Nicole Colombo

Overview

Nicole Colombo is a marketplace executive best known for running eBay’s collectibles and trading cards business through the pandemic-era trading-card boom, and for leaving eBay in November 2021 to become the first president of Alt, the alternative-asset platform for trading cards (TechCrunch). At eBay she held the title of general manager for collectibles and trading cards, and at Alt she was hired to drive the platform’s overall business strategy as it expanded beyond sports cards into other alternative assets (Boardroom; Value Added Resource).

This profile covers Colombo’s documented public career at eBay and Alt only. It does not claim a total length for her eBay tenure, a later role after Alt, or any personal or educational background, because none of those appears in a source read in full for this profile.

At eBay: the executive behind the trading-card boom

Colombo came to the collectibles role from fashion merchandising: Bloomberg, quoted by trade blog Value Added Resource, described her as a “former fashion-merchandising executive” who had run eBay’s fast-growing business in collectibles and trading cards for the past two years at the time of her departure (Value Added Resource). By August 2021 she was the public face of eBay’s cards business, interviewed at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago as the general manager for collectibles and trading cards at eBay (Boardroom).

The numbers she was explaining were extraordinary. eBay reported that United States sales of trading cards grew 142% from 2019 to 2020, with over four million more trading cards sold by US-based accounts than the year before (Sports Collectors Daily). Basketball cards led the sports categories, up 373%, while soccer sales rose 1,586%, hockey 258%, football 168% and baseball 73%; across sports and gaming cards alike, Pokemon was the overall growth leader at 574% (Sports Collectors Daily). Colombo attributed the surge largely to people staying home, cleaning out garages and rediscovering old collections while there were no sports on television, telling Sports Collectors Daily that new collectors were entering trading cards “as another avenue of investment to diversify their portfolios” (Sports Collectors Daily).

In her Boardroom interview she gave a fuller version of that theory: the business had already been growing steadily for five years, but the pandemic accelerated it as nostalgia, the ESPN documentary The Last Dance, and investor-minded newcomers combined (Boardroom). Michael Jordan’s cards boomed during the documentary’s run, she said, with spikes too for featured players such as Steve Kerr and Isaiah Thomas, while a first-edition set of Pokemon cards sold on eBay for over $600,000 (Boardroom). She stressed the breadth of the market as well as its top end: eBay sold cards from $2 to $500,000, with a large community trading in the $10–$200 range, flipping cards for short-term profit (Boardroom).

Under Colombo, eBay also built tools to serve that new audience. Work begun before the pandemic produced a Collection tool and a Price Guide, both in beta by July 2021, after users told eBay they were using the site to determine market value but struggling to do so, and were managing their collections in scrappy spreadsheets (Boardroom). The goal, she said, was transparency: letting every user see what they owned, track its value like a portfolio, and make informed purchasing decisions (Boardroom). The momentum continued into 2021: in the first quarter, she said, eBay did over $1 billion in trading-card sales, saw double the number of buyers, and added 20 million new listings (Boardroom).

The move to Alt: first president of a rival platform

Colombo’s departure was reported on 9 November 2021, when Value Added Resource wrote that eBay’s general manager for collectibles and trading cards was leaving to become president of Alt, “an up and coming competitor in the collectibles and alternative assets market” (Value Added Resource). TechCrunch confirmed the appointment days later, reporting that Alt had “recently hired Nicole Colombo, previously eBay’s GM of collectibles and trading cards, as its first president” (TechCrunch). The “first” matters: Alt, founded by Leore Avidar and covered by TechCrunch in March 2021, had previously been led by its founder alone, so Colombo was its first president as a distinct role.

The context of the hire shows what Alt was buying. By November 2021 the company had raised a $75 million Series B at a valuation it put at over $325 million, employed around 60 people, and held over $70 million worth of cards in its vault (TechCrunch). It had expanded from sports cards into first-edition Charizards and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, and its founder was talking about sneakers, watches and NFTs as future asset classes (TechCrunch). Colombo’s remit, as Bloomberg reported it, was to “drive overall business strategy for the platform, whose first asset class is trading cards”, with management planning to expand into several other categories (Value Added Resource). Her own framing of the job matched that ambition: “Alt’s main goal is to create transparency and liquidity of alternative assets,” she said. “That can mean trading cards, luxury watches, NFTs. The goal is to go beyond that.” (Value Added Resource)

Back at eBay, her old role was filled by Bob Means, according to a December 2021 update from Value Added Resource (Value Added Resource). The move was widely read as a competitive loss for eBay: its trading-cards chief had jumped to a startup attacking the same categories, in a pattern commentators compared to an earlier executive departure to a rival marketplace (Value Added Resource).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state how long Colombo worked at eBay in total. Trade snippets quote a “six incredible years” farewell, but the source article was not read in full for this profile, so no tenure figure is asserted; only the Bloomberg-reported “past two years” running the collectibles and trading cards business is claimed.
• It does not state a later role after Alt. A trade snippet reports a subsequent Walmart Marketplace position, citing a LinkedIn announcement, but that was not verified from a fully-read source and is not asserted here.
• It does not give the fuller four-part remit wording (strategy, marketing, customer experience, business development) found in some trade coverage, because the full text of that coverage could not be re-fetched in this pass; only the verified “overall business strategy” wording is claimed.
• It does not state exact start or end dates at either company, Colombo’s tenure at Alt after 2021, or any birthplace, education or personal details — none appears in the sources read in full.
• Title wording varies across coverage, with some snippets calling her “head of eBay Collectibles”; this profile uses “general manager for collectibles and trading cards”, the title three fully-read sources agree on.