The art market
felt impenetrable.

I spent a decade in fintech — I helped scale a startup to a $95B valuation — but I'm not from the art world. I'm a museum-lover who reads the wall labels. When some company stock sold, conventional wisdom said put the proceeds in the S&P 500. I've never been a fan of conventional wisdom.

We'd just bought a house, and I figured I'd spend twenty thousand dollars putting art on the walls. Then the idea struck, and it wouldn't leave: instead of buying things for the walls, could a beginner collect art he loved that might also appreciate? Could I 10x the plan — if I knew what I was doing, and could buy the right work? Could I be part of the vaunted and, from where I stood, very exclusionary art world?

I bought every book on collecting. I learned that 95% of gallery art never returns a dollar — and that frameworks exist for identifying the investment-grade 5%. I don't have an art history degree. I do have a career built on applying frameworks to tricky problems. That half, I could do.

The books had one other piece of advice: "buy what you love." Useless. I knew what I loved when I saw it. The hard part comes after: walk into a gallery and the gallerist asks what you're collecting — and most people freeze. The market's doors are guarded, and the gatekeepers aren't checking your net worth. They're checking whether you'd be a good steward of the work. Whether you have a vision. Whether you can say what you're collecting, and why. Whether you sound like you belong in the room.

So I built the tool I needed: one instrument for both needs — a coherent aesthetic vision, and a rigorous, data-driven investment framework. I named it Egon.

Using it, I deployed $200,000 into a collection that hangs in my home — bought selectively, decisively, and for reasons I could say out loud. The barriers dissolved. Studio visits with artists whose work hangs at MoMA. Real friendships with emerging artists. Fair invitations, gallery openings, a museum board seat, collectors I'd only read about. And — nobody tells you this part — an enormous amount of fun.

What stays with me is everyone who turns back. Without the right tools, people in my position walk into a gallery once, feel out of place, and walk right back out. They never return. The art world loses them, and the artists lose the collectors who would have carried their careers.

Knowledge, connoisseurship, and passion open locked doors. None of those requires millions.

That's what Egon is for.

— Frank Bozzo, founder