a16z Podcast - How Whatnot Built a Global Marketplace

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

a16z General Partner David George is joined by Grant LaFontaine, co-founder of Whatnot, to unpack how a marketplace that started with collectibles evolved into one of the world's leading live shopping platforms. Grant traces the company's origins from selling Pokémon cards online as a kid to discovering live commerce by watching Whatnot's earliest customers hack together sales on social media. They discuss why Whatnot thinks less like a traditional e-commerce marketplace and more like a digital shopping mall, where discovery, entertainment, community, and commerce all happen at once. Today, users spend roughly 95 minutes a day on the platform, and most aren't even buying something on a given day. They also explore how Whatnot is enabling small businesses to reach global audiences, expanding from collectibles into categories like fashion, food, and golf, and using AI to make sellers more efficient without replacing the human connection at the center of the experience.   Resources: Follow Grant LaFontaine on X: https://x.com/GrantLaFontaine Follow David George on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83 Follow Whatnot on X: https://x.com/whatnot Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you look at e-commerce today, you have to know exactly what you're looking for. Live commerce is over a third of all commerce in Asia. Is that right? 30 to 40% of all commerce is live commerce in China. What is it in the U.S. today? Single digits, really. Experience is really broken. Transactions weren't integrated well.

Shipping wasn't, payments, discovery, CX. And we just thought we could build a better one of those. I want to start all the way back when you were a kid. Your first online sale was a... a holographic Pokemon card. At that point in time was when eBay was getting started and was like, wait, you can make money

from Pokemon cards? Like, I love Pokemon cards and I can make money from doing it. The first one sold for 10 bucks. That's probably the true origin stories of whatnot. Users spend 95 minutes a day on the platform.

Is that right? Yeah, about 95 minutes. It's incredible. Users don't give a shit about the market. They care about whether they're going to enjoy the thing. It provides value. And that's the experience

that makes it fun and keeps you coming back. What are the most exciting things that you're building towards that you want to grow into over the coming 12 months? Yeah, I mean... Online shopping has become incredibly efficient. What Not is betting it can also be fun. In this episode, A16Z general partner David George sits down with What Not co-founder Grant LaFontaine

to unpack how live shopping combines commerce, entertainment, discovery, and community in a way traditional e-commerce doesn't. Grant shares how selling a Pokemon card online in elementary school eventually came full circle with What Not, why the company stumbled into live commerce by watching what its users were already doing, and how the platform has expanded from collectibles into more than 100 categories. They also discussed the small businesses being built on the platform, why trust and safety accounts for a significant part of the company's investment,

and how What Not is using AI to help sellers scale without taking the humans out of the experience. Okay, I want to start all the way, when you were a kid. So I understand it that your first online sale was a holographic Pokemon card and the buyer mailed you a money order and you cashed it at the post office and then you shipped the card.

So what age was this? This is like a formative young age? I must have been third or fourth grade. I want to say so I don't know, how old are you there? Like seven, eight, nine, something like that. Yeah, okay. So there's all these stories of a founder kind of finding their market this early.

Tell me about you kind of having that experience and making it a formative piece of starting whatnot eventually. Well, I think all kids back then, there was just a Pokemon craze. Pokemon cards became big, get my dad to go bring me to the shop, open my Pokemon cards. I had my binder, had all my Charzards in it,

had everything. And I down sort of the street from where I was living, I was like a little lake and hangout area. And me and my friends used to go there and we'd trade Pokemon cards. And I'd try and hustle people on getting the better cards. and then at that point in time was when eBay was getting started

and their biggest competitor was Yahoo Auctions and I don't know how I found out about it but I found out about it and was like, wait, you can make money from Pokemon cards I love Pokemon cards and I can make money from doing it and so I got my dad to help me set up an account

and I posted my bunch of my holographic cards online and the first one sold for 10 bucks and it was the holographic chancey card. Chancy's the chance of card, yeah. And the thing that always feels funny about that is that at that point in time, internet was so nascent, you weren't doing payments online, which is just crazy. Yeah. Yeah, this is clunky. I mean, yeah, early days, there was no trust to do it. The infrastructure didn't exist, but there's

no trust either, obviously, so. Yeah, but it's also pretty wild that there was enough trust that someone would send you the money order in the mail and sort of hope you would then send the card back. So I remember, I got the money order. And I go, okay, I can send the card now, Dad, can you bring me to the post office? I'm going to wrap it up and send it off. And that's probably the true origin story. of whatnot. Whatnot's pretty funny in that. Almost all of my experience in life, like the big bits,

all of my core jobs have come full circle and whatnot. Yeah. It's like Pokemon cards. And I worked at YouTube for a long time. And so I did video. And then I was working at Facebook and was working on Marketplace stuff.

