Whatnot founder Grant LaFontaine on 80 min/day engagement, food's next frontier, and why live commerce isn't gambling

less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Well, great to meet you. Likewise. Good to meet you. Thank you. Uh can you fellow LA technology brother? Yeah. Not many of us. Yes. Not many. Uh here I'm going to have you right there. That's good.

Uh why don't you introduce yourself uh and and kind of describe the shape of the business today and then I'd love to go back and kind of hear the whole the whole entrepreneurial journey. Sure. Uh so I'm Grant La Fontaine uh co-founder CEO of a platform called Whatnot.

Not's a live stream shopping platform online marketplace. The way to best way to think about it is we sort of enable anyone to create like a digital brickandmortar store.

So as opposed to you know interesting you know any seller can come on they can then sell through live video which means you sort of like this you can stand up you can be in your store you can walk around your store sell goods sell anything.

And so we have people on the platform um selling comics to paintings to plants to women's fashion everything in between. Um, and it just ends up being, you know, incredibly good way to build a business. Very similar to like a brick-and-mortar retail shop online.

It's so interesting that that digital commerce has just end doesn't look like yes, there's items on the storefront that you can buy, but imagine if stores had no employees in them and you couldn't like in real time quickly ask Yeah. ask a human like, "Hey, like, you know, what size do you recommend here?

" Or do you have this? you have this in another, you know, all these different things that ultimately drive like higher purchase volume in a retail setting that we just generally don't have online but do exist on whatnot. Yeah. What was the uh take me back to the start of the company.

What were the what was the competitive landscape like at the time? What was the uh was this something that was like working internationally and you were like, "Oh, I think of course that was the whole that was the whole thing.

It was like everyone was like looking at China and and you look at how some of China's retail giants got started. It was like selling fruit and vegetables like in live and something that Americans just don't understand at all.

You know, buying like bananas through like basically a farmer who's just like, "Yeah, check out these bananas. " I I actually imagine you buying bananas through I would I would do that in Malibu. But anyways, but yeah, walk us through kind of like the early days of discovering kind of the opportunity. Yes.

So one of the funny things with us is so the live shopping market in Asia is like monstrous you know like nearly a trillion dollar and it's been big for a long time. [sighs] So I think it took off in like a little after 2015 or so and was just like ramp to a crazy and when did you get started? What year?

So we started whatnot in 2020. Okay. Okay. So there was like some there were examples out there like this can work although we had no idea. Yeah we literally had no idea. Yeah. So, when we started Whatnot, it was me and my co-founder, Logan, and we were working at some bigger tech companies.

We'd both started businesses before. We're like, we like to build. Yeah. Like, that's sort of the thing we enjoy to do. Yeah. And we're like, we don't like what we're doing now. Let's go build something new. Yeah. Um, and we were both really into buying and reselling things online, collectibles.

So, you know, at one point we were selling sneakers and, you know, in that whole world. And I I my first business was when I was seven and I um started selling Pokemon cards online. There we go. There we go. I love it. I was selling DJ equipment. He was selling skateboards.

At the last YC batch, we we were asking every founder that we interviewed like how they started their first what what their first business was. And a lot was like somewhat collectibles like running Fortnite servers, collectibles. Like there's something about I don't know. I I have kids. I don't know if you have kids.

I want to get my kids to like do business online ASAP. Well, yeah. And people that don't people that are like I want to start a business, but I don't have an idea. It's like business is just making something for one price or buying something for one price and selling it for a higher price. Like that is just business.

So just sneakers, sneakers or collectibles, Pokémon cards, whatever. Just very simple.

So, so I feel like a lot of the a lot of the media platforms uh they'll start with just like the idea of like I want to share photos online Instagram or I want to have a place to host video online YouTube and then over time the commerce aspect comes in and becomes uh more featurerich whether it's you know tagged products with affiliate codes or sponsored content or an ad network like how how mature was your thinking when you went to write like the first pitch deck or the first uh did We go through YC.

