Alright. We are back with another episode of Passion to Profession brought to you by my good friends at eBay. This is one, I'm quite excited about.

You know, about, I don't know, several weeks ago, about a month ago maybe, I was exchanging emails with today's guests, and he shared with me some my I prompted him to, but he shared with me some of his collection.

And we're gonna dig into some of those cards today, and they're just amazing cards with awesome stories. On today's episode, I'm joined by Tim, who's the founder and CEO at COMC, one of the most popular brands in the hobby.

I'm sure if you're listening, you have bought or sold cards on COMC before. But, yeah, let's just get into it. Tim, welcome. How are you? I'm good. I'm super happy to be here.

I've actually really enjoyed listening to your podcast, especially the WNBA episodes, and I'm excited to be here today. I I love, the WNBA collection you have built, and that's maybe a teaser for the audience.

We're gonna get into that. But let's let's start, with, COMC. Mhmm. Founded 02/2007, simple goal, help people list their cards more efficiently. You're kind of a tech guy coming from Microsoft. What and a big problem solver.

What was going on in 02/2007? What was the problem that you saw in the hobby that you were looking to solve when you started CompSe? Yeah. I got back into collecting after a product cycle ended at Microsoft, and we had some downtime.

This was back in about 02/2003. I got back onto eBay, and I was buying a bunch of stuff on eBay, and it was just, like, all these little sellers were really inefficient to buy from.

And I found myself gravitating to these really large sellers because I got I'd get, like, a 100 auctions, and I'd pay them $5 for shipping because they're, like, flat shipping.

It's like, okay. Well, I'm paying, like, 5¢ per lot, and then anybody else I buy from, I gotta pay like $5 for a couple cards. So I'm like, okay, I I'm there's some skew here that favors large collections.

Also at the time, there were two, new services, in the trading card industry. One was called e TOPS, where every week they'd have a set of IPOs. It was kind of the predecessor to TOPS NOW, Upper Deck's game dated moments.

The the topical cards, they would basically do, like, a a few IPOs. They would only make whatever was purchased, and then they would store them for you, And you would buy and sell them on eBay.

So you you you had this market where you could relist. You you had this website. You keep track of it. But it they had some, inefficiencies. You you'd win an auction.

You couldn't instantly relist. You had to wait for the cards to get transferred one account to another. But and it was only their cards, the the IPO'd cards. I couldn't use it with cards I had on hand or anything like that.

And then there's another service called The Pit, which was basically a way to take graded cards and effectively turn them into something like a stock certificate and then use something honestly, very similar to StockX or the stock market to, like, buy and sell graded cards.

Cool, but only supported graded cards. And I do wanna give them a shout out because thinking about it, I think they're the first ones to actually do, like, cloud storage.

Like, you would send your graded cards into them. Again, the the etops would store things for you. So they kinda had like the stores, but they manufactured them.

I think the pit was the first where you would have something in hand and you send it into them, and then you have this market where you could send stuff back and forth and take it.

So I I basically saw this combination of eBay, etops, and the pit, and I'm like, there's something where you can get efficient shipping.

What if, like, somehow we were all collectively one big seller? And this is not favoritism for the person that has a thousand cards versus the person that only has a couple cards.

And what if I could exchange like you do with etops and, like, you could buy and sell, but it's with anything, and it's not limited to graded cards like like, the pit.

So I'm like, okay. Let's put all these things together and create one central place that everybody can send their raw cards into, and we were really focused on raw cards.

I think, honestly, we didn't even support graded cards until a year or two in. The and still today, graded cards are only, like, 1% of the cards that that we handle. So, yeah, that was, like, 02/2006, 02/2007.

We were, like, rolling out these building these new concepts, and that kind of gave birth to at the time, it was just intended to be a self sustaining hobby where I could just instead of going to eBay and buying cards and, like, keep having to spend money, if I could just, like, recycle my money and just keep it in the hobby.

I wanted to just create a system that did it, and I started with a low price cards, which was my own website. And then we added support for users and low price cards became the account on Compsi that's now low price cards.

So I wanna maybe get really nerdy, on on this where did you re did you realize in that moment, in that problem that you were solving, did you realize that as you were building the product from, like, a tech perspective that it was going to scale and end up being what it is today?

Or is that, like, a realization that you had, after the fact in whether whichever way it was, like, how did you how did you make sure that you had the right people, the right tech infrastructure in place to make sure it could be what you wanted it to be.

Okay. So at first, I focused on the problems at hand and just wanted to deliver something that provided value to people.

I had employees that saw this growing to where it is way before I did. I had some employees that worked at card shops, had been in the industry for a while, or like dealers at card shows.

And in the early days, we were we started in, originally started in a garage, but, like, our first warehouse was 2,000 square feet.

And one of the first employees was looking at it, and he's like, you're gonna need a warehouse the size of a Costco.

Like, this is gonna this is gonna be he saw it way before I did. And, actually today I'm in a building that's 200,000 square feet.

This is bigger than and most Costcos are 150,000 square feet. So, like, he saw it before I did. And then regarding, like, how do you make the system scalable, well, it's changed over the years, to be honest.

When I was building this, the I literally started writing code, and there's employees using software that I wrote in 2,003. There's been a constant evolution and at the time I used different technologies.

There's new technologies that didn't exist when I was building. So if people were building something today, I think I or if I were doing it today, I would do it differently.

