Two ex-Palantir guys built a search bar for data the government already owns. Investors just put a $6.8 billion price tag on it.

That’s Peregrine Technologies, and on Monday it announced a $250 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investors, including Fifth Down Capital, Sequoia Capital, OG Venture Partners, Goldcrest Capital, XYZ Ventures, and Godfrey Capital. Here’s the number that matters most: 15 months ago, Peregrine’s Series C valued it at $2.5 billion. So this is close to a 3x markup in barely over a year.

What does it actually do? It connects the data a city already has, police records, 911 logs, permit databases, sensor feeds, and makes it searchable in real time, with role-based access and a full audit trail baked in. The company says it doesn’t create or collect new data and doesn’t use facial recognition. It now serves more than 400 agencies covering roughly 125 million people across North America, doubled its customer base in a year, and is running security fusion centers for eight of the eleven U.S. host cities for the World Cup this summer.

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The model from my book that explains this is Circle of Competence.

Founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph didn’t chase the flashiest AI demo. Noone ran Palantir’s Special Operations business. Rudolph built data infrastructure for the UN’s refugee agency. They went straight into the hardest, most trust-sensitive arena there is, public safety, where a wrong answer carries real consequences, and they earned competence and credibility there first. Now they’re expanding outward from strength: federal, enterprise, international, even pilots in financial services and travel. That’s how a circle of competence is supposed to grow. You start where you’re genuinely excellent, then push the edges deliberately. You don’t start at the edge.

There’s a second-layer lesson here, and it’s the one builders should sit with. The AI model isn’t the moat. Models keep getting cheaper. The hard, scarce part is the context: knowing where the data lives, what the rules are, and who’s allowed to see what. As the CTO put it, the model isn’t enough on its own, it needs context. Peregrine owns the unglamorous layer everyone else skipped past.

I see the same thing building in regulated markets. At /mkt, the compliance and structure aren’t friction sitting on top of the product. They’re the product. The boring layer is the moat.

My contrarian flag, kept conservative because I’m not telling anyone what to buy. Two things. First, a 3x markup in 15 months is investors repricing a category, not a business literally tripling, and Peregrine won’t disclose revenue, so watch that gap. Second, the real risk isn’t the tech, it’s the politics. Rival Flock Safety learned what happens when public backlash catches up to a surveillance-adjacent product. Peregrine’s restraint may be its smartest design choice, because in this market, trust is the thing that’s hardest to rebuild once it breaks.

If this was useful, share it with someone who builds things. And if you want the full toolkit of 50 mental models, you can grab my book, Mental Models: How to Think, Act, and Win, right now.

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Startup Spotlight is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Company metrics are self-reported, and funding details are drawn from public reporting and company statements. Figures may change.

For a century, the house always won because the house wrote the rules. A startup out of New York just got Washington to change them.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission granted Novig approval to operate as a federally regulated Designated Contract Market, which is the formal term for an exchange. In plain English, Novig now has a path to offer sports trading in all 50 states, not as a sportsbook, but as a venue where people trade contracts against each other. A competitor, ProphetX, cleared the same bar about a week earlier. The race to be the regulated sports exchange is officially on.

Quick context on the company. Novig was founded in late 2024 by Jacob Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah. It runs a commission-free, peer-to-peer exchange with an order book, meaning there’s no house taking the other side of your trade. Back in February it raised a $75 million Series B led by Pantera Capital, pushing total funding past $105 million at a reported valuation around $500 million. The company says its annualized trading volume has run into the billions after roughly 10x growth in 2025. It also claims a far higher share of profitable users than traditional sportsbooks. Treat that as a company figure, because it is one.

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The model from my book that cuts to the heart of this is Follow the Incentives.

A traditional sportsbook is your counterparty. When you win, it loses. So its incentives are exactly what you’d expect: shade the odds, limit the sharp players, discourage anyone who wins too often. That isn’t a bug in a few bad operators. It’s the structure. As Charlie Munger liked to say, show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.

An exchange flips that. It doesn’t take the other side of your trade. It makes money on volume and fees regardless of who wins, so its incentive is a deep, active, trusted market with lots of participants. Align the incentives, and you get better pricing and a platform that doesn’t punish you for being good. That structural alignment, not the app design, is the real threat to the incumbents.

