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My First MillionPeople are doing $100M+ in sales on this app (ft. Whatnot founder)
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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
65 min read · 12,854 words- 0:00 – 1:00
Intro
- SPShaan Puri
You built a company that is worth $20 billion. But just to put that in perspective, that is more than if you add up the entire market cap of Wendy's, Under Armour, Hertz rental car, Harley Davidson-
- GLGrant Lafontaine
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... American Airlines also. [laughs] Isn't that bananas when you hear that?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I think it's absolutely nuts. [upbeat music]
- SPShaan Puri
What I find interesting about you is that you went from a guy who was, a, a kid who was working in a deli, [laughs] al- almost failed out of high school, to now you've, you built a company that is worth $20 billion.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
In all, in all honesty, I try not to focus on the number, 'cause I just... Like, w- if you focus on it, it sort of seems obscene, and then you're like, "Well, I've, you know, done a lot already. I'll pat myself on the back." But I think we're pretty early in what we're doing, and so I just try not to think about it and just sort of look at, like, the problem ahead and put one step, one foot in front of the other and... Yeah, we started this thing six and a half years ago. There's still a lot of work to do.
- 1:00 – 2:12
Grant turned down Shaan’s investment
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, I remember because, uh, you may not remember this, but we were on a phone call, and I was like, "Hey, this is a great idea. I'd love to invest." And you were like, "I don't know. We got, like... Kind of it's already full." And I was like, "Oh, but I'm such a great guy." And then, uh, you were like, "We'll see," and then I didn't follow up, and, uh, that not following up cost me. It cost me dearly.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I, I actually do remember. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Say more.
- SPShaan Puri
I wrote it down in my diary that day. [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Grant, what happened from your perspective?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, yeah, you tell the story.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, so, um, yeah, what happened? I mean, when- whenever you're, like, one of the... Like, we've, we've had rounds where we've been a hot company, and we've had rounds where we've not been a hot company. Sort of, like, s- seen this, the full spectrum of things, and once the round's closed, all we really want to do is go back to work. So I remember talking, uh, to Shaan, and, um, you know, I'm like, "Oh, I should probably follow up with him," and then I just got busy with work and didn't. And I think I s- I... Like, in my head, I sort of felt bad 'cause I think I should've done something, but I don't know.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Well, listen, I've been a fan. I was a fan before. I'm still a fan now. Now I'm just a bitter fan, uh, which is, is a unique place to be in. And we should explain what the company is, right? You, you're the founder of Whatnot. What's so amazing is you've built a large company in a space that I think most people would've found very small
- 2:12 – 3:58
Shaan buys a crab on Whatnot
- SPShaan Puri
and unusual. Unusual... It's, uh, almost like a stack of unusual behaviors. We'll just give a kind of quick summary, which is if you open up Whatnot today, the app, you will see people selling all kinds of things. It started off with collectibles and, you know, like, these little Funko, Funko dolls and then opening up packs of cards and stuff like that. But now you could buy anything. I, Sam, I don't know if you know this. You could buy crazy shit on Whatnot. I bought a crab this morning. It was, like-
- GLGrant Lafontaine
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... a fisherman fishing, and he's like, "Oh, I got these crabs." And then he's like, [laughs] "You can buy this crab right now." [laughs] I bought a crab. He's like, "Great," you know? He's, "It's gonna be sent in the mail to you." Congratulations, Shaan. And there's a crab coming my way now, and that's, uh... I don't know what just happened, but I, I have a crab coming in the mail.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
The seafood's incredibly good, to be honest.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Like, I actually eat it. I eat it, like, very regularly. It's my favorite, uh, category when purchasing.
- SPShaan Puri
It better be, because I'm telling my wife I bought internet crab, and, uh, I don't know if she wants that to be in the house, but, uh, [laughs] I got internet crabs coming my way.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
You saw where it came from. You don't know what you're getting if you go to the supermarket.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] That's true.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
That, that thing came off the boat.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, the person who was doing it, their profile shows, like, how many they've sold, and it says 3,300. Her, her username's, shout out to ilovecrabs. Um, so ilovecrabs, she's sold 3,300. Yeah, this crab pack I bought, whatever, it was $34, she's made over 100 grand selling crabs on the internet. Like, this is unbelievable.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, last week I had a full crab boil, um, brought to me by Whatnot. Um-
- SPShaan Puri
I can't tell if Sam is dumbfounded or his internet connection has dropped. He's made the same face-
- SPSam Parr
No, I'm like-
- SPShaan Puri
... for the last 30 seconds. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
I want crab, but I, I don't understand how on earth you could start something like this because a marketplace like this seems like probably the hardest business to start. I think marketplaces are probably the most durable and also the most challenging. And
- 3:58 – 19:07
First 1,000 users
- SPSam Parr
when Shaan originally told me this idea, it might've been four years ago, you might've been two years in, I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds cool, but these are impossible." How did you get your first, let's say, 1,000 sellers to even use the thing? 'Cause I'd imagine that's harder, sellers, not buyers.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I mean, uh, uh, the early days it was all sort of hard. I think for us, the reason we did it is because me and Logan, who started it, we'd only ever spent our careers in consumer internet and working on two sided platforms and marketplaces. So when the idea of starting a B2B business sounded way more painful than starting, like, a consumer marketplace to us, just because of what we knew. When we f- when we first got started, we didn't even have the, the live component, and so we had to get, like, immensely creative. And so initially we had a value prop if we'd authenticate whatever was sold.
- SPShaan Puri
Can you do it like a movie scene? So you and Logan, you're sitting somewhere. You have an idea. Who says the idea? Where are you? What, what happened? And then how long from there did the first go live?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
So there, there is, there's sort of, like, two founding stories, depending on if you talk to Logan or you talk to me. They're both, both technically true. So I'll go back to the first one, 'cause Logan will be annoyed if I don't tell it, which is Logan and I are in Japan, uh, over, like, the holidays, and we were both sort of fed up with our jobs, and we'd both, we'd both built companies before, so we, we, we prefer to sort of, like, focus on building things. And we're drinking in a bar in Tokyo. We're like, "Let's start a business," and we bought, like, 50 domains. And we knew we were gonna... We were like, "Let's start a marketplace business," and we bought all these, like, random domains.
