapped with a backboard I used to have a comic book shop near the high school that we attended in Princeton, New Jersey it was called Steve's comic relief and
It might still be there now, but, in any case, those are the things I used to collect as a younger person. Now in my older age, I've... The landscape has changed. It's been...
Wow, there's so much more investing. There are speculators, there are corporate interests, there are funds allocating percentages of their assets. And so these days, I do some consulting on that side. I educate people on the spaces. I tell them what I think would be good investments. They consult with me on where to put money and what to expect and where the direction of the culture is going.
Yeah, so it's been sort of almost a lifelong journey for me.
slava (03:46.338)
So you started, if I heard correctly, with sports cards, and then comic books, and then you got into the sneakers. Is that right?
ryan (03:54.635)
Yeah, sort of went in reverse order. Sorry about that.
slava (03:56.502)
No, that's great. Just, it's interesting to see how like the gateway drug, and I guess that was the sports cards for you.
ryan (04:03.285)
Yeah, yeah, truly an addiction, honestly. And I guess you can feed the addiction with numerous types of collectibles. It doesn't have to be one.
slava (04:11.478)
And I know we're going to definitely deep dive into all the things that you're so good at. But before we get there, I just wanted to hear your thoughts on the other asset classes. I like, do you invest in them or do you shy away? For example, like real estate outside of like a primary residence, is that something you're investing in?
ryan (04:31.287)
Yeah, I did a couple of bills. I did a couple of investment properties in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. I did two townhouses in Brooklyn. I loved those projects. I loved designing them from the ground up. I loved being the principal. I GC'd one of them. I loved being interiors and understanding HVAC and plumbing and electrical and just top down permitting and all those things. And so I will say that...
I guess I didn't even know until right now that those are considered alternative investments because I guess those are so commonplace to many people. Everybody has sort of like a beach house and investment property or even stuff on VRBO and they're just renting it out. But you're right. Yes. So I've been involved in those things for quite a while and I'm taking a break right now because the last project that I did in Brooklyn was sort of a large scale for one person. It was a large townhouse in Brooklyn Heights.
of being principal designer and general contractor all at once.
slava (05:32.194)
Got it. And then how about like venture? I know that you're an incredible entrepreneur. You created an awesome and very scalable tutoring business. So is that something where you like to angel invest at all or you invest into funds?
ryan (05:49.451)
Yeah, angel invest and into funds. I am, I guess there's not a huge theme, maybe technology, if that's an appropriate theme.
I'm into quite a few funds. A lot of them are into the crypto platforms, the crypto pipelines, the integrating crypto into real life. They're into new kinds of disruptive tech. There are also food and beverage brands like a hibiscus tea called Ruby that I recently invested into and now you can find them at Whole Foods. So there's all kinds of different things at play in terms of my venture stuff.
I also, as you mentioned, I have a tutoring company. That's my main gig. I've done that since graduating college. It's been almost, wow, it's almost been 20 years. I don't know, I guess that many people my age who've had one job for that long, but I'm one of them. And so, yeah, we provide one-on-one public, one-on-one private tutoring services to high school and older, sometimes even younger. And we do all academic subjects, college placement,
LSAT, GMAT, all kinds of testing. We build strong rapport with our students and the families that we work with. We focus a lot on mentoring and coaching and emotional development as well, alongside academic performance and college consulting. So that has been, I guess, the main driver behind the opportunities that I've had to fund a lot of the interests in AltAssets or in venture. And I'm still tutoring today. I love the grassroots.
students. I'm a little bit more selected these days than I used to be on who I work with and it's just a machine that I love being a part of and also running at the same time. We're very small we only have about 40 students and there's no sort of desire to get much bigger than that. At one point we had about 120 and I realized that you know I think I'd rather just give more attention to a
slava (07:59.278)
Great. And then how do you think about your diversification of your assets in terms of cash versus public investments in the stock market versus all of these alternatives, high level percentages? Do you think about it like that?
ryan (08:17.699)
You know, I wish I did, and I probably should. I will say that I got into alternatives, heavily invested into alternatives, about four or five years ago, and I think the reason wasn't an allocation thing. It was more like I thought that the world lacked.
asset classes. There's a shortage in actual asset classes because all the money that's been printed over the past few decades and just population growth and inflation and how many rental properties can one person actually want to manage or realistically manage by himself. And so you're talking about what cash, bonds, real estate, and maybe a very short list of five traditional assets let's say.