And so I did some of that and then whatnot, sort of the amalgamation of all those things. Yeah, the perfect combination of all those trends. Yeah, it's awesome. So there's different stories about how you and Logan decided

to start the company. How did you guys settle on doing this? Yeah, so there's Logan's story and there's my story. Yeah, okay. And look, both of them are like actually correct. I think Logan's just more nostalgic about, Logan's story actually, I don't know, maybe it's slightly better. So it was, Logan's origin stories start in like January 2019, I want to say. We did a trip to Tokyo over the hall over like New Year's.

And we were drinking in a bar and we both of us had started businesses before. And so a couple drinks, we just started talking about, oh, what did we do one day? And then we started talking about building some marketplace business. We bought 30 or 40 domains. And then, like, the trip ended. We got back to the real world and sort of nothing happened for six, seven, eight, nine months, basically. And so that's all true. Like, we talked about it and, like, we said we're going to do it.

But then there was like this huge launch moment. Yeah, there was this, like, huge intervening period. And so mine really was sometime around October of 2019. And, you know, I was like, Logan, remember we talked about doing those businesses, and we brought those hundred domains when we were drinking in a bar in Tokyo that we never used. Maybe now is the time. Logan was, like, wrapping up his job. And I still had mine, but I was like, I need to go back to building some stuff. And we could see a bunch of our friends getting back and the collecting. So it was like, Funko Pops and comic books and sports cards. And I was like, know a little bit about that industry. And I'd always dabbled

even after Pokemon cards, got into sneakers for a while, and then I was doing some of the Funko stuff for a while. And so I sort of knew that market, and it just hasn't changed in a really long time. And everyone like us now is older, is starting to have some disposable income, they grew up on a mobile phone.

I think there's something around collectibles and social commerce. If someone's going to figure it out, why not us? Let's see what we can do. Yeah. And so then December 2019, we'd both quit our jobs,

and then we went full time. and launched our authenticated Funko Pop marketplace. So I got to ask was Whatnot one of the domains that you had bought? No, that would have been, can you imagine? Pretty good. That would have been amazing. Yeah, it would have been amazing. Actually, so the origins of What Not name, which everyone always asks,

because Whatnot's a very memorable, good name. We've had it for a very long time. So actually, one of the domains we bought, again, think we were drunk in a bar in Tokyo, so it wasn't as if our judgment was immensely good, was like always legit. And I'm not joking because that was the first domain for whatnot.

And the reason it was the first domain for whatnot is we're always obsessed with let's just make progress. Yes. Let's just do a thing. I was like, we don't even have a product. We don't have anything. I don't want to sit here and talk about

a branding exercise for days. Just go. Let's just go. Yeah. And so it was always legit. And then the first designer on whatnot, this guy John, who I worked with my prior startup, before we were about to launch,

He's like, I cannot be associated with a company called Always Legit. That is a horrific name. And it was. I named it and it was a horrific name, but I was like, it doesn't matter. We don't have a product. Who cares what it's called if you got nothing? And so he made us get into a room, do a brainstorming exercise for like an hour. We got a list of 10 names.

We're like, all right, we'd be comfortable if we got any of these. Let's go see if we can buy the domain. And so I got three. John got three and Logan got three or four. and Logan got whatnot. And of all those domains, all of them would have cost like $100,000 plus dollars and we had raised no money.

Logan got a hold of the guy who had whatnot. And he, the guy goes, I'll sell to you for a Bitcoin. So I was an early Bitcoin investor. So I had Bitcoin. This is amazing. And Bitcoin back then was worth $10,000. So not like what is worth now.

And Logan haggled them down to half a Bitcoin. No way. Yeah. You got it for five grand? Yeah, for five grand. And so... I hope the guy held on to it. I hope so, too.