We went through YC. Yeah.

So the YC application like did you apply with this idea or did you guys like uh take a little bit of a So I'd say we had like a quasi pivot which was so early on the thesis was there's something around collectibles in social commerce because a lot of why you collect is not necessarily for the object but to sort of hang out and talk to people over about your interests.

Mhm. And so our initial pitch was basically a social commerce like marketplace for Funko Pops, which are like little vinyl dolls. And that was it. You can That's what's in the YC application. [snorts] And we didn't have any idea we were going to do video.

It sort of looked like a standard marketplace with a follow button and a cool handful of features. So was it creatorled in the sense that uh I as the collector come and share pictures and inventory and details about particular products that I have in stock? Yeah, it would basically be that.

So you like you'd have a profile, you could follow it, you could post your stuff, there's DMs, you could chat with people. Yeah. And how many investors uh obviously you managed to pull around together, but how many investors passed because they were like, "Sorry, I'm not backing your like niche toy marketplace. " Yeah.

I mean, it's it's funny now because the amount of money we've raised is like ungodly large. Um, [laughter] you know, but not even not even godly large numbers. Not even not relative to the valuation. I mean, you've raised like just under a billion dollars. You're sitting at 11 billion.

It seems like also the stakes right now for for raising an ungodly amount of money are like uh if you if if your business doesn't work, does everyone in the whole world lose their job? And as long as you're not there, like have fun. or people are like, I have two GitHub stars on my projects. I'll take two billion.

[laughter] Uh but yeah, so so so when did this when did the video aspect come in? What were the what were the thinking and like how did you how did you think about the first design and then start iterating? Yeah.

So I'd say like I'm a purist when it comes to building product which is like you you know stay close to your customers, you talk to your customers and you figure out the problems they have. And so as we were building our Funko Pop marketplace, we just knew everyone on the platform. Like we knew all the sellers.

We were friends with them. Sure. And we could see them hacking sort of social media video in interesting ways. In particular, trying to run like auctions in live video. Oh. So they'd be going live on Twitch or other platforms and then and then selling on whatnot. Yeah.

So what we well the fir the actual real initial example was we were uh following I was following a seller on Instagram and I tapped into their Instagram live and they were trying to hold auctions in the comments and the latency on Instagram live video at least at that time was like 30 plus seconds.

So they basically have like put up the item run a clock and then once the clock stopped they'd start taking the bids and the comments and I invited my co-founder in. We got into a bidding war and it was just like really fun. We're like, "Huh, why has no one built sort of broken? " Yeah. Like, what?

Why has no one built mobile video auctions? Just sort of felt obvious. Yeah. And then people don't realize unless you've bid on an online auction, you have no idea how thrilling thrilling it is.

So, I' I've I've I've uh bought cars on on uh Bring a Trailer, and once you start bidding, it is just there's nothing more entertaining on the entire planet. the more I get to know you, the more you're like, actually, gamification really works on me. It does work on [laughter] me.

No, it's just it's it's it's incredibly it's incredibly fun. And that's even in the context of Bring a Trailer, which anybody that's used Bring a Trailer, like maybe uses goes on the site all the time, but they're like, "This is so underdeveloped in comparison to every other application that I use.

" just the dynamic of bidding against their bidding history and like this guy just bids a lot. He doesn't actually buy cars. Okay, this guy's bought like six cars in the last 6 months. Like I've got a real real competition here. So that's amazing. Um but I still Yeah.

Still the percentage of people that have actually like done like bought things online via auction I think is relatively it must be relatively low still. Yeah. And so so it yeah we basically how quickly did you ship the the your version of the live auction product after that? Four weeks. Okay. Yeah. Correct.

They were good APIs around that time because I remember uh wasn't Clubhouse doing live audio and they were partnered with some new company that was able to kind of do it like turnkey. Yeah. It was uh this company Agore I think club house was using. We actually didn't again we made a bunch of mistakes.