- SPShaan Puri
Did you have an idea or just straight to the domain? [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Uh, you know, it's, you're drinking in a bar-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
... and so it's like, one of our initial ideas, which, uh, we, we did actually sort of do for a couple weeks, was we'll build, like, a better full service Craigslist, which is t- a horrific business idea, by the way. Um, but that's what we, we initially started with.
- SPSam Parr
That's, like, in the, uh, in, like, the starter pack of entrepreneurs.
- SPShaan Puri
It's like, "Craigslist is so ugly. I could do better."
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. The, the unit economics just don't make any sense, right? And so you're selling all these used goods that are basically worth nothing, but you need to be able to- you know, spend a bunch of money in order to make the user experience of Craigslist better, like be able to do. So, so sort of like, I'll give you an example.
- SPSam Parr
I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs on this podcast, and I've got a bunch of takeaways, but one of the big ones, one of them that shocks a lot of the people out there who are product nerds, which frankly I am myself, is that oftentimes in order to turn something that's going kind of good into something that's absolutely amazing is to fix the marketing, not the product. And in particular, fix how many people know about the product. That's like the big thing. It's called attention. Say it with me, attention. And so this team at Starter Story, they put together a free guide. They call it the $1 million attention guide. It's this pretty amazing 39 page document that's filled with 15 tactics to get eyeballs on what you are building. And so there's even a 30 minute recording from Pat, who's the founder of Starter Story. He has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs. So he's able to put this together through a bunch of research and experience. And so if you're interested in getting more attention, which frankly you should be, everyone should be, then you should click the link below in the description or scan the QR code right here.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
You know, we're in Tokyo, we buy these domains. Some of the domains are like random domains we're going to use to like SEO hack, like used Peloton and, you know, you name it. Like we probably had like 50 domains. We were sort of growth hacking our way into the business, even at that stage. So anyways, then it comes to sort of like fall of 2019. And we were sort of like, all right, we're going to make the plunge. Logan left his job, started to work on what became Whatnot. And the early division of labor was sort of like Logan's going to build it and then I'm going to like do everything else. And so like, all right, we're on the full service Craigslist. And one of the bits of full service Craigslist was going to be like, we're going to be able to do deliveries. And so I'm like, all right, let's go figure out. I did like the envelope on, you know, on an app and be like, yeah, maybe they're there. And then I start calling all the delivery companies. So I go on LinkedIn and I LinkedIn all of these people who run delivery businesses, like the guy who runs delivery at Bob's Discount Furniture, the guy who runs delivery at like all these other companies. And I take calls with me. I'm like, how much does a delivery cost at scale? And so like, how much is each leg and how efficient is it? And they were nice enough. They sort of told me. And with after doing two of those calls, like this just doesn't work. Like the cost per delivery relative to the value added on the used item is just there's no margin there for the business. Then like, oh shit, need to find something else to do. And at that point in time, it was Logan. We brought on an engineer already and then we had half a designer. So the team was sort of like three and a half people.
- SPSam Parr
Can you give a little perspective to your financial situation? Because we have a lot of entrepreneurs who listen, but we have a lot of people who want to start. So like you're talking about hiring people already. Did you have funding or did you just have like $100,000 saved up? What was your financial situation to do that?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, probably, I don't know, $100,000, $200,000 in the bank.
- SPSam Parr
Okay.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Not including my 401k.
- SPSam Parr
Did you wire that over to the company and you're like, all right, now we have $200,000. That's what we can hire with.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Check by check. You know, you sort of go like the implicit agreement was I'd be willing to spend up to that amount of money doing the business before I raise money. And so like what we did early on. So our first engineer was actually based in Brazil. It was a guy that Logan used to work with and had known really well who was like super talented. But, you know, he's in Brazil. And so it's much more cost effective there. He's kind of difficult to work with. So he's, you know, he's like really talented but really challenging to work with. So you can get him on the cheap and then you give him some good equity. And then the designer, we just gave him equity. We're like, do the branding, do all of our designs. We'll give you equity in the business, which obviously has turned out well for both of those folks. And so, yeah, we're sort of doing that 24 hours into like doing diligence on delivery costs. I'm like, oh, shit, we have to change this business. And by the way, they're building it. So we have even to this day, we try and have an immense bias to action because you just learn things by doing things. So even if you're wrong, as long as you're willing to admit you're wrong and then change direction, it's totally fine. So Logan and Gustavo were building the back end, like the order system and some of the front end and go, everyone, hey, everyone, I don't think this idea is going to work. I'm going to try and find something else. We're like, it's OK. We got to build a payment system anyway. So as long as we're doing a marketplace, we'll keep building. She's like, all right, yeah, we'll still do that. And then I was just going around the Internet looking for other marketplaces that I thought were really broken. And I kept coming back to eBay, which is, you know, back in the day, I used to sell on Yahoo Auctions and eBay. It was like prepayment processing online. It was Pokemon cards. And I was going-
- SPShaan Puri
You recognize this bad boy? I don't know if you can see it.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Is that the holographic Chansey? Hell yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
It's a holographic Chansey. This is your-
- GLGrant Lafontaine
You guys did your diligence.
- SPShaan Puri
I bought this off of you 20 years ago. Our paths crossed. I bought this for $10. [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. I remember that $10 money order. Definitely one of those like making money as a first time when you're a kid and like-
- SPShaan Puri
It's the best
- GLGrant Lafontaine
... something special about that. Yeah. So I kept on, you know, going through marketplaces and coming back to eBay. And then like everything that was trending on eBay was collectibles. And I could see all my friends were getting back into collectibles. And then me and Logan start making trips to all of the comic book shops in L.A. And they're like packed. They're full of Funko Pops. And so I go, everyone, I got this amazing idea. We're going to go and change and build a collectibles marketplace. And let's focus on Funko Pops. And here's all of the reasons.
- SPSam Parr
Well, what were the reasons? Because the way that you're describing this is very unsophisticated. And maybe it was that unsophisticated. Because like if a normal person, they'd be like, well, eBay seems like they're doing collectibles pretty good. Like a marketplace is, I would imagine, all about liquidity, meaning the perfect amount of buyers and sellers and there's stuff there. And so like what was the metric or the signal where you said this is actually attainable? Or was it just, I want to build a business. This might work. Let's just see what happens.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
It was probably a little bit of both. Um, the initial sort of data or research we used to inform it was, at that point in time, you could pull the sales by every single category on eBay. There was a tool, I think it was called Terapeak, and, uh, we, we went across every single collectibles category and plotted the sales and collectibles through time and how it was growing. And, and every one of these categories was, like, going gangbusters, so there was clearly a, a broader trend happening in the market. And when you looked at it then, there were more Funkos being sold on eBay than comic books, which is one of the reasons we ended up choosing comics... Or sorry, Funkos over, you know, say, comics or a bunch of the other categories. It was between Funko and Pokemon were the first two categories we were-
- SPShaan Puri
So there's demand.
