Grant LaFontaine
Co-Founder & CEO, Whatnot. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@grantlafontaine ↗LinkedIn ↗whatnot.com ↗
Grant LaFontaine is the co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, a livestream shopping marketplace tailored to collectibles and enthusiast goods. Earlier in his career, he worked in product management roles at Google and Facebook and co-founded Kit.com.
3shows
3appearances
65statements
8resolved
8supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Grant LaFontaine said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
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.”
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.”
LaFontaine: Top Whatnot Sellers Do $100M+ in Revenue With Strong EBITDA
“The biggest businesses on whatnot are probably doing upwards of a hundred million dollars in, in revenue, and, you know, with, like, very strong EBITDA margins, 2030, 40, Plus percent.”
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…”
Whatnot's revenue has never grown less than 90 percent year-over-year
“I don't think we've ever grown under, like, you know, top line sales. I mean, revenue's probably never grown under 90% a year. In the entire history of the business.”
TikTok struggles with commerce because users visit for video, not shopping
“Like, say, TikTok, amazing product, but people are going there to, like, watch videos, not necessarily shop, and I think that pattern's really hard. So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose built to be world class at shopping and…”
LLMs cannot beat traditional machine learning for core ranking systems yet
“In core ranking systems I haven't seen anything yet that's, like, much better than the state-of-the-art machine learning models. So I'd say we're, at least in core ranking systems, probably not a lot of LLMs.”
The average Whatnot user watches 80 minutes of video per day
“And the average person watches 80 minutes.”
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.”
The other half of the tape: Grant LaFontaine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 4
2022 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Kevin Weil: Lessons from Leading Product at Instagram & Twitter | 20VC #934 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
- 20 Product: Lenny Rachitsky on The 3 Key Roles of the Product Manager, 5 Skills All The Best PMs Have, When To Hire Your First PM, How to Structure the Hiring Process for PMs & What Leaders Can Do to Make Their PMs Successful
- 20VC: David Friedberg on The Framework for Business Value Creation, The Bifurcation in Venture Today That No One Talks About, The Impact of Interest Rate Hikes on Venture and Step by Step; How TPB Incubates, Funds and Exits The Next Generation of Companie
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Grant's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Whatnot | 1 | 34 | 100% 5/5 | full record on 20VC → |
 TBPNLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Whatnot | 1 | 16 | 100% 1/1 | full record on TBPN → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Whatnot | 1 | 15 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |