Most people know this moment, but they don’t do anything about it: the quiet realization that the job that takes up most of your waking hours might not be the best thing to build a life around. This usually happens between a Tuesday standup meeting and a fourth cup of coffee. For one software engineer in Seattle, that moment came when he opened a pack of Pokémon cards on a Sunday afternoon and saw a card that he had paid $40 for sell online for several hundred dollars.
The next day, he didn’t quit. It doesn’t work that way. But the thought took root, and over the next few months, it grew.
It’s not really a new story that adults are getting back into Pokémon cards. During the years of the pandemic, nostalgia became a big business. When influencers started opening old packs on live streams and auctioning off single cards in front of thousands of people, the hobby that most adults had left in shoeboxes at their parents’ houses became a real business. The prices of some cards that used to be very cheap are now over a hundred thousand dollars. At auction, a single rare card from a first-edition set sold for $672,000. It’s not a mistake.
A lot of regular professionals, not famous people or former athletes, quietly got into this market and found it to be stable. This may not be widely known. A tech worker in Seattle bought card lots in his spare time around 2021. He had written code for a medium-sized SaaS company for years. He looked into prices the same way he looked into software tools: methodically and obsessively, making spreadsheets to keep track of margins. This turns out to be true: the collector mindset and the analyst mindset aren’t that different after all.
Giving up a steady tech salary isn’t an easy choice, especially in a city where rents rise and fall with the tech industry. He thought about it for almost a year. His close friends thought it was just a phase. From what he said, his parents were somewhere between confused and alarmed. And he might not have been fully convinced until the numbers started to make the case for him.
If you can understand condition, rarity, and timing at the same time, you may do better in the Pokémon card market than just being lucky. A card from a certain print run that is in mint condition can be worth more than a card that is almost identical but has a single scratch on the surface. It takes time to build up that level of detail, and that’s the kind of problem that people who are trained to understand complicated systems like. There’s a sense that the path from technology to trading cards isn’t completely random.
He now runs his business out of a separate room in his apartment. In the mornings, he finds new stock, and in the afternoons, he handles sales on a number of different platforms. It took some getting used to the live-streaming part, which involved opening packs on camera and taking bids in real time. He’s not naturally good at acting. He says that the audience cares more about being real than about how well you polish your work. People who watch these streams want to know what’s in the pack.
It’s still not clear if this kind of work can survive a big drop in the market. The market for collectibles has gone down before, and it will go down again. For now, though, the cards are changing, the margins are staying the same, and the Tuesday standup meetings are becoming less and less important. That might or might not be a success, depending on who is measuring and what they think a career should look like.
