Are You Selling the Secular or Sacred?

If you spend enough time in venture, you begin to see the same idea come up time and time again. Generally, these are “tar pit” ideas, which means that they seem compelling at the surface but underneath lie a well of corpses from attempts in the past. Think marketplaces for monogamous demand—wherein you want the same provider each time, as with nannies and cleaning services—discovery apps, etc.

Another classic of Silicon Valley: a stock market for people.

Theoretically, the idea makes sense. If you have people you believe in, buying “shares” in their life and getting an upside when they make it is rational enough. This works for companies, so why wouldn’t it work for people?

There have been a few recent attempts to do just this, using Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) and efforts like Bitclout, which was a similar attempt to create a stock market around individuals via the blockchain. 

The latest iteration is friend.tech, a crypto project that lets you buy “keys” based on the strength of an individual's influence. Predictably (greed gonna greed), trading went viral on X, and volume soared. Mostly, the people being bought were influencers within the crypto community. Within a few days, interest died down. 

The issues with the “personal stock market” idea are, unfortunately for founders, foundational. 

The first issue is to look at when such ideas have existed in the past, notably slavery and indentured servitude. Both structures flourished while they were legal, as the law was on the side of capital. Now, rightfully so, both are illegal, and the law protects labor. This highlights a fundamental problem for capital—the law now favors individuals (for example, you can eliminate most debt and financial obligations by declaring bankruptcy). Speculation on market fluctuations may still have demand, but underlying assets (like cashflow and labor) are off limits from an enforcement perspective, hollowing out the value proposition for “investing in individuals” and leaving speculation as the only utility.

So stripping down the “stock market for people” value proposition to “gambling on assets loosely associated with individuals with no underlying economic component” then begs the question: is speculation enough? 

In order to flesh out the answer, it’s important to distill the idea in question to its core components, something I call the “atomic value swap.”