- 19:07 – 28:52
Black hat growth tactics
- SPSam Parr
Sports, Star War- Star Wars, Rick and Morty, and if you click on it, uh, I'm not sure if it will show you, but it looks like you have sellers on there. You're only four or five months in, but it looks like a lot of sellers, sellers are on there actually, and it even has staff picks. Like, you guys are curating some cool ones. How many sellers were actually on there, and how did you convince them? And also, feel free to admit if there's any black hat tactics there. There's a statute of limitations.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Oh, yeah. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, yeah. There's, uh, yeah, there's some, um-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
... unique tactics at play. Um, I think by, by March 2020, we probably did have in the hundreds or maybe, maybe 1,000 sellers at that point. S- so the way we got things going is, so classically with a marketplace, you have a chicken and egg problem. How do you get sellers if you don't have buyers? How do you get buyers if you don't have sellers? So the way you solve that is you solve for one side of the equation, and so we were initially the, the, the seller on Whatnot, and so all of the early inventory was, was us. Now, obviously we can't own 28,000 Funkos. [laughs] So what we did is we would go and authenticate them, and by doing that, that gave us additional value to add to the customer, and then we would, when someone would purchase them, we'd go and buy it from a number, like 100 different stores online. I had, like, a team of people in Brazil who would help me hunt down the right Funko Pops.
- SPSam Parr
Oh, so you... They, they, they didn't exist then. It was just photos of them, and you're like, "But I'll, I'll go out and find them, and, uh, I'll b- I'll buy them."
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I mean, it was, it was a little more... You know, there's a little bit more new to it than that. So one of the things that we did that... I don't know. There's like 100,000 Funko Pops out there. It's like an obscene number of Funko Pops, and so you do have to be able to secure them and secure them at a reasonable price and be able to price them at a reasonable price. And so we ended up having to build, like, a pricing algorithm. We basically scraped all of the sites that had various Funko Pops and then looked at the amount of liquidity in each version of the Funko Pop. And based upon, like, we'd sort of set a liquidity floor because if that thing had, like, one liquidity... You know, one sold over a 90-day period, you're never gonna be able to secure it. I forget what the liquidity floor was now, but let's just say you had to sell 10 over a, a 30-day period. We'd use the past 10 sales plus the amount of liquidity per item to then be able to price it at a reasonable price such that we could then go and resell it authenticated and then make sure we could actually secure it, um, from one of the sites.
- SPSam Parr
And then did you buy Google ads for the buyer? Were you buying Google ads or posting on Reddit or something to get the, the buyers?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
There, there was two, two tactics, um, that we initially used. So tactic number one was we partnered with a bunch of the Funko Pop influencers on YouTube. So, you know, I can remember in December calling up every Funko Pop influencer, and they're like, "Who is this company? I don't trust you." I found someone that I knew from prior world to, to work with, and that was sort of the starting place. So that was tactic number one. Then tactic number two was we built this sort of, um, viral Funko Pop giveaway mechanic in the app. So if you're into collecting anything, the thing that you most want to collect are, like, the grails or the chases. So if you're into sports card, maybe, maybe that's, um, you know, rookie Topps Chrome LeBron. If you're into Funko, maybe that's, like, the Tony the Tiger flocked Funko Pop. And what we would do is once a week, we'd give away, like, a $500, $1,000 Funko Pop, and in order to be able to enter, you would have to share it. And, and we sort of built these mechanics where you could sort of have, like, unlimited sharing. So someone could sign up with your referral link. Someone could sign up with your code. Um, you could share it on Twitter. You could share it on Instagram. And each time someone used your link or your code, they would get an extra ticket in the raffle. So it g- it gave this, like... It, it, it sort of, um, encouraged everyone who wanted to win it to share it with everyone that they knew and keep on sharing it.
- SPSam Parr
Right.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
And so we basically took over all the Funko Pop subreddits, Facebook groups, uh, et cetera, because every- we were giving away the best stuff.
- SPSam Parr
This is basically stuff... Like, this is gritty internet entrepreneurship stuff that everyone, Shaan and me, everyone listening who's, has an internet business, everyone has done something where it's like, "Ah, we're just gonna, like, do this and do this, and maybe I won't want to tell everyone, like, 10 years looking back."
- GLGrant Lafontaine
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
So it's really cool to see that that was only six years ago. Now you're worth $20 billion.
- SPShaan Puri
It even extends. Uh, we had Mike Posner, the music artist who did "I Took a Pill in Ibiza" on, and, uh, he s- he, you know... I think a lot of people didn't even listen to the episode 'cause it's like, oh, it's, like, a musical artist on our business show. But he had this amazing story that was just like any other entrepreneur, where he was in college when he was trying to be an artist. So he realized he could post onto... He wanted to be on o- on the top of the charts of iTunes, but that's where, like, you know, Jay-Z and Rihanna, whoever were at the top. He realized iTunes had a iTunes U section for, like, college lectures. So, but he's a student, so he called the guy. He hustled to find the guy who, like, controls that board. He's like, "I'm a student. Can I upload audio to that? And he became the number one on iTunes U. Then he emailed all these campuses being like, "I'm number one on iTunes (U) ." [laughs] You know, people didn't, people didn't realize the distinction, and he got booked for, for gigs. And then he had all his friends at other colleges and so- and, and fraternities. He was in a fraternity, so he said, "Great, everyone in the, this same fraternity in every college, on this day, change your profile picture to this picture just to create some mystery." Like, what is that? And then people went and hunted down that, oh, it's about this album release, and that was the start of his music career. He growth hacked his way to success there, too, and I love these stories. As a founder, like, you know, uh, the front door is not the o- not always the only way in.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. Well, my, my theory has always been the same, which is if you try and copy the obvious pathways, you're basically gonna get stonewalled because you don't have the resources. In the early days, everyone wants to spend a ton of money on paid ads. You know, we spent virtually no money on paid ads in the early days. It was never gonna be an effective acquisition channel for us. We spend an obscene amount of money on paid ads today.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
But you have to get your way there, and, and each step of the way, you know, sort of unlocks new and interesting things. But I do think in the early days you have to find unique advantages that, um, other people aren't gonna be able to leverage.