We didn't know anything about China. We didn't know anything about the low latency live video APIs. So, we actually stood up our own like low latency live video serving infrastructure. If we if we hadn't, we probably would have built it in a week. Yeah.

Um and it was not very good, but like good enough to get good enough. And the product was so clearly had product market fit. I'm not entertaining as you guys can tell. And I did the first live stream because we, you know, we got to like make sure it works. And I sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops in two hours.

And so you're like unentertaining human being sells that much. We basically dropped everything the next day and we're like we don't know what this is but this is really fun. This is it. Drop everything. We're all in. Y okay. Yeah.

And and $5,000 doesn't sound like a huge amount of money, but when you look at that in the context of an individual seller that probably has decent margins on that $5,000 and then they start realizing I can do this every single day and this quickly just becomes like a real business out of like could be out of nothing.

So from there, help me understand the growth mechanism. Is it people screenshotting and sharing to other platforms? Are you running ads? Is there a referral program? Is there SEO? Like what's the flywheel?

Because it's Well, and part of it because I I imagine like the people that are obsessively buying like Funko Pops are like pretty like they know where they're being sold, right? Like these are people like it's not like same with G3 RS's. Like people know I'm going to go find that on Bring a Trailer. Yeah.

Or their hand handful of other platforms. Yeah. It's like people that are obsessive about a category are going to know all the surface area where selling is happening and just go to where the inventory is. Yeah. Is that roughly that? Yeah, that's roughly correct.

For for, you know, for almost the first three or four years of the business, we basically just focused on collectibles and enthusiast categories. Um, which we'd sort of broaden out maybe like if you're into cars and things like that.

And it was fundamentally because these categories people like to talk about um what they're buying, where they're buying it. And so we leaned for the first four years we basically just grew through referrals and word of mouth. Was it pretty?

And what was it like with the investors once once the product was clearly working? Because I remember there was so many VC like think pieces on live shopping and how it had broken out in China.

And I imagine when they met you they were like lean [laughter] I finally I finally but there was also there was also like in the early days like I remember there were I won't uh there there was like there was like pop shop was also very hot.

I think they raised around from like benchmark around the same time as you guys. So it seemed like very competitive at the time. Also Amazon owns Twitch. They have selling infrastructure. Like there were lots of reasons why someone else might do this. The classic like what if Google builds it? What if Twitch does it?

What if someone else does it? Yeah. I'd say probably at least for the even the first couple years after we did live, we weren't like particularly hot. Yeah.

Um, a lot of people like looked at the side that we started in, which was, you know, all collectibles and then sort of compared it to Asia and they're like, is that really the same? So, like, you know, a lot of it was people holding, you know, doing auctions and they're not showing their face on camera.

They'll just show like the Funko Pop. Okay. And so and a lot of the other companies that's like they'll put the product out and wait till it sells and then put a new one up there. Yeah.

They'll like talk to you and you'll just like look at the product and you can you meanwhile in China if people haven't seen these videos it'll be like they'll they'll show like it's they'll just take a product, hold it up, move on, take a product, hold up, move on. Right. Yeah. We we have those we have those.

It's crazy that that works at all.

Like that feels like such a worse experience than just an e-commerce app with like a bunch of drop downs and filters if I don't know something something about seeing a product in real life like makes it I I think it inspires like some element of like trust even than just seeing like a digital you know photo or render.

Yeah. I think what we see is that um people start to build relationships and trust the seller. So as opposed to like in the previous e-commerce world is where is it coming from who you don't know people come to whatnot because they build a relationship with a seller.

It's sort of like I don't know a local shop where you go and meet someone talk to them and so it just builds a lot more trust in the system. So in that sort of like I it seems like there were a few years where like you weren't as hot as like maybe you should have been.

Uh was that driven by just uh not fully monetizing as well as you wanted or like choppy growth? Were you cyclical at all? Was it like the interest rate like crisis and SVB collapsing that like put a damper on the hype or was it all pretty smooth?