I’ve watched this movie before from the building side. At Robinhood I worked on prediction markets and derivatives, and at /mkt we build on regulated trading infrastructure. The pattern repeats: take a market run by a middleman, financialize it, and move it onto a regulated exchange. It happened to stock brokers. It’s now happening to the sportsbook.

Here’s my contrarian take, and I’ll keep it conservative. A license is not a victory. It’s a permission slip. Novig is walking into a brutal field where Kalshi already dominates and Robinhood, DraftKings, and FanDuel have enormous distribution. The exchange model is structurally better, but better structure loses to better distribution all the time. And there’s a real societal question underneath all of this: turning every game into a 24/7 tradable asset is exactly why some states are pushing back. The incentives that make this a great business are the same ones worth watching closely.

If this was useful, share it with someone who builds things. And if you want the full toolkit of 50 mental models, you can grab my book, Mental Models: How to Think, Act, and Win, right now.

Get it Here

Startup Spotlight is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Company metrics are self-reported, and funding details are drawn from public reporting and company statements. Figures may change.

Sports franchises just posted returns most hedge funds would kill for. Almost nobody reading this could buy a single dollar of them.

Start with the numbers, because they’re the whole point. The big four North American men’s leagues returned 13.2% annualized over two decades, and 16.9% over the past year, per the Ross-Arctos Sports Franchise Index. That’s an asset class quietly beating almost everything else, and the smart money knows it. The Lakers sold for $10 billion in 2025. KKR is moving to buy sports-focused PE firm Arctos in a roughly $1 billion deal. Apollo took operating control of Atlético Madrid at an implied valuation near $2.9 billion. An IPL franchise just changed hands at $1.65 billion. Underneath all of it sits an engine that looks more like infrastructure than entertainment: NFL media contracts running past 2033 worth more than $110 billion, the kind of long-term, inflation-linked revenue that makes franchise values compound.

So capital is flooding in. And ordinary investors are, in the words of the reporting, clamoring for access. Here’s the catch. Almost all of that value gets monetized through minority sales to institutions and billionaires. The door is open to about four hundred people on earth.

Time for a model from the book: Inversion. Most people ask the obvious question. “Which team can I buy a piece of?” Invert it. Instead of asking how to get into the existing deals, ask why the asset is closed in the first place. And the answer isn’t demand. It isn’t returns. It isn’t appetite. It’s structure. Sports exposure has been packaged, for decades, as private, illiquid, and accredited-only. The bottleneck is regulatory and operational, not financial. Once you see that, the opportunity stops being “build a better sports fund” and becomes “build a different access rail.”

This is the problem we work on at /mkt. We build athlete and sports exposure inside a regulated framework, using Reg A+ offerings with tZERO handling the trading infrastructure. That’s not a glamorous sentence. But Reg A+ exists for exactly this reason: to let everyday investors access things that used to live behind an accreditation wall. The hard part was never wanting to open the door. It’s doing the compliance work to open it legally, and keep it open.

Here’s the contrarian take.

The wave of billion-dollar deals isn’t the sports finance story. It’s the symptom. Every Apollo and KKR headline is two things at once: proof the asset works, and proof the door is still mostly shut. The next $10 billion sale won’t unlock the real value. Whoever builds the rails that let the people filling the stadiums own a sliver of what they’re filling, that’s who unlocks it. The fans have always been the product. The interesting question is when they get to be owners.

If this was useful, share it with someone who builds things. And if you want the full toolkit of 50 mental models, my book is coming soon.

Valuation, returns, and deal figures cited above are sourced from public disclosures and reporting. This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. References to /mkt describe operational and structural context only and are not an offer or solicitation. Returns referenced reflect past performance and do not predict future results. Do your own research and consult a licensed professional before making any financial decision.

Every sports fan has felt it. The third quarter is slipping away, a run happens, the energy shifts, and you know before the scoreboard does that the game just changed. That feeling has always been worth something. Until now, there was no market for it.

SpeedLabs wants to change that. On June 1st, the New York-based sports technology startup announced a $6.5 million seed round to build what it’s calling Momentum Markets — a system that creates and prices new tradable markets in real time, keyed to live game momentum. The round was led by Parlay Capital Holdings, with participation from Bullpen Capital, TA Ventures, and EdgeEquity. The company is targeting a summer 2026 launch, just ahead of football season, with a consumer-facing skill game built on the same engine set to follow in the fall.

