Whatnot founder: This is the future of e-commerce

Yeah, I think it's absolutely nuts.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.

What I find interesting about you Is that you went from a guy who's a kid who was working in a deli, almost failed outta high school, to now you've, you built a company that is worth $20 billion.

In all, in all honesty, I try not to focus on the number, 'cause I just like, if you focus on it, sort of scene, zip scene, and then you're like, well, I've, you know, done a lot already. I'll pat myself on the back. But I think we're pretty early in what we're doing. And so I just try not to think about it and just sort of look at like the problem ahead and put one step One foot in front of the other. And yeah, we started this thing 6 and a half years ago. There's still a lot of work to do.

Yeah, I remember because, uh, you may not remember this, but we were on a phone call and I was like, hey, this is a great idea. I'd love to invest. And you were like, ah, I don't know. We got like kind of, it's already full. And I was like, oh, but I'm such a great guy. And then, uh, you were like, we'll see. And then I didn't follow up. And, uh, that not following up cost me, cost me dearly.

I, I actually do remember.

Say more. I wrote it down in my diary that day.

Grant, what happened from your perspective?

Yeah, yeah, you tell the story.

Yeah, so, um, what happened? I mean, whenever you're like one of the, like, we've had rounds where we've been a hot company and we've had rounds where we've not been a hot company, sort of like seeing the full spectrum of things. And once the round's closed, all we really want to do is go back to work. So I remember talking to Sean and, you know, I'm like, oh, I should probably follow up with him. And then I just got busy with work and didn't, And I think I, like, in my head, I sort of felt bad because I think I should have done something, but I don't know.

Well, listen, I've been a fan. I was a fan before. I'm still a fan now. Now I'm just a bitter fan, which is a unique place to be in. And we should explain what the company is, right? You're the founder of Whatnot. What's amazing is you've built a large company in a space that I think most people would have found very small and unusual. Unusual. It's almost like a stack of unusual behaviors. We'll just give a kind of quick summary, which is if you open up Whatnot today, the app, you'll see people selling all kinds of things. It started off with collectibles and, you know, like these little Funko, Funko dolls, and then opening up packs of cards and stuff like that. But now you could buy anything. I, Sam, I don't know if you know this, you could buy crazy shit on Whatnot. I bought a crab this morning. It was like a fisherman fishing. And he's like, oh, I got these crabs. And then he's like, you can buy this crab right now. I bought a crab. He's like, great, it's going to be sent in the mail to you. Congratulations, Sean. And there's a crab coming my way now. And that's, uh, I don't know what just happened, but I have a crab coming in the mail.

The seafood's incredibly good, to be honest. Like, I actually eat it. I eat it like very regularly. It's my favorite.

Uh, it better be because I'm telling my wife I bought internet crab and, uh, I don't know if she wants that to be in the house, but I, I got internet crabs coming my way.

saw where it came from. You don't know what you're getting if you go to a supermarket.

That's true.

That thing came off the boat. The

Yeah, last week I had a full crab boil. Brought to you by Whatnot.

I can't tell if Sam is dumbfounded or his internet connection has dropped. He's made the same face for the last 30 seconds.

I want crab, but I don't understand how on earth you could start something like this because a marketplace like this seems like probably the hardest business to start. I think marketplaces are probably the most durable and also the most challenging. And when Sean originally told me this idea, it might have been 4 years ago, you might have been 2 years in. I'm like, yeah, that sounds cool, but these are impossible. How did you get your first, let's say, 1,000 sellers to even use the thing? 'Cause I'd imagine that's harder, sellers, not buyers.

Yeah, I mean, the early days it was all sort of hard. I think for us, the reason we did it is because me and Logan, who started it, we'd only ever spent our careers in consumer internet and working on two-sided platforms and marketplaces. So, And the idea of starting a B2B business sounded way more painful than starting like a consumer marketplace to us, just because of what we knew. When we, when we first got started, we didn't even have the live component. And so we had to get like immensely creative. And so initially we had a value prop of we'd authenticate whatever was sold.

Can you do it like a movie scene? So you and Logan, you're sitting somewhere, you have an idea. Who says the idea? Where are you? What happened? And then how long from there to the first Go live.