Yeah, because I cuz cuz my my memory of of the whatnot hype cycle was like, okay, wow, this company has like a massive valuation, but I've never used it. And I think that's what a lot of people like recogn like people are like something can't possibly be real unless I'm using it every day unless I use it.

But you guys had this insane valuation and then every once in a while you're not you don't go on a lot of podcasts or at least I haven't I haven't uh heard you on one before, but like you just pop up with like a massive up round and then just pop up with another massive up round.

And so I guess like what we're trying to get at I think is like has the growth been like relatively like consistent and smooth or has it been like unlocking new categories, unlocking new use cases that have just really continued to to drive the business in in general. It's been pretty smooth.

We had one slow patch probably coming out of co where growth during co if you were like a consumer [laughter] entertainment company it was just no one had anything to do and so I think we were sort of lazy in our growth motion because it just basically we didn't have to worry about growth.

It just sort of like boom happening to you and and then we had to get a little bit more deliberate but I don't think we've ever grown under like you know topline sales I mean revenue has probably never grown under 90% a year. Yeah. In the entire history of the business. That's amazing. And so it's been pretty good.

And there's when people like there's moments in times where people get excited. So for a long time we're like, "Oh, this is niche. It's collectibles. " And then we got fashion going and working and be like, "Oh, that's exciting. " That's a big catch.

And is fashion uh driven mostly by reselling existing inventory or are are you partnered with specific brands or fast fashion companies? Like so the shape of the market? Yeah, I mean it's pretty diverse. Um so there's some brands selling now. Um, there's brickandmortar jewelry shops selling.

I would say the dominant sort of theme in in fashion is probably like old season inventory or overstock. Um, so people and the reason it's it's really great is it's great for whoever owns that inventory because they can collect higher margin by selling it on whatnot. And if you're a buyer, it's the individual brand.

Um, a lot of times it's it's [snorts] um businesses think like TJ Maxx style stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so people getting access to TJ Maxx style inventory and it's multibrand and it'll be like Lululemon but um from last year and so you're gonna buy 60% less or something. Yeah.

60% less and the deals are incredibly good. Yeah. Yeah.

So people are kind of building their own business on whatnot from from scratch but then scaling to a point where they kind of have an operation relationship with different brands and they have a whole kind of strategy and probably pretty stable earnings as a creator.

What's the competitive landscape been like over the last uh couple years? Because I know uh it's been widely reported that Tik Tok's been willing to just burn billions of dollars trying to get shopping working on their platform.

You have there was another one, I can't even remember the name that popped up with crazy incentives that was like I don't think it was live, but what what's the one that Flip? Flip. So Flip popped up and they were like free money as a service.

we're just gonna get [laughter] and that that was like I remember people were like people would send me a text and it's like I just sent you $200 on flip and so I'm like this can't go this is not going to last that long.

Um and so you've had a number of people kind of like you know trying to at least like enter this like overall kind of like entertainment meets commerce market. But how how have you got it sounds like it's just been continuing to execute against your road map.

Yeah, we're pretty like as you said, we I sort of don't go on much podcasts and, you know, maybe we'll pop up every once in a while with a fundra. We just try and stay really heads down and just deliver.

Our thesis has always been it's going to be a competitive market and so how you're going to distinguish yourself is consistent delivery and then you know, continuing to add value to customers every day. And you know, our belief's always been there's room for a purpose-built platform here.

Like say Tik Tok, amazing product, but people are going there to like watch videos, not necessarily shop. And I think that pattern is really hard. So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose-built to be world class at shopping and sort of, you know, shopping meets entertainment.

And um I think over the past six years, we've sort of largely proven that out. Is there a Mr. Beast of whatnot? [sighs] um a true power law creator that's just a whole order of magnitude above everyone else in terms of seriousness and operational excellence, size of team like that type of thing.

There there are a few people who are like I think whatnot's very similar to other entertainment platforms. So I spent like six years at YouTube. Yep. you know, it is power law oriented and so the handful of people who are in the tippity top tier. Sure.

You know, you're looking at operations with like 100 plus employees at this point. Um, so pretty big. That's pretty remarkable. Yeah. Um, uh, why do people say what not is gambling? It feels like collecting things that just like I mean obviously there's a little bit of risk.

You buy a GT3 RS and you find out that it is a broken, you know. Yeah. And I think to be more specific, people are saying like certain sellers on whatnot are focused on card, you know, mystery boxes, right? Like the power packs from GameStop and I've seen a lot of those.

So you you you would have to like also say that Yeah. Power packs. Do do you have like policies around it? Do you have a personal stance? Like how does that Yeah, because game gamification too is like that is something that sellers want. They're like make it easier for me to provide an entertaining shopping experience.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, first off, there's no gambling allowed and whatnot, right? Like flat out flat out like it's illegal and whatnot. Okay. Uh, you know, our trust and safety and customer experience team is probably our biggest team at the whole company. So, we do take this stuff like very seriously.

Let's hear for no gambling. We love that. Let's hear for trust and safety. Let's hear for trust and safety team. They work really hard. We know it's a serious expense. Very good. But yeah, so none of that's loud. I I think you know people open packs of cards. It's fun. I opened packs of cards when I was a kid.

I sold Pokemon cards when I was a kid. And so we try and give sellers the flexibility to run their business in the right way while making sure it's safe for customers and we don't nothing illegal is allowed. Stop. Yeah.

And so and so there are there there is an element of randomness if you're selling just like I I used to buy the booster packs of Magic the Gathering cards as a kid and like sometimes you get something that's a foil or something but that's very different than putting money into the whatnot platform participating in some sort of ecosystem then pulling out dollars directly like that's what gambling would be right.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Thank What uh what categories are you guys working towards that you're kind of most excited about? You said you unlock fashion. So, the one the future category I'm most excited about, it's still early innings is food and drink. Okay. Um so, it feels like really hard to sell online.

Well, so this it it would be in a static world, but in a video-based world where you can like, you know, so like the we have a there's a farm um outside of San Diego who sells organic citrus. The bananas. Yeah, back to the bananas. Back to bananas.

Um, and so [clears throat] like I'll order from them and like the next day at my doorstep will be like organic tangerines and things like that. And so I'm like I'm really into I'm a foodie and I think everyone increasingly is more conscious around what they eat, where they get their stuff from.

And so I think being able to eventually, you know, get fresh meat from a farmer, get fresh fish from uh a lobsterman from Maine. There's a bunch of stuff we're going to have to figure out logistics wise and and all sorts. But that's Seafood is crazy.

But but wouldn't wouldn't you rather like see it get caught and then at your doorstep the next day? Yeah. With Starlink with Starlink, the fisherman's going to be out there and be like, "All right, I'm just pulling up a crate of crab. Who wants it? Who wants it? " That's wild.

and then he pulls it up and and there you go. Uh yeah, that that's uh I can see that. I can also there's so many other categories of like collecting. I I don't know if these are popular yet, but eventually I could imagine like a wine wine collectors going on there and wine is something that you want if you're buying it.

Like unless you're like a just an insane expert, you probably want somebody like part of going to a wine shop is being able to talk to the, you know, associate there and they can talk through like the origins and the winery and what made what made, you know, a certain um case of wine like special, things like that.

So wine makes sense. I think other categories of like collectible alcohol like um you know, whisies and and things like that. What about cars? cars. Would love dreaming of the day to do cars. I've wanted to do cars for a long time. We'll eventually get to it.

Um the the truth is we're growing so fast and so we're having to like make sure the core user experience is really good before we get outside. How rigid are you? Because uh Twitch just has, you know, like a just chatting or like IRL for like it's a catch-all.

If you're not playing Fortnite or Minecraft, they have a catch-all and then people kind of go and innovate in that category. Why? Like is it just like I will get deplatformed if I try and sell my car and whatnot? Um or is it just like you're not ready to say like it's actually a good experience but it is possible to do.