The idea is straightforward: momentum swings the injury that changes field position, the streak that shifts the score, the big play that flips the probability should be priceable in the second they happen. Not pregame. Not halftime. Real time.

For anyone who spent time building prediction markets, this concept is immediately legible. The hard part was never the idea. It was always the infrastructure.

Mental Model: First-Order vs. Second-Order Problems

There’s a mental model I call First-Order vs. Second-Order Problems in my book. First-order problems are the ones everyone sees. Second-order problems are the ones that kill you.

SpeedLabs’ first-order problem is product: can they build markets that move fast enough to capture momentum as it happens? That’s real engineering, and they’re hiring across machine learning, trading infrastructure, and engineering to solve it.

But the second-order problem is the one that will actually determine whether this company scales: regulatory structure.

Real-time tradable markets tied to live sports events sit at a genuinely complex legal intersection. Depending on how they’re structured, priced, and offered, they may be treated as prediction markets, sports betting products, or securities each carrying different regulatory obligations, state-by-state licensing requirements, and federal oversight frameworks. The CFTC, SEC, and state gaming commissions have overlapping and sometimes conflicting jurisdiction here, and recent precedent around prediction markets (see: Kalshi) has shown that the courts and regulators are actively sorting through where the lines are.

I know this territory. At /mkt, we’re building an athlete tokenization platform that structures its offerings under Reg A+, using tZERO for trading infrastructure. We didn’t arrive at that structure because it was the easiest path. We chose it because doing this right, inside a compliant framework from day one, is the only way to build something that lasts. Getting regulatory structure right upfront isn’t a constraint. It’s a competitive advantage.

SpeedLabs is targeting a fantasy and DFS audience players who already live in probabilities, already understand real-time game state, and are primed for this kind of product. That’s a smart beachhead. The question is whether they’ve pressure-tested the regulatory layer as thoroughly as they’ve pressure-tested the model.

Spence’s Take

Here’s the contrarian read: $6.5 million is a seed round. For a platform that needs to move fast enough to price momentum in real time, hire across ML and trading infrastructure, obtain the right licensing across potentially 30+ jurisdictions, and launch before football season that’s a tight budget with a demanding timeline.

The sports finance space is heating up fast. The U.S. collegiate NIL market alone is projected to hit $2.55 billion by end of this year. Global sports sponsorship is on a path from $114 billion in 2025 toward $195 billion by 2032. Real-money products tied to live sports are attracting serious capital and serious regulatory attention in the same breath.

SpeedLabs has a genuinely interesting product thesis. Real-time momentum as a tradable asset class is an idea whose time has been coming for a while. The companies that win in this space won’t just be the ones with the best algorithms. They’ll be the ones who figured out the compliance architecture early enough that it became a moat, not a bottleneck.

That’s the game within the game. And right now, the clock is running.

Now the part that makes people choke on their coffee. Cognition is running at a $492 million annualized revenue run-rate, which puts the valuation at roughly 53x ARR. For reference, public software companies usually trade in the single digits to low teens. So the easy take writes itself: bubble, peak froth, the end is near.

I think the easy take is doing first-order math on a second-order problem.

The model: Second-Order Thinking.

First-order thinking stops at the immediate, obvious effect. The price is 53x revenue, therefore it’s overpriced. Done. Second-order thinking asks the harder question: and then what? What does the world look like two or three steps after the obvious one?

Run it forward. Devin’s enterprise usage has grown 50% month-over-month for six straight months, and revenue went from about $37 million a year ago to $492 million now. If that growth holds even partway, the denominator in “53x ARR” balloons fast, and the multiple compresses on its own. The number that looks insane today can look cheap in four quarters. That’s the bull case, and it’s a real one.

But second-order thinking cuts both ways, which is the whole point of using it honestly. The other clock is the moat. Cognition’s own CEO says the future isn’t one model but systems that combine many models and tools. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have all shipped competing coding agents. So the real race isn’t “is 53x too high.” It’s whether revenue compounds faster than the moat erodes. Growth rate versus commoditization. Two timers, one room.

My take.

Stop arguing about the multiple. The multiple is a snapshot, and snapshots lie about anything growing this fast. The signal worth watching is the gap between usage growth and competitive pressure. When 50% month-over-month starts slowing before the moat is proven, that’s your tell. Not before.