So there's sort of like 2 founding stories depending on if you talk to Logan or you talk to me. They're both technically true. So I'll go back to the first one because Logan will be annoyed if I don't tell it, which is Logan and I are in Japan over like the holidays and we were both sort of fed up with our jobs and we'd both built companies before. So we prefer to sort of like focus on building things and we're drinking in a bar in Tokyo, And we're like, let's start a business. And we bought like 50 domains and we knew we were gonna, we were like, let's start a marketplace business. And we bought all these like random domains.

Did you have an idea or just straight to the domain?

You know, it's, you're drinking in a bar. And so it's like one of our initial ideas, which we did actually sort of do for a couple weeks, was we'll build like a better full-service Craigslist, which is horrific business idea by the way. But that's what we initially started with.

That's like in the, in like the starter pack of entrepreneurs.

It's like Craigslist is so ugly. I could do better.

Yeah, the the unit economics just don't make any sense, right? And so you're selling all these used goods that are basically worth nothing, but you need to be able to you know spend a bunch of money in order to make the user experience of Craigslist better. Like be able to do so so sort of like I'll give you an example.

I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs on this podcast, and I've got a bunch of takeaways. But one of the big ones, one of them that shocks a lot of the people out there who are product. nerds, which frankly I am myself, is that oftentimes in order to turn something that's going kind of good into something that's absolutely amazing is to fix the marketing, not the product. And in particular, fix how many people know about the product. That's like the big thing. It's called attention. Say it with me, attention. And so this team at Starter Story, they put together a free guide. They call it the $1 Million Attention Guide. It's this pretty amazing 39-page document that's filled with 15 tactics to get eyeballs on what you are building. And so There's even a 30-minute recording from Pat, who's the founder of Starter Store. He has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, so he's able to put this together through a bunch of research and experience. And so if you're interested in getting more attention, which frankly you should be, everyone should be, then you should click the link below in the description or scan the QR code right here.

Can you give a little perspective to your financial situation? 'Cause we have a lot of entrepreneurs who listen, but we have a lot of people who wanna start. You're talking about hiring people already. Did you have funding or did you just have like $100,000 saved up? What was your financial situation to do that?

Yeah, probably, I don't know, $100,000, $200,000 in the bank. Okay. Not including my 401.

Did you wire that over to the company and you're like, all right, now we have $200,000. That's what we can hire with?

Check by check. You know, I just sort of go like, the implicit agreement was I'd be willing to spend up to that amount of money. doing the business before we raised money. And so like what we did early on, so our first engineer was actually based in Brazil. It was a guy that Logan used to work with and had known really well who was like super talented, but he's in Brazil and so it's much more cost effective there. He's kind of difficult to work with. So he's like really talented but really challenging to work with. So you can get him on the cheap and then you give him some good equity. And then the designer, we just gave him equity. We're like, do the branding, do all of our designs, we'll give you equity in the business, which obviously has turned out well for both of those folks. And so yeah, we're sort of doing that 24 hours into like doing diligence on delivery costs. I'm like, oh shit, we have to change this business. And by the way, they're building it. So we have, even to this day, we try and have an immense bias to action because You just learn things by doing things. So even if you're wrong, as long as you're willing to admit you're wrong and then change direction, it's totally fine. So Logan and Gustavo were building the backend, like the order system and some of the frontend, and go, everyone, hey everyone, I don't think this idea's gonna work. I'm gonna try and find something else. We're like, it's okay, we gotta build a payment system anyway. So as long as we're doing a marketplace, we'll keep building. So we're like, all right, yeah, we'll still do that. And then I was just going around the internet looking for other marketplaces that I thought were really broken. And I kept coming back to eBay, which is, you know, back in the day I used to sell on Yahoo Auctions and eBay. It was like prepayment processing online. It was Pokémon cards. And, um, you recognize this bad boy?

I don't know if you can

see it. Is that the holographic Chansey?

It's a holographic Chansey. This is your—

you guys did your diligence.

I bought this off of you 20 years ago. Our paths crossed. I bought this for $10. Yeah.

