Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, discusses how Whatnot structures its team to give engineers direct ownership over the product roadmap.
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“So today we have about 50 engineers in the team. We have one product manager.”
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More from Grant LaFontaine
PredictionOpen · timeframe Mar 2032
Whatnot Will Have the Largest IPO in History by 2032
“We're the biggest social commerce marketplace in the western world. We've had the biggest IPO ever.”
Grant LaFontaineMar 23, 2022▶ 37:0420VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
AssertionSupported
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Opinion
Clubhouse, OpenSea, and Whatnot Are the Only Notable Recent Consumer Startups
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Insight
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AssertionNot checkable as stated
Team Performance Drastically Improved After Every Employee Firing at Whatnot
“But what I can say is after every one that we have done, the team's actually improved quite drastically.”
Grant LaFontaineMar 23, 2022▶ 19:1620VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
Insight
Building Consumer Products Requires Deep Empathy Rather Than Metric Formulas
“Building great consumer companies is not a mathematical equation. It's like when I go and look around, like all of the materials about how do I build product? How do I think about this? There's so much stuff on retention and cohorts and metrics and this and th…”
Grant LaFontaineMar 23, 2022▶ 21:3620VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
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