What a great price for that domain. And so then the escrow service we were using. It was kind of funky because they didn't really use Bitcoin before. So anyways, we sort of like sent the Bitcoin off. And then he sent the domain to us. And he sent us the wrong domain. He sent us, why not instead of whatnot. But we're like, not a bad.

Also a pretty good option. Pretty good name. But we're like, let's try and see if we can get whatnot. because we always had this idea that we're going to sell lots of different categories of items and collectibles. And so whatnot always felt a little better. And luckily, I think it took us 36 hours to get a hold of the guy. But 36 hours later, we were able to get whatnot. And we were almost, why not, for a period of time, which also would have been okay.

That's great. That's an awesome story. I haven't heard that piece of it before. Okay, so at the time that you guys were getting started in the U.S., Facebook marketplace was working, right, in the sense that there was a lot of activity, right? and you could sort of see the network effect behavior at that time. Is that right? And then in China, this had actually started to happen, right? The live shopping trend had become a category.

It was early. And then in the U.S. and the Western world, you had QVC. So talk about just the state of the market when you guys were actually starting and what you saw that made you have conviction that this was going to be a really good idea. So I guess the state of the market when we started it, so keep in mind this is sort of, December 2019 going in just before COVID.

So one, I'll preface it was saying, we probably weren't very sophisticated on the state of the market. We had no idea like live shopping in Asia. We had heard of QVC. And my impressions of QVC was like, no one wants to shop on QVC. Like it's like grannies shopping on QVC.

So no one my age wants to shop on QVC. And look, there was a bunch of other big marketplaces around. But we sort of, you know, you know, there was a bunch for our market initially, which was collectibles. You know, there were a bunch of players who were doing it, but I sort of felt like it was a little bit stagnant, like the space hadn't changed in a while. So that was sort of like the state of the market. And by the way, I would just say, I think it's probably an asset, not a liability,

that you guys didn't know much about the market. Because if you knew a lot about the market, you'd probably try to build what existed in the market, but, like, iterate on it as opposed to an entirely new thing. Yeah, but I was 1,000% of it. an advantage. Yes. Because look, I think the punch line, and I can get into it, is users don't give a shit about the market.

Yeah. They don't care about the market at all. They care about whether they're going to enjoy the thing. It provides value. Yeah. And so there's this counterintuitive thing, which is if you try and build a market, it oftentimes distracts from, like, are you building a really great user experience? Yeah.

Because, again, like, no one's, the consumer is not making a, going like, oh, this is a live shopping market. and, you know, I can transact all these things in this market. They're going like, well, no, what are you going to provide from you? What's the value? And so there were a bunch of players who were trying to do that because I sort of saw what was happening in Asia. It's a monster market.

It's like a trillion-dollar plus market today. And we were like, we don't know. We were building our Funko Pop marketplace. We were talking to our customers every single day. And then we saw our customers hacking social media, interesting ways. And the way they were trying to hack it was selling like selling items and live video. but the experience was really broken.

Yeah. Transactions weren't integrated well. Shipping wasn't payments, discovery, CX. And we just thought we could build a better one of those and it would solve the problems of the customers we had in the platform. Logan locked himself in his room for a few weeks, came out with the first version of the product, and I went live, sold a lot of items,

and the rest is sort of, you know, history from there. That's incredible. Yeah, awesome. So it's interesting to think about what you all provide. So I think it's a super insightful way to say, like, customers don't give a shit about a market. Like, they want a product that's compelling to them. Like, what value do you provide to them? Shopping often starts with intent.

So how much of the idea of this is, like, entertainment versus intent? And, like, how do you think about the distribution of the behavior of the buyers and what they're getting out of you? Yeah, I think what not sort of like analogous to visiting a store. Yeah. Which is, I don't know, if I go to the mall or I go to a set of retail shops, I'm sort of like I kind of know I want a thing, but I don't know exactly what that thing is. I'm going to go walk in that shop. I'm going to go and browse around.

And so I don't, what have I bought, reason? I bought some new shoes. And so I went on to go get some new sneakers. I was like, oh, yeah, I need some sneakers. I'm going to type in the website. and I go like, I spent 30 minutes browsing, didn't know what I wanted, I came away on the other side, and that's sort of the whatnot journey.

Whereas if you look at a lot of the e-commerce companies that have been built in the past, you know, prior to us, you sort of know exactly what you want. It's not really great for discovery. It's not really great for an experiential or having fun or being entertained. So I think that's sort of the analog with whatnot. Maybe you know you want a thing, but you don't know what that exact thing is. You're going to come on whatnot.

