🎙️ Chicago Futurist Vol. 12 with Tyler Mozeleski, Co-Founder and CEO of Tradepost

📋 Every Venture Capital Firm in Chicago

💻 Claude Code Chicago Meetup Recap

📅 9 Events in Chicago This Week

I met with a team of Gen Z builders posted up in a Fulton Market apartment, building an entirely new kind of marketplace called Tradepost. Fresh off a $4.6M seed round, these guys are laser focused on a simple idea: let anyone sell anything in 30 seconds, no listings, no scams, no fees, and make anything instantly liquid.

Tradepost blends two areas Chicago has long been strong in: consumer marketplaces and trading infrastructure.

Here’s our conversation:

TM: My dad worked at Topps for a while and started teaching me about sports cards when I was about 10. That was my introduction to anything reselling adjacent. After starting to resell and trade cards, I eventually got sick of them (how focused can you really keep at 10 y/o), and moved on to sneakers. Back then, I was too young and dumb to write a bot for myself, so I would buy other people’s software with the goal of spending my entire bank account every weekend on the hottest Yeezy, Supreme, Jordan, etc drop of the week.

I really didn’t have much money to work with back then, so I would always be trying to sell everything as quickly as possible before the next drop. It was such a battle to use each platform, dealing with either a lack of liquidity, constant counteroffers and negotiations, and fraud. I suppose I have been subconsciously working on this problem ever since then.

TM: The friction around selling something online is immensely higher than the experiences we’ve become accustomed to, especially today, when I can click a button on Uber a car shows up a minute later, or when I ask about the history of Topps Chrome and I get a Deep Research report back from ChatGPT in seconds

To create a similar experience for selling, the only thing that matters is that you’re able to aggregate all of the credible demand at scale, and that you give them the technology those people need to express the positions they want to take. Essentially a Bloomberg Terminal for all real world assets, with Wall Street grade asset catalogs, market data, valuations, underwriting, the whole nine yards.

To pull that off, it takes an insanely deep understanding of each of these niche asset classes and how the participants price and think through their trading, taking the best things from traditional finance and applying them to everything in the real world, and leveraging AI to unlock upgrades to valuation and underwriting previously impossible. The magic comes from being able to thread the needle somewhere between all of that.

TM: Tickets are probably the most culturally relevant of all the sized asset classes we care about, especially as people’s lives get more digital, they crave real-world experiences more than ever. ​Yet, that same demand for live events has driven ticket prices to astronomical levels for fans, and there are many cases where a die-hard Swiftie is spending $3,000 for a single ticket or a family is planning to fly into the US from Ecuador to watch their country play in the World Cup for the first time for $500 a ticket. 

Inevitably, life happens, so people have to cancel and change plans, and they deserve a safe, secure, and quick place to sell their tickets so they don’t feel like they’re losing their shirt on the expensive tickets they bought. There’s an incredible demand for a safe and secure alternative to the traditional marketplace model in this space.​

On the demand side, it’s incredibly impressive what our partners in tickets have built so far. Their organizations look far more like quant firms than like old-school brokerages. We’re definitely standing on the shoulders of giants in that respect.

TM: Lots of cold brew and hours behind the keyboard, but we love it. They just opened up a coffee shop directly below our apartment last month, which has been incredibly convenient, so much so that I think they know all of us by name now.

Our team is a super tight-knit group with very similar backgrounds to mine (reselling as long as they can remember). I frequently compare our culture to a high-functioning sports team rather than a traditional tech company.

We’re all incredibly competitive and love to win, but also really enjoy our time together as a team, which ultimately makes us want to win even more, simply because we care about the mission and each other more.

TM: When I first moved to Chicago for an internship in 2022, the city blew me away. For Tradepost, the amount of trading/quant talent here is ideal given the products we need to build for the business to work, and for our founding team, who are younger and just starting out, the affordability mattered to us a lot while getting our feet under us, especially before closing our round. I think there’s so much untapped potential here.

TM: We’re always looking to work with smart, ambitious, and hungry people. Especially if you grew up reselling, making money online in weird ways, or love things like cards, collectibles, sneakers, watches, etc

I made some updates to the Chicago Tech Scene Navigator:

It’s an up-to-date encyclopedia built just for Chicago founders with every local VC, coworking space, founder community, grant program, and more.

Check it out at www.bullishonchicago.com.

Build the things you wish existed.

Last week I attended the first Claude Code meetup in Chicago.

Huge shoutout to Chicago local Christian Somora for making it happen. That’s really all it takes to build a community. Someone willing to bring people together around something they care about.

The theme was healthcare, with builders from across the city sharing tools they’ve built using Claude.

A group of UIUC students presented an app for managing chronic illness. Then a 60+ year old practicing physician walked through how he’s using Claude and Node.js to manage complex patient data. Different backgrounds, same mindset.

Meetups like tis continue to prove that anyone can build anything.

Merraine Group: Cubs Opening Day for Builders & Operators

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