FOR SELLING COLLECTIBLES BY THE SHARE

Crafted from individually selected Nile crocodile scales in cream and gray, Hermès’s Himalaya Birkin is one of the world’s rarest handbags, fetching more than $100,000 at auction. Rally cofounder and CEO Chris Bruno wants you to own one—in part. Rally, which launched in 2017, acquires high-end collectibles—birkins, Porsche convertibles, Rolex watches, even first-edition novels—and allows people to buy and sell shares in them via an app, as if the items were public stocks. Investors—including Rally, which invests up to 10% in each collectible—can make money by selling their shares as an item gains in value, or if the treasure is eventually sold for a profit. (Rally registers each item as a security.) The app’s average investor—there are currently 10,000 total—is 28 years old and owns shares in four different Rallymanaged assets. The company has held offerings for nearly 75 items and sold off several, including a 2000 Ford Mustang Cobra R for a 21% return. Last January, in its largest IPO to date, Rally sold 5,000 shares of a $635,000 1980 Lamborghini Countach for $127 apiece. The company, which recently opened a showroom in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood to spotlight items coming up for IPO, gives non-elite investors “the ability to have exposure to the best of the best,” says Bruno. “We took something that was available to 0.001% of the population and made it available to every investor.” Rally’s Himalaya Birkin, for example, is rumored to have been previously owned by Kim Kardashian West.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of getting birthday wishes from Snoop Dogg, Gilbert Gottfried, or even Stormy Daniels, there’s Cameo. The three-year-old platform leverages fan culture and nostalgia to create a new kind of social experience: Users purchase personalized video shoutouts from celebrities and influencers for anywhere between $2 and $2,500. Cameo, which takes a 25% cut, is able to solve one of the conundrums of the social media age by delivering satisfying, personal interactions between celebrities and their fans. On top of that, the famous people are paid for their talents, and fans get a shareable piece of content—the perfect viral marketing tool to expose more people to Cameo.

Last year, the platform grew its talent roster from 5,000 people to more than 20,000 and facilitated the creation of more than 400,000 videos (up from 100,000 in 2018), which included pep talks, internet parody videos, and Sugar Ray front man Mark Mcgrath doing someone’s dirty work in a breakup (“You mean the world to her. But she says she’s having difficulty staying in this long-distance relationship”). “Every day, we’re talking to our customers, finding out who they want that we don’t have, and then trying to get them on,” says cofounder and CEO Steven Galanis. The company has also begun experimenting with brand partnerships: The Kool-aid Man became a free bookable celebrity for a short period last summer. Oh yeah!