It's just like the evolution that we chose. Fortunately, I came from a computer science background. I worked at Microsoft. I focused on database like in college that was one of my favorite classes.

At Microsoft, I worked on Microsoft Access helping design mainly front ends that connected to databases and I was very I learned what Microsoft was doing with SQL Server, and and I knew the right architectures to build because I would be, like, in meetings at Microsoft or dealing with bugs where people were hitting limits and, like, we had to figure out workarounds for people and say like, okay, here's the recommended way for your use case.

So I I knew the answers.

I knew like at the time how to build things to be scalable, how to support like right now, we have 300 and some employees that are regularly using our internal systems based on a lot of technology that I started literally twenty years ago, but I knew it would scale to at least hundreds of people.

And some of that now we're rewriting to be even more scalable for the future using new newer technologies. How how important has just the your your location been in terms of, talent acquisition?

Obviously, I'm imagining people from Microsoft have come over and worked for, Commsi, and then also just you as a CEO and and a for our company in the hobby with a tech background.

Like, how important do you think that has been since tech has become even more and more important for businesses in this space?

Yeah. So we, our our first warehouse that I mentioned that 2,000 square foot warehouse was literally across the street from Microsoft's campus.

Because when I left Microsoft, I was still doing contract work part time so I didn't have to take money out of the business.

And I could just go like at lunch just run over to the warehouse and like make sure things were working smoothly. Or I do like the first half of the day at Microsoft and the second half at at CompSe.

I have had probably a dozen people that are former Microsofties help out at different times at CompSe. And I right now, I think there's six of us that are on the engineering team that worked at Microsoft.

And in fact, if you look at the whole company, there's even more. There's some people in, like, sales that used to be at Microsoft. So there's a lot of, just we know people.

There's people I I worked with and played basketball with at Microsoft that are are now employed at ComC. And so that's been super helpful just to have a tie, and we all knew the same technologies community.

There's a whole culture of people that went to work at Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, and now even like Google and Facebook or Meta that have spun off and started their own startups.

And then there's, like I used to be a regular at startup poker where every couple weeks, all these startup founders would get together and we we'd play poker.

And you'd sit next to people and you chat about their businesses and learn what worked for them and what didn't.

So, yeah, there like, there's not a lot of cities that have a healthy start up community to, like, learn from their mistakes and learn from what worked for them.

So, absolutely, Seattle, was a hot spot to help us with a lot of our our early days. How do you view just with you being the, obviously, founder, CEO, setting the vision for Mhmm.

Comtea? What sort of advantage or if there is disadvantage? Do you have you learned about yourself having that technical background leading a company Yeah.

In the industry, in 2025? So, a couple points here. Fortunately, with the eBay investment that we got a couple years ago, we're able to hire a bunch of people and build some new teams so that things weren't all on my plate.

For the first fifteen plus years of Commsi, I was basically focused on the technology and I'd have like one or two people alongside me to help out.

And, now we have a full team. And as such, I've actually transitioned, my CEO responsibilities to my cofounder and our president who's now our CEO.

So now Julia is our CEO and I'm actually taking the chief product officer role. So I get to focus on two things as the chief product officer. I, own our engineering team and I own our new product team.

Prior to a couple years ago, we didn't have a product team. And so I get to help set the vision and focus on like what are we building and the technology, how are we building it.

So I get to be hands on on that, and I don't have to think about things like finance and HR and a lot of stuff to like just keep keep the running operations, keep the the business running.

So we've got an awesome team that's helping out with those things. And now I have a like a 30 person product and engineering team that I get to spend day day in and day out with.

And I I really wanted to focus my energies on making sure that we're building the right things and we're doing it the right way.

So that's kind of my approach now. It it we're we're building a whole bunch of stuff that's gonna get released here very shortly, over the next month, month and a half.

We're gonna have some big launches, and then there's a whole bunch more stuff that's coming, because now I have a team that's helping, and it's not just me building stuff. Like, every year or so, some interesting innovation comes up.

So That shift to chief product officer, ultimately, what what does that mean, I guess, to the COMC user? The seller individual selling cards on Comsee or the individual buying cards on Comsee?

So I have had, for twenty years, ideas that I've been playing with in my head. As we built out these things that didn't exist, I've gotten a chance to think about what's next, but I didn't have the bandwidth to go build it.

So I was just, like, doing what was needed to keep the business running and to grow with the organic growth of the business for like fifteen years.

But in the back of my mind, I was like, but what's next? Great. We we've pioneered this cloud storage of physical cards. We we have this comp c store credit model, and we have this, buy now, ship later model.

And, like, what can we enable that the world hasn't seen yet? So I've I've had these ideas, and I just it was busy, like, building software to solve the problems at hand.

So now I actually, as chief product officer, having a whole team, have people that can go build the next version of things, can can think strategically more long term so that we can build the next innovations.

And that's what it means for COMC is you're gonna get to see things come to real life that have been in my head for twenty years. We're we're we're excited for that. What has it been like with ComC being, like, one of the first Mhmm.

At this the storage physical storage and that the there's been a proliferation of vaulting and storage storing cards, you know, for the last, you know, five to seven years.

What has it been like kinda being the leader in the space and then seeing every that trend take shape with other businesses? Yeah. Imitation is the best form of flattery. The it's a very challenging space.

