Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, discusses merchant scale and profitability on the live shopping platform with a16z GP David George.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Consumer Goods Businesses Will Eventually Adopt Live Commerce
“And so I think that, that value prop means if you're a business you know, selling consumer goods I think you're eventually gonna get into live commerce. I don't think you're gonna be able to ignore it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Over 80% of Whatnot's Daily Users Do Not Transact
“Most people don't, like, you know, greater than 80% of people don't purchase on a given day. They're just there watching, having fun.”
Insight
LaFontaine: AI Avatars Will Fail as Live Shopping Hosts
“If someone goes over top on, I don't know, building an AI avatar, people aren't gonna come back to them. Right. Yeah. It's not good business. Because the core of whatnot is you visit a shop, you know the shop owner, and then you know the people who frequent th…”
Insight
LaFontaine: Obsessing Over Market Size Distracts From Building Great UX
“Users don't give a shit about the market. They don't care about the market at all. They care about whether they're gonna enjoy the thing. It provides value. And so there, there's this counterintuitive thing, which is if you build, try and build a market, it of…”
Insight
LaFontaine: Traditional E-Commerce Gained Efficiency by Obscuring Sellers
“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 …”
Assertion Supported
LaFontaine: Whatnot surpassed $1B in sales last year and YTD
“If you looked at what not last year, we did, you know, over a billion in sales, and so far this year, we've done over a billion in sales, and we don't, we take a small fraction of that.”