I remember that $10 money order. Definitely one of those, like, making money is the first time when you're a kid and like— The best. Something special about that. Yeah. So I kept on, you know, going through marketplaces and coming back to eBay and then like everything that was trending on eBay was collectibles and I could see all my friends were getting back into collectibles. And then me and Logan start making trips to all of the comic book shops in LA and they're like packed, they're full of Funko Pops. And so I go, everyone, I got this amazing idea. We're gonna go and change and build a collectibles marketplace, and let's focus on Funko Pops. And here's all of the reasons.

Well, what, what were the reasons? Because the way that you're describing this is very unsophisticated, and maybe it was at that unsophisticated because like if a normal person, they'd be like, well, eBay seems like they're doing collectibles pretty good. Uh, like the marketplace is, I would imagine, all about liquidity, meaning the perfect amount of buyers and sellers, and there's stuff there. And so like, what was the metric or the signal where you said this is actually attainable, or was it just, I wanna build a business, this might work, let's just see what happens?

People wanna buy used Funkos.

Yeah, there's huge demand. And then the sort of taste element of it was we just felt like the product hadn't changed in 20 years materially, and it felt like it should. And when we thought there was something around social, we didn't really know what it was, but we just sort of felt there was a, with sort of this broader trend in collectibles, which was really driven by people our age who had money getting back into things that were nostalgic from childhood. And the fact that there just hadn't been a lot of innovation in the space that probably should have had more innovation. And we could sort of squint and imagine there's a much better social experience around this where you discover new things, where you chat with people who are into the same things as you. And then yeah, we just took a leap of faith. When we started the company, one of the things we always said is we're not a sort of vision-driven company. We're a user-driven company. So we were never beholden to like our idea needing to be like the idea. We were always going to try the thing, make sure we were building a great user experience. And if users didn't love it, we were always willing to just change.

Why do you think that's important? Because I think, you know, the media, movies, TV, magazines, they love the visionary founder, the one who saw it before anybody else. And it's sexy as the founder. You also wanna be the visionary founder. And the most iconic founders, you know, Steve Jobs was, you know, I would say that was like the attribute that was associated with him was this sort of like taste, you know, people don't know what they want, but I will see what they want. I know what I'll do. I'll put 1,000 songs in their pocket, that sort of thing. Why do you think it's important to kind of highlight the other way?

When we said we were sort of a customer-driven versus vision-driven company, it didn't mean that we, we didn't think there was, wasn't any value in having an idea for how you want to build the future. You have to know which direction you're heading in. It was more of this idea though, that no matter what, it starts and begins with the customer. If you have this amazing idea for something and customers do not want that, you're dead to rights. And so if you're thinking about stack ranking these things in terms of what matters and what is of greater importance, of course it's the customer. No matter how great your vision is. And I think, you know, one of my lessons that's been even more solidified from running Whatnot is stories are sort of BS. You know, a lot of stories in terms of like business are really a mechanism to convince people to follow you versus something of like real substance. Like the things that matter actually have much, much, much more depth to them. Yeah. And so I think the, you know, the visionary founder just sounds good.

What would be an example of a kind of popular myth, but the actual substance is something different? What would be an example?

Isn't that how eBay also started? Like, it wasn't the first thing, like a Pez dispenser, but then wasn't it like, weren't they also very niche at the beginning?

The PayPal story is kind of like this, right? So you have Elon has this vision for X and he's like, it's going to do everything a bank does on the internet. It's going to be, you know, lending, it's going to be mortgages, it's going to be checking accounts, savings accounts. And that's what the vision was for that. And then here was PayPal, this little tool for eBay sellers. You know, it's like this kind of the niche within the niche. And he kind of resisted it actually for a little while. And then they finally kind of gave in and was like, well, that's what the users— that's where the demand is. That's what the users want this for. And like, of course, now PayPal can do a lot more than it did when it started, but it went after that very small market initially and finally rejected the founder vision idea going in.

There's always exceptions to the rule. So I never say, you know, definitively that's the way to do it. But I can tell you in that every consumer success case that I'm aware of, Um, the, the pathway looked like that.

I'm looking at the, uh, March 2020 web archive. I think, how, how, uh, into the company are you in March 2020?

