LaFontaine: Traditional E-Commerce Gained Efficiency by Obscuring Sellers
Grant LaFontaine · How Whatnot's Live Shopping Beats Traditional E-Commerce · Aug 19, 2026 · at 21:55
Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of live shopping platform Whatnot, contrasts traditional search-based e-commerce with Whatnot's seller-centric live commerce model.
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“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 is sort of the polar opposite.”
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