- SPShaan Puri
Do you remember when you first started doing the Grails giveaway? 'Cause, you know, uh, some part of you has gotta be nervous. You're giving away things that are worth thousands of dollars. Did it work right away? Did it take, uh, you know, a few tries? I guess, do you remember the math the first time it worked, where you're like, "Holy shit, we just ... Th- this is like 10 cents a user," or whatever. You know? Like, could you take us back?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I, I do remember. The first, the first one was definitely a flop. So we gave away this like $500 item, and I think 104 people, there were 104 entries total in the raffle. You know, maybe that's like 30 or 40 accounts or something like that, and no one purchased anything. So you're like, "Uh-oh."
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
And we didn't have, we, we had like, you know, no money for the business back then. It was like all coming out of my bank account. So like, "Oh, this is painful." And I'm not working, so like, you know, the bank account's dwindling at that point. Yeah, I think there's, there's always just a sweet spot between when do you know a thing's actually ... When have you proven a thing wrong that it's not going to work, and when have you given it enough legs to make it work? And so for us it was like, okay, well, now we have all those accounts who joined, and we can send a push notification. And when we do the next one and then the next one, they're gonna be encouraged to share out to more people. And so if we can see that in the next one we can go from like 100 to 300, maybe there's a pathway there. And so I think, I, I forget what the, the, the second one is, 250 sort of rings to mind, so maybe it wasn't exactly 3X, but it was 2.5X. And so you started to get this like exponential on it, and then you can sort of make the math work.
- SPSam Parr
Was the number of sellers like the metric where you're like, "We need more sellers, more sellers, more sellers"?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Well, back then, um, it was just us as the seller, and what we were trying to do is we were trying to build the buyer base because we couldn't add any seller [laughs] other than us because no one was gonna purchase anything-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
... uh, from any of the new sellers, and they weren't gonna stick around. And so the early days were about, was about getting enough demand on the platform such that we could open up selling. And so I think we, you know, we, we launched the platform in I think December 2019 was when we launched our app. And then we didn't open it up to our first seller until I think towards the end of February was when we started to have enough demand in the marketplace. And even then, we, we did an- another hack, which was anytime a seller would come on Whatnot, they'd get our audience, and then we figured out a way to cross list it across other marketplaces using our [laughs] Whatnot account.
- SPShaan Puri
Gotcha.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
And so-
- SPSam Parr
Which is like another classic thing, right? That's what Airbnb did. That's what a lot of people did.
- 28:52 – 34:03
30 sales to $2.3M in year 1
- GLGrant Lafontaine
for us was December 2019 we started it, and I bet you we did 30 sales. You know, like pretty [laughs] pretty, pretty grim numbers.
- SPSam Parr
30 in the first month?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
30, 30 sales. Yeah, 30 sales.
- SPSam Parr
That's pretty exciting. One a day. That's exciting.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. But mo- so most, so the way it actually went was the first w- first week of December, which was the first time we were all full-time on Whatnot, was like one sale. And the second week of December was one sale.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
And then I managed to like work with a Funko Pop influencer the third week of December, and then we got like 30 sales, some- something like that. And a bunch of them we priced incorrectly. So there's like a bunch-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
... of the sales were people finding mispricings in our algorithm-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
... and taking us to the cleaners.
- SPShaan Puri
The bounty hunter. [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. It was [laughs] it was like selling a $500 Funko Pop for 150 bucks because the liquidity bit of the equation wasn't very good. So that, that was, that was December. And then we, in July of 2020 is when we launched our first version of Live, and, and that's when the business really started to take off.
- SPShaan Puri
Where, where did that insight come from? 'Cause it sounds like the insight for Funko came from looking at data and trends on eBay. Where did the, the second big insight, which was live selling, where'd that come from?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
So we, when we first started the business, uh, in January, went through Y Combinator. So we originally, originally were in LA, then went up to San Francisco to go to Y Combinator, and we thought we were doing well. The business was growing, et cetera. And then we went to fundraise in the middle of COVID as a Funko Pop marketplace- And like, everyone hated our business
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, why did YC bet on you? Like, Goddamn YC's good that they bet on you guys when nobody else would one month into a Funko Pop marketplace. What the hell did they see?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
They were, they were very smart, to be honest. Um, and they bet on us m- many times throughout our journey. Like when the business started to take off, they were, like, tremendously helpful and helped put in more money into the business ahead of when many of the other investors, who you would know their names, um, were passing. The thing we were really good at, and are, are still pretty good at, is we're, we have pretty good taste, and we know how to execute. Um, and so if ever we said we were gonna do a thing, we did the thing.
- SPShaan Puri
But that first YC interview's 15 minutes. What could you have shown them in that first 15 minutes? [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I don't know. They just flip a coin, you know?
- SPShaan Puri
All right. I see. [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
We, we, we, we, we had pretty good backgrounds relative to, like, what we were doing.
- SPShaan Puri
I see.
- SPSam Parr
Wait, that's a funny line. We had good back- backgrounds relative... Meaning, like, there's no way someone this smart is working on something so silly. Surely that's a sign.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Uh, well, I guess, like, Logan, um, was, like, running eng- or running engineering at, like, pretty large resale marketplaces. Um, I worked at Facebook, I worked at YouTube. So, like, you know, we, I'd started a company before, got acqui-hired. We weren't, like, n- hugely known commodities, but clearly had a background for doing things. We built our product for the YC interview in, like, a week. Like, we built it and launched it and pushed it live so that we had something and could, like, talk about real stuff that we had done. So yeah, we just went all in.
- SPShaan Puri
You wanna hear, read my, uh, hear my notes from... Uh, that I, I just found my, my notes from when, [laughs] when I talked to Grant and I was looking at investing. I, uh, by the way, this is my, this is my personal notes. So no, no, [laughs] no, uh, no insult intended. I go, "Looks like a soccer dad. Quiet intensity, humble confidence. He seems like a serious person who's actually doing this." [laughs] I don't know. Those are my, those are my things that I wrote. Love the ending. I wrote, "Winner energy. We should invest." [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Soccer dad, huh? [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Yeah. He only heard one thing.