Uh, basically like 4 months in.

Okay. I'm looking at the website on web archive. It looks pretty good. It says, uh, browse fandoms. So I guess that means like different niches of Funkos. So you can look at sports, Star Wars, Rick and Morty. And if you click on it, uh, I'm not sure if it will show you, but it looks like you have sellers on there. You're only 4 or 5 months in, but it looks like a lot of sellers, sellers are on there actually. And it even has staff picks. Like you guys are curating some cool ones. How many sellers were actually on there and how did you convince them? And also feel free to admit if there's any black hat tactics there. There's a statute of limitations.

Yeah.

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Oh, so you, they, they didn't exist then. It was just photos of them and you're like, but I'll, I'll go out and find them and, uh, I'll buy, I'll buy them.

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was a little more, you know, there's a little bit more nuance to it than that. So one of the things that we did, I don't know, there's like 100,000 Funko Pops out there. It's like an obscene number of Funko Pops. And so you do have to be able to secure them and secure them at a reasonable price and be able to price 'em at a reasonable price. And so we ended up having to build like a pricing algorithm. We basically scraped all of the sites that had various Funko Pops and then looked at the amount of liquidity in each version of the Funko Pop. And based upon, like, we'd sort of set a liquidity floor because if that thing had like one liquidity, you know, one sold over a 90-day period, you're never gonna be able to secure it. I forget what the liquidity floor was now, but let's just say you had to sell 10 over a 30-day period. We'd use the past 10 sales plus the amount of liquidity per item to then be able to price it at a reasonable price Such that we could then go and resell it authenticated and then make sure we could actually secure it, um, from one of the sites.

And then did you buy Google Ads for the buyer? Were you buying Google Ads or posting on Reddit or something to get the, the buyers?

Right.

And so we basically took over all the Funko Pop subreddits, Facebook groups, Et cetera, because we were giving away the best stuff.

This is basically stuff like, this is gritty internet entrepreneurship stuff that everyone, Sean and me, everyone listening who has an internet business, everyone has done something where it's like, ah, we're just gonna like do this and do this. And maybe I won't wanna tell everyone like 10 years looking back. So it's really cool to see that that was only 6 years ago and now you're worth $20 billion.

Yeah, my, my theory has always been the same, which is if you try and copy the obvious pathways, you're basically going to get stonewalled. Because you don't have the resources. In the early days, everyone wants to spend a ton of money on paid ads. We spent virtually no money on paid ads in the early days. It was never gonna be an effective acquisition channel for us. We spend an obscene amount of money on paid ads today.

Yeah.

But you have to get your way there. And each step of the way sort of unlocks new and interesting things. But I do think in the early days, you have to find unique advantages that other people aren't gonna be able to leverage.

Do you remember when you first started doing the Grails giveaway? Because, you know, some part of you's got to be nervous. You're giving away things that are worth thousands of dollars. Did it work right away? Did it take, uh, you know, a few tries? I guess, do you remember the math the first time it worked? Were you like, holy shit, we just, this is like 10 cents a user or whatever, you know, like, can you take us back?

Was the number of sellers like the metric where you're like, we need more sellers, more sellers, more sellers?

Gotcha.

And so,

which is like another classic thing, right? That's what Airbnb did. That's what a lot of people did. That's what I did when I had a miniature marketplace. You post on Craigslist.

Yeah. And so between our demand plus the demand for other marketplaces, we got to a place where we were able to retain sellers and then slowly get that flywheel spinning.

And it probably didn't take a lot. It's probably like if you just get a sale within the first X hours or days, You'll stick around. Is it— did you find some metric like that?

I think our data was too sparse and we were just like, I don't know, let's just try and get them as many sales as we can such that people stick around. It took us a long time to get the precision around the metrics that mattered and retained and kept people coming back. We definitely weren't that sophisticated back then.

How many transactions happened in the first 12 months? Uh, and did that account for any meaningful revenue to you guys at all?

So sort of the journey for us was December 2019, we started it, and I bet you we did 30 sales. You know, like pretty grim numbers.

30 in the first month? 30

sales, yeah. 30 sales.

That's pretty exciting. One a day, that's exciting.

