WorthPoint Founder Will Seippel on Democratizing the Value of Antiques and Collectibles

WorthPoint is the Bloomberg of reporting systems for an asset class encompassing our items in our houses. In many cases, the value of these possessions comes close to or exceeds the actual value of the house. These assets are often forgotten and thrown out during or after our lives. This is where WorthPoint becomes a necessity. WorthPoint’s suite of research and data tools provides market pricing transparency, allowing collectors and resellers to buy and sell more efficiently in a $360 billion marketplace.

Primarily three events:

1) The advent of my five kids going into elementary school and wondering what to do with all the stuff we had accumulated to that point. eBay was the solution for disposing of the items, but I had no idea what to sell them for and needed a tool to help.

2) My mom was a recent immigrant, and having come from Europe, she thought many of our personal assets were in small items such as coins or jewelry because the currency was constantly changing with transitioning governments. As a result, you had to keep track of asset values going up and down.

3) The fact that a baseball card could previously sell for over $100K, but now they can sell for over $1M.

• Antoine Lyseight is our CTO and has been with us for over ten years. He started with us as a Grails developer and brings excellent technology and management experience.
• Alex Rascanu does a lot of analytics and content and has over ten years with the company. He leads a small team in Romania and is an economist.
• Neal McAtee is our CFO and an investor. I have known Neal professionally for about 30 years.
• Rachel Sammons is the VP of Marketing and has been with us for several years. She sizzles on the customer experience side and was promoted from within.
• Eric Bradley, our VP of Editorial Content and PR, was sought out because of his 25-year career in the industry. Eric has written a dozen books on antiques and collectibles and has experience with leading auction houses and reselling.

Our business model is largely based on recurring subscriptions. We have been lengthening the user subscription; now about 22% of the subscriptions are annual. This number is up from 12% just a few years ago. 

We are increasingly focused on:

1. Consumer adoption of our Vault. This tool will enable users to archive items as an ongoing course of action and preserve them for:

• theft protection
• insurance
• memories for future generations
• inheritance
• natural weather disasters (45% of the US population lives in a FEMA Zone)

2. The Enterprise Business Customer that needs WorthPoint in multiple workstations in either local or multi-location businesses.

Generally, players in this space have focused on being part of the marketplace, with their core business being live auction bidding software versus providing pricing data as an independent third party. The former causes a conflict of interest and hurts market transparency.

WorthPoint has three key initiatives over the next six months. These are:

• Visual Search Recognition—subscribers can snap a photo to identify and value objects within seconds across our database of 1.3 billion images—specially curated for art, antiques, and collectibles.
• Marketing The Vault: a user-generated digital database to organize valuables, inventory, and collections and track their values over time. This service will help price, sell, and archive items of emotional and historical significance documented through photographs, family histories, and videos. 
• Finishing and marketing our Indices, starting with the WorthPoint 100 in 2023. These Indices will use our database of more than 742 million realized auction prices to create the industry’s first index-linked investment product that statistically measures price trends.

A historic transfer of wealth is taking place in America as $84 trillion is projected to be passed on to future generations through 2045. Millions of families will face the same problem: “What is the fair market value of our fine art, heirlooms, and precious objects, and how do we maximize their full value?” WorthPoint solves this problem with its unparalleled product and resources. Our innovations will make it easier for people to identify valuables and where they can be sold. The solution interests customers ranging from auction houses to the IRS.

Over this time period, I would expect that WorthPoint is either bought by a larger company or becomes a publicly traded company. Our goal is to become the bellwether for emerging financial markets in the personal asset space and legitimize this space as a class of assets. Everyone should know the “WorthScore” of their assets.