Inside Whatnot's Bet on Live Shopping

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. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - The Holographic Pokemon Card That Started It All 03:49 - How Grant & Logan Settled on Whatnot (Drunk in a Tokyo Bar) 09:18 - The State of the Market: Facebook Marketplace, China & QVC 12:41 - Entertainment vs Intent: What Whatnot Actually Sells 21:18 - The Supply Side: Turning Sellers Into Real Businesses 29:22 - Expanding Into Europe & the Seafood Distributor Story 32:47 - Operating at Scale: Staying on Top of What Breaks 39:34 - What's Next: Cars, More Countries & Better Businesses 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: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.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 http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you look at e-commerce today, you have to know exactly what you're looking for.

• 0:05David George?

  Live commerce is over a third of all commerce in Asia. Is that right?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Thirty to forty percent of all commerce is live commerce in China.

• 0:13David George?

  What is it in the US today?

• 0:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:24David George?

  I want to start all the way back when you were a kid. Your first online sale was a holographic Pokemon card.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  At that point in time was when eBay was getting started. And I was like, wait, you can make money from Pokemon cards? Like, I love Pokemon cards. I can make money from doing it. The first one sold for ten bucks. That's probably the true origin stories of whatnot.

• 0:44David George?

  Users spend ninety-five minutes a day on the platform? Is that right?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, about ninety-five minutes.

• 0:49David George?

  It's incredible.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:59David George?

  What are the most exciting things that you're building towards? That you want to grow into over the coming twelve months?

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:07Erik Torenberg?

  Online shopping has become incredibly efficient. Whatnot is betting it can also be fun. In this episode, A16Z general partner David George sits down with Whatnot 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 Whatnot, 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 one hundred categories. They also discuss the small businesses being built on the platform, why trust and safety accounts for a significant part of the company's investment,

• 1:50Erik Torenberg?

  and how Whatnot is using AI to help sellers scale without taking the humans out of the experience.

• 1:59David George?

  Okay, I want to start all the way back when you were a kid. So I understand that your first online sale was a holographic Pokemon card, and that 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?

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I must have been in 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?

• 2:26David George?

  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.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Well, I think all kids back then, there was just a Pokemon craze.

• 2:39David George?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  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 Charizards in it, had everything. And down sort of the street from where I was living, there 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. 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. The first one sold for ten bucks. And it was the holographic Chancy card.

• 3:24David George?

  Chancy was the Chancy card, yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  And the thing that always feels funny about that is that at that point in time, the internet was so nascent, you weren't doing payments online, which is just crazy.

• 3:33David George?

  Yeah. Yeah, this is clunky. I mean, yeah, early days, there was no trust to do it. The infrastructure didn't exist, but there was no trust either, obviously, so.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Yes, 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. 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 stories 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 in whatnot.

• 4:08David George?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  It was 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.

• 4:20David George?

  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?

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's Logan's story and there's my story.

• 4:31David George?

  Yeah, okay.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  And look, both of them are like actually correct. I think Logan's just more nostalgic about... Logan's story is actually, I don't know, maybe it's slightly better. So it was... Logan's origin stories start in like January twenty nineteen, I want to say. We did a trip to Tokyo over the whole, 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 of drinks, we just started talking, oh, what should we do one day? And then we started talking about building some marketplace business. We bought thirty or forty 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.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Like, we talked about it and we said we were going to do it. But then there was like this.

• 5:19David George?

  That wasn't the launch moment.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was this like huge intervening period. And so mine really was sometime around October of twenty nineteen, yeah. And, you know, I was like, Logan, remember? We talked about doing those businesses. And we bought those hundred domains when we were drinking in a bar in Tokyo that we never used. Maybe now's 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 neglecting. 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. I 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.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  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, maybe why not us? Let's see what we can do.

• 6:21David George?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  And so then December twenty nineteen, we'd both quit our jobs. And then we went full time and launched our authenticated Funko Pop marketplace.

• 6:32David George?

  So I got to ask, was Whatnot one of the domains that you had bought?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  No, that would have been, can you imagine?

• 6:38David George?

  Pretty good. That would have been amazing foresight.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it would have been amazing, actually. So the origins of Whatnot 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, I 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.

• 7:07David George?

  Yes.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Let's just do a thing.

• 7:09David George?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  It 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.

• 7:16David George?

  Just go.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Let's just go.

• 7:17David George?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And so it was Always Legit. And then our, the first designer on Whatnot, this guy John, who I worked with on 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?

• 7:38David George?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  And so he made us get into a room, do a brainstorming exercise for like an hour. We got a list of ten 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 a hundred thousand plus dollars. And we had raised no money. Logan got ahold of the guy who had Whatnot. And he, the guy goes, I'll sell it to you for a Bitcoin. So I was an early Bitcoin investor, so I had Bitcoin.

