The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 28 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Clubhouse, OpenSea, and Whatnot Are the Only Notable Recent Consumer Startups
“I think in the past year, there's probably been like Three really interesting consumer companies. It's been Clubhouse, OpenSea, and us.”
Whatnot Operates Without Product Managers, Jira, or Ticketing Systems
“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.”
Startup Founders Should Never Engage in Angel Investing
“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.”
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.”
Whatnot's Growth Team Ships Fast and Refuses to Run A/B Tests
“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.”
Whatnot Operates With 50 Engineers and Only One Product Manager
“So today we have about 50 engineers in the team. We have one product manager.”
Grant LaFontaine Claims Whatnot Is the Fastest-Growing Marketplace in Tech History
“We're the fastest growing marketplace ever.”
Whatnot's GMV is doubling to $16 billion with a 12% take rate
“You measure GMV, which is about eight billion last year, going to sixteen billion this year, and then they get a 12% take.”
Openly Roasting the CEO Builds High-Trust Executive Leadership Teams
“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…”
Leaders Must Let Problems Burn so Teams Build Problem-Solving Muscle
“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.”
Organizational People Conflicts Cannot Be Solved Using First Principles
“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…”
Startups Should Not Reward Failure, But Ensure It Is Not Punished
“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?”
Pre-emptively De-risking Projects Is Inefficient for Early-Stage Startups
“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.”
Whatnot's Mobile App Experienced System Outages Every Day in February 2022
“You know, I think in February of this year, our app went down every day, literally every single day.”
Whatnot recently raised $500 million at a $20 billion valuation
“Background for people, Whatnot raised about half a billion at twenty billion in valuation, right?”
Whatnot's Live Shopping Feature Was Built by One Co-Founder in Six Weeks
“Live shopping on whatnot was built by my co-founder in six weeks by himself”
Whatnot Requires All Engineering Candidates to Pass a Product Interview
“All of our engineers actually go through a product interview so that they can make sound product decisions and judgments.”
Whatnot Plans to Maintain Unusually High Engineer-to-PM Ratios Long Term
“We'll probably always keep the ratios very high relative to standard companies because we want to optimize for speed.”
Whatnot Rolled Out a Major Browse Feature Update Without A/B Testing
“We just, we rolled it out two days ago. We didn't maybe test. It was a huge, huge change.”
Startups Should Cap Experimental Bets at 20 Percent of Total Resources
“No more than 20% of resource on new and exciting bets.”
Gross Merchandise Value Is Whatnot's Primary Tracked Business Metric
“The metric that we look at the most is GMV.”
Whatnot Grew 100 Percent Month-Over-Month During Its Early Scaling Phase
“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.”
Whatnot expanded to five product categories within five months of Series A
“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.”
OpenSea and Clubhouse Founders Both Originated From Pinterest
“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.”
Whatnot Pivoted From Craigslist Alternative to Collectibles in Two Weeks
“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.”
Whatnot Runs Company-Wide Slack Dogfooding Before Releasing New Features
“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…”