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 34 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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.”
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.”
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.”
A/B Testing Slows Product Execution and Encourages Incremental Thinking
“I think it just slows you down, encourages incremental thinking.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Grant LaFontaine Claims Whatnot Is the Fastest-Growing Marketplace in Tech History
“We're the fastest growing marketplace ever.”
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.”
Empowering Engineers to Drive Product Decisions Significantly Accelerates Execution
“When you have the people who are actually executing and building the thing, driving the decisions, they're way more empowered and you have fewer people in the equation so you can get things done way faster.”
Big Tech Product Managers Focus Too Heavily on Strategy and Numbers
“In terms of hiring PMs, the biggest pool of PMs today are coming from like the fan companies, Facebook, Google, et cetera. And they tend to be Strategy and numbers focused.”
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.”
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?”
Taking Insufficient Risk Is a Primary Reason Scaling Startups Fail
“I actually believe one of the bigger failure points for startups, they do not take enough.”
Software Features Rarely Require Teams Larger Than Six People to Build
“Most things in software, you don't need more than six people to actually make happen.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Startups Are a Long Process Without Singular Aha Moments
“I think, like, you know, many start-ups, It's a long process in there. I don't think there is an aha moment.”
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.”
User Empathy Enables Fast, High-Quality Product Decisions Without Large Datasets
“If you are really grounded and empathetic to your users, you can make high quality decisions Without huge amounts of data, ultimately what that allows you to do is speed everything up. Add value to users exceptionally fast.”
Startups Should Cap Experimental Bets at 20 Percent of Total Resources
“No more than 20% of resource on new and exciting bets.”
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 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 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.”
Gross Merchandise Value Is Whatnot's Primary Tracked Business Metric
“The metric that we look at the most is GMV.”
User Retention Is a Lagging Indicator That Misses Emerging Platform Issues
“One of the problems with that is it's probably just like a lagging indicator of the value of the platform. People will leave once there are problems and you want to like isolate the problems earlier on.”
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…”