• 8:15David George?

  This is amazing.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  And Bitcoin back then was worth ten thousand dollars. So not like what it's worth now. And Logan haggled them down to half a Bitcoin.

• 8:24David George?

  No way.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:25David George?

  So you got it for five grand?

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, for five grand. And so.

• 8:28David George?

  I hope he got held on to it.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  I hope so too. What a, I mean, a great price for that domain. And so then that's growth service we were using. It was kind of funky because they hadn't really used 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.

• 8:49David George?

  Also a pretty good option.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Pretty good name. But we're like, let's try and see if we can get whatnot. Cause we do like, 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. Luckily, the, I think it took us 36 hours to get ahold of the guy, but you know, 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.

• 9:11David George?

  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 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.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  So I guess the, the state of the market, um, when we started it, so keep in mind, this is sort of December, 2019, going in just before COVID. Um, so, so one, I'll preface it with saying, we, 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.

• 10:06David George?

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And my impressions of QVC was like, no one wants to shop on QVC. Like it's like crannies shopping on QVC. So no one my age wants to shop on QVC.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  And look, there was a bunch of other big marketplaces around.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  But we sort of, you know, there was a bunch for our market initially, which was collectibles. Uh, you know, there are 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, that was sort of like the state of the market.

• 10:34David George?

  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.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:46David George?

  As opposed to a new, an entirely new thing.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. But the, I was a 1,000% in advantage.

• 10:53David George?

  Yes.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Cause look, I, I think the, the punchline, and I can get into it is, um, users don't give a shit about the market.

• 11:01David George?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  They don't care about the market at all. They care about whether they're going to enjoy the thing. It provides value.

• 11:07David George?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  And so there, there's this, um, counterintuitive thing, which is if you built, try and build a market, it oftentimes distracts from like, are you building a really great user experience?

• 11:17David George?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Cause 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 of these things in this market. And they're going like, well, no, what are you, what are you going to provide from you? What's the value? And so, um, uh, there were a bunch of players who were trying to do that because they sort of saw what was happening in Asia. And it's a, it's a monster market. It was like trillion dollar plus market today. And we were like, we don't know. Uh, we were building our Funko Pop marketplace and we were talking to our customers every single day. And then we saw our customers hacking social media in interesting ways. And the way they were, were trying to hack it by, was selling like, um, selling items and live video, but the experience was really broken.

• 11:53David George?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  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, uh, 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, um, I went live, sold that, sold a lot of items. And the rest is sort of, you know, history from there.

• 12:19David George?

  That's incredible. Yeah. Awesome. The, 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 to product, like they want a product that's compelling to them. Like what do you, what value 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?

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think, um, whatnot is sort of like analogous to visiting a store.

• 12:55David George?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  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, 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 browse around. And so I don't, what if I, what if I bought, I bought some, some new shoes. And so I, 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'm going to 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, um, 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 in experiential or having fun or being entertained.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  So I think that's, that's sort of the, 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. You're going to have some fun along the way.

• 13:50David George?

  Yeah, that's awesome. So there's all of those elements embedded in the product. So watching, chatting, bidding, buying, returning. Are there pieces that are missing?

• 14:03David George?

  You mean, just generally discovery?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 14:34David George?

  Entertainment. Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and so that's, that's why I, I can do, like, it's not a perfect analog, but I, I like the sort of analog of like going to the shopping mall. Like you'd go to the shopping mall, hang out with your friend. At least, you know, when I was growing up, hanging 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.

• 14:52David George?

  I am struck by, obviously we're long time 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?

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. I've, I've heard anywhere about 30 to 40% of all commerce is, is live commerce in, in China.

• 15:20David George?

  Yeah. And then what is, what is it in the U S today?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Oh, I, I mean, single digits really.

• 15:25David George?

  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?

• 15:31Speaker 00

  No, I think it's, it's clearly going to close. It's just a richer way in which to, to sell and build a business. And it's just more efficient. So, you know, um, 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 that 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, um, whoever's in New York city. And they're like, that's a great experience. You can feel it. You can talk to people. You can discover things. Well, and whatnot, you can set up for $0 and you can have an entirely global audience that is, you know, unbounded.

• 16:15David George?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  And so I think that, that value prop means if your business, um, 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, uh, in China.

• 16:33David George?

  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, uh, dynamic, lots of sellers, that, that drives demand.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:50David George?

  Right?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:51David George?

  It makes total sense. I mean, the numbers are just staggering. You said it's about a trillion dollars in, in Asia. Um, that's a huge number. I looked it up before this, so, uh, 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 is only so big or eBay is only so big. Uh, 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.

• 17:35David George?