It's interesting seeing people evolve and hitting some of the same problems that we've seen. But I remember a number of years ago, looking around at all the new vaults that had come up and kind of almost everybody focused on high end.

Even the fact that they call themselves vaults, vault kinda has this, connotation of a one way trip.

You put something in a vault and it's really hard to take it out. Like, you just leave it there. It's like Fort Knox. It just stays. That's not exactly what I am trying to enable. We're trying to enable high volume joy for the hobby.

It's collectors. It's not necessarily people storing gold. Right? So I think of our system I I like to use the term an archive. Like, you can imagine the National Archives, like, a massive building with all like, a huge library.

Libraries intended to, like, check things out and, like, have people enjoy them and and and and look at them, but also keep them in really good shape.

And so we wanna do this at massive volume. And, when I was looking around again, this is a few years ago.

This is probably not still true today. There's people have scaled up their services. But, we would look at the amount of cards vaulted on every vaulting service combined, and the joke was that's our Thursday every week.

Like, by Thursday every week, we've ingested as many cards as every other consignment service combined. We were just doing things at scale that was different from everybody else.

Now a lot of them may even have more value, more dollars of because they're focused on like storing gold and we're focused on joy and just moving things that people wanna see and and wanna play with.

And and, but that that's our niche, and that's really where our focus has been. How have you managed that scale over the years kind of from bringing on new inventory to shipping out cards?

I I just think about, like, the the the peaks of the moments. I think about the pandemic where everyone was in cards. Like, how have you managed that over each era of the hobby? Always in hindsight, there's better ways of doing things.

There's things that we missed and things I mean, some of it, like, gee, if I knew the future, I could have done a better job. And, like, you just don't know the future. And so some of it is like, well, that was kind of inevitable.

Like, given the data we had, we did the best we could. The pandemic was very, very challenging. The again, as I was saying, we just solve problems at hand. Like, what is the immediate need that we have?

Like, how can we make our team more efficient? How can we prevent mistakes? How can we, make the system easier to learn? How can we, just make it more enjoyable for our employees so that they wanna stay around and and continue building?

It it's one of the the things that we still have a lot of room to grow and to improve, is just helping employees have employee retention, like getting systems that employees want to stay at.

If people are constantly leaving and you have to go find a new person and train a new person, that's really hard to grow. You want people to stay and then you want them to tell their friends, come join the company too.

And so, we we that's been a focus and we want to we're going to continue doubling down on that and really making a system that's easy for people to plug in.

That's easy for them to come up to speed and be efficient. That they enjoy working here, creating an environment that, people wanna work in, and and creating systems that can support the the ever changing workforce.

It's a lot of little decisions. Our internal software is called Tim's Sports Cards because originally, it was a system to keep track of Tim's sports cards. And it is on version I think it's, like, 8,147 just got released.

Like, we are constantly iterating making like listening to employees listening to customers listening to our corporate partners and building things that help our team meet those needs.

Like, the for business, at least from my perspective, those of you that want business advice, what we did is we tried to find an opportunity where we could find a gap between what people could do on their own and what it was worth to them.

And so we're basically saying, you know what?

If you try to do this work on your own, it's gonna cost you this much time and this much money. If we apply technology and we have professionals doing this for you, if we can buy things at scale, can we solve that need at a lower price?

And so like that's the gap that defines our business is the diff like how much does it cost you in your time and money to go do this thing that you love?

Can you go focus on the parts of the hobby that you enjoy and outsource that portion to us?

So anyhow, that's been, kind of our our our, like, how we created our niche. I love it. The, I always talk about that and saving your time and, using other services, opportunity costs and all that, and I love the call out.

I love that maybe understand the okay. Marketplaces serve multiple audiences. Any anyone does. Like, maybe this is my marketing curiosity that's peaking here.

I'm curious, like, what the, maybe, go to market strategy has been in terms of, like, making sure the message not only resonates with the potential buyer from COMC, but also the potential seller for COMC and how you've managed that over the years.

Alright. Good question. There's an interesting story here. I, learned early on I did not wanna do sales. Like, I I had a sales job in in high school, early in college, and I'm like, this is not for me.

I wanna do tech. I don't wanna be like out there cold calling people or anything like that. And when I started ComC, I was like, you know what?

I I don't know how to market. I don't know how to to sell, but I think I can create something that people enjoy. And I know I've heard word-of-mouth is like the best way to create adoption.

So I'm like if I can just create something people are happy with I think they'll go tell their friends, go check out my cards. And that is, like, that's my, like, marketing pitch was the name of the company.

Like, I like this so much, I put my cards here, go check out my cards. And so that was our thing for years. Now, I think we're we're growing up, and I think there's lots of room for improvement.

If you look at our services, again, not like great ideal go to market strategy, but I basically said, I don't wanna focus on, like, giving favoritism to big sellers and, like, monitoring the type of inventory they're selling and are they they profitable for the company.

I just say this has an expense. I'm gonna put a fee here. If you like the service and you pay the fee, I can afford to grow the company.

If I'm keeping you happy, we'll keep my company. So I'll apologize. We definitely have some fee fatigue and a lot of little nickel and dime fees because we have costs there.

And we unfortunately, what that's done is it it has allowed us to grow, but it allows us to grow with people that really get to understand our fees and how to make it work for them.

And that works for early adopters, But it's it's sometimes challenging for people that are new. And so that is one area that we're looking to grow and to maybe provide a new, model that's easier for mass market adoption.

One of the things that we're trying to do at CompSea, our our mission is to optimize joy for collectors. We want to bring as much joy to the world as possible.

We wanna 10 x the amount of joy that we're giving to collectors, the amount of cards ingested, stored, fulfilled, the transactions happening. To 10 x, I don't think we're gonna do that with just the early adopters.

I think we need to get more mass market appeal. We need to get make services that people that just got into the hobby can understand and don't need to understand, okay, what's the ingestion fee?

What's the storage fee? What's the shipping fees? What are the promotion fees, the auction fees, the grading fee? Like, I want people to just think in terms of I have these things other people want and they have things I want.

How do I play in this system? So we're actually going to be doing some more work, and we have a product and marketing team that can come up with our go to market strategy of these new approaches.

How do we go get that the new customer? And that's something that we're working on and we're growing.

Again, historically, our my mantra has been build it and they will come. Like just go build things that are so good people wanna talk about it and just charge people where there's expenses so that we can afford to scale.

If we're doing a good job, we'll have more demand and we'll scale and there'll be money to pay for it. And and that's allowed me to not have a marketing department for a long time.

But I think now we're at a point where we're making massive investments and we need to, like, have predictable growth and and so we are gonna make that adoption that adapt adaptation, and we're going to try to make our services more have more of a mass market appeal and and easier to understand for people.

I would imagine a lot of those non ComC customers who you like to be ComC customers who are perfect fits are already using platforms probably like eBay, and it's probably helpful that, Comsee is on eBay and the brand is there.

Do you see maybe eBay as an opportunity to get, the the brand out there to an audience of people who might not really realize all the things you all do outside of just selling cards through eBay?

Absolutely. There when we go to conferences, more often than not, when people say they've heard ComC, they found us on eBay.

Like, I've seen I've seen ComC consignment on eBay. You guys are everywhere. Like, every search I do, you have some some things that match.

Like, that's where they saw our brand, and they didn't even know that we are consignments even though it's literally comp c consignment. They didn't, like, put two and a together and realize, like, oh, I can leave my cards with you.

I can, I can actually buy and sell on the comp c platform? I can make offers on the Commsi platform. And so it's definitely been an opportunity where we don't have to have a cold intro.

When you talk to people at, a show, almost everybody's seen us on eBay. And, and then we can explain how our service works, and and that's definitely an in for people.

And it helps being the largest trading card seller on eBay by volume. One of the top across all categories on eBay, having that, like, visibility everywhere on eBay.

Because the, kind of partnership and integration with eBay, has that always been present throughout the life cycle of the company, or when did that, come to be? Yeah. Fun fun stories. We didn't join eBay until 2016.

We started, again, low priced cards started in basically 02/2006. We just created the check on my cards model in 02/2007. Few years later, we rebranded as ComC, and we were just independent. We actually listed originally on Amazon.

I think it was in 2012 we started listing on Amazon, and then we were at industry conference in Hawaii, and there was a new employee for eBay at the conference. And she got to meet me, and she's like, oh, this could be a big win.

I could get you on on eBay. This will like, let's let's figure out how to get you any I I didn't know anybody on eBay. I didn't even think about listing on eBay. And, yeah, they they basically introduced got got things started.

And things definitely in 02/1718, there was kind of some growing pains and more around, 02/2019, I think it was, we decided to go exclusive with eBay and it just made things simpler because we're getting sales when people were hot.

We'd get sale everything would sell out on all three platforms, and you get, like, double sales and you had to refund some customers.

So just focusing on two platforms made it easier for us, and then we could just really make a great experience on eBay. Obviously, eBay offers auctions, and they've been the the main place people look for trading cards.

So that's been super helpful. The eBay business ended up dwarfing the Amazon business and has continued to grow since then. How how pivotal like, back at that conference and having that conversation Mhmm.

How pivotal was that decision Mhmm. That you made to sell through eBay for where ComC sits today? Yeah. It was 2016 was a really big year because not only did we launch our eBay store, we also, introduced the upper deck e pack service.

Both of those, like, made a massive impact on our sales and ingesting more inventory and we had that was a big growth year for us.

I think, that was one of those like, a lot of time with our growth, we'll have these spikes and then plateaus. It's not like steady growth. It's often spike and you gotta, like, catch your breath.

That was one of those spike years where we nearly doubled in a year and had, we had to hire a lot of people and adapt our systems For upper deck we had to change stuff to handle their type of inventory.

For eBay we had to streamline a lot of our fulfillment. And then at first with eBay, we kind of had a very arms length relationship. And I don't know if you remember all the things that were happening at eBay back in the the late teens.

Like, we didn't know if eBay was friend or foe. And so it was like keep your friends close, keep your enemies close. So like we didn't know what they were.

It wasn't until honestly we just before we became partners with eBay that we really got brought on into the inside and got to meet people and there had been a change in leadership. There's a new CEO at eBay.

I actually got a before the investment, I got a chance to spend a lot of time with the CEO of eBay and, talked about my vision for the future of the trading card industry, and it became clear eBay was gonna be an amazing partner for us.

And so I would say early on, it was, like, it was good to have that relationship just that, like, we were not a foreign entity later.

Like, it became a more interesting partnership, like, right around the pandemic and then a couple years ago when we decided to take the investment from eBay.

