John Arnold

So things that you don't necessarily think about, but are extraordinarily useful.

Being able to buy any and all data, come up with proprietary data sources, have the best people trying to translate that raw data into something useful and build the best fundamental models in the business.

I think all becomes part of the flywheel.

So I was always entrepreneurial.

I always wanted to make a dollar.

As a 13, 14, 15-year-old kid, have limited options and didn't really want to work retail because you weren't going to make very much money doing that.

I was in high school in the late 80s, early 90s, and this baseball card boom was happening.

And I remember even in middle school, first getting started, introduced into baseball.

baseball cards.

It was when it was really starting to take off around 87.

It became clear to me that, I guess in retrospect, that this is a really interesting financial instrument that's very volatile, that information on pricing is not very uniform across the market, that there was a lot of geographic price differences that were happening.

I managed to talk myself onto this bulletin board of baseball card dealers back in the late 80s.

And you had to get some references and I'm like 14, 15 years old.

And I somehow finagle myself to be on this bulletin board, which is when internet commerce is just getting going.

And they just had this wholesale system that was in a real-time pricing.

In effect, you'd have...

People in New York were trying to buy hockey cards and people in Texas were trying to sell their hockey cards because there wasn't much demand for them.

And there was these arbitrage opportunities that got created.

I know this from this bulletin board, people in Montreal or New York or Buffalo are willing to pay X and I can buy these at Y and make that money.

And so I started doing that.