  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, 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?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Look, I, I think, um, you know, to, to tear it apart a little bit, um, people will peg us to eBay because we sort of got started in collectibles and that's where eBay got started. But actually the, the live format is just very, very different.

• 18:21David George?

  Yes.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  It means that a whole swath of different types of sellers can use the product.

• 18:28David George?

  Yes.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Anywhere from, you know,

• 18:32Speaker 00

  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 eBay.

• 18:45David George?

  Yeah, they would never, yeah, it wouldn't make sense.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:12David George?

  Yes.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  And so if you look at e-commerce today, it's so, 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've still got to know exactly what you want. And as like 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.

• 19:39David George?

  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.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:48David George?

  Right? Which is like actually expanded the, the demand characteristics of the market.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:53David George?

  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?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, about 95 minutes.

• 20:11David George?

  It's incredible. That's like a shocking number and puts you on par with social platforms, like entertainment platforms.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's because it's fun. You know, if you were, if you were to sort of simplify whatnot 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, 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, like, you know, greater than 80% of people don't purchase on a given day. They're just there watching, having fun.

• 20:52David George?

  It's amazing. Yeah, it's, it's 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.

• 21:33David George?

  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.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think the, 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 that are going to come back to you. And so, you know, I think that's one of the, one of the best bits of the platform is, you know, we're generating billions and billions and billions of 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.

• 22:30David George?

  It's amazing. Yeah, the, 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, you know, highly gamified and like competition among first party, third party, international sellers, like it's just an entirely different experience on the sell 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?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:11David George?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, gather the power centrally. Yeah, yeah, that's well said. That's well said. So you have really interesting insight into all of these 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?

• 23:35Speaker 00

  So I think we're, we're seeing a continuation of the trends that we saw when we first started the business, which was one of, one of the reasons we, we, we came back in the collectibles. We saw a bunch of people getting back to the market with people like us who were, 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 trend's basically continued unabated for the past six and a half years. And so, you know, I think collectibles is, 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, and a collectible, I think of collectibles like a niche thing,

• 24:19Speaker 00

  but it's actually becoming a core part of, 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, you know, 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.

• 24:46David George?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  You know, yeah, LeBron James refractor or something like that.

• 24:51David George?

  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, I think, 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.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the, 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, 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.

• 25:33David George?

  So you know, very fast growth.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  And we don't, we take a small fraction of that. You know, we, we, and we'd like to, we're, we want to, 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.

• 25:55David George?

  Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It's, it's, it's one of the great and probably lesser known, less covered stories of small business empowerment in the US and increasingly now in Europe, which we can talk about. But it's, uh, 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, you 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.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 26:51David George?

  By the way, Ben and Ben and I started buying it after dinner.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. 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, and I just, I think, you know, the fresh, it's, it's early days in fresh food for us, but I'm excited to buy it because I think the food supply chain is so opaque in the US. And it's really nice to know where your food comes from and be able to get the story around it. You know, flipping gears, I don't, for whatever reason, all my friends golf now. I'm at that age in my life.

• 27:26David George?

  Because you're getting old.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  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, it's growing hundreds of percent year over year. And we have all these golf shops selling. And so that's, you know, another, another fun category that I've been buying in, the team's been investing in. And you sort of, there's so many beyond that even.

• 27:49David George?

  Yeah, it's a 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.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  I think, I think anything that someone would build a retail shop around, they'll work on whatnot.

• 28:07David George?

  Anything, anything that would be in the shopping mall, yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Literally anything, because if you were, if you were going to go visit a store, well, you can do it from your couch on your phone.

• 28:15David George?

  Yeah, that's awesome. What about clothing and apparel in particular?

• 28:20Speaker 00

  I mean, women's fashions, woman is now our biggest category.

• 28:23David George?

  Wow.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  And, you know, there's, there's a huge range of, of stuff in there. I'd say that, you know, the dominant is, is actually sort of looks like almost TJ Maxx like. Yeah. Just 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, when I was growing up, there'd be those like discount shoe stores where you get like the Nikes for like 40 bucks or something. There's, there's a lot of that and it's just great, great deal.

• 28:52David George?

  I shopped, I shopped at a lot of those.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, yeah, you know, you, there's, there's nothing that beats a good deal when you're shopping.

• 28:59David George?

  DSW.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's the one.

• 29:01David George?

  It's like the TJ Maxx or shoes.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so there's, there's a, a ton of that popping up in like the fashion apparel side. And live's 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.

• 29:15David George?

  Yeah, 100%, 100%.

• 29:18David George?

  The other part of expansion is obviously you've had a tremendous amount of success in the US. Talk about the expansion into Europe and what's worked, what's not, what are the learnings?