- SPSam Parr
Fucking bunk, right?
- SPShaan Puri
I knew he would only hear the one thing. [laughs]
- 34:03 – 34:56
$2.3M to $163M in year 2
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I wanna say, like, August or September. That was sort of, like, the business started to inflect when we, we launched live. Like, growth went to, like, 100-plus percent month over month. And probably in September, we did 250 to 300,000 in sales. So probably 10Xed it.
- SPSam Parr
Uh, gross v- gross volume.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. Our take's probably, like, 10% of that. Then, you know, it continued to inflect up. By December of 2020, we sort of ended the year at $2.3 million in total sales. And the number of employees in the business would have been, I think, about 17 or 18. Then we closed the following year at, um, 168 million.
- SPShaan Puri
2 million to 100, 100 million-plus.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
163
- 34:56 – 37:02
$163M to $1B in year 3
- GLGrant Lafontaine
million, and we would have closed that year at about 100 employees.
- SPShaan Puri
Wow.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
So 10X employees, too. And then, so, um, the following year, we did a billion in sales.
- SPShaan Puri
What happened? How did you go from 2 million to 163, 163 to a billion? What happened?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
The core live experience we built is just really fun. And it, and on the seller side, uh, you know, transformational for business building. And so if you're a seller, what was happening to you was you were very quickly starting on Whatnot. And, and, and again, it's not for everyone, but for, you know, a lot of the people who invested deeply and, and, and, and, and tried to build a really large business, um, Whatnot was a bigger channel than anything else you'd done. And, and that w- that was also a time, like, this is during COVID, and so you'd have people like, "Hey, I had a comic book shop, and people stopped coming in. Now I'm on Whatnot, and my comic book shop is doing more sales on Whatnot than, than it ever did in a physical brick-and-mortar shop. I'm closing down my brick-and-mortar shop."
- SPShaan Puri
You had the COVID e- forces everything online, but then you had the benefit of, if I'm a, if I'm selling a niche thing, I'm gonna find more buyers when I use the, the sea of the internet versus just whoever's in a five-mile radius, 10-mile radius of wherever my shop is. So that helped, for sure, in that first year.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I mean, [sighs] C- COVID definitely helped, but you know, our business has continued to do, you know, incredibly well throughout COVID. So I think, anyways, the core value was there, and then I think we, we had a really good team. So, like, the first- 30 people we hired at Whatnot are lights out good. And we knew, we figured out how to... Like, the big unlock was sort of how to l- how do you launch multiple categories, and what is the mechanism for doing that fast? And as you start to launch multiple categories on a marketplace, people in each one of those categories start to cross-pollinate, and everything that you had working in one category sort of compounds across all the categories.
- SPSam Parr
What did you have to change about your personality to grow? Because
- 37:02 – 42:04
How to be a billion-dollar founder
- SPSam Parr
you went from being a very scrappy guy doing everything to being the CEO of a company that's worth a billion plus dollars. What had to, uh, that you've just compressed a lot of personal growth in a very short amount of time, I'd imagine.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I, I think probably people overemphasize the like, um, "I need to change because I'm a leader of a large organization," because I think they look at certain models of what suc- success looks like at really large companies, and those are sort of like stoic, slightly stilted people who operate in a corporate manner. And, you know, the, there are, there are definitely things that you have to learn and adjust as you go, but I would say I actually just generally try and be me. And, you know, the, the nuances to that, of course, though, are... A- and by the way, I had to learn this. I, I thought I would have to change more. Like, I think one of, one of the mistakes we made early on in the business was just trying to be, you know, too corporate, for lack of a better word, which is like hire some executives from well-known companies, hire people from well-known companies, and it's sort of like one of those things where the story sounds good, but the reality is, is often, um, you know, a lot different. 'Cause you, you'd sort of go like, "Oh, you ran such and such at this big company. You must know what you're doing." A- and that's actually turns out to be, like, broadly incorrect. Like, no, someone needs to know and be able to sort of articulate in specific detail what, what they're doing and how they're doing it. So one of, one of the biggest lesson that I've learned through the, the history of, of Whatnot is to just be really maniacally focused on what the problems and opportunities are and don't let anyone necessarily tell me what the right pathway is into those problems because running Whatnot, I, I tend to have a much... And my team has a much better grasp of what the nuance and context around those things is. And so be focused on what we're trying to achieve, and then be really, really nimble around how to achieve it, as long as we know the details around it. Okay, now back to your question, what did I have to learn and change? So one was actually not to change too much because actually we're pretty good at what we do. There's a re- you know, the, again, we got really lucky, but, you know, there's also a reason we were able to take advantage of the luck. Then the things that I had to personally adjust is, you know, the company's 1,400 people today, as an example, and you do need really good systems and process to run a company at this scale. And so you have to learn how to, like, you know, one of the products you end up building is, you know, I call it my operating system. How do I run the company to make sure that we're moving in the right direction, we're making good decisions, and we're executing at a really fast pace? So I had to learn how to, like, construct an operating rhythm across the business. There were certain points in time in the business where the accountability wasn't high enough, growth drifted, people's focus drifted, and we had to, like, fix that. We're a pretty straightforward group of people. Um, we always have been. Like, if you went into the early Slack of Whatnot, when someone did bad work, we'd like, "You did bad work. This is bad. Let's fix it." And a- as you get bigger, the peop- you know, 1,400 people at Whatnot, there's a bunch of people who sort of, like, know me as, like, the person on Zoom they've seen in, like, a, a, a team meeting and, like, a, a title that would scare people. And so I've had to soften my approach to try and get the best out of people, and again, because I, we always wanna get the best out of people. You wanna get the best work. You know, what would have worked in the early days be like, "Yo, this sucks. We gotta do better," someone might cry today if I do that, and we don't want anyone to cry. Um, and so you, you just sort of have to, like, know how to flex a little. Again, you don't wanna be dishonest and you don't wanna be, like, this fake person, but you have to know how to flex to get the best out of people. I think those are probably my, my biggest things is just, like, be maniacally focused on the problem, be, be conscious of the context and around how other people are going to view things and, and adjust that to make sure you're getting the best out of people in the company. There's so much corporate gobbledygook from people. I think most of it's bullshit. It's all about, like, what's your problem? How do you solve your problem? And how do you do it in the best way?