It's been those five for such a long time, and I think that has created a shortage in what people define as assets. And so now that group is growing, and people are putting money into asset classes 6 through 10. And that could be wine, that could be a sports car, that could be anything honestly that you think it might be. It could be cryptos, right? And so another category that I'm in is crypto. And the NFT space is blowing up tremendously.
in terms of which places I house my money rather than what percentages I have allocated. Of course, I own a primary home and that will be a fixture. And of course I have some cash and that will be a fixture and some public stocks and those will be a fixture, yes.
slava (09:54.67)
Well, that's a great segue into really the heart of what our conversation can be. It's really about these collectibles and even more about sneakers. But you mentioned the term in the beginning that maybe not everybody knows. You said sneaker head. What does that even mean?
ryan (10:08.419)
Yes.
I guess a sneaker head means somebody who's obsessed with sneakers. And that's an umbrella term. When I think of sneaker head, I think about generally a youth and that person hoards shoes, has multiple pairs of shoes. We have phrases like one to rock and one to stock, meaning you wear one pair, you put the other on the shelf and you see if it appreciates. You have people who attend sneaker conventions.
You have people who just own more sneakers than they could possibly ever wear in their lifetime. And I think there's also their rotation. They have 15 pairs that they're rotating this month and they'll change for next month. They clean them, they sell them, they hoard them. That's a sneakerhead.
slava (11:06.018)
So when I was a kid in the 80s and then even the early 90s, you wore sneakers, definitely some people noticed if you had nicer sneakers than somebody else, but I think an expensive pair of sneakers was like 80 or a hundred bucks, and that was a lot. So what exactly happened? Like how did sneakers become an asset class and now there's thousands of dollars?
ryan (11:25.656)
Yeah.
slava (11:34.754)
thousands of dollars for a sneaker or tens of thousands or even, you know, seven digit sneakers. How did that happen?
ryan (11:41.931)
Wow, I think we probably grew up around the same time, 80 to 90 sounds like my high school experience too when people wanted to get the latest Jordan release. So yeah, how did it get from that to here? Really smart marketing and people really started to take...
note of the supply and demand issues here and the fact that if you had a limited release and you had enough interest in it, it would create frenzies. There was something almost two decades ago, we're almost at the, we just passed an anniversary of it on February 22nd was something called the Pigeon Riot and that was almost 20 years ago. It made the front page of the New York Post.
people, mostly youth, were anticipating Jeff Staples' release of the Pigeon SB Dunk at his shop called Reed Space Design in the Lower East Side. So people had camped out there two or three nights. They had handcuffed themselves to the fences just to maintain their place in line.
Unfortunately, people had also brought some weapons, some knives and, you know, bats and things to protect themselves. And especially after they got the sneaker, they wanted to be protected on the way home. The police got word of this. And so they came to the scene. There wasn't any violence, but they escorted people after they got one of these 150 pairs from the store to a taxi cab.
to go home. And this was on live, I don't know if it made live TV, but it made evening news, it made the front page of the New York Post, and that is one of the sort of talking points in the timeline of where sneaker culture evolved in big jumps. That was definitely a punctuation mark. And so, all of a sudden...
ryan (13:42.499)
we were making news. The kids that were lining up outside of stores and camping, people knew about it. But the fact that it was New York City, the fact that they bought these shoes for I think about $150 or $200 and sold them the very next day for $2,000 made news. The fact that the police showed up made news, right? And so that model kept repeating itself and Nike really took advantage of it with a lot of its drops thereafter.
