The Pickleball Effect
Spotting major cultural shifts can help investors get years ahead of the market. Here's how a budding new hobby in 2019 led to massive gains for ONON investors...
Megan Brantley
August 27, 2025
The butterfly effect is the idea that small sparks can trigger chain reactions far larger than anyone expects. In business, these sparks often look trivial at first, but they end up reshaping entire industries.
Napster is one of the clearest examples.
Launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning as a peer-to-peer file-sharing platform, it reached 20 million users within months. By 2001, more than 60 million people had tried it. U.S. music sales peaked at $14.6 billion in 1999 and fell by half over the next decade.
That shift in behavior set the stage for Spotify (SPOT), which now has more than 600 million active users.
Apple’s iPhone release had a similar impact. Introduced in 2007, it sold 1.4 million units in its first quarter.
The transition from a mobile-only-device to and internet-connected-tool created surprising pin action.
In 2008 the company rolled out the App Store. It opened with 500 apps and passed 1 billion downloads in less than a year. For the first time, independent developers could put their software directly into the hands of millions of iPhone owners.
That distribution model unlocked entirely new businesses. Ride-hailing companies like Uber, social platforms like Instagram, and food delivery services like DoorDash scaled because the App Store gave them instant reach. What began as a feature inside one device became the foundation of a global mobile economy measured in trillions.
Between 2019 and 2020, tennis experienced its own butterfly effect that helped to send several stocks to new all-time highs…