- SPSam Parr
You're, you... We, we've kind of coined this term. We call it, like, aw shucks success. Like, if you read Warren Buffett's book, you learn that, uh, even though he has this attitude that he, uh, this image that he's like, "Oh, I just, you know, I just hold forever, and I just buy good companies," and you're like, "Oh, anyone can do it," and then you read about him and you're like, "Oh, well, you were a math prodigy at a very young age, and you've been, like, you're just super high IQ and patient, and you have this beautiful temperament." With you, you have that same thing where you sort of are like, you kinda have this Canadian Midwestern energy where you're like, "You know, we were just... I think we just made decent decisions, and we got a little bit lucky." And then, but the reality is, is that there's, like, personality traits or something underneath there that is, like, world-class, and it's very clear you have that. What would you say your reports would say or investors would say, "This guy's world-class at blank"?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I think one of the, coming back to, like, my distaste in stories, one of the, one of the faults in human
- 42:04 – 45:44
Going all the way deep on a single problem
- GLGrant Lafontaine
behavior is people tend to follow stories, and they tend to follow other human beings. One of the things that I consider myself lucky with is I've, I've obviously learned a tremendous amount over six and a half years, but I, I was put in this situation, and there will be plenty of other people if they were put in the right set of situations would be able to learn. So that's, you know, the luck element. The things that I, I think we're, we're pretty good at are getting to the root. So when, you know, like, what is actually happening here, and how do we know? So seeking the truth maybe is a, is a, is a simple form. And so one of the things that always breaks at Whatnot is our discovery systems. A-as the company grows and grows and grows, you get more and more supply and, and you're balancing all sorts of, like, competing objectives. You gotta make comic books succeed, and you gotta make women's fashion succeed, and you gotta make fresh food succeed, and you gotta make the UK succeed. And we have this feed that recommends people all of these things. And our discovery team is very studious. They'll go really deep in the data. They'll A/B test a bunch of things. I'll see something, a metric go down in the business, and I'm like, "Uh, this looks like a discovery problem. I've seen this before." I'll talk to the team. The team are like, "No, we tested it. We know exactly what's happening." I'm like, "No, how do you know exactly what's happening? Walk me through every little thing in the system. So what's happening to this seller? Have you gone and looked at every individual seller, how impressions have changed for that seller, how that's happened across category, how it's happened across country, how many lost this much in impressions, how many gained this many?" Because just 'cause the A/B test, as an example... So A-A/B tests are notoriously bad on network systems. So if you, like, A/B test a thing, you change the feed, um, which means you change what users see, and then people all of a sudden start to go into different streams. Now, as they start to go into different streams, the sellers will behave in different ways, which means you pollute both sides of your A/B test, as an example. You know, there's a example where we start going through all this, and, you know, we, we sort of get to the bottom. We dissect every bit of s- bit of seller behavior, and like, okay, well, you know, maybe these sellers, their discovery changed a little bit, but these ones increased and increased engagement. I'm like, well, I'm looking at the metrics. The metrics say everything went down on a macro level, even if it's not in your A/B test. How do you actually know that? Then we plot the elasticity curves of those sellers. We actually see that there are certain parts of the platform where if you, um, even if you improve buyer engagement, if you take away certain impressions from certain sellers, their businesses shrink more than the engagement draw increases it. And so you have to look at these things on much larger time horizons and in different ways. And so, you know, the... A classic way someone would approach that problem, particularly like a lot of the ranking companies or, like, social media companies that look at near-term engagement. And you go, "Okay, of course, you're right. You've done this before. You've worked at Facebook and Google and wherever." And I would go like, "I don't think... How do you actually know that? Everything's a little bit different. Let's go all the way to the bottom." And then we unearth, like, an incredible insight that will shape our discovery systems for the future. So that would be, like, the example of, like, just going immensely deep into the problem.
- SPShaan Puri
I love how, like, two minutes ago, you were like, "Business is not that complicated."
- GLGrant Lafontaine
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And then you're like, "So we have, you know, our sellers in our fresh food department, and so we plotted the elasticity s-curve." You know, it's like, yeah, yeah. Super simple. Me and you, we do the same thing. Yeah, it's great. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
You, you sort of answered the question in a way where your answer is probably true. You are world-class at that. But the real answer is the way that you answered it. You're just... I think you are very smart, and more so, your rate of learning seems very, very, very high.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, look, you, you do have to learn fast. But even, even what I just described to you, if you whittle it down to simple components, all, all elasticity curves is, is like what happens to a seller when you increase their viewership and you decrease their
- 45:44 – 49:48
Don’t let people use fancy language
- GLGrant Lafontaine
viewership. How much does their business grow or shrink? And that's like, you know, if you're, if you're running a platform where you have a feed and you're sort of directing traffic around things, it's probably a thing you should know. And it's, it's just... it sounds more complicated 'cause you use elasticity, but actually, like, how much do businesses grow and shrink subject to the number of buyers that you throw in their, put in their feed? One of the things that tends to happen, you know, we hire all these smart people. In tech, there's all these, like, smart people. They went to, like, all these fancy schools and what have you, and they like to be smart. They like to sound smart, so they use big words, and, and the big words will just, like, obscure a bunch of things. And so of-of... my job oftentimes is to try and get to, like, the simple sets of truth around things. What is the simple sets of things? What do we know, and how do we know it? And so if you start to use a bunch of fancy words, I'm going to make you explain it to me like I'm in, you know, uh, in middle school. And if you can't explain it to me like I'm in middle school, you probably actually don't know what you're talking about, and I just will keep going and going and going and going and going until it can be explained.
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, I love that. I, when I... So we got acquired by Twitch, and I got to be at Twitch for a couple, uh, two years. And, uh, you know, I didn't... I, I probably learned, uh, many things, some things not to do in a company, some things, you know, to do. But one of the most important to-dos was Emmett was like this. He, he would sit in these meetings, and so- you know, a team would come in, and they would say something, and he would ask them this, "Is that... Well, what do you mean? How do we know that? What does that mean? So no, what, what exactly did we do? Why, why do we think that that was the right thing to do?" Very simple questions. Questions that, you know, uh, uh, that are second-grade reading level, and then the answer would come back at a PhD level. Then he would bring them back down. "No, no, no. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let's... Walk me through this." And then by the... You know, within 15 minutes, they've sort of been undressed. You could realize they don't know what... They themselves don't know what the hell they're talking about. They weren't trying to mislead. They just di-didn't really themselves get to the root of it. Um, and everybody was taking things at face value, and it was leading to bad decisions. I loved it. I was like, "This is amazing. This is like, this is finally like..." You know, the, the, the best work is happening in those sessions. Most people in the company hated it, and they used to give him feedback all the time that this sort of Socratic method of, of sort of debating almost, like, semantics and getting down to, like, the b- the base level of things, like talking in binary basically at the end.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, I do that with my wife. I'm like, "Were you thinking of me when you made this meal? Because you know I don't like zucchini." [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] No, I just want to know.
