My first ever deal was a Doctor Who card
At primary school I traded my entire Doctor Who card collection for one ultra-rare card — then sold it on eBay for a few hundred pounds. My first, accidental taste of a deal.
Long before any company, before I could even really call it business, there was a Doctor Who trading card.
I was obsessed with Doctor Who at primary school — properly obsessed. So when a collectable card game called Battles in Time came out, I was gone. I begged my mum for weeks to pick up the first pack from the post office. She kept telling me she couldn’t find it, and then one day I walked into my childhood bedroom and there it was, sitting on my bed. She’d had it the whole time. Core memory unlocked — I don’t think I’ve ever been happier over something so small. From then on, every scrap of pocket money went on card packs. I wanted to complete the collection.
Months went by, and I was close — maybe ten cards short. Other Doctor Who fans at school were collecting too, and we all knew about the cards that never turned up. The one I was chasing was a Super Rare Rose card. I think it was something like one in ten thousand. Then one day a kid walked into school with one.
Here’s the part I didn’t understand at the time. On a whim I’d looked it up on eBay, and I was seeing that card go for two, three hundred pounds. To a kid at primary school that was a genuinely staggering amount of money. So the next day I made him an offer: my entire collection — everything I’d spent months and all my pocket money building — for that one card. He said yes. We shook on it and did the deal.
I must have been ten or eleven. I took that card, put it on eBay, and sold it for a few hundred pounds. I can still picture exactly what I spent the money on — a Cyberman helmet, and a pile of other Doctor Who merchandise I’d never have been able to afford otherwise.
I didn’t think of it as anything at the time. It was just a good swap. But looking back, it was the first time I spotted that something was worth more than the person holding it realised, and acted on it. Years later that same instinct turned into running a Minecraft server, and eventually into real companies. It started with a card on my bed and a deal in a school playground.