slava (14:11.394)
So, you know, I think of Nike as trying to sell as many basketball sneakers as possible. So why did they create this run of just 150 of this sneaker? And that's what you're calling a drop, right?
ryan (14:28.695)
Yeah, it's something called the hype model, where you build up a lot of hype and anticipation, and then you release far fewer in supply than you know you're going to sell. And then you see this model being replicated by so many corporations now, even Popeyes, they had that chicken sandwich come out last year, and it was sold out everywhere. That was on purpose. It was the PR move of the fast food industry for a month.
slava (14:56.795)
Is it Nike that invented that hype drop, drop limited run model or is it somebody else?
ryan (15:03.499)
I think Supreme had a large role in that and I guess don't quote me outside of this space. I don't think any other names in this space were doing it before Nike and Supreme.
slava (15:14.026)
And is this just the way sneakers get exposed to people today? It's always through this drop model.
ryan (15:21.227)
Not always. There are definitely models where they just come to market and there are numerous pairs and it's a lot easier to get. But some specific models, namely collaborations with artists, Nike will pick a Jeff Staple and do a collaborative pigeon SB duck. And when you do that sort of collaboration, there's a special design on the shoe. And I guess it makes more sense for them to limit production on those select models.
rather than all their models because I'm sure they want to mass produce and mass sell also.
slava (15:56.778)
are all sneakers now investable assets that are gonna go up in price. So I bought some Asics, you know, that I like to walk in. Am I gonna make money on them if I don't wear them for a year and sell them?
ryan (16:08.575)
I mean...
I hear that Slava is the next Elon Musk, so if Slava does what he is going to do in his life and then houses his first born Asics, then yes. But otherwise Asics has themselves off the rack at Payless and you know not to criticize or anything like that. There are just some shoes that when they come out and when people buy them, they're for use. Right? They're to wear and they're to, they're called beaters, they get beat up, you wear them in the mud, you run around with them and they're for everyday use.
use. And so the sneakers that we're talking about beforehand, I guess, cross the threshold into possible investments. There's also a group of sneaker heads who just wear all their pairs. They don't care how much it's worth. They don't care how much it's going to be worth. There's hashtags skate your dunks.
buy those dunks and skate them to death on your skateboard. Because SB dunks stand for skateboard, and that was the movement back in that decade, about 20 years ago. We're almost on the 20th anniversary of SB in fact. And seeing as we probably went to high school around the same time, there's probably a bunch of skaters at your high school. When we were growing up and they carried their skateboards and they attached them to the backpacks and they skated outdoor after school in the pavement and just in the parking lot, just trying to ollie the curb.
That was the movement that Nike took advantage of with the SV model. They realized that there was a little bit of this counterculture going on. They wouldn't sell the largest number of shoes, but the shoes that they would sell to this community, this community would be deeply passionate about it. And that, and that I think is the core of collectability. When you have.
slava (17:53.263)
What's the line or how do we know whether something's a beater or it's a good investment? Like how do I evaluate that?
ryan (18:03.063)
You know, there's a lot of factors. I think these days, these days you can sort of get a sense either on social media or your community, skaters, skate shops, which pairs have insane demand in the pipeline, which pairs prior to even release, they come out with one image and the hype is already generating. You can feel the buzz, right? And so it's not the.
most scientific model, but it's also not the most difficult to predict. Everyone knew when the off whites launched years ago that those were going to be insane. Oh, Virgil Abloh's line, off whites, and he started making shoes after he made clothes, and rest in peace, he passed recently a few months ago, but and I'm wearing off-white right now, in fact.
slava (18:41.966)
Sorry, what's the off whites?
ryan (19:00.503)
And so there's some things that you just know. When the Air Yeezy 1 dropped and Kanye was releasing it and rumored to be limited to around 5,000 pairs per colorway, I believe, everyone knew that it was gonna sell more than 5,000 pairs. And people queued up. You can see what's happening before the sneaker actually releases.
slava (19:21.938)
Awesome. And is there like a particular website you could go on to do this research or to get this buzz or to buy these sneakers? Like where are you sourcing these? Where are you pricing these? Where are you evaluating what's next?
ryan (19:37.879)
Right. So everyone has their own, I guess, avenue towards pre-information.