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So today, I think we're in about, we're in 10 countries. So US 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. The, I think the most interesting thing

• 29:49Speaker 00

  that I don't, 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 US, we've been able to help create there and collectibles and fashion and electronics. And a lot of the dynamics are incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly similar. And so, you know, we're just incredibly bullish that like live is an incredibly durable value medium and much to shop from.

• 30:23David George?

  So one of my favorite stories is the, is the recent one that you've, you told us about the seafood distributor who messaged you on LinkedIn. And first of all, like what an inbound. And then he 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?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Again, I think the punchline there is that live is just a really good medium 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 you can watch his show and you see this type of fish you've never heard of, and you talk about how it's sustainable, and that it just got off the pier today, and here's the fisherman who caught it. That's just a great experience. And so, you know, you can take him and we can push him to and whatnot now as a large, you know, buyer base. And, you know,

• 31:33Speaker 00

  it's pretty easy then to generate thousands of dollars an hour in sales with that experience. And so...

• 31:40David George?

  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.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  And I think it's really hard, like, buying food on the internet, like fresh fish, like, because it's one of the, 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 the trust.

• 32:06David George?

  Yeah, yeah. And like a real identity of the person.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. You can talk, you can 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.

• 32:17David George?

  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 in 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.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's challenging. I mean, you know, so many dimensions 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.

• 33:19David George?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Like, I think the punchline on trust is measure everything.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  And we have, invest a lot in it. So I think trust and safety in particular on whatnot is about 40% of employees. So 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.

• 33:45David George?

  Right.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  And, and so, so those, you know, 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 our rules engine. And it takes in billions of data points at this point in sub one second to

• 34:25Speaker 00

  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 into the, 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, and look, these are ever changing, you know, problems and issues.

• 35:01David George?

  Yeah, weighting of scoring and things like that will always change. Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  And, and so you constantly have to be on top of these things.

• 35:09David George?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you think about just how many concurrent users you have and how many transactions you process per day.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. I always, the analog I like for trust and safety is, so, you know, tens of millions of people use whatnot every day.

• 35:24David George?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  And so the trust and safety team is basically the police force and the legal system of whatnot. You gotta write your policies, you gotta have your 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 analog would be like, I mean, it's a couple, a couple of New York cities.

• 35:47David George?

  Yeah, two New York cities.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Two New York cities. And, you know, in, in New York, it's not, not perfectly run. And so there's going to be some bad things that happen, people get arrested. But at our, at our scale, because of some of the systems we build, there's actually far, far fewer problems. And then of course, like, whatnot is a business for a small, small business, everything's on video. So if you're, so if you're a small business, you want to build a great business. Any good business knows you gotta have repeat customers, you gotta invest in the 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, things happen. And then you, you sort of go, okay, we

• 36:29Speaker 00

  put 40% of the company on, you know, law enforcement, effectively, our 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.

• 36:51David George?

  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 on the product side, you know, not, not the backend. 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?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think the good thing is some of the platforms self reinforcing, which is,

• 37:36Speaker 00

  you know, if someone goes over top on, I don't know, building an AI avatar, people aren't going to come back to them. It's not, it's not a good business. Because the core, the core of whatnot is you visit a shop, you know the shop owner, and then you know the people who frequent that shop.

• 37:52David George?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  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, is gonna enhance, is gonna 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?

• 38:14David George?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  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 of 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 like a fairly succinct way, what we, 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.

• 38:49David George?

  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

• 38:59Speaker 00

  No, I mean, look,

• 39:00David George?

  To try to build scale or something like that.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Look, at the end of the day, we'll, 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.

• 39:16David George?

  Yeah, they come for the human connection.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:17David George?

  Yeah, totally agree. That makes a ton of sense. But we've covered a ton of ground, like we've talked about, you know, the platform today, the origin story, supply side, demand side. Whatnot is definitively 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?

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's, it's relatively simple, which is there's just an incredible amount of work to do to help more and more businesses grow on 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 like, see the full experience, get the video behind it?

• 40:23David George?

  Oh, this is, that's an awesome idea.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. It might be not good for my bank account. And I'm, I'm obviously obligated to try it out.

• 40:35David George?

  You have to test all the products.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  You gotta dog food it. And so, so I think there's a, you know, just a huge amount of investment, just continuing to make sure, make people, help people build better businesses. And then, you know, in order to do that, we have to have a really great buyer experience.

• 40:49David George?

  Yes.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  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 in customer support, trust and safety, bringing down shipping prices, improving the selection and quality of the products on the platform. And that's, 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 were, we're excited to do, but fundamentally it boils down to help more people build businesses and make sure that the people transacting in those businesses are having a great experience.

• 41:21David George?

  That'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.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 41:37David George?

  So fun to be with you.

• 41:40David George?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 42:05David George?

  As a reminder, 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. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.