- SPSam Parr
And tonight. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, but I, anyways, I loved it, and I... It almost gave me... I, I like that you said it here because when I saw him doing that, it in a way gave me permission that, like, I didn't really fully do before that, meaning, A, I didn't want to be a jerk, but, B, I didn't want to be an i-idiot. I hired all these smart people. They're telling me things that sound smart. Maybe I shouldn't get caught up trying to, like, get to, you know, base level understanding of this myself. And what I realized was no, no, no, that was actually a very good val- uh, virtue to have inside of a company. And when people knew that, they showed up very differently to every meeting after the first few times that it happens.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I think, um, one of the, one of the things that we've tried to do here is we try really hard for the culture to be about getting to the right answer. And so if we find people sort of recoil from that, we'll give them feedback, and when I hire executives, they n- I will let them know upfront they're not beyond reproach. Their, their methods are, at best, sort of neutral when they come in. And so we've, we've sort of built this team now who likes that way of working, who's given permission to work and seek the truth and go to the bottom, and I think that's been... I think if you don't have probably both of those, it doesn't work. Well, now, th- that is a challenge of when we're hiring, I know we had, like, 500 people this year or something, you know, keeping up with that. But if you look at, like, my team of people, my team, I've been working with most of my team for four-plus years now, and then most of their teams are pretty similar, and so you get, like, a really nice, "No, this is how we do things here. This isn't meant to be mean. This isn't meant to, like, understand the truth," 'cause it's quite unnatural to be challenged at that level of detail.
- 49:48 – 50:43
Being disagreeable but likable
- SPSam Parr
Hey, can I ask you about that challenge? Because I'll, I... There's two phrases and words that I really dislike. One is first principles, and two is contrarian, because typically the people who talk about that stuff are either kinda dumb, or they're smart, but they're an asshole when they deliver it. You seem smart, and you seem like a pretty kind, likable guy. Was there a person or a book or something that inspired you to be disagreeable but not rude? Because it's quite challenging.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I, I think for, for me, what I always try to do is imagine myself in someone else's shoes, and imagine when I had certain stuff like this, you know, happen to me, and what would enable me to do my best work? And I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. There are definitely times where I am not as nice and where I will, you know, you know, sort of be at the end of my, my
- 50:43 – 53:39
The reason I left Facebook
- GLGrant Lafontaine
level of patience. I, I try to make it few and far between, but it happens. One of the examples that sticks with me for a l- a lo- for a while is, and it's, and it's actually one of the reasons I ended up leaving Facebook. I was in, uh, this big product review with a bunch of very well-known and very senior people, and there was... The thing I was bringing to a product review was, was a project that I unfortunately got stuck on, I did not wanna work on, and it was one of the most politicized projects across the entire business. And, you know, I put together this thing, and I spent boatloads of time because all these freaking VPs would never agree with anyone. It was just me running in circles like this. And you get to the review, and the guy who's running the review basically just starts yelling at everyone. And I'm like, "You know what? I've been up the past couple weeks till past midnight, and I worked like hell on this, and no matter who you gave this thing to, it was gonna be a absolute cluster [beep] ." You know, now running my own large organization, I see what he did wrong. I know what I would do differently, but the way that was handled was never gonna make me wanna do more great work. And so I basically, at the end of that, I was like, "I'm out of here. I'm not dealing with this." And, and so I just think about ultimately what you wanna do is you wanna get good work out of your organization, and being mean, nasty, or combative will almost never do it.
- SPSam Parr
I know that you don't, uh, you kinda said you don't like talking about numbers because you're like, "There's still a lot to do," but of all the people who have done business, which is, like, billions of people, there's probably only, like, 300 or 400 or 500 who are worth over a billion dollars below the age of 40, and you're one of them. I think according to Forbes, you're worth, like, $2 or $3 billion. Surely there's been a moment where you're like, "This is pretty awesome." Have you had, uh, a moment like that?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Fr- from, from time to time, it's, it's nice to, to reap some of the rewards of what's been built. You know, it's really nice n- to be able to take care of my family and take care of my family properly. And yeah, look, I'm... It's, it's not lost on me that, that, like, in six and a half years we've been able to build something, you know, pretty massive. Millions of people build busines- or, you know, hundreds of thousands of people build businesses on Whatnot, making billions of dollars. You know, 1,400 people at Whatnot. A lot of people have been there for the entire journey. Um, so yeah, you know, it feels good, but also, I think we still have a lot that we wanna do. And, and again, I, I sort of, you know, you get a little... I, I don't wanna get complacent, and so from time to time I'll have a, you know, I'll reflect for about five minutes and be like, "Wow, this is pretty insane." But then, you know, I'm, I'm in my 30s still. There's 1,400 people who came to work at Whatnot that I have high accountability for. Raised a billion and a half dollars from investors who we have high accountability for. And so, um, you know, it doesn't do m- me any good patting myself on the back.
- 53:39 – 54:13
“If you think you’re moving fast, you’re probably not”
- GLGrant Lafontaine
That doesn't get me to the next step.
- SPShaan Puri
Sam, I'm gonna start saying that, "I take care of my family. I take care of my fam- family properly." [laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
I'll let you figure out what properly means. I'm just gonna start using that ever. I, I, I enjoyed that one. That was good. You said, you had a good quote. You said, "If you think you're moving fast, you're probably not." [laughs] What, what do you mean by that?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, almost everyone who says they're moving fast is moving slow, if I'm being honest. If you have to talk about it, you're moving too, you're moving too slow. If you even have time to think about it, you're moving too slow.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- GLGrant Lafontaine
And, and frankly, you can always move faster.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Hey, what's the weirdest trend of a thing that's, that people are buying
- 54:13 – 56:21
Trends: NeeDohs, squishies, gold bars
- SPShaan Puri
and selling on Whatnot that, you know, an average person wouldn't even, wouldn't even realize there's a craze going on or a, a behavior, uh, that, that you've seen on there?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I mean, probably the most popular thing this year that other parents probably know about is, like, NeeDohs and squishy toys. I don't know if you guys have younger kids. You know, you brought up some of the other ones that I think are really fun, like just people selling crab and meat.