But I think that the most reliable consistently is people's pages on Instagram. There are now dedicated pages talking about upcoming sneaker releases. There are people who professionally specialize in getting tons of new release pairs and then flipping them immediately. There are people who specialize in bots that get onto the sneaker apps.
act like you are 15 different locations or human beings, and raffle with every single one of those, I guess, VPNs. I'm the dumbest tech guy ever, but maybe a different VPN for each single computer that you're on or each phone. And then hopefully two of them hit. And so there's all kinds of different complex ways to get an early release shoe or to track an early release shoe. The information advantage that we used to have when we queued up and talked to skate
and build relationships with them, I'll hold a size 10 and a half for you, Ryan. I'll hold a size 10. I know it's upcoming. I know you want one. That is, I guess that's a dying art. Because everything else now is becoming automated, even the hype drop. And so you see this model, the hype model, with NFTs now. And so that is one of the reasons why I guess it was a natural evolution for me to start looking into that space. But we'll get into that later.
slava (21:11.424)
Are sneakerheads moving to NFTs?
ryan (21:14.403)
They are, they are. There are even some sneaker-based NFTs where there's one called Sneaker Punks from an OG sneaker legend. His name is Frannalations, and he builds these crypto-punk looking sneaker designs, really.matrixy, really pixelated, and they have success because...
I think I mentioned this before, the core aspect of collectability in my opinion is this grassroots, almost culty, deeply passionate subset of people that will ride or die with your product no matter what. And I think that's what Nike successfully found in the SB dunk, those skaters. Those skaters were going to buy more SBs no matter what. They weren't going to wear any other shoe, right? And they didn't necessarily care how they looked.
same pair brand new because they were going to skate it to death again right and so I think these modern NFT models were I guess they're trying to fast forward they're trying to jump to corporate partnerships they're trying to team up with the Nikes of the world and then drop an NFT and then hope that it will be long-term sustainable long-term investable but a lot of the time they're missing that grassroots movement that I think the sneaker community built up
ryan (22:35.953)
you see them appreciate regularly, consistently, 25% a year, and they never go down some pairs. I've never seen like the grail pairs of sneakers go down. Economic depression doesn't matter. It's just going up. And I think it's because there are those guys who are too deeply passionate. And remember, there's one thing in the supply chain of a sneaker that's different from many supply chains. Every now and then, you have a guy, he wears it.
And so even though he's been housing it for 15 years, he just took one of the supply off the market. And so you can have actually a reducing supply effect.
slava (23:17.13)
Got it. And in the NFT world, Artifact sold to, I believe, Nike. So that was really interesting because they were an NFT sneaker company as well. So that's interesting to see the collaboration. Okay, so most of our listeners won't have the opportunity to talk to you. So I'm gonna just use this opportunity to, you know, mind your brain. Let's say we have 10 grand and I need your help. We wanna make some money. How do I turn 10 grand into, you know, whatever, 50 grand in five years with sneakers? Is that possible?
ryan (23:22.36)
Yes.
ryan (23:37.668)
Yeah.
ryan (23:47.535)
totally possible. And I think a lot of it has to do with how much time you're willing to invest outside of the 10 grand. If you just want to write a check for 10 grand or go on StockX and buy some pairs for 10 grand, you might be capping your upside just because you're buying evolved pairs, right? You're buying pairs that are already on the secondary market. If you're willing to build relationships, stand in a line, visit your local skate shop, support your skate shops. There's something called a tier zero account.
have tier zero accounts. They get supplies. Sometimes they get a full size run of the brand new drop. And all of a sudden they're holding 20 pairs of what they already know are $1,000 sneakers, but they retail at $185. And so you could be sitting on a, what is that, a 5 or 6X immediately if you have that relationship. So as with most things in life, how much time are you willing to invest?
slava (24:43.254)
Why do the retailers sell them at 185? Because they have to, they're not allowed to sell them for more.
ryan (24:48.619)
I don't know the legal verbiage on that, but I imagine that if they did the markup, they would lose their tier 0 relationship with NIC.
slava (24:55.254)
Got it. So if you're helping me, so I'm gonna start going like sneaker shop to sneaker shop, skate shop to skate shop, and I'm gonna start trying to make relationships over the next couple of weeks, months.
ryan (25:08.407)
You could do that.
slava (25:09.15)
And how do I make that relationship? Do I have to buy shoes or am I just getting them coffee?
ryan (25:15.087)
Well, somebody with your personality probably just has to get them coffee, but other people might have to buy a ton of shoes. I guess it's an exact science, right? But you can also meet people who have been in the space for a long time and sort of...
You know, I have had, I guess, people offer to intern for me. I've guess I've had young people asking me if they can shadow me and just hang around. And so there's relationships that way. Just like in the corporate model where you enter a company, start an internship, it's unpaid or then becomes paid and then summer thing and then as a entry level job type thing, that entire structure sort of exists on an informal model in an informal way in the sneaker space now
because it is involved into its own marketplace.
slava (26:03.522)
So you mentioned StockX, are there any other websites for buying, trading, research, any other Instagram pages that you're like, give me like five nuggets so that I can go right after this, just start working on it.
ryan (26:21.115)
Sure, there's Heart Copy, H-A-R-T-C-O-P-Y. That is a pretty, I guess it's relatively old now. It's about two or three years old. And that will get you started on a lot of historical research, which is important because you can understand the trends, you can understand what people liked and when they liked it and for what reason. You can understand what the prominent artists are doing in the space in terms of collaborations and the prominent brands, they don't just cover Nike.
post a shoe with a nice historical recap. So even a data junkie sneakerhead like me learns a thing here or there from them because that site is definitely run by some experts. Number two, you can follow larger platforms like hypebeastkicks or Complex Sneakers and they tend to cover a lot of new drops. Frannelations, the person I introduced before, F-R-
ryan (27:20.591)
has been a sneaker OG for a really long time now, transitioning into the NFT world. And so he definitely gives a lot of tips as to what to look out for next, which NFTs are being minted, and how to get onto the white lists for the ones that he thinks are advantageous. Yeah. And so you can even take a look at large corporations and what they're doing around the space. You are familiar with Goat.
Sotheby's, Christie's, these are major platforms that are now looking to permanently exist in the sneaker world.
slava (27:56.778)
And then that's a great transition to like an incredible story. You actually got Sotheby's to start selling sneakers Right. You were one of the people behind making that happen
ryan (28:09.419)
Yeah, I think...
It was destined to happen. I think I was one of the people who maybe accelerated it by a little bit. I had a great relationship with a friend named Noah Wunsch who used to be one of their VPs over there. Now he is the founder of Ruby Hibiscus which is one of the ventures that I have seeded. And so I've known Noah for a really long time. He is one of the most creative and forward-thinking
ryan (28:41.533)
they're onto something it just has a higher probability of hitting than your average person. And so him and I had been talking about Sotheby's leading the way on something like this, pushing sneakers into the category of fine arts, which I have always believed that they should exist in. And we ran some auctions, it's been successful, and now I hear it's the largest growing segment
in the entire Sotheby's organization is collectibles led by sneakers and a really intelligent VP that they have over there now named Bram Wachter who I work with a lot and so Bram and I have had some successes after Noah has left as well and so go ahead.
slava (29:27.766)
No, I was gonna say great. And I mean, you're being humble, but I believe as part of one of the first auctions, you sold your Yeezys, right? For what was it, like 1.8 million?
ryan (29:39.447)
Yeah, that was last year. That was a $1.8 million sale for the Nike Air Yeezy prototype, the one that Kanye wore at the Grammys. It was that iconic performance where he sang Hey Mama and Stronger and...