Yeah, but so most, so the way it actually went was the first week of December, which was the first time we were all full-time on Whatnot, was like one sale. And the second week of December was one sale. And then I managed to like work with a Funko Pop influencer the third week of December, and then we got like 30 sales, something like that. And a bunch of them we priced incorrectly. So there's like a bunch of the sales were people finding mispricings in our algorithm and taking us to the cleaners. Like

a bounty hunter.

Yeah, it was like selling a $500 Funko Pop for $150 because the liquidity bit of the equation wasn't very good. So that, that was, that was December. And then we, in July of 2020 is when we launched our first version of Alive. And, and that's when the business really started to take off.

Where did that insight come from? 'Cause it sounds like the insight for Funko came from looking at data and trends on eBay. Where did the, the second big insight, which was live selling, where'd that come from?

So We, when we first started the business in January, went through Y Combinator. So we initially, originally we were in LA and went up to San Francisco to go to Y Combinator. And we thought we were doing well, the business was growing, et cetera. And then we went to fundraise in the middle of COVID as a Funko Pop marketplace. And like, everyone hated our business.

By the way, why did YC bet on you? Like, goddamn, YC's good that they bet on you guys when nobody else would, one month into a Funko Pop marketplace. What the hell did they see?

They were very smart, to be honest. And they bet on us many times throughout our journey. Like when the business started to take off, they were tremendously helpful and helped put in more money into the business ahead of when many of the other investors who you would know their names were passing. The thing we were really good at and are still pretty good at is we have pretty good taste. And we know how to execute. Um, and so if ever we said we were gonna do a thing, we did the thing.

But that first YC interview's 15 minutes. What could you have shown 'em in that first 15 minutes?

I don't know. They just flip a coin, you know? I don't know. We, we, we, we, we had pretty good backgrounds relative to like what we were doing.

I see.

Wait, that's a funny line. We had good back— backgrounds relative, meaning like there's no way someone this smart is working on something so silly. Surely that's a sign.

Well, I guess like Logan was like running engineering at like pretty large resale marketplaces. I worked at Facebook, I worked at YouTube. So like, you know, I'd started a company before, got acquihired. We weren't like hugely known commodities, but clearly had a background for doing things. We built our product for the YC interview in like a week. Like we built it and launched it and pushed it live. Wow. So that we had something and could like talk about real stuff that we had done. So yeah, we just went all in.

You wanna hear, read my, uh, hear my notes from that? I, I just found my, my notes from when, when I talked to Grant and I was looking at investing. I, by the way, this is my, this is my personal notes. So no, no, no, no, uh, no insult intended. I go, looks like a soccer dad. Quiet intensity, humble confidence. He seems like a serious person who's actually doing this. I don't know. Those are my, those are my things that I wrote. I love the ending. I wrote winner energy. We should invest.

Soccer dad, huh?

He only heard one thing. I knew he would only hear the one thing.

Get him, Grant! Don't take that shit.

I, I, I like that.

But dude, here's what's the reason why I'm being kind of naggy about timelines is because you're describing being like, my bank's dwindling. I'm just trying to make this work. We only got 30 transactions in the first month. But what's insane is that I think it's something like 20 months later you raised money at a billion-dollar valuation. Is that right?

That's probably about right. Yeah.

So like the rate of, the rate of growth is, is astounding here. Do you remember how much funding did you raise and how many employees did you have at the time?

So we came out of YC, we raised probably $250,000 out of YC. Maybe a little bit less. It was a bunch of people who knew me and felt bad for me, and maybe they were scout checks and some stuff like that. So I think we had a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and we were, at that point, we brought in one more engineer, and then before our seed round, we probably got to 6.5 folks. So March, when we came out of YC, we did probably $20,000 to $25,000 in sales, total transaction volume. Then we did our seed round in, I wanna say like August or September. That was sort of like the business started to inflect when we launched live, like growth went to like 100+% month over month. And probably in September we did $250,000 to $300,000 in sales. So it's probably like 10x.

Gross volume.

$2 million to $100 million plus.

$163 million. And we would've closed that year at about 100 employees. Wow. So 10x employees too. And then, so the following year we did a billion in sales.