Cars are tough too because I mean think of you know you can buy a new car, it could be a lemon, you can buy totally you know an existing you know a used car and you know even after you know on bring a trailer there's like you buy it and then you can get PPI you win the auction then you're getting the the the PPI done and then at that point you can back out.

You don't get your like I guess like fee back but at least there's like some protections there.

So when you up the when you up the price like you know thousandx it just gets so theoretically today if you adhere to our platform policies you'd be able to do it you could theoretically it's it would be almost impossible because you'd have to be able to pay for it with your credit card.

You'd have to be able to you know like ship it in two days. [laughter] Um it's like I will be driving challenge accepted cannonball across the country. We have sold some cars on whatnot. those have been more for like collectible cars for specific events.

So like the creator of Spawn sold like the Spawn mobile and so we we just did some custom stuff there. But it but in practice if we saw people um starting to sell cars they'd likely butt up against some of the just general policies we have today and so we we'd have to go and make the platform suitable for it.

How's it like uh is the majority of the team in LA? [sighs] Uh so we're all over the place now. So the are you true co company?

Yeah, we're a true co we even before like we started a handful of months before co and our initial team there's our designer was in Italy two engineers in Brazil and me and Logan in LA and so we've always sort of been distributed. I'm an introvert. Did you go to YC up in the Bay?

We did go to YC up in the Bay and then we couldn't raise money and so we moved to Phoenix. No way. Yeah.

um because we had like no money and we just ran it ran the company from our garage in Phoenix and then I would off air I would love to see who passed because uh I mean even to to a lot of people's credit I mean I saw Shield uh from BTV posted yesterday like if I got pitched uh whatnot and they were selling like dolls I would have like almost certainly passed.

Yeah. Look, you would have the only way you would have ever invested in whatnot in the early days was if you knew me or Logan deeply and had worked with us because that's the only thing that would have given you confidence.

We always had the confidence because we, you know, we thought we were capable of doing a lot per period of time, but we're not. I didn't know that many people. I hate networking. And you're coming here with like a Funko Pop thing. play.

So like I totally do so I harbor like a little bit of like you know well you're getting the last laugh but but you know like I still think it's early so I don't even worry about it. I just sort of like blinders on. We got to deliver but yeah unless you knew us you would have sort of been a fool to invest.

How did the Logan Paul investment come around then? Um I think we got introduced to him through Andre. So Andre did our series A and um then helped you know get us connected and he was really into Pokemon cards at that point in time and so it was sort of like a natural fit.

He's you know been on the platform a handful of times and and and so was a a good add-on investor. Yeah.

I was reviewing his post uh uh talking about the investment and I was like that makes so much sense because he's been so immersed with even early stage like Vine was so primordial in terms of like what Tik Tok became. He's been so early to all these platforms.

makes sense that he could see the vision better than a lot of other people. How how international is the business today? So, I think we're in nine countries now. Um, so I think we we got into international maybe about two and a half years ago. It's it's a it's a really big focus for us.

The international business is doing very well and I think you'll see us continue to expand this year. Going on the offensive. Are we going to China? We're taking the fight to them. We're going to Tik Tok's front door. You know, I think dancer on notice.

We we'll we'll go anywhere where we think we can add customer value. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh how uh how crazy has the Laboo uh side of the business been? We we covered it. So So we I think we literally by the time we did a deep dive on it, I think we like may have like top ticked that that trend. Yeah. I don't know.

Maybe maybe they're still growing as fast as they were, but uh I mean it was pretty much came out of nowhere and then was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on whatnot. It still is, I think. Wow. Um annually. Yeah. Annual. Annual. Annual. Like if you were annually like now daily.

No, it's it's it's it's pretty big. Um you know, I I I think it's just like fun. You know, you sort of get a box and you see which one you get and it's kind of quirky and weird. So it it had it it like lends itself to making content and so it sort of takes off.

What's the relationship like with the company behind Laboo in that case?

