A Founder's Reflection: Same Starting Point, Why Did fomo Outrun Us?

Original from Phil Jacobson

Compiled by / Odaily News Golem (@web3_golem)

A few years ago, we built Vector, a mobile social trading app for on-chain assets. Our growth was explosive—from zero to a peak of over $20 million in daily trading volume, with cumulative product volume around $1 billion. In the first few months after launch, as growth accelerated, our user retention looked more like a social network than a traditional trading app, which was exactly what we had set out to build.

But in late 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.

Since then, I've been watching how fomo has taken a similar idea in a different direction and executed it brilliantly. They've broken out of the CT (Crypto Twitter) bubble, onboarded a wave of new users into on-chain, and recently surpassed $100 million in daily trading volume.

Seeing their success, I don't feel like "it should have been ours." Instead, I think what they've achieved is remarkable. They took a product thesis we believed in deeply, focused it on a market we never really pursued, and realized that vision at a scale far beyond what we reached.

The whole journey fascinates me, and I can't help but imagine a parallel universe where we might have taken a very different path...

All interesting products start out looking like toys

Vector was born out of Tensor, the Solana NFT trading platform.

Before joining Tensor as VP of Operations, I had participated as an angel investor in Tensor's only funding round, at a time when the project had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, Tensor had become the dominant NFT trading platform on Solana, with market share exceeding 80% at one point and trading volume in the billions of dollars.

Around my second day on the job, Ilja came to me and said something like: "We're not sure where NFTs are headed, but we think the next wave will be meme coins, so we want to build a product for that."

Our insight wasn't just that meme coins would become the next hot asset class. We believed the bigger opportunity was "social trading."

Trading is already inherently social. The GameStop saga and the WallStreetBets community are obvious examples. More and more people are investing on their own, and their decisions are increasingly driven by trusted individuals online rather than traditional financial advisors or institutions.

Crypto makes this behavior even more visible. On X, there are always people who spot major trading opportunities early—Ansem is a great example, having been extremely bullish on Solana when it was around $8. If you trusted his judgment and acted on it, you could have earned incredible returns.

The problem is that discovering an opportunity and executing a trade are often completely disconnected.

You might see someone you trust post about a token on X or in a Telegram group, decide whether to get in, and then hunt for the correct contract address. On mobile, the actual execution experience was terrible: you'd open Phantom wallet, open a browser, find Jupiter, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, set your trade size, and finally execute. For meme coins, time is money. By the time you finished all that, the opportunity was often gone.

So we firmly believed that social signals and trade execution should live in the same product, with the distance between them reduced to as close to zero as possible.

Chris Dixon, founder of a16z crypto, famously said that all interesting products start out looking like toys. That's exactly how we saw meme coins—they were the "toy" that could bootstrap a social trading network.

Our long-term vision went far beyond that. As more mainstream assets moved on-chain, the network would naturally expand into those asset classes. Once you had the users, the social graph around trading and alpha, and a best-in-class execution experience, the leap from meme coins to stocks or other assets wouldn't be that large—especially as those assets themselves increasingly moved on-chain.

Sure, stocks usually have real businesses behind them, while meme coins often don't; but there are growing signs that the way people actually trade them is strikingly similar.

GameStop was an extreme early case, but this behavior has become increasingly common. Look at memory chip trading, next-gen cloud services trading, or hyperscaler trading—these trades are highly social and driven by narrative and momentum.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent example. He built enormous credibility through his unique insights into where AI is heading. Now investors closely track and mimic his positions in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and conviction have become part of the information people use to evaluate and execute those trades.

Some of these investment theses will turn out to be right, and some won't—only hindsight will tell. But what's clear is that the information layer around investing has become social.

We believed that the behavior pattern most extreme in meme coins wasn't unique to meme coins—it was an amplified version of a broader market trend.

What it feels like to find real PMF

The simplest way to explain Vector or fomo is as a combination of Instagram and Robinhood. Instagram's core element is photos, TikTok's is short videos, and for Vector, it was charts.