It was just, I think, one of those moments in time where when he jumped on stage, everybody was asking, remember that phrase, what are those? It was sort of like a compliment version of what are those? Holy cow. No one has ever seen this shoe before. It wasn't the super viral Instagram era yet where people had all kinds of pre-information and things leaked left and right. People saw the shoe and they wondered what the hell are on his feet.
AR-EC1 prototypes. Rumor had it that he wanted to keep them after the show, but they went to charity auction, they changed hands one or two times, they ended up with me, and... No, I bought it from a private collector who I think bought it from that auction. It didn't really change hands that many times, but when I sold it, you know, Sotheby's came to me with the opportunity to sell it and...
slava (30:38.267)
How did you actually get it? Was it from an auction?
ryan (30:54.999)
You know, in a private sale, you have options because you have a little bit of information on who the potential buyer might be. And I was really intrigued that it was going to a sneaker fractionalization site. I didn't want this sort of cultural artifact to exist in the catacombs forever. I had held it for about four years, something like that. But the fact that it had now the opportunity to be fractionalized into the world, to have millions of owners buy in at $10 each on a app called Rares.
led by an entrepreneur named Jerome Sapp.
That to me was a new segment in the growth of the sneaker world that I really wanted to contribute my two cents to, to add a little bit of fuel to that. Because as things get more and more expensive, it's difficult to own them outright as a single collector, right? And an artifact that special, we do want to share it with the world. We do want people to feel ownership in it because everyone helped create that, right? It's not just Kanye on stage.
a sneaker who contributed to the hype model, who contributed their time and energy and their passion. That's why that sneaker is worth something.
slava (32:07.358)
And what do you think of the current market? You know, you've been early for a decade. You've been on top of this, you know, as is risen. Is this still gonna grow as rapidly or have we seen the top or where in between?
ryan (32:21.111)
You know man, I have called top on this market so many times before that I'm just never gonna call it again. Because every time I do that, it's wrong. I will say that my best comparison is that sneakers are like really aggressive bonds on steroids. They tend to just go up, the right ones, and it's not too hard to figure out which ones are the right ones these days. About 25% a year.
And then just don't go down because everybody knows that these are the grail pairs from the early 2000s. And like I said, every now and then somebody takes one supply, one supply quantity off the market by wearing it because there's a huge difference between a dead stock model and one that has been worn by somebody else. It's kind of...
slava (33:07.798)
Dead stock means it's never been worn.
ryan (33:10.763)
Deadstock, OG All means it's never been worn and it comes with the original box and the extra laces and whatever other paraphernalia that the sneaker was originally sold with. And so if you want to undies something, aka undeadstock it, it's sort of like driving the car out of the lot. Whatever percentage you lose immediately, 20%, that's what happens on the sneaker as well. And so the thing I love about sneakers is that...
They're consistent from my experience. They can't tear an ACL and the value goes down by 50%. Right? At the same time, they can't win the Super Bowl and the value doubles. But over time, it's consistent.
slava (33:53.358)
Can you give me a pair or two that I should look out for in let's call it the, in any range? Let's call it the moderate range or the expensive range. Three years from now, five years from now that you feel very confident is going to be quite up.
ryan (34:11.675)
Sure. I think we've spoken about a few of them already. I'm gonna go with one of the SB dunks on the super high end. It's called the Paris SB Dunk. Right? Paris SB Dunk? One of the... Let me think. Yeah. One of the favorite pairs of mine that I collected super early on because...
slava (34:25.154)
Paris, like the city.
