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GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), bringing you a startup idea that lets you bet on people before they build.

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Here’s what we’ve got for you today.

• Daily Idea - Back Human Potential

• Buy / Sell / Short

Bet on Founders First

The One Liner

Invest in ambition before it’s a company.

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

What if you could’ve invested in Elon before Tesla? This platform turns founders into an asset class, buy options on people, not startups.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem

Every investor says they “bet on founders,” but they don’t, they bet on cap tables. You only get to back the next great entrepreneur after the traction, the hype, the Series A deck. By then, the upside’s already priced in. Meanwhile, the real frontier of venture is believing in raw, unproven ambition and it is stuck in DMs, handshake deals, and coffee chats. There’s no structured way to back talent before it’s obvious.

The Solution
Imagine a marketplace where belief itself is tradable. Investors buy options or future contracts on emerging founders, the right to invest in whatever they build next. Founders get upfront capital, validation, and mentorship. Investors get early access to tomorrow’s icons. It’s like a derivatives market for entrepreneurial potential, not speculating on startups, but on the humans who create them.

It’s clean, institutional, and totally new. The same mechanics Wall Street uses - options, futures, liquidity is now applied to the most powerful force in capitalism: founders. The result? You can literally own early conviction.

How We’d Build It

Stage 1 – Prototype (for the builders)

• Stack: Supabase + Next.js + Stripe + Notion for a curated invite-only beta.

• Contracts: Legally structured through Assure.co.

• Manual Launch: 10 handpicked founders, 50 investors. Founder profiles, simple term sheets, AI-generated due diligence using Harvey AI.

• Narrative Hook: “Founder Options Drop #1” released like a sneaker drop, not a funding round.

Stage 2 – Growth (for the hustlers)

• Platform: Add tokenized contracts via Zora.

• Liquidity Layer: Allow peer-to-peer trading of founder futures within accredited networks.

• GTM: Launch on X Spaces with a panel of VCs debating ethics vs innovation, the perfect controversy.

• Growth Flywheel: Founders tweet their option prices. Investors flex their portfolios. Curiosity fuels demand.

Stage 3 – Scale (for the institutions)

• Regulatory Play: File under Reg D; partner with Carta Liquidity for compliance rails.

• Institutional Expansion: Syndicates can package “founder index funds” — baskets of future stars.

• Ecosystem: Accelerators issue options to grads, creating a tradable layer of early belief.

• Data Engine: AI models score founder traits and market potential, the Bloomberg Terminal for human ambition.

Why It Needs to Exist
Because venture capital is broken it rewards proof, not potential. The next generation of unicorns is walking around unnoticed, unfunded, and underleveraged. This flips the model. It lets investors front-run greatness and gives founders capital before the pitch deck. It’s not just investing in companies anymore and it’s investing in possibility itself.

This is where conviction becomes liquid.

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How to Find the Next Founder Before Everyone Else

A Message From Our Partner

If you’re building this “bet on people” platform, your edge is spotting talent before it trends. And there’s one tool that’s absurdly good at that: GummySearch. It’s like X-ray vision for the internet’s weird little corners, the places future founders quietly hang out before anyone knows their name.

Here’s how you’d use it:

1. Hunt in the right rabbit holes. Search Reddit for posts like “I’m building something on weekends” or “thinking about quitting my job to start…”, that’s your pipeline of pre-fame builders.

2. Find signals of obsession. Filter for founders who won’t shut up about a niche — “couldn’t find a tool for this so I made one.” That’s conviction disguised as a Reddit post.

3. Map communities, not resumes. Use GummySearch’s audience mapping to spot where emerging builders cluster (think r/IndieHackers meets r/MLStartups). Build lists, start conversations, offer them early backing.

4. Apply this anywhere. Even if this isn’t your thing, the lesson holds: search where people think out loud. Want startup ideas? Find frustrated rants. Want customers? Find their complaints. Want cofounders? Find who’s answering those complaints.

It’s the digital version of hanging out at the right coffee shop before the world knows who’s sitting there. Tools like GummySearch make it stupid easy, the internet’s full of founders-in-the-making, you just need to listen in the right places.

Buy / Sell / Short: The Human Edition

The trading floor looked like CNBC on steroids. Screens everywhere. Names instead of tickers. $ALT, $PRIYA, $MATT, all flashing red and green as traders shouted across the room. Except they weren’t trading stocks or crypto, they were trading founders.

It started as a joke. Someone on X said, “I wish I could’ve bought stock in Elon before Tesla,” and two years later, here we were. A derivatives market for ambition.

Investors wore Patagonia vests and noise-cancelling headphones, studying founder dashboards that tracked “momentum signals” like tweet engagement, podcast appearances, and GitHub commits. When a founder landed on My First Million or dropped a “We’re building in public” thread, their price spiked like an earnings beat.

On the 8:00 a.m. bell, chaos erupted. $ALT, a charismatic AI founder who once sold an NFT of his morning routine was up 22% overnight after a viral tweet. Traders debated in real time:
“Long $ALT, pure builder energy.”
“Short him. Too shiny, not enough shipped.”

In the corner, a quieter buzz surrounded $PRIYA—a climate tech founder in stealth. No followers, no hype, just relentless output. The kind of founder every seasoned investor drooled over. Her chart was boring. Which, in this market, was gold.

Then the headlines hit: $MATT Launches Tokenized Equity for Creators. His price doubled in six minutes. Everyone screamed “pump and dump.” But half the room still bought in. Nobody wanted to miss the next messiah of monetization.

Later that day, an anchor on FounderWatch summed it up perfectly:

“We’ve officially financialized belief. It’s no longer who you invest in, it’s when you believe.”

And that’s the weird beauty of it. This new market blurred lines between faith and finance. Some called it dystopian. Others called it genius. But deep down, everyone knew this was inevitable, the first market built not on cash flows or code, but on conviction itself.

The Ideas They Regret Not Building

We found the graveyard of billion-dollar ideas and they’re not dead.

📝 The “Ghost Mode” Browser — Browse like a ghost. A Chrome extension that scrubs your identity as you move through the web. No cookies. No tracking. No trace.

🔥 The “Weekend School” Network — Saturday-only campuses for real-world skills: AI, finance, storytelling. Taught by builders, not professors. You leave with results, not degrees.

💎 The “Refund Economy” App — Your personal watchdog for money you’ve already spent. It hunts refunds, credits, and price drops across Amazon, Uber, and your bills, automatically.

This might be your moment.

🚀 These are the kinds of ideas you’ll find inside NTE Pro, 5,668 (and counting) startup sparks that could’ve changed everything… and still can.

$99/year. Instant access. No regret later.

👉 Join NTE Pro

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