We're definitely gonna get into, Tim the collector, and I'm really excited to do that. Before we transition over to that side, I want to maybe get some understanding from you in the industry and what you're working on.

Like, what is the most exciting thing that fires you up every day when you walk into work and, you know, whether it's conversations with team members, things you're building, new role, like, what gets you the most excited about what's happening at ComSee right now?

Staying true to our our purpose. We are here to bring joy to collectors. We are in a world that has all sorts of uncertainty. We started the business, during the housing recession in 02/2007, 02/2008.

And we've always been around, like, uncertainty. And just to be kind of that escape, I I'd heard during the Great Depression, hundred years ago now, the the sale of movie tickets and soda was actually really strong.

Like, people wanted to just escape. They didn't have money to go buy a home or buy big ticket items.

During the recession people couldn't like buy a new car. They couldn't afford homes anymore, but they could afford $20 for 10 of their favorite trading cards. And it was just this escape. We just provided this thing.

I I I when I started the company, I was kinda burnt out at Microsoft. I had put in a ton of time and I was building things that were interesting technology, but it wasn't my passion. So getting a chance to say, you know what?

I've loved trading cards since I was in grade school. I wanna go focus all my free time, all of my energy in my hobby, and I just wanna create something that's enjoyable. I just I was missing that joy when I was at Microsoft.

So getting to do that every day, getting to be around trading cards, getting to use the mobile. Like, I I've seasoned tickets to Seattle Storm, one of my favorite things to do while there's, like, a time out.

Like, whoever's doing well, I just go to the app and buy their cards, whether they're Storm players or or people that are are visiting.

Like, I'm like, we just got spanked by Aliyah Boston, and I had to go buy some of her cards. Like, she destroyed us. The it's it's fun.

It's just to enable those things. That that's passionate. And then the other thing I I kinda hinted to this and you you I can't really speak to it in detail, but I've been thinking about the future and kind of what what we've enabled.

And I actually just got a chance to do an on-site with our product and engineering team, and we had everybody in town for a few days.

And I got to give them a talk on what I call my holy grail. Like, what what does the future look like for for COMC, and what can we do beyond just our traditional COMC, market?

And it it's just super exciting. It's super but I I just I I get to chance to rewatch my talk, and, like, I'm so excited. Like, it like, there's really cool things in the future that we can get excited about.

So that we're building some exciting things at ComC, and we've already built things that are super enjoyable, that are simple. And, like, they can like, it doesn't need to be a big time sync.

I love the fact that I can I can get a notification that a card went up for sale, and I can buy it in, like, a second and then put it away? There's no other platform I can do that. I can just I I own that card.

Whenever I want possession of it, I can have it sent at that point, but I own that card now. I'm one step closer to my my super collecting of a certain player, WMBA, whatnot. I love the Aliyah Boston, call out. Big fan.

She's great. Let's let's talk about you as a collector. Has obviously, like, you shared early days of why you built Comsee, and it was basically, you know, satisfying kind of your curiosity in helping support your own collecting.

Have has collecting always been a part of what you do? Have you always collected sports cards? I got introduced to sports cards in, 02/2006.

So I was, like, nine years old. I I got a Lenny Dykstra card that was according this was not even a Beckett. I don't remember what price guide it was, but I found this guide, and it said this Lenny Dykstra card was worth $2.

And I was like, oh my goodness. This thing is actually worth $2. Wow. I I loved numbers. I loved math. I don't know how much I realized it at the time, but I was really attracted to that.

I ended up getting, like, subscriptions to Beckett and monitoring the prices, and I still have graphs of, like, tracking every month, Robin and Yount and George Brett, 75 tops rookie cards, and just seeing, like, these dynamics.

And, in '87, the Twins won the World Series, and I was like, I gotta go I gotta go invest in in baseball cards. Like, I wanna go buy I mean, I'm, like, 10 years old.

I'm like, I I want like, there's the future here. There's something and a ton of us back in the the eighties. Like, we we got introduced to Beckett. Beckett was showing like this the the the values of what cards we're selling for.

We could see this stuff. Like, we could make sense of it. So a lot of people were attracted to the industry. And the industry has had a lot of growing and learnings from them.

But that that got me interested in, like, finding something I'm passionate about, like the Minnesota Twins in '88. Oral Hershiser set the consecutive scoreless, innings record, and I had to go to my first card show.

So, yeah, I guess, '88, I was I was 10 years old. So, around 10 years old, I went to my first, did I get this right? So I was eight years old when I first started, got introduced to cards.

But, yeah, when I was 10, I went to my first card show. But by the time I was 12, I set up a table my first table at a card show. And so I was interested in kind of the business of cards, but also the passion behind it.

Like, wanting to go like, I saw I wanted to go to a card show to get an Aurel Hirschizer rookie card. I had cards that other people wanted. Like, how do I, like, make a business out of this?

How do I keep track of what it's costing and sell stuff, and how do I make money here? So that was, again, like, between eight and 12 years old around that time just growing up and and being interested in this.

And that was kind of, like, in the back of my mind as I, like, went to college and learned computer science and, like, eventually knew I want I I even when I was at Microsoft, I wanted to just, like, learn what people did to to run a business, and I wanted to go start my own business and have it be something I was passionate about, which was trading cards.

So almost as long as I can remember, I've I've been collecting cards.