ryan (34:39.711)
It was made from a Bernard Buffet canvas. And he is an impressionist artist who collaborated with Nike, took a canvas of his, an artwork, and they cut it up and they made sneakers out of it. So every single pair of these 202 Paris dunks is a different.
portion of that canvas and so they're unique to themselves. How many DS pairs exist in the world right now? Maybe about 25. Maybe about 25. And so that's an incredibly expensive pair, but a pair that relentlessly continues to go up in price. I think it holds the StockX record still from a sale about a year ago or almost two years ago. It was sold on StockX for 52,000 but Sotheby's recently did a sale
I think it hit 90 and in the private markets these days, it's really hard to get one under 90 And so if you're looking at those sort of numbers, which is what the fund managers come to me with they come to me with Seven figure numbers where I say well, we actually aren't evolved enough to handle that I can't just take seven figures and advise you that you can get these sneakers over here because the liquidity isn't quite there yet And the supply isn't quite there. It's not like a public market, right?
I'm from the days where we would meet up with each other at Heathrow, do a little cash exchange and then fly home. So then you got your $8,000 transaction in the books. And so are we headed towards that era? I think we are because I think everything is appreciating. And if you pick the right thing, it is going to go up over time. Another one I will say, I guess on the lower end is...
Tara did her friends and family release recently, the designer, European as well. They did a limited release, about 36 pairs, and those have consistently gone up. I think they're trading above $6,000 or $7,000 each now, which is amazing because you have to remember somebody got these for $200 bucks three years ago.
slava (36:49.395)
Is the name of the shoe Para or is that the company?
ryan (36:52.751)
That's the name of the company. Yeah, and it's a dunk. It's the paranaki done Yeah
slava (36:55.618)
Haru Nike dunk, got it. Cool. And then if you had any other predictions because you seem to be able to, whether on purpose or by accident, be predicting the future as to where things are headed, culturally, business, investments, outside of the specific asset, the specific SB, Paris dunks, what do you predict for three to five years out what's happening in alts or sneakers or collectibles or any of it?
ryan (37:24.883)
I think right now, this year, is going to be a major separation between the highest quality choice assets and the large majority of things that will just go to junk. And like with a lot of things, my prediction is that there will be a shrinking, almost non-existent middle class.
And so that's, I guess, one of the points I tried to make earlier with Nike doing acquisitions and trying to dive into the NFT space. They may have their NBA Top Shots moment where things just skyrocket to the moon, but they could come crashing down just like NBA Top Shots did shortly thereafter, right? And a lot of the NFT projects I've become more and more and more selective on because there's just so much out there.
I don't know if you were in crypto four or five years ago, they had that major spike up to I think crypto hit about Bitcoin 20,000 and then it dropped and it stayed there in that plateau what for $3,000 a coin for a really long time, right? And then sort of wave two happened 2.0 crypto verse and now we're in the full blown metaverse. I think NFT is probably in for that sort of dive. That's one of the reasons I like sneakers a lot.
right ones. It's a mature market, right? I would, I guess, advise in coming in heavy, meaning one pair for 20,000 versus 20 pairs for a thousand each. Okay? I think the scarcity factor is really going to be the thing I play here. I see it in sports cards too. The bases and commons in PSA 10 that were selling of stars during the pandemic.
those things have come crashing down no matter if the guy won the championship. Right? And people are just getting, I guess, a little bit tired of things being that accessible. I think that the art markets and the...
ryan (39:33.295)
big funds and private investors are still coming. But when those guys come, they won't be as interested in, I guess, the common gettable findable assets as they are in what people often refer to as the one of ones.
slava (39:52.706)
Amazing, I've learned so much. So much about sneakers, so much about alternatives. And everything from one to rock, one to stock, or the Pigeon Riot, or tier zero accounts. I mean, you just brought me to the next level. And the idea of the evaporation of the middle, I'm really on board with that as well. Thank you so much for your time, Ryan. This has been an incredible conversation. I look forward to talking again in the future.
