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In 2016, while Tarek Mansour was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, he watched clients nervously trying to hedge their investments in case the Brexit referendum passed. They had no direct way to do it, and the insight became the seed for a startup idea—Kalshi, an exchange where investors could make unusual bets on future events. He cofounded the New York company with fellow MIT alum Luana Lopes Lara in 2018.

In March 2020, as Covid-19 began to spread, OpenSea founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah held a gut-check phone call. Their five-person startup had built a platform on which users could create, buy and sell all sorts of nonfungible tokens (NFTs)—computer files used to track ownership of unique digital assets like art and music on a ledger known as a blockchain. Yet 26 months after going live, they had just 4,000 active users doing $1.1 million in transactions a month, which translated (given OpenSea’s 2.5% sales commission) to a paltry $28,000 in monthly revenue.