How how important has that passion you have had almost your entire life around cards to building what you've built with you and others at Comsee. How important has that just, like, flame been to pushing you and the company forward?

One of the things that I I saw early on is we would hire a lot of employees that were were great employees, and they would come in and do a good job, and then they'd go find some other, career opportunity.

They'd learn some other skill, and they'd move on. But there is this group of employees that would stay.

And it was these people that were collectors that were passionate about what we did, and they just wanted they they loved like, almost one of the, benefits of working here was they got to they got to see cards.

They got to play with cards. They they could enjoy that portion of the hobby.

And so absolutely ingrained in the growth of the company has been, passion for cards. I I felt like my interest in collecting and and to be honest, as I mentioned, we've been pretty lean on, the engineering side.

We've been able to do that because I'm I'm our customer. I built something that I wanted, and it it just turned out I wasn't the only one.

I didn't need to have other people tell me as an engineer what to go build or I didn't fortunately need to go find engineers and tell them to build something. It was kinda close to what I wanted and then tweak it.

No. I'm the one that's gonna use it. So I built the thing I needed. One of my favorite things that I built, getting back to passion, I built when I was supposed to not be working because I broke my foot.

So I I broke my foot, and I was on all sorts of medication. And and the doctor said, do not go online and buy anything.

Like, you're you're not like, for these next couple weeks, you're not gonna make good decisions. Of course, I only went on COMC, and I found myself wanting to buy I love basketball.

So I wanted to buy all these prism cards. This is like 2016, 2017. So before like this actually turned out to be a pretty good good opportunity for me to go like find good deals on COMC. But I found myself on COMC.

Like you would find a card and you'd be like is this a good deal? I don't know. Like, what does this prism has tons of parallels. Some of them are serial numbered. Like, what are the cards of lower serial numbers selling for?

I can't easily see that. So I built the feature on ComC that shows all the parallels so that you can see like this card is $5 but I can get a rarer version for $3 Okay I'm gonna go buy that.

Like, and then putting a little checkbox to be like, hey. You own that. Like, I built those features while I was literally laying in bed because I couldn't work because I broke my foot, and I had to, like, let my foot heal.

But that there's passion for the hobby, and I didn't need I could go build the tech myself. And then I spent, like, thousands of dollars on prism cars just, like, buying all this stuff.

That was just finding all the deals because it made it easier for me to see them by showing the parallel. So it's just like some of those things. Like, someone could come up with this idea and then try to tell an engineer, hey.

This is gonna be cool. And you try to go, no. I used it. I knew it was good. I it changed my use case. And, like, if nothing else, like, I I used it. It made it fun. It made it was worth it for me.

And I've built a ton of features like that over the years. Again, now I have other ideas that I can't go build everything. And so now now we have a team and now we're adapting and growing and we're bigger.

But that's really the first, like, fifteen or so years of COMCE was me just, like, seeing things that would make my life easier and building those, listening to employees, what would make their lives easier and help build those, listening to collectors, what would make their lives easier and go go build those.

I think you said something there that might be like the golden nugget of this episode, and that is you were building something where you were the end user, and so you were very passionate about it.

And you knew what people like you wanted as you were building that. And I think so often we've seen businesses in the hobby come and go, and oftentimes, businesses don't make it because the same passion doesn't exist.

People just want the money side of it. But do you do you find throughout, this entire run, do you find that your passion for the industry and what you're building has been maybe a competitive differentiator for you?

Oh, absolutely. I I think there's a lot of people that create businesses because they see dollars.

I got early advice. A friend of mine had a start up, and he was on a panel where they were talk just giving business advice for start ups. And they said, you know what? 90% of start ups fail.

If you do something that you're passionate about, you're gonna stay in it even when there's not money there. They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity. The longer you sit around, the more chance you have to catch opportunity.

If you're passionate about something and you wait it out when the money is not there, when you put in the hard work, eventually, you increase the chances that you're gonna be around when the opportunity strikes, like, when you get the right, market adoption.

That's really what happened with us. Like, we we built this thing. We just grew by, like, 20% a year for almost fifteen years, and then the pandemic hit.

And everybody came back, and we just saw this massive acceleration of growth that we expected to see over five years happen in, like, a year and a half.

It was just being it being there, stay like, putting in the effort whether the money was there or not because this was my passion.

You mentioned you are a storm season ticket holder, WNBA collector. What is it about WNBA, WNBA collecting that draws you to that segment? I, so I I started collecting WNBA when I got my season tickets in 02/2013.

That was Brianna or sorry. Brittney Griner's rookie season. I got to see her first dunk. It was, in the I think it was a pre it's either for the first game of the season or preseason, in in a rookie year.

Actually, I my tickets were at the end of the, court. That was like, I was right there to see her her get that dunk. I I was blown away by the fact that they only made, like, 500 sets, and it was, like, thirty, forty bucks a set.

I'm like, there's something wrong here. Like, I could actually I I could probably spend, like, $5 in corner, like, a significant portion of the market. I didn't do that, but I was like, this just seems wrong.

So I I would buy typically five or ten cent sets a year just, because if you they'd have autographs, and there'd be a few different autographs, and you get, like, one autograph per set.

And if you bought, like, a certain number of sets, they'd guarantee you got all the different autographs. And I wanted two of each autograph. So, like, like, however many different autographs, that's how I'd get twice as many sets.