I build in regulated markets at /mkt, where the second-order question is permanent. Every product decision sits inside rules that move slower than the tech. You learn fast that the first-order answer is rarely the one that pays off. The second-order one almost always is.

None of this is investment advice. It’s a thinking exercise. Do your own work, and do it two steps deep.

If this was useful, share it with someone who builds things. And if you want the full toolkit of 50 mental models, my book is coming soon.

Brett Adcock raised $700 million in Series A last Thursday. The kicker: Hark, the AI lab he founded, hasn’t shipped anything. No public product. No demo. No models in market. Just a deck, 70 engineers, a fresh Nvidia B200 cluster, and a $6 billion post-money valuation.

Most Series A rounds clock in between $20M and $40M. Hark’s is roughly 20x that. Parkway Venture Capital led. Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, and Prime Movers Lab all wrote checks. Basically the entire silicon supply chain plus a few growth funds, all backing the same idea. Adcock himself seeded the company with $100 million of his own money in late 2025.

That’s wild. It also might be one of the more rational deals of the year.

The mental model: Convex Bets

In my book I write about convexity as the shape of a payoff. A bet is convex when your downside is bounded but your upside isn’t. You can lose 1x. You can win 100x. If you can find one of those with even a small probability of payoff, the math says you take it. Then you take the next one.

VCs already think this way for seed rounds. What’s new here is doing it at $700M check size.

The bet isn’t “Hark will ship a great product.” The bet is: if Hark becomes the universal interface between humans and AI, our piece of a $6B cap table compounds into something that makes the check look small.

Run the rough math. If the probability of Hark hitting a generational outcome is even 3%, the expected value covers the round. And the strategics aren’t paying just for that 3%. Nvidia gets a marquee chip customer either way. AMD and Intel get the same option. Salesforce gets distribution intel. ARK gets a public-markets-ready position long before the IPO conversation starts. Everyone gets a front-row seat to what Adcock’s actually building.

That’s not one bet. That’s six bets stacked, three of which pay even if Hark flops.

The contrarian take

The reflex is to call this peak froth. It might be.

But the deeper read: when an asset has skewed payoffs, the right size of a position scales with conviction in the operator, not the maturity of the product. The investors didn’t underwrite Hark’s roadmap. They underwrote Adcock’s pattern. He turned Figure AI into one of the most valuable humanoid robotics companies on earth and took Archer Aviation public. That’s a different kind of diligence than what most pre-revenue rounds run.

For founders, the lesson isn’t to chase $700M rounds. It’s this: capital prices convexity. Build something where the downside is small, the upside is large, and the path between them isn’t a function of luck. Build it visibly. Then do it again.

At /mkt, we think about this every day. We’re building infrastructure for athlete tokenization through Reg A+ qualified offerings, with tZERO as the trading infrastructure partner. Regulated markets don’t reward stealth or hype. They reward operators who can build that same shape inside the rules. Different game. Same model. toolkit of 50 mental models, my book is coming soon.

Twenty-five percent of a Super Bowl franchise just changed hands. The buyers were a TV agency CEO, his COO, the founder of Dell Technologies, and a Blackstone executive. The valuation was $9.9 billion. The retail participation was zero.

Here’s the deal that broke last week. Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro, top execs at WME and TKO Group, are buying small ownership stakes in the Las Vegas Raiders. Emanuel will own 1.4 percent and Shapiro 0.6 percent, with deals expected to close later this month. After the deals close, Durban’s stake will increase to 22% and Meldman’s will go up to 12.9%; Baratta will own 1.7%. Dell picks up 5.3%. Together, that’s a combined 25.3 percent of the Raiders, valued at US$9.9 billion. Mark Davis remains the majority owner. The stakes were bought out from First Football, a consortium that had been a significant minority shareholder since 2007.

For context, this isn’t a one-off. Silver Lake Partners has also acquired a 3.2 percent stake in the Cleveland Browns, valued at over US$9 billion. Arctos, which owns stakes in the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Chargers, was recently acquired by KKR for US$1.4 billion. The NFL only opened the door to institutional money a few years back, and capital’s been moving fast ever since.

The mental model: Second-Order Thinking

First-order analysis stops at the headline. “Rich people bought expensive thing.” Cool. Move on.

Second-order thinking asks what happens next, and what the move signals about the system. Two things stand out here.