When you opened the app, the first thing you saw was a social feed. When someone shared a trade, you'd see the token's live price chart, and users who traded through Vector would have their buys or sells displayed directly on the chart at the corresponding price levels.

The feed was algorithm-driven, designed to surface the most valuable trading signals in the network. After seeing a signal, you could execute a trade almost instantly. Our goal was to compress the path from social signal to executed trade from minutes to seconds—ideally milliseconds—in stark contrast to the terrible mobile trading experience of the time.

One idea we pioneered was displaying user avatars and trade activity directly on the chart. Nobody was doing that at the time, and I remember seeing the design internally and thinking, "This is genius." Today, that UI pattern has become standard across trading apps, and it's great to see.

For product-market fit (PMF), our founding team had a simple definition: PMF means user demand is so intense that you can't supply it fast enough—they're practically ripping the product out of your hands. We knew Vector had succeeded before the public launch because that frenzy appeared during the beta. Users kept demanding invite codes so they could bring their friends in.

We launched in late November 2024 and quickly went viral within the crypto Twitter (now X) community. Our daily trading volume soon hit around $1 million; by late January, during the Trump-related meme coin launches, daily volume peaked at over $20 million.

User retention was equally impressive. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I recall day-7 retention was between 60% and 70%, and day-30 retention was around 40% to 50%. Users opened Vector frequently to trade, follow each other, share investment ideas, invite friends, and copy-trade people they followed.

At the time, our team was under 25 people, and the explosive growth created pressure everywhere: systems crashed frequently, trades occasionally failed to execute, customer support was overwhelmed, and the list of features to build always exceeded our available bandwidth.

That experience taught me firsthand what real PMF feels like—it was one of the most profound lessons I've ever learned. Demand creates pressure everywhere, pushing everything forward faster than the company can actually handle.

It also reinforced a strong belief I have about company building: small teams of exceptionally talented people can achieve astonishing things, and nothing matters more than staying close to your customers. Customer-centricity is a culture that must be modeled from the top. If you're not in the trenches talking to users, providing support, and understanding where the product falls short, you easily lose touch with what the product actually needs.

The misstep: betting on the pro trading market

But as the meme coin market cooled, a structural problem became increasingly clear.

Average users eventually lost most of their capital, leading to reduced trading or complete churn. Professional traders, on the other hand, made money, kept trading, and generated enormous volume. The economics were extremely concentrated—roughly 5% of users accounted for about 95% of trading volume.

So we made what seemed like a rational choice: go after the professional trader market. Their needs were different from average users. They typically had multiple screens, monitored several charts simultaneously, and executed frequent, rapid entries and exits. Vector was a mobile product, and many professionals did use it, but for them, mobile was often a supplement to their main trading setup rather than the primary venue.

Meanwhile, competition was intensifying. Axiom had built an excellent product, and Photon, BullX, and others were all fighting for the same users. Given that professional traders drove the vast majority of volume, we started building a desktop version of Vector. Becoming the go-to trading interface for professionals seemed like the best way to win the market at the time.

To this day, I still think that was a very viable strategy. Our desktop product was excellent, early beta users loved it, and we had a confident go-to-market plan. However, we never ended up launching it publicly, so we never got to truly test that strategy.

Looking back, I have another perspective on our choice. We were focused on winning the existing market rather than growing the market. We spent far too little time asking whether we could dramatically expand the market by attracting new users who had never made an on-chain trade before.

And that's exactly the path fomo ultimately chose.

What fomo did differently to succeed

What interests me most about fomo is their strategic focus. When we were building our desktop product, the obvious opportunity in the market was serving professional traders. Axiom was growing fast, professional traders dominated the market's economics, and numerous products were fiercely competing for that segment—it was the center of attention for the entire industry.

fomo chose a completely different path.

They looked beyond TikTok, Instagram, and the CT bubble to an audience of people, many of whom had never made an on-chain trade. Instead of fighting for seasoned traders, they targeted a massive consumer market that most of the industry was ignoring.

