One Hundred Thousand Hustlers in One Room: The National, My First PSA Grading, and the Birth of Holo

Every gold rush builds a saloon — one room where the miners, the assayers, the card sharps, and the money all drink from the same bar. Walk into that room and you can read the entire economy in an afternoon: who's striking gold, who's selling shovels, and who's quietly buying the land under everyone's feet.

The National Sports Collectors Convention is that saloon, scaled to a convention center. The National at Rosemont was, wall to wall, a hundred thousand hustlers — dealers, breakers, flippers, graders, vault reps, streamers, and twelve-year-olds negotiating like floor traders. I mean "hustlers" as the highest compliment the hobby can pay. And I'll say the quiet part with a smile: we were by far the biggest ones in the building, because we walked out with something better than a grail card. We walked out with a company.

The Slab Ceremony

I got my first in-person PSA grading done at the show, and there's a reason people line up for it. Watching your card go behind the glass at PSA is the hobby's version of watching your bar of gold get assayed and stamped — raw cardboard goes in, a fact comes out. A slab is a tiny treaty: this card is what we all agree it is, forever.

Here's the moment worth writing about. When the overnight service couldn't fit my cards in, PSA didn't shrug — they came back with a better rate for the wait. Small gesture, big signal. When a company holds the keys to your grails and something slips, watch what they do next: when they make it right without being asked, that's a partner; and PSA made it right without being asked. Much appreciated, and remembered.

And that moment planted a seed.

When the Pack Rips, Then the Listing Should Already Exist

Stand at the National long enough and you see the hobby's whole loop compressed into thirty feet: someone rips a pack on a stream, the hit goes to grading, the slab goes to market, the money goes back into wax. Every arrow in that loop is a marketplace. Every gap between the arrows is friction.

Holo is the app we built to close the loop.

Holo lets you rip packs — and then does what every ripper actually needs at 1 a.m. with a table full of bulk: it connects directly to the eBay API and lists your pulls for you. When you finish a break, then your inventory is already photographed, titled, priced against comps, and queued to the world's biggest card marketplace. When a card comes back from grading, then Holo pulls the cert straight through the PSA API, so the listing carries the slab's own credentials — the treaty travels with the card. Rip to listed, one motion.

The design principle came straight from the show floor: the hobby doesn't need another place to talk about cards. It needs the distance between a pull and a sale to approach zero. Under those circumstances — bulk pulls, live audiences, thin margins on singles — I'd want the listing engine welded to the rip itself. So that's what we welded.

The Don of Darien

Now let me tell you about my tour guide, because the National gave me one of the great walking history lessons of my life.

Scott Samuel knew half the people in that building — and I'm being conservative. He introduced me to the founder of the show. He waved at dealers who've known him for forty years. And he came by it honestly: as he tells it, he started his first company at fourteen — Darien SportCard Inc., out of Darien, Illinois — a kid running a trading card business before he could drive to it, back when he knew old man Beckett himself, the man whose price guide was the hobby's first shared reality.

(insert baseball card photo here)

Then the kid from Darien went and helped wire up the internet. The record backs the legend: <cite index="21-1">Samuel originated the idea of the auction page counter by prototyping it on his own eBay listings — other users saw it and asked to use it, and he presented it to eBay's board. Adoption went from 20 users in minutes to 10,000 sellers by late 1998, so he founded Honesty.com to host the counters</cite> — and here's the part I love most: he gave the counter away for free. The free counter was the trojan horse for something bigger: every counter phoned home. <cite index="21-1">Honesty.com grew to 1.1 million users before Andale acquired it in 2000 for $35 million</cite> — his bio pegs it as a 17x multiple inside 14 months, running just behind Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com in global daily active users at its peak.

Think about what that counter actually was. Before analytics dashboards, before "growth teams," before anyone said the words "network intelligence," one guy in Illinois built a free tool that let him see the traffic of an entire marketplace flow back to him. When you can see everyone's traffic, then you know what the market wants before the market does. That's the invention under the invention — and it's the same discipline that made everything after it possible.

Scott's fingerprints keep showing up in the origin stories. As he tells it, his machines from the mid-80s — Speakeasy, the first dial-in social network on an Apple computer, and later God's Country — make him a social media founder before the term existed, and <cite index="21-1">the record confirms he ran God's Country, a Diversi-Dial chat service, through the late 90s</cite>. The original computer, he says, is still in his basement — the Kitty Hawk flyer of social media, parked next to the water heater. <cite index="21-1">Reid Hoffman credits Samuel's early internet pioneering in his book The Alliance</cite>, and Samuel played a key role in PayPal's early adoption inside the eBay ecosystem — bringing Pay-with-PayPal into the marketplace through his connections and helping drive the viral growth that made the whole PayPal Mafia mythology possible. He'll walk you through the ad-tech lineage too, from the earliest display-ad experiments through Andale's era and onward toward the DoubleClick-to-Google-Ads world we all live in now.

People think Thiel was the don. After a day walking the National with Scott — watching the room organize itself around him — I'm telling you: the don was from Darien. And here's my favorite piece of hobby trivia to leave dangling: <cite index="29-1,35-1">when eBay bought Goldin in 2024, the financial terms were never disclosed</cite> — which means there's nothing on the record stopping me from believing Scott made more selling his eBay business than the King of Collectibles did selling his. I find that endlessly funny, and I'll keep believing it until someone shows me a number.

He's still building. His new initiative, Something Global, is aimed at bringing the tech scene home to Chicago — quantum computing based in Chicago, capital in Chicago, the next network forming where the last one started. When the man who invented network intelligence tells you which city the next network runs through, then you listen. And true to form, when a startup called Luxex caught his eye on the floor of the 46th National, he tried to invest on the spot — no committee, no memo, the same instinct that saw a free hit counter and understood it was an empire. Read the fuller history on his Wikipedia page.

Dead Wax and Living Trust

The National also taught me the hobby's darkest campfire story, and every collector deserves to hear it told straight.

Spend time around the serious rippers — the Whatnot streamers, the crews from CardVault by Tom Brady — and you'll hear the vocabulary of the underworld: dead packs. Dead hobby boxes. Dead cases — product that's been searched, stripped of its hits, and returned to the shelf looking factory-fresh. Here's the operating rule I came home with, stated as plainly as I can: when vintage wax isn't sealed in a slab, I treat it as opened and resealed — full stop. When the money got big, the reseal game got professional; when the reseal game got professional, the only wax I trust is wax an authenticator has already entombed. Buy the story sealed in acrylic, or assume you're buying someone else's leftovers in the original wrapper.

Notice the pattern, because it's the same pattern this whole article has been drawing: every era of this hobby, the value flows to whoever builds the trust layer. Beckett built it in print. PSA built it in acrylic. Scott built it in counters and payments. Holo is our wager on the same eternal trade — trust, made portable.

Two Rings and a Shoebox

Before I left, I picked up two salesman-sample Super Bowl rings — the demo pieces the ring companies made to show the teams — and tossed them in with my haul, destined for the shoeboxes back home. That's the National in a single image: championship rings, riding home in a shoebox, next to cards that might be grails and might be lessons. Everything in this hobby is a bet on what the future agrees to remember.

A hundred thousand hustlers in one room, and every one of them making that same bet.

See you at the next one. We'll be the ones ripping packs with the listings already live.