You're going to look for it. going to have some fun along the way. Yeah, that's awesome. So there's all of those elements embedded in the products. So watching, chatting, bidding, buying, returning. Are there pieces that I'm missing? Um, you mean, just generally discovery. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you've covered a lot. I mean, the, the, the, one of, one of the reasons why whatnot has worked so well to date is that there's a lot of value because it's such, you can do so many different things. Sometimes you're going to look for a great deal. A lot of times you're going to just have an experience and be entertained. So on any given day, most people on whatnot don't purchase anything. The vast

majority of people don't purchase anything on whatnot. They're just going and they're watching and they're talking with people. Entertainment. Yeah. And so that's why I can do like it. Like it's not a perfect analog, but I like going to the shopping mall. Like you go to the shopping mall, I hang out with your friend, at least, you know, when I was growing up, hang out with my friends, walk around the mall, have some fun. You know, many times I wouldn't purchase something. Just go there for an experience. I am struck by, obviously, we're longtime investors with you. And so, you know, this is, this is not new news to us. But it is striking when I describe it to other people, how big the market for this is and how big whatnot actually is. So, you know, you talked about Asia. Live commerce, I think the

latest is it's over a third of all commerce in Asia. Is that right? Yeah, I've heard anywhere about 30 to 40% of all commerce is live commerce in China. Yeah. And then what is it in the U.S. today? Oh, I mean, single digits, really. Single digits. And do you think there's any, is there any reason why you don't think that that gap could close over time? No, I think it's clearly going to close. It's just a richer way in which to sell and build a business. And it's just more efficient. So, you know, if you're a fashion brand or store, you could go and set up a brick-and-mortar shop on, I don't know, pick a famous street. Fifth Avenue, you know, it costs you millions of dollars and rent.

And you're restricted to a set of people who come to your shop at a, you know, nine to five on whoever is in New York City. And that's a great experience. You can feel it. You can talk to people. You can discover things on whatnot. You can set up for $0, and you can have an entirely global audience that is unbounded.

And so I think that value prop means if you're a business, you know, selling consumer goods, I think you're eventually going to get into live commerce. I don't think you're going to be able to ignore it. I think you're going to be able to bring in lots of audience, and that's why you see that 30 or 40% number in China.

Yeah, so it's like the, if you think about just sort of marketplace dynamics and the network effect, the supply side is so compelling. because it's zero, it's effectively zero cost. And with a very compelling supply, dynamic, lots of sellers, that drives demand, right? Yeah, it makes total sense.

I mean, the numbers are just staggering. You said it's about a trillion dollars in Asia. That's a huge number. I looked it up before this. So I think U.S. e-commerce is about a trillion two, if I have that roughly right. And one of the historical knocks I've heard people say about whatnot is, well, you know, Etsy's only so big or eBay is only so big. And I always find it funny when people mention that.

You know, eBay was actually, if you go back something like 10 years, it was like 15% of the overall market. And it's 80 billion of volume, still, by the way. It was like 15% of the overall market. Now it's less than 1% of the market. So the big change that's happened is the market. has actually just grown beyond it. And so I always say it's way too limiting to think about, you know, what your market is or what you can go get to think about that. eBay is sort of a proof point to me that there's at least an $80 billion market of long-tail commerce to go get

online. But the real thing is like how much of the gap between $80 billion and $1.2 trillion do you go capture because the experience is so much better? Is that a, would you agree or disagree with all that? Yeah, look, I think, you know, to tear it apart a little bit, people will peg us to eBay because we sort of got started in collectibles and that's where eBay got started. But actually, the live format is just very, very different. Yes. It means that a whole swath of different types of sellers can use the product. Yes. Anywhere from, you know, when eBay got started, a lot of it was like smaller resellers.

If you look at whatnot today, it's fundamentally like small business and then we're getting into brands. And a lot of those brands and small businesses would typically not be on either. Yeah, they would never, yeah, it wouldn't make sense to anything. Yeah, yeah. Maybe they have a brick and mortar shop or they have a Shopify store or, you know, a bunch of things like that. So I think the seller base is inherently much more diverse.

