Whatnot

“Live shopping on whatnot was built by my co-founder in six weeks by himself”

“Don't do it. Never. I think there are founders I know who do it, and some of them have, like, reasonably good logical reasons for why they do it. I think if you're a founder, it's incredibly important that you fully optimize the success of your company.”

“I think in the past year, there's probably been like Three really interesting consumer companies. It's been Clubhouse, OpenSea, and us.”

“Two out of three founders, OpenSea founder and Clubhouse founder all came from Pinterest, and a huge chunk of our team is actually now from Pinterest.”

“But what I can say is after every one that we have done, the team's actually improved quite drastically.”

“At most Fang companies. The growth team is heavily oriented towards A-B testing and metrics. Our growth team is just building things and doesn't test anything and ships it fast.”

“He'll kick it off with me where it'd be like, all right, you can go and roast Grant on all of the bad things he's doing. Give him like the toughest feedback you can give him. I'll sit there and listen to it. And most of the time it's accurate. And so I'll ackn…”

“I see a problem, I let it burn for a little bit, so we can get the team focused in on that problem, and actually solve it on their own.”

“All of our engineers actually go through a product interview so that they can make sound product decisions and judgments.”

“Like all the people problems that you run into, they're not like the business problems where you can work back from first principles. People are really like complicated. When you start to run those conflicts and getting like organizations to work well together…”

“We were going to start a better full service Craigslist. Two weeks in, I was validating the business model, and I was like, we can't make money from this business. We have to change. And then we switched over to building a collectibles marketplace.”

“We actually don't explicitly reward failure, because I also don't think you want to reward failure. We make sure that failure is not punished, right?”

“Because we're in a world where we basically don't have PMs, there's so many decisions and bits of ownership that engineering is required to take control of. We don't have JIRA. No one writes tickets.”

“Most of the risks that you enumerate are never real, and so instead you kind of have to just push something out there and understand what the real risks are.”

“So today we have about 50 engineers in the team. We have one product manager.”

“We'll probably always keep the ratios very high relative to standard companies because we want to optimize for speed.”

“We're the fastest growing marketplace ever.”

“You know, I think in February of this year, our app went down every day, literally every single day.”

“We just, we rolled it out two days ago. We didn't maybe test. It was a huge, huge change.”

“No more than 20% of resource on new and exciting bets.”

“The metric that we look at the most is GMV.”

“We're the biggest social commerce marketplace in the western world. We've had the biggest IPO ever.”

“We're really heavy dog food and culture. Once a feature is ready, We just spin up a slack dog fooding channel, and the whole company goes at it, and everyone sends the feedback, and the engineers stack rank it, and figure out what they want to fix, and what th…”

“In terms of what we've messed up in culture, when we first started scaling the company, we had not like well articulated our culture. The thing was growing a hundred percent month over month.”

“Our business is very, very seller oriented. And so we do spend a lot more of our time on the supply side.”

“Met with a whatnot team, and I met with them within four or five months of their series A, they were already live in five categories.”

“Background for people, Whatnot raised about half a billion at twenty billion in valuation, right?”

“You measure GMV, which is about eight billion last year, going to sixteen billion this year, and then they get a 12% take.”