One, the operators are buying. Emanuel and Shapiro already make their living off live sports economics. They run UFC and WWE through TKO and built the agency side at WME. They’re not stretching into an unfamiliar asset class. They’re doubling down on the one they already run. That’s a different kind of conviction than a passive PE allocation, and it’s worth noticing.

Two, the structural read. There are 32 NFL teams. There will always be 32 NFL teams. Media rights keep climbing. Live sports remain the rare category that still pulls in real-time attention at scale, which is exactly what broadcasters and streamers pay for. Fixed supply plus growing demand explains why a $9.9B price tag is now a baseline rather than a ceiling. The PE math is doing what PE math does.

The contrarian take

The headline number is $9.9 billion. The more interesting number is who got to participate.

The most durable consumer obsession in America (pro football) is owned by fewer than 100 individuals and a handful of funds. That’s not a complaint, it’s a structural observation. And it’s the question every builder in sports finance is sitting with right now: how do you create regulated, transparent access to sports economics for people who aren’t writing nine-figure checks?

At /mkt, we’re working on that for athletes, not teams. Reg A+ offerings, qualified by the SEC, with trading infrastructure through tZERO. Built inside the rules, not around them. Different vertical, same builder question.

The Raiders deal is a reminder that sports is one of the cleanest fixed-supply stories in markets today. The challenge isn’t valuing it. It’s widening who gets to participate, carefully, compliantly, and with eyes open.

This is industry commentary, not investment advice. Always review official offering documents and consult a licensed professional before making any financial decision.

Athletes have always been the product. Now they’re buying the platform.

Earlier this month, Factory Holdings, a family office built for athletes, entertainers, and next-gen wealth creators led a $4.7 million investment into Kalshi’s Series E financing round, bringing together 74 investors across sports, entertainment, and business. PR Newswire The names on the cap table read like an All Star ballot: Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman, Diana Taurasi, Nneka Ogwumike, Breanna Stewart, Connor McDavid PR Newswire, and more. They came in alongside a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund.

The round valued Kalshi at approximately $11 billion and included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, ARK Invest, Charles Schwab, and Y Combinator. Yahoo!

This isn’t a celebrity endorsement play. Kalshi is the infrastructure layer for how real-world events get priced and traded. And athletes just bought a seat at that table.

Factory’s mission, according to founder and CEO Keenan Beasley, is straightforward: the people who shape culture should also own the systems they power. PR Newswire

Hard to argue with that.

Mental Model: First-Order vs. Second-Order Thinking

Most people look at this deal and think: athletes investing in a hot fintech company. That’s first-order thinking. It’s accurate, but it’s shallow.

If 74 athletes build fluency with prediction market infrastructure, how contracts are structured, how liquidity works, how regulated markets function, they become dramatically more sophisticated capital allocators. That changes who they trust with their money. It changes what deals they’ll evaluate. It changes what platforms they’ll eventually build or back.

The second-order effect of this investment isn’t just a return on Kalshi. It’s a cohort of high profile, high-influence individuals who now understand financial infrastructure from the inside. That’s a fundamentally different kind of athlete than the one who signs a brand deal and moves on.

Spencer’s Take

I’ve been building /mkt since December 2025, a platform that lets athletes tokenize their brand and earning potential using Reg A+ offerings with tZERO as trading infrastructure. The question I get most often is: are athletes ready for this?

The Kalshi deal is my answer.

Seventy four athletes didn’t accidentally end up on the same cap table. Factory organized them. That’s the important part. The infrastructure to aggregate athlete capital to make collective ownership possible without requiring each individual to have a family office, a GP relationship, and years of deal flow is being built right now.

That’s exactly the gap /mkt was built to address on the other side: the fan to athlete economic relationship. Fans want access to the upside of the athletes they follow. Athletes want to convert influence into durable ownership. Regulated markets are where those two things meet cleanly.

What Factory did with Kalshi is proof that athletes aren’t passive participants in the financial economy anymore. They’re learning to use the instruments. And when athletes understand how regulated markets work, every product built in that space gets a more sophisticated, more engaged set of potential partners.

The ownership era isn’t coming. It’s already here. The question for builders is whether you’re designing for the athletes who are still waiting to be told what to do with their money or the ones who are already on cap tables and asking better questions.

Build for the second group.