The Next Superstars

When I look back on the last 25 years, one theme above all stands out to me: technological progress lowers barriers to entry. Lower barriers encourage more participants, creating larger arenas, and fiercer competition. And when more people can compete, previously undiscovered, superstar talent emerges.

Look at the transition from FCC-regulated television and radio to YouTube channels and podcasts like Joe Rogan’s. Look at prestige Hollywood’s decline and the rise of streamers and internet celebrities. Look at the complete decentralization of the modeling industry through Instagram and TikTok. In every case, technology expanded the arena. More participants, more competition, better talent.

The internet didn’t eliminate gatekeepers. It replaced a handful of centralized gatekeepers with a far larger and more competitive selection process.

A generation ago, becoming a broadcaster required access to a television network. Today, anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world. A generation ago, becoming a professional online athlete wasn’t even a career. Today, millions of people compete online and the best players command audiences larger than many traditional athletes.

The result was a dramatically more effective process for discovering talent that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

For most of modern history, elite finance has been concentrated inside a relatively small number of institutions. If you wanted to become a great investor, trader, or market maker, you typically needed the right geography, the right network, the right credentials, and access to markets that most people simply couldn’t reach.

Finance moving onchain changes that.

Now, anyone with an internet connection can compete in a global financial arena. The same markets are available to a teenager in India, a taxi driver in Brazil, and a portfolio manager in New York. The barriers separating amateurs from professionals are collapsing in real time, and with them the monopoly institutions once held on discovering talent.

One of the most important consequences of this is the creation of a much larger talent-discovery machine.

The next Bill Ackman may be a kid from Eastern Europe who learned to arbitrage oil perps from his bedroom. The next Jim Simons may be a construction worker whose screen name is something like “GoonScalper.” The next generation of great investors won’t emerge from a handful of universities or banks. They’ll emerge from a global pool of millions of competitors all playing the same game.

This is what happens when an arena becomes accessible. The participant count explodes, competition intensifies, and the standard required to win rises with it.

Nobody is surprised that soccer produces extraordinary athletes. Billions of people play it. Nobody is surprised that the internet produced creators larger than Hollywood stars. Hundreds of millions of people compete for attention every day.

Traders have never competed in an arena with billions of potential participants. Onchain finance may be the first time they do.

And when the arena gets bigger, the outliers become superstars.

This is the insight that led us to start First Movers. We want Azura to be to traders what Red Bull is to athletes. I remember pitching this idea to some of the traders we interviewed for the campaign and one of the most common responses was, “Really? Traders?” The assumption, of course, is that traders aren’t the kind of people who become public figures.

Roaring Kitty was the canary in the coal mine. A single trader captured the attention of millions and moved markets worth billions of dollars. Most people see that story as an anomaly, but we see it as a preview.

First Movers exists because we believe the next generation of iconic investors and traders is already here. They’re of all backgrounds, distributed around the world, and competing under pseudonyms. Our job is to find them before everyone else does.

Millions of people already watch markets every day. They follow narratives, debate outcomes, and obsess over performance. As finance becomes more participatory, the people who consistently win will attract audiences in the same way elite athletes and creators do.

And when that happens, the biggest names in finance won’t just outperform the market.

They’ll become cultural icons.