And it was just like okay it's not fun like the rest of trading cards where I got to open packs and I got this chase and I had all these parallels.

Like it was kind of boring like I just bought the sets and then I'm done. So I was super excited when Panini got the the rights, and they did Don Res. I was at the National. Of course, nobody else saw this as interesting.

And so I don't know if those of you that haven't been in the hobby for a while may not realize the National used to be the place where the, manufacturers would basically incentivize whatever products weren't selling.

Now it's like not everything sells out, so they don't even really have to do any of these incentives.

Products are super expensive. But you used to be able to go to the national, and they would give these silver packs and stuff as incentives.

And you could get, like, boxes for $20, or you could get, like, cases for not very much money. So I, the the biggest incentive they had was for Donruss, 02/2019, but nobody wanted it.

So I went to blow out cards and said, hey. I I was having conversations. Like, there's a bunch of people that want this, but they only want the silver packs.

Are you interested in just buying the cases without the silver packs? But, of course, they have to, like, they have to break the seal on every box to get the silver packs.

I'm sure I I'm a collector. I'll take this up. So I got 20 cases 20 cases of 2019 Donruss. I got bored opening by, like, case 12 because I had I was basically only interested in the golds and the one o ones at that point.

So it's just like open up packs, look for gold in one o one, and it's like, I open a case and I might get a a one one zero one and a few golds. It's like, okay. It's not worth it says it's tiring.

I'm just gonna go to eBay and just buy the one zero ones and buy the the one of tens. I already had, like, everything else that I pulled out of the packs. Prism came out, and I bought, like, five cases of Prism.

But I didn't bother opening it. I just went on eBay and, like, would buy the the parallels that I knew would be hard to get. I would typically open enough to get, like, the base set and maybe, like, the silver parallel set.

Like, it and then it's like, okay. I got a smattering of other rarer parallels, and then I just go online and just follow the market and just buy as much as I could on COMC, on eBay.

And I was like, my goal was to super collect because there's only one product a year. I'm like, I'll try to do literally complete sets to 10 and then as many one on ones as I could get.

And that was kind of my mentality, and then it got expensive these last couple of years. Yeah. I think with the Caitlin Clark year, I heard from eBay, WNBA was the hottest, the fastest growing market. It was like it 10 x'd in one year.

So I can't afford to do that anymore, and I've had to focus my collection on mainly storm cards. That's I I love following the storm and trying to get as many, storm miss many different storm cards as I can.

That's incredible. Take us back to that time where we could buy that many cases of 2019 Donruss for whatever you paid pennies on the dollar today?

It was it was $800 a case. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's 20 cases at $800 a case. Yep. And we're and we're going full circle with Donruss coming back Yeah.

As a new product or a returning product as well. Let's let's talk about maybe some of your, cards in your collection and anything that you pulled during those days that you still have or any of those big cards that are are are fun.

Okay. I've got I'm I'm gonna start with one that you already know about. I I got this from a collector. I think I found them on Facebook.

This is, I believe, the first superb one of one. This is the 2019 optic, gold vinyl PSA 10. If it if it's not the first, there may have been, like, a early years, like, Ultra one zero one, but it probably doesn't have a 10.

So I'm pretty sure I can claim the first PSA 10, Sue Bird one zero one, the GOAT. I mentioned going to the storm game against Indiana Fever.

Of course, everywhere Indiana goes, the arena sells out, the complete arena. Sue Bird was at the game. I don't know if I've heard a louder scream when they, like, put the spotlight on Sue Bird, and everybody just went crazy.

So this was honestly one of the I I don't think I've paid more for any card than I paid for this. But this was an early pandemic, purchase.

I also have a interesting story. Again, right around the beginning of the pandemic, Kobe passed away. And, two things happened. Just before Kobe passed away, I was opening some, prism basketball NBA, and I got a redemption card.

I even have the redemption card here. Kind of interesting. You can't really see it on the screen, but, let's see if I can find the re I don't remember the redemption card.

But when he passed away, I scratched off the redemption, and I put it in thinking I'm probably not gonna get that card. Like, he's gone. There's like, they I don't even know if they can make that card. They did, and I have that Kobe.

This is numbered out of 10 gold auto. So that was that was an important moment. And on that same day, I was I went into the office. I think it was a Sunday, and I I just, like I wanted to open up a box of cards, and I had Donruss.

I had a box of Donruss there, and I just I opened up one box of Donruss, and in that box, I pulled this is a gold, number to 10, jewel Lloyd.

If you know the history, Jewel Lloyd and Kobe have a had a relationship, and her nickname is the gold mamba.

This is her gold card, number eight out of 10. Oh, gosh. So this is a not again, like, these are never going anywhere. These two gold prism out of 10 are permanent fixtures in my collection.

Also, kind of fun story, the Seattle storm, wanted to give some gifts to, like, sponsors or, other people. So and they knew I was in the trading card industry, and I offered to get together, a bunch of complete sets.

I think they I got them, like not complete sets, team sets, like, 50 team sets of DomRes. So they had them autographed, and they gave each of their, like, sponsors a Danris complete set or team set that's autographed.

This is our 2018 team. We won the WNBA championship in 02/2018. This is a very sentimental group of people, and they as compensation for me giving them the 50 sets, they gave me one of those autograph sets.

So these are in person hard signed autographs from the Seattle Storm of Jewel Lloyd, Sue Bird, Natasha Howard, Alicia Clark, like, the whole the the whole team.

So this, again, permanent fixture in my collection. There's, I I was telling you I just grabbed some interesting cards to talk about.

Those are WNBA themed, basketball themed, but just, this is not really a mem a part of my collection, but cards that I've held on to. There was when we first started lowpricecards.

Com, there's some bugs that we had to work out of the system. Somehow, one of the first orders, if not the first order, came in without a mailing address. I couldn't fulfill it. I had an email address.

They didn't respond. I have held on to this order of about 20 Frank Thomas cards. I've had this for nineteen years now. The top loaders are or or have turned orange. Someday, we will find this collector and give them their order.

Maybe this podcast will help us find that that person. But, like, this is a typical comm c order. It's someone passionate of like, this is the essence. This is why ComC had product market fit.

Someone found joy in $22 Frank Thomas cards. So this hopefully, I can give this to the the person that bought it back in 02/2006. I also have some key cards from our journey. This very common Shaq Ultra rookie.

This was item number 1,000,000. This was I had told myself, once we ingest a million cards, there's no going back. I'm not gonna just be like, oh, that startup failed, and I'm gonna go back to Microsoft.

Like, this is real. I have to I have to maintain this. This is gonna be hard to shut down. So this was item number 1,000,000. So obviously I bought that.

And so this this is the card, which is like, I this is my years of growing up. Like, these were at card shows everywhere. Like, this is not a, like, hard to find card. Like, this is iconic, and it was item number 1,000,000.

I also have, like, item number 5,000,000, 4,000,000. I I would collect the millions, and I then, like, now it's kinda gotten crazy, so I haven't been able to keep it up. But this is, like, the first 10, of the the million item cards.

Couple other random cards that are kinda fun. This is, Brian Gray, very, big personality in the trading card industry. And he personalized this and said, Tim, cut the damn 20% cash out already.

Like, he knew our service. And he like, we used to have a 20% cash out, and and sure enough, we did. We we reduced that down to 10%. But that's fun to see like people in the industry enjoying, using our service.

And then the last thing I have here for show and tell, again I mentioned the first card show I went to is to get an Aurel Hirschizer rookie card. Well, they reprinted that rookie card and had Aurel Hirschizer sign it. Mhmm.

And this is a just a beautiful card. And the app that we use, our employees use, Tim's Sports Cards, has this as its logo. And, like, on like, people open it up, and it shows the oral Hershiser autograph reprint of his rookie card.

Just a beautiful card from tops archives. And this this was, like, the card that, like, this was I was serious when I went to go get Oral Hirschizer's rookie card and to get, like, an a hard signed autograph beautiful autograph.

Aurel Hershiser really he he he goes all out with his autograph. And so that was that was really big.

Amazing, collection of cards. Love the stories there. A lot of them, felt very sentimental to me. Right when you pulled up the Shaq card, I knew exactly what it was, and it transported me back to an earlier moment in my life.

This has been fun, Tim. Before I let you get out of here, maybe some advice you have for anyone out there, any aspiring entrepreneur who is maybe looking to build a business in the sports card category.

What sort of advice after your experience building ComC would you leave them with?

Yeah. I would I'd say, first of all, businesses are challenging. I mentioned how important it is to have passion. I would focus your energies on things that you know well and you care about.

Because if you're gonna be successful making a business out of it, you're gonna be eat, sleeping, breathing, that topic. So make it something that you actually are interested in.

Don't chase the dollars, chase the passion. That's that's what's gonna make it sustainable. That's gonna be what makes you wanna put in the extra effort to go learn the skill, to, try out the new thing.

You're you're gonna be passionate. You're gonna wanna see it. You're gonna know whether you have something that's interesting because you're gonna enjoy it.

So if you're simply just looking at, like, what part of the hobby do you start trying to make a business out of, I would focus on what part of the hobby are you passionate about.

For me, WMBA. In fact, some of the next things that we're innovating on, we're gonna focus first on enabling that functionality for WMBA cards because I'm gonna use it, and I wanna use it for my WMBA collection.

And And I wanna make sure it's really good, and then we'll expand it to everything else.

So start with the thing that you are you're passionate about, and you'll know whether you got it right. Also, you'll put in the investment even if you're the only one that's gonna find benefit in it.

And then hopefully, you're not the only one. You could do research and be like, oh, everybody's interested in soccer, but I don't know anything about soccer.

Well, you might not get it quite right because you don't really know what's going on. Maybe you start getting into soccer, and you find out you really like it, and you it becomes a passion.

Then maybe you're onto something. But I would start with passion over profit. And, then that may probably also my my route has been just build, like, a side hustle that supports your hobby.

It may grow into something more. Don't leave your day job. Start with, like, when you have a day job, when you don't have pressure, you don't have to have something immediately work. You don't have the stress of it.

You can put in your extra hours in it. Let it grow, and then maybe you're onto something. Maybe you get it to a point where, okay, now it's making enough money that I can, actually have it support my business, support my life.

Great advice. Great story, Tim, founder of Comsee. Appreciate the time. Looking forward to doing this again down the road.

My pleasure. This has been amazing. Thank you for helping me go down memory lane. And, this is a great podcast. I appreciate listening to it, and I'm looking forward to all your upcoming episodes.