What happened? How did you go from $2 million to $163, $163 to a billion? What happened?

The core live experience we built is just really fun. And on the seller side, transformational for business building. And so if you're a seller, what was happening to you was you were very quickly starting on Whatnot. And again, it's not for everyone, but for a lot of the people who invested deeply and tried to build a really large business, Um, Whatnot was a bigger channel than anything else you had done. And, and that was also a time, like, this is during COVID And so you'd have people like, hey, I had a comic book shop and people stopped coming in. Now I'm on Whatnot and my comic book shop is doing more sales on Whatnot than, than it ever did in a physical brick and mortar shop. I'm closing down my brick and mortar shop.

You had the COVID forces everything online, but then you had the benefit of, if I'm a, if I'm selling a niche thing, I'm going to find more buyers when I use the sea of the internet. Versus just whoever's in a 5-mile radius, 10-mile radius of wherever my shop is. So that helped for sure in that first year.

Yeah, I mean, COVID definitely helped, but, you know, our business has continued to do, you know, incredibly well throughout COVID. So I think anyways, the core value was there. And then I think we, we had a really good team. It's like the first 30 people we hired at Whatnot are lights-out good. And we knew, we figured out how to, like the big unlock was sort of how do you launch multiple categories and what is the mechanism for doing that fast? And as you start to launch multiple categories on Marketplace, people in each one of those categories start to cross-pollinate and everything that you had working in one category sort of compounds across all the categories.

What did you have to change about your personality to grow? Because you went from, being a very scrappy guy doing everything to being the CEO of a company that's worth $1 billion plus. What had to— that you've just compressed a lot of personal growth in a very short amount of time, I'd imagine.

You're, you, we, we've kind of coined this term. We call it like aw shucks success. Like if you read Warren Buffett's book, you learn that even though he has this attitude that he, this image that he's like, oh, I just, you know, I just hold forever and I just buy good companies. And you're like, oh, anyone can do it. And then you read about him and you're like, oh, well, you were a math prodigy at a very young age and you've been like, you're just super high IQ and patient and you have this beautiful temperament. With you, you have that same thing where you sort of are like, you kind of have this Canadian Midwestern energy where you're like, you know, we were just, I think we just made decent decisions and we got a little bit lucky. And then, but the reality is, is that there's like personality traits or something underneath there that is like world-class. And it's very clear you have that. What would you say your reports would say or investors would say, this guy's world-class at blank?

I love how 2 minutes ago you were like, business is not that complicated. And then you're like, So we had, you know, our sellers in our fresh food department. So we plotted the elasticity curve. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, super simple. Me and you, we do the same thing. Yeah, it's

great. You sort of answered the question in a way where your answer is probably true. You are world-class at that. But the real answer is the way that you answered it. You're just, I think you are very smart and more so your rate of learning seems very, very, very high.

I love that. So we got acquired by Twitch and I got to be at Twitch for a couple, yeah, 2 years. And I probably learned many things, some things not to do in a company, some things to do. But one of the most important to-dos was Emmett was like this. He would sit in these meetings and a team would come in and they would say something, and he would ask them this exact— well, what do you mean? How do we know that? What does that mean? So, no, what exactly did we do? Why do we think that that was the right thing to do? Very simple questions. Questions at a 2nd grade reading level. And then the answer would come back at a PhD level. Then he would bring them back down. No, no, no. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let's walk me through this. And then by the, you know, within 15 minutes, they've sort of been undressed. You realize they don't know what they themselves don't know what the hell they're talking about. They weren't trying to mislead. They just didn't really themselves get to the root of it. Um, and everybody was taking things at face value and it was leading to bad decisions. I loved it. I was like, this is amazing. This is like, this is finally like, you know, the best work is happening in those sessions. Most people in the company hated it. And they used to give them feedback all the time that this sort of Socratic method of of sort of debating almost like semantics and getting down to like the, the base level of things, like talking in binary basically. And

I do that with my wife. I'm like, were you thinking of me when you made this meal? Because, you know, I don't like zucchini.