Timing also mattered. fomo rose after the meme coin mania had cooled, in a market environment that was less frenzied and speculative than when we were operating. I'm not sure the same strategy would have worked as well at the peak of the frenzy, but they targeted a different user base at the right time and executed exceptionally well.

They figured out how to reach users outside the traditional crypto world, onboard them, and get them to make their first on-chain trade. That's no small feat—it requires excellent distribution paired with a great product, making something as foreign to ordinary people as "on-chain trading" feel simple, converting them, and giving them reasons to keep coming back.

fomo nailed the product experience details that mattered to that target audience. If we had simply taken our original Vector and dropped it into those distribution channels without adapting the product for those users, it wouldn't have worked the same way.

But I don't think our decision to serve professional traders was wrong. I still believe our desktop strategy could have been very successful. The more valuable lesson is that beyond the market we were focused on, there was a much larger market we didn't spend enough time exploring—and fomo did, and they cracked it open.

It turns out that the market that gets you to PMF may not be the market that supports massive scale.

The first target market a founder finds might be a perfect beachhead, but it may represent only a small fraction of the ultimate market opportunity. Once you've found a product users truly crave, it's worth asking: where else could this product shine?

Hindsight is always easy, but seeing this in real time is much harder. Your data comes from the market you're currently serving. That data can powerfully guide you on how to win your existing market, but it can't tell you much about users you haven't acquired or distribution channels you haven't tested.

In our case, the data showed that professional traders dominated the economics of on-chain meme coin trading. What the data couldn't predict was what would happen if you put a social trading product in front of a completely new group of people who had never made an on-chain trade.

fomo has answered that question.

Is social trading a trillion-dollar opportunity?

What fomo has reinforced for me is that the original thesis about social trading was not only directionally correct, but the opportunity is growing faster and bigger than we ever imagined.

We live in an increasingly financialized world. More and more people are investing and trading on their own, market dynamics are a topic of public conversation, investment ideas spread through social networks, people build trust in specific traders, investors, and creators, and capital flows along those networks of information and consensus.

Trading and investing are inherently social. This applies across asset classes—whether meme coins, crypto, prediction markets, or the stock market.

I believe this trend will only accelerate. The world is becoming more connected, information travels faster, and AI will dramatically enhance information discovery and synthesis. At the same time, more and more assets are moving on-chain. Stocks, prediction markets, options, real-world assets (RWAs), and financial products we haven't even imagined yet are converging on an increasingly global, 24/7 financial infrastructure.

If you can build a high-quality social graph around trading and alpha, paired with excellent execution, you'll be in an extremely strong position. Meme coins can be the entry point, but the product can evolve far beyond that. As more of the financial world moves on-chain, asset classes will become increasingly modular.

This was always part of the Vector vision, but fomo's journey has given me a much more concrete sense of the scale and timing. People are ready to trade on-chain, and they're ready for a social financial experience. fomo has proven that this experience can reach a broad audience far beyond the crypto-native market.

I think they're in a very strong position. They've already started moving into perpetuals, going beyond just meme coins, and if they continue to execute well, the opportunity is enormous. A natural comparison is Robinhood, but fomo has had a social graph and on-chain assets built into the product from day one.

Conclusion

If we had kept going, could Vector have become a multi-billion-dollar company?

I think it's entirely possible. It might even have been much more than that. We had a great product, a talented team, and a strategy I believed had strong potential. Maybe we would have started there and eventually expanded into the broader consumer market. Maybe fomo would have beaten us anyway. Or maybe we would have grown even bigger than fomo is today.

Maybe someday quantum technology will let us explore that parallel universe. For now, what interests me most is watching another great team—fomo—explore a path we never took.

I'm witnessing it all as an observer. They've opened up a market we never really pursued and pushed the social trading model far beyond what we achieved, and I have deep respect for what they've built.

More importantly, watching this unfold has only strengthened my conviction that financial markets are fundamentally social, and as more of the world's assets move on-chain, that social nature will only intensify.

We tried to build an early version of that future with Vector, and fomo's trajectory is showing us just how big this space can become.