Because I can imagine that they want to capture some of the value created by the gamification and they have the ability to sell directly and they they they might even have the ability to auction things off like they want efficient pricing and so uh how how does the relationship work between you and like the originator of the collectible?

I think it just depends. Um, you know, there are some collectibles companies we work with directly, like I think we're working with Marvel and, um, we've done a bunch of stuff in the toys and comic space. Uh, we haven't specifically worked with Laboo, honestly.

I think Leumu stuff took off to such large degree, even they're like I again, I don't know, but I imagine like, holy, you know, [laughter] uh, so no matter what, they were going to sell a gajillion L boooos. And so I think they were just trying to make sure manufacturing hits and the product is still good.

So um that makes sense. Uh what uh before you jump off, what what is the next like couple years look like? I think it's a lot of the same stuff. One, just continue to make the buyer experience better, the seller experience better.

You're going to see us get into more categories, more countries, and then make sure we build the product for more and more types of sellers. So more investments in brands is is definitely in the cards very specifically. Yeah. Where where does AI play a role?

Do you need uh like a traditional machine learning system for recommendation algorithms or is there a role for generative AI in this business or is it more just like you're using uh you know tab completion models to write speed up [clears throat] the developer productivity of the company?

I think everyone's like there's there's the obvious spots where like yes, everyone uses cursor and you know whether you're an engineer or not, you can prototype and build stuff faster. Um I think we're seeing obvious applications in CX and trust and safety. It's really good at like detecting context.

Y in core ranking systems um 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 um core ranking systems, probably not a lot of LLMs. We're starting to use it more for like content understanding. So, it's very good.

You can take a live stream and like tell me everything about this live stream to feed into the ML models. Yep. Um so, I think for us, we're just trying to be world class at using LLMs to solve our customer problems. Uh so, we're making deep investments, but it's, you know, wherever we can solve a problem.

Where's the community stand on AI generally? Are they like anti- AI because it needs to be like a, you know, old-fashioned collectible or do they see it as an opportunity? There will be new IP that comes from some kid prompting a model and then creates some collectible phenomenon. Yeah.

I I mean I I think people still want to interact with people at the core. So in some in some ways whatn not sort of anti- AI and that it's like about the human experience. So I think anything that undermines the human experience will always have a little bit of a knee knee-jerk negative reaction.

And so for us again I think c customers don't care if you're in tech they care if you're using AI but you know everyday customer uses whatnot doesn't care. So it's more behind the scenes stuff where we can make their lives easier. So you're a seller.

Can we tell you what are the the the five major things happening with your business or you know generate tips for you or make it so you can list products really fast? We get all the context from them.

I think that's sort of where we're a cohort of folks that uh just I mean like there are obviously tons of people that just watch Doug Demiro videos because they're interested in cars and they never buy a car on cars and bids or they never even buy a new car because they're just happy with their car but they like him and they like him talking about cars.

And are there are there users on whatnot who don't really buy stuff but watch a lot and just see it as like some sort of meditative, you know, content? Parasocial.

Maybe parasocial, but also maybe just like it's kind of like background TV and they're just like enjoying learning about different products and understanding the market. Yeah, absolutely.

So on like any given day, the vast majority of people who are watching do not purchase anything and the average person watches 80 minutes. 80 minutes. 80 minutes a day. 80 minutes a day. That's so much. Hit the gong. [laughter] That's crazy. Uh well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it. Really great to meet you guys. Always welcome when you have news. Anytime you want to pop your head up and announce a new Yeah, I'm glad that we're here and hang out. 80 minutes a day. Wow, that is a lot of minutes. [laughter] Uh, gonna need more minutes in in the days. Yeah. Sorry, Sam Alman.

Good luck with your 30 minutes a day of catchy PT usage. Whatnot's got 80 uh get those numbers up. Time to get those numbers up if you're if you're building anything except whatnot, apparently. Uh Tyler, can you find out the day that we did our uh PopMart deep dive? Yes, I need to know that.

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