No, I just want to know. But anyways, I loved it and I, it almost gave me, I like that you said it here because when I saw him doing that, it in a way gave me permission That like I didn't really fully do before that. Meaning, A, I didn't want to be a jerk, but B, I didn't want to be an idiot. Hired all these smart people. They're telling me things that sound smart. Maybe I shouldn't get caught up trying to like get, you know, base level understanding of this myself. And what I realized was, no, no, no, that was actually a very good value, virtue to have inside of a company. And when people knew that, they showed up very differently to every meeting. After the first few times that it happens?

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've tried to do here is we try really hard for the culture to be about getting to the right answer. And so if we find people sort of recoil from that, we'll give them feedback. And when I hire executives, I will let them know upfront they're not beyond reproach. Their methods are at best sort of neutral when they come in. And so we've sort of built this team now who likes that way of working, who's given permission to work and seek the truth and go to the bottom. And I think that's been, I think if you don't have probably both of those, it doesn't work well. Now, that is a challenge of when we're hiring. I don't know, we have like 500 people this year or something, you know, keeping up with that. But if you look at like my team of people, my team, I've been working with most of my team for 4+ years now, and then most of their teams are pretty similar. And so you get a really nice, no, this is how we do things here. This isn't meant to be mean. This is meant to understand the truth, because it's quite unnatural to be challenged at that level of detail.

Hey, can I ask you about that challenge? Because there's 2 phrases and words that I really dislike. One is first principles, and 2 is contrarian. Because typically the people who talk about that stuff are either kind of dumb or they're smart, but they're an asshole when they deliver it. You seem smart and you seem like a pretty kind, likable guy. Was there a person or a book or something that inspired you to be disagreeable but not rude? Because it's quite challenging.

I think for me, what I always try to do is imagine myself in someone else's shoes and imagine when I had certain stuff like this, you know, happen to me and what would enable me to do my best work. And I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. There are definitely times where I am not as nice and where I will, you know, you know, sort of be at the end of my, my level of patience. I try to make it few and far between, but it happens. One of the examples that sticks with me for a while is And it's actually one of the reasons I ended up leaving Facebook. I was in this big product review with a bunch of very well-known and very senior people. And the thing I was bringing to a product review was a project that I unfortunately got stuck on, I did not want to work on, and it was one of the most politicized projects across the entire business. And you know, I put together this thing and I spent boatloads of time because all these freaking VPs would never agree with anyone. It was just me running in circles like this. And you get to the review and the guy who's running the review basically just starts yelling at everyone. And I'm like, you know what? I've been up the past couple weeks till past midnight and I worked like hell on this. And no matter who you gave this thing to, it was going to be a Absolute clusterfuck. You know, now running my own large organization, I see what he did wrong. I know what I would do differently. But the way that was handled was never going to make me want to do more great work. And so I basically, at the end of that, I was like, I'm out of here. I'm not dealing with this. And so I just think about ultimately what you want to do is you want to get good work out of your organization. And being mean, nasty, or combative We'll almost never do it.

I know that you don't— you kind of said you don't like talking about numbers because you're like, there's still a lot to do. But of all the people who have done business, which is like billions of people, there's probably only like 3 or 4 or 500 who are worth over $1 billion below the age of 40. And you're one of them. I think according to Forbes, you're worth like $2 or $3 billion. Surely there's been a moment where you're like, this is pretty awesome. Have you had a moment like that?

From time to time, it's nice to reap some of the rewards of what's been built. You know, it's really nice to be able to take care of my family and take care of my family properly. And yeah, look, I'm, it's not lost on me that like in 6 and a half years we've been able to build something, you know, pretty massive. Millions of people build businesses or, you know, hundreds of thousands of people build businesses on Whatnot making billions of dollars. 1,400 people at Whatnot. A lot of people have been there for the entire journey. So yeah, I think it feels good, but also I think we still have a lot that we want to do. And again, I sort of, you get a little, I don't want to get complacent. And so from time to time I'll have a, I'll reflect for about 5 minutes and be like, wow, this is pretty insane. But then I'm in my 30s still. There's 1,400 people who came to work at Whatnot that I have high accountability for. Raised a billion and a half dollars from investors who we have high accountability for. And so, you know, it doesn't do me any good patting myself on the back. That doesn't get me to the next step.