- SPSam Parr
I think there's, like, people selling gold bars, aren't there? Like miners selling bars?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, go- bars of silver, bars of gold, um-
- SPShaan Puri
Like, who-
- GLGrant Lafontaine
You know
- SPShaan Puri
... like, from the mine? Like, who [laughs] what's happening?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I mean, the, you know, huge range. Um, could be anywhere from, like, a coin shop to, you know, there are, there are, like, mints that, like, mint coins [laughs] and gold to like-
- SPShaan Puri
You know, are they basically just, like, selling- cutting out the middleman and just selling direct on Whatnot? Is that the, kind of the idea?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Uh, yeah, some, some of them are.
- SPShaan Puri
Do you think there's an opportunity, like, you know, with Twitch, for example, people built Streamlabs. They built other, like, tools and, and companies on top to service the e- e- ecosystem that you weren't, that the platform wasn't gonna build. What do you think is, is a kind of good tool or business that somebody could be doing on top of the, the growth of Whatnot?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah, I mean, I think, so, so stepping back at, like, a macro level, I think you're gonna see over the next decade that live commerce will be 30-plus percent of all of e-commerce. It means this is just like an absolutely enormous market.
- SPShaan Puri
What, what is it today?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
When you take the top three biggest players in the market across, like, US and Europe, you're probably around 30 billion, something, something like that.
- SPShaan Puri
Sorry, but just to show the, the percent, you said it's gonna be 30%. That means it's current- it's currently at what? Like, how much room do you think there is there?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Single, single-digit percentages.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay. So it's got a 5X from, from here at least.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I, I, I think 20, 30, 30X plus.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
And the, the comp is sort of like what's happened in China and Asia. So in Asia, it's, in, in China, it's about 40% of e-commerce. And, and if you looked at, you know, the growth of Whatnot and the engagement on the platform, sort of looks like it's headed that, towards that direction. And so, you know, that's, that's a market in the hundreds and hundreds if not, you know, a tr- a trillion dollars into the future if you go outside of
- 56:21 – 1:00:19
9-figure sellers
- GLGrant Lafontaine
China. And so there's just gonna be a, there will be a ton of opportunity. So the biggest live shopping businesses are gonna, like, the pe- people who are selling are gonna do a billion dollars plus in, in revenue. Like, our, our biggest seller probably does a couple hundred million.
- SPSam Parr
You say your biggest seller is doing nine figures?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Well, well over, yeah. Mul- many, multiple nine-figure sellers.
- SPShaan Puri
Selling what?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Collectibles, fa- you know, we have brands doing tens of million, hundred million in fashion.
- SPShaan Puri
But are these, like, um, these are not individuals. These are just, like, large companies? Or what, what is, what's going on? Like, I guess give us the hero story.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
The be- it's probably, like, the, the biggest are people who probably started as, like, individuals, or maybe, like, two or three on Whatnot and just took advantage and grew it. So, like, the, the oper- the biggest operation that I can think of started initially as, like, three or four, three or four people. It's now probably 150 to hun- 200 people, almost completely built on Whatnot. And they're just, like, really savvy businesspeople who sort of jumped on the, the live, um, shopping train, um, and built a really large business. And so if you, you know, if you sort of imagine a future where there's five, you know, three or $400 billion in sales in the US off of live, there's going to be an immense number of, of really large businesses built. And, like, the biggest sellers in, in China will do a billion dollars plus a year, as, as just, like, an example. Um, then there, there's a bunch of peripheral services around there. So one of the things we're starting to see is, um, like, wholesale marketplaces directly supply, supplying our sellers is a really big opportunity 'cause they need a lot of inventory. Um, I've, I've definitely seen a couple of wholesale marketplaces get pretty substantial fundraises, and, uh, I know a huge chunk of that growth is off the back of Whatnot, as an example. So I think there's, there's a lot of opportunity around helping these people source really great supply. And then you're sort of starting to see what they call MCNs around this stuff, so multi-channel networks, which is a bunch of people who specialize in helping people run their, their live shopping businesses. So I think all three of those will, will probably see a proliferation over the next decade.
- SPSam Parr
This is nuts. I-
- SPShaan Puri
That's wild.
- SPSam Parr
You're just a killer. I, I didn't realize... I knew what Whatnot was. I've, I've used it. I did not... I guess I, I saw the numbers, but, uh, it's kind of like now that I see what you're saying, I'm like, "This is insane. This is so much bi-" Like, originally, when Shaan first told me about this, I had the reaction I imagine a lot of people did, which is like, "This is silly. This is small. This, this is nothing," uh, like a, like a multi tens of billions of dollar company. But this is insane, and I understand why you have helped lead it there.
- SPShaan Puri
Sam, you should start, you should start, start your denim shop on Whatnot.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, I buy, um, I buy a ton of... I, I'm a p- eBay power user. I buy a ton of, uh, I collect old denim. It's very weird. But, uh, I guess I got to start using Whatnot.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Oh, it's a, it's a popular, popular, uh, segment.
- SPSam Parr
Do you have any hobbies? Do you, do you like any weird stuff now that you, uh, see all these other weird things that people buy and sell? Do you have any, uh, interesting hobbies?
- GLGrant Lafontaine
I mean, I still collect things, but, you know, nothing, like, obscene. I've sort of been collecting type one photos, which are, like, original photographs. Um, yeah, that's probably the one thing I've been purchasing most recently. And then other than that, my hobbies are, are pretty, pretty tame. I'm Canadian, so I still play hockey.
- SPSam Parr
Shaan, you had a good read on him, man.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Winner energy, I told you.
- SPSam Parr
Winner energy. Wow. Great read.
- SPShaan Puri
Grant, thanks for coming on, man. This was fun.
- GLGrant Lafontaine
Yeah. Th- thank you, guys, for having me. It was a really fun conversation. You guys made it, made it super fun.
- SPSam Parr
Well, thank you.
- SPShaan Puri
Thank you.
- SPSam Parr
We appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 1:00:19
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Transcript of episode TAHAlGH_DK0