And then the thing with Live is it's, it's demand expansionary. because you go in and discover new things you didn't know that you would be interested in. Yes. And so if you look at e-commerce today, you have to know exactly what you're looking for. So all it's really done is take a bunch of offline sales and bring them online in a more efficient way.

You still got to know exactly what you want. And as live commerce proliferates, it's just going to expand that market. So not only could it be 30 or 40% of that market, that market's going to get a lot bigger. Yeah, it's sort of like it would be more akin to not so much like e-commerce, but more like the inception of department stores or shopping malls. Yes.

Right? Which is like actually expanded the demand characteristics of the market. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes total sense. So the other thing that is so striking about the demand side, and then I want to talk about the supply side in great detail because I think that's one of the most exciting things about the platform. is on the demand side,

I understand users spend 95 minutes a day on the platform. Is that right? Yeah, about 95 minutes. It's incredible. That's like a shocking number and puts you on par with social platforms, like the entertainment platforms. Yeah, and it's because it's fun.

Yeah. You know, if you were to sort of simplify what not down on like the buyer value problem, it's a fun experience to shop. And there's not a whole lot of fun experiences shopping online. And, you know, historically you'd go to a shopping mall and, you know, the dynamics there are all changing, so it's not even as fun to do that anymore. And as I said earlier, most people aren't even purchasing. They're actually just going to have a

good time and experience it. Most people don't per, like, you know, greater than 80% people don't purchase on a given day. They're just there watching, having fun. It's amazing. Yeah, it's an, it's an incredible sort of blending, if you go back to your history of entertainment plus filling the shopping need on the demand side with new discovery and over 80% of people not actually even transacting. It's like clearly a form of entertainment. I actually, I spend a lot of time on there entertaining. I transact too, but yeah, I get it. That makes sense. Okay, so that's like the origin story, like the layout of the market at a high level. And I want to go into categories and stuff. But I'd love to talk about the supply side, like the sellers on the platform. Talk about

the scale that you have of sellers. And, you know, this is sort of one of the underrated things by being a marketplace. You enable all this new business creation or business growth of existing businesses that otherwise would not exist. So I'd love to explore that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most fun things about whatnot is it's fundamentally empowering small business. And if you look at a lot of what's happened, again, in e-commerce over the past 20 or 30 years is it got so efficient. And one of the ways to make it so efficient is to obscure who you're buying from and obscure the ability for people to like build brands and businesses around it and

whatnot, sort of the polar opposite. If you're on whatnot, you're going to have your store, you're going to have your brand, you're going to have your customers, they're going to come back to you. And so, you know, I think that's one of the best bits of the platform is, you know, we're generating billions and billions and billions the dollars for small businesses. And these are anywhere from, you know, one and two-person operations all the way up to maybe a couple hundred folks at the high end. That's amazing. Yeah.

The, uh, I think you've compared it in the past to like a local shop owner or like a local pub owner. And if you think about what whatnot allows that person to do compared to, say, Amazon, which is like highly utilitarian, um, you know, highly gamified and like competition among first party, third-party international sellers. Like, it's just an entirely different experience on the cell side that will allow someone who's creative and ambitious to thrive maybe in a way that they wouldn't otherwise on those platforms.

Is that fair? Yeah, I think it just empowers small business in a way where maybe the prior trend was, it's almost disempower small business and obscure them away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we gather the power centrally. Yeah, yeah, that's well said. That's well said. So you have really interesting insight into all of these things.

different types of entrepreneurs, right? So I'd love to maybe start with just, you know, the original categories, like collectibles, cards. Like, what are you seeing about the behavior in that market? So I think we're seeing a continuation of the trends that we saw when we first started the business, which was one of the reasons we came back in the collectibles. We saw a bunch of people getting back to the market. It was people like us who had maybe some money and were buying things that were nostalgic from childhood and getting back into unique, you know, things that they loved. And that trends basically continued on abated for the past six and a half years. And so, you know, I think collectibles is largely going like mainstream now for like lack of a better term. You have,

you have mainstream celebrities in it, you have athletes in it. And so I think a lot of people thought, I think of collectibles as like a niche thing, but it's actually becoming a corporate. part of pop culture. And I think over the past six years, we've just seen that evolution continue to grow and grow and grow and grow and, you know, in fact, a lot of the new art that people are collecting is now, like, trading cards with that are going for millions of dollars. And, you know, maybe your parents, if they were doing high-end art or, you know, you were lucky enough to have parents who could do that, they're buying, you know, famous artists. And now people are buying, like, the one of one. Yeah, Rickie Ford cards. Yeah. Yeah. LeBron James refractor.