Sam, I'm going to start saying that I take care of my family. I take care of my family properly. I'll let you figure out what properly means. I'm just going to start using that ever. I enjoyed that one. That was good. You said you had a good quote. You said, if you think you're moving fast, you're probably not. What do you mean by that?

Right. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe 7 or 8 businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Column and A, members FDIC. Hey, what's the weirdest trend of a thing that's— that people are buying and selling on Whatnot that an average person wouldn't even— wouldn't even realize there's a craze going on or a behavior that you've seen on there?

Yeah, I mean, probably the most popular thing this year, other parents probably know about it, is like Neatos and squishy toys. I don't know if you guys have younger kids, you know, You brought up some of the other ones that I think are really fun, like just people selling crab and meat.

I think there's, like, people selling gold bars, aren't there? Like, miners selling bars?

Yeah. Bars of silver, bars of gold.

Like, who, you know, like, from the mine? Like, who— what's happening?

I mean, you know, huge range. Could be anywhere from, like, a coin shop to, you know, there are, there are, like, mints that, like, Mint coins and, you know, they basically just like cutting

out the middleman and just selling direct on Whatnot. Is that the kind of the idea?

Uh, yeah, some, some of them are.

Do you think there's an opportunity, like, you know, with Twitch, for example, people built Streamlabs, they built other like tools and companies on top to service the ecosystem that you weren't, that the platform wasn't going to build. What do you think is a kind of good tool or business that somebody could be doing on top of the growth of Whatnot?

What is it today?

I mean, you take the top 3 biggest players in the market across like US and Europe, you're probably around $30 billion, something, something like that.

Sorry, but just to show the percent, you said it's gonna be 30%. That means it's currently, it's currently at what? Like how much room do you think there is?

Single digit percentages.

Okay. So it's got a 5x from here at least.

I think 20, 30, 30x plus.

Okay.

And the comp is sort of like what's happened in China and Asia. So in Asia, it's in China, it's about 40% of e-commerce. And if you looked at, you know, the growth of Whatnot, the engagement on the platform sort of looked like it's headed towards that direction. And so, you know, that's a market in the hundreds and hundreds, if not, you know, a trillion dollars into the future if you go outside of China. And so there's just gonna be a, there will be a ton of opportunity. So the biggest live shopping businesses are gonna, like the people who are selling are gonna do a billion dollars plus in revenue. Like our biggest seller probably does a couple hundred million.

Did you say your biggest seller is doing 9 figures?

Well, well over, yeah. Many multiple 9-figure sellers.

Selling what?

Collectibles, fat, you know, we have brands doing tens of millions, $100 million in fashion.

But are these like, these are not individuals, these are just like large companies or what's going on? Like, I guess give us a hero story.

This is nuts. I, you're just a killer. I, I didn't realize, I knew what Whatnot was. I've, I've used it. I did not, I guess I, I saw the numbers, but it's kind of like, now that I see what you're saying, I'm like, this is insane. This is so much better. Like originally when Sean first told me about this, I had the reaction I imagine a lot of people did, which is like, this is silly. This is small. This, this is nothing. like a, like a multi-tens of billions of dollar company. But this is insane. And I understand why you have helped lead it there.

Sam, you should start, you should start your denim shop on Whatnot.

Yeah, I buy, I buy a ton of, I'm an eBay power user. I buy a ton of, I collect old denim. It's very weird, but I guess I got to start using Whatnot.

That's a popular, popular segment.

Do you have any hobbies? Do you like any weird stuff now that you see all these other weird things that people buy and sell? Do you have any interesting hobbies?

I mean, I still collect things, but, you know, nothing like obscene. I've sort of been collecting Type 1 photos, which are like original photographs. That's probably the one thing I've been purchasing most recently. And then other than that, my hobbies are pretty, pretty tame. I'm Canadian, so I still play hockey.

Sean, you had a good read on him, man.

Winter energy. I told you.

Winter energy.

Wow. Grant, thanks for coming on, man. This is fun.

Yeah, thank you guys for having me. It was a really fun conversation. You guys made it, made it super fun.

Well, thank you. We appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.