or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's super cool. Yeah, and it's obviously there's an entertainment element of that as well. I've been struck by the scale of some of the businesses that are on whatnot. So obviously you're empowering millions of small businesses. But, you know, if done right, a business owner can actually build something north of $100 million of revenue and highly profitable, all on the back of whatnot. Yeah, you know, the biggest businesses on whatnot are probably doing upwards of $100 million

in revenue and, you know, with like very strong. EBITDA margins, 20, 30, 40 plus percent. You know, what we try and do, you know, so if you looked at whatnot last year, we did, you know, over $8 billion in sales. And so far this year, we've done over $8 billion in sales. So you know, you very fast growth. And we don't, we take a small fraction of that.

Yeah. You know, we, and we'd like to, we want it, we're not raising fees or doing that. It's really important that the businesses take the majority of that. And then our business grows with, with all those businesses. So we just spend, you know, all of our time. trying to help build great businesses and make sure that people who are transacting

with those businesses have a great experience. Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It's one of the great and probably lesser-known, less covered stories of small business empowerment in the U.S. And increasingly now in Europe, which we can talk about. But it's super exciting. I want to shift gears now. You know, that's obviously a little bit on the supply side.

You know, talk about some of the categories that you're working on. Obviously, you know, started with collectibles, and cards, and then now you have success, you've had a lot of success in fashion, which is obviously one of the biggest categories in commerce, and there's many others. So just talk about the category expansion, evolution over time.

Yeah, I mean, I guess if you look at whatnot today, we're selling things in 100 plus categories. And then we're always investing in new areas to help people grow up their business. So some of the fun ones today are like fresh food and drink where you can buy fresh fish sourced from the dock in San Diego or... By the way, Ben and I

started buying it after dinner. Yeah, yeah. All that. It's awesome. Another one, my favorites, there's a barbecue restaurant where you can get

amazing barbecue and, you know, I have a bunch of it sitting in my freezer. You know, I just think, you know, the fresh food, it's early days and fresh food for us,

but I'm excited to buy it because I think the food supply chain is so opaque in the U.S. And it's really nice to know where your food comes from and be able to get the store

around it. You know, flipping gears, I don't, for whatever reason, all my friends golf now. I'm at that age your life. Because you're getting old. Yeah. My hip's bad, so I can't do any other real sports. And so golf on whatnot is having a huge surge. You know, that's growing hundreds of percent year over year. We have all these golf shops selling. And so that's, you know, another fun category that I've been buying in and a team's been investing in. And you sort of, there's so many beyond that even. Yeah, it's sort of like anything that's highly considered, right, should be a fit

for whatnot, where you know, an explanation, a personality that goes along with it, you know, a story behind it, like, would be a fit. I think anything that someone would build a retail shop around would work on whatnot. Anything, anything that would be in the shopping mall, yeah. Literally

anything, because if you were going to go visit a store, well, you can do it from your couch on your phone. Yeah, that's awesome. What about clothing and apparel? particular. I mean, women's fashions, woman is now our biggest category. Wow. And, you know, there's a huge range of stuff in there. I'd say that, you know, the dominant is actually sort of looks like almost T.J. Max like, which is like old season inventory, really good pricing. And so you can get some like amazing deals on like great brands. Same with sneakers on whatnot. It's almost,

I forget the name, like I was growing up. There'd be those like discount shoe stores where you you get like the Knikes for like 40 bucks or something. There's a lot of that and it's just great great deal. I shopped at a lot of those. Yeah, it's like, you know, there's nothing that beats a good deal when you're shopping. DSW. Yeah, that's the one I was thinking. It's like the DJ Max shoes.

Yeah, and so there's a ton of that popping up in like the fashion apparel side and lives really great. It helps you move a lot of volume and that when you can move that much volume, you're willing to take the discounts and it gives customers a really good price. Yeah, 100%. 100%. The other part of expansion is, obviously, you've had a tremendous amount of success in the U.S. Talk about the expansion into Europe and what's worked, what's not, what are the learnings?

Yeah. So today I think we're in about 10 countries. So U.S. and Canada and North America, five countries in Europe, and we're also now in Japan and Australia. So we're sort of, you know, have a good chunk of the globe covered. I think the most interesting thing that I think would be counterintuitive to folks is that we've just seen it work the same way across all of those countries

which is there's all the small businesses that we've helped create in the U.S. We've been able to help create there and collectibles and fashion and electronics and a lot of the dynamics are incredibly, incredibly similar. And so, you know, we're just incredibly bullish that, like, live is an incredibly durable value medium in which to shop from. So one of my favorite stories is the recent one that you've told us about the seafood distributor who messaged you on LinkedIn. And first of all, like, what an inbound.

And then you went live the following week. And he sold, I think, between $3,000 and $4,000 of fish during the pilot phase. So what happened that caused that and like how did that even come about? Again, I think the punchline there is it live is just a really good median to discover things, right? And so his story is, you know, he's been in the fish business for a while, deeply knows what he's selling. He's going to bring you the freshest fish from San Diego at that time of year and he's rotating the stuff in when it's seasonal. and he's so incredibly knowledgeable. So we watch a show and you see this type of fish

you've never heard of and you talk about how it's sustainable and that just got off the pier today and here's the fisherman who caught it. That's just a great experience. And so, you know, we can take him and we can push him to the whatnot now as a large, you know, buyer base and, you know, it's pretty easy then to generate thousands of dollars an hour in sales with that experience.

And so... Yeah, and imagine him trying to sell over the internet at large. Like, they're actually like, is, like, he can access his local market, but there's probably no way for him to really access a nationwide market except for something like this.

And I think it's really hard, like buying food on the internet, like fresh fish. Like, because it's one of those things you're like, wow, fresh fish on the internet. Like, how do I know if it's good? If I can get sick from it? And so video just really enhances to trust.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like a real identity of the person. Yeah, you can talk and ask questions. You can know how he's going to pack it. And if you're on a static website, like, well, I hope it's good. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

That is very true. Okay, so if you think about the platform and you've talked about the scale that you guys are running, it's just massive, massive scale. And so you, one of the things I've used to describe you and Logan is relentlessness. Like, you guys are relentless and, execution, what are some of the things that you encounter with that amount of scale that you constantly have to be on top of? And I think this is a big, like obviously now you're big and you have a network effect, but I think this is one of the big underrated things that allowed you

to win in the early days is that you guys were constantly on top of anything that could break. So I'd love to understand some of those big things. Yeah, I mean, it's challenging. I mean, you know, there's so many dimensions to to trust. So there's sort of like, is the platform reliable and is it working and is it stable and is it fast? And so, you know, we measure just everything. Yeah. Like I think the punchline on trust is measure everything. And we invest a lot in it. So I think trust and safety, particular, on whatnot is about 40% of employees. Wow. Yeah. It's a huge, huge investment from us because It's a challenging one, and you don't want to put your credit card in a place you don't trust.

You certainly don't want to buy fresh fish from a place you don't trust. Right. And so I think a lot of measurement, a lot of user feedback, and then a big just people investment to get the thing done is sort of what drives it. And then, you know, the problems are pretty diverse, and you have to make sure you're building the right set of things for it. So as an example, we have a system in the background. We just call it a rules engine.

And it takes in billions of data points at this point in sub one second to be able to take down or find any range of bad behavior on the platform. So if you harass someone in a live stream, the LLM will detect it. It will get plugged in. to our action rules engine, we'll look at the history of the seller

and based upon other signals, programmatically take them down, suspend them, ban them, warn them. If you are not shipping on time, the rules engine will do the same thing. If you have a high refund rate, the rules engine will do the same thing. And so these are

ever changing problems and issues. Yeah, the waiting of scoring and things like that will always change. Yeah. And so you constantly have to be on top of these things. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you think about just how many concurrent users you have and how many transactions

you process per day. Yeah. I always, the analog I like for trust and safety is, so, you know, tens of millions of people use whatnot every day. Yeah, yeah. And so the trust and safety team is basically the police force and the legal system of whatnot. You've got to write your policies. You've got to be people who enforce your policies.

and, you know, in a city that has 10, 20 million people, you're looking at a city the size of Tokyo or, I mean, maybe a better landologue would be like, I mean, it's a couple of New York cities. Yeah, two New York cities. Two New York cities. And, you know, in New York, it's not perfectly wrong. And so there's going to be some bad things that happen.

People get arrested. But at our scale, because of some of the systems we build, that is actually far, far fewer problems. And then, of course, look, if whatnot is a business for a small business, everything's on video. So if you're a small business, you want to build a great business.

Any good business knows you've got to have repeat customers. You've got to invest in a customer experience. So our sellers reinforce it. Then you're on live video. So it's not, you know, you're not going to get away with too much on live video. You know, things happen. And then you sort of go,

okay, we put 40% of the company on, you know, law enforcement effectively. a trust and safety team. And so, you know, it still means it's challenging because if you're running the, the, the police and legislative system of New York City, that's a challenging and hard job that you always have to be on top of and be, you know, looking for what the new areas are to invest in and improve. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

This makes total sense. The, so it's actually a good segue into the topic of AI, because obviously you're using cutting edge AI to do a lot of the trust and safety. work. Maybe taking a step back with AI, though, you know, maybe front facing in the product side, you know, not the back end. You know, you have a very inherently human platform where buyers and sellers are engaging as humans. What are the learnings about how to employ AI most effectively while also preserving that human connection? Yeah, I mean, I think the good thing is some of the platform self-reinforcing,

which is, you know, if someone goes over Thaupon, I don't know, building an A avatar, people aren't going to come back to them. Right. It's not good business. Because the core of whatnot is you visit a shop,

you know the shop owner, and then you know the people who frequent that shop. Yeah. And that's the experience that makes it fun and keeps you coming back. And so anyone who's good is not

trying to rip out the human experience. Anyone who's good is going to enhance, is going to try and enhance that. And so then where AI comes in is, well, how do you help someone keep it human but run their business more efficiently? Yeah. So whether that's like listing items,

we can make that much better. We, you know, when you're setting up a live stream for the discovery systems, oftentimes you need to add a lot of metadata. We can infer all that metadata with LLMs. we're investing in it from an analytics perspective so we'll tell you where your business is doing well where it's not doing well, where you can improve it.

And so, you know, honestly, in a fairly succinct way, what we generally do is look at where we're deploying AI and where it's being efficient for us and then try and expose it to the sellers. Yeah, that makes total sense. And if I hear you right, that doesn't involve like giving sellers avatar tools or something like that to try to build scale or something like that.

At the end of the day, we'll put energy into what's going to be good for the buyer and it's going to be good for the seller. But today, we don't see a need for avatars because that's not why people come to whatnot. Yeah, they come for the human connection. Yeah. Totally agree. That makes a ton of sense. We've covered a ton of ground.

We've talked about, you know, the platform today, the origin story, supply side, demand side, whatnot is definitely one of the most interesting and unique companies that we've invested in and, you know, I've been very fortunate to be part of your journey. In closing, I would love to hear just what is next. Like, what are the most exciting things that you're building towards that you want to grow into over the coming 12 months? Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's relatively simple, which is there's just an incredible amount of work to do to help more and more businesses grow on and whatnot. And so over the next 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, a lot of it is just like making sure sellers can run better businesses on whatnot,

giving them the tools to run better businesses, opening up and making the experience better for more categories on whatnot. So one of the ones that I've been dying to do is like, I want to do cars on whatnot because you should be able to buy a car on whatnot. And how cool would it be to be able to see the full experience, get the video behind it? Oh, this is, that's an awesome. idea. Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. It might be not good for my bank account.

And I'm obviously obligated to try it out. You got to test all the products. You got to talk food it. And so I think there's just a huge amount of investment just continuing to make sure, help people build better businesses. And then, you know, in order to do that, we have to have a really great buyer experience. Yes. Because in order to build a good business, people have to come back. And so we're going to continue to make sure we're investing customer support, trust and safety, bringing down shipping prices, improving the selection and quality of the products on the platform. And that's really it. Now, maybe we'll launch in some more countries. We'll do some cool stuff like cars.

You know, eventually we'd like to get into liquor, beer, and wine. So there's a whole litany of things that we're excited to do. But fundamentally, it boils down to help more people build businesses and make sure that the people transacting those businesses are having a great experience. it's an awesome way to close. Your maniacal, relentless focus on the seller experience, obviously drives the buyers and then making the buyer experience as affordable and as good as possible

is clearly working. So thanks for the time, Grant. So fun to be with you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family.

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