Grant: If you look at e-commerce today, you have to know exactly what you're looking for.

David: Live commerce is over a third of all commerce in Asia. Is that right?

Grant: 30 to 40% of all commerce is live commerce in China.

David: What is it in the US today?

Grant: Single digits really. The experience is really broken. Transactions weren't integrated well. Shipping wasn't payments, discovery, CX, and we just thought we could build a better one of those.

David: I want to start all the way back when you were a kid. Your first online sale was a a holographic Pokemon card.

Grant: At that point in time was when like eBay was getting started and I was like, "Wait, you can make money from Pokemon cards? Like I love Pokémon cards and I can make money from doing it." The first one sold for 10 bucks. That's probably the true origin stories of whatnot.

David: Users spend 95 minutes a day on the platform.

Grant: Yeah, about 95 minutes.

David: It's incredible.

Grant: Users don't give a about the market. They care about whether they're going to enjoy the thing. It provides value and that's the experience that makes it fun and keeps you coming back.

David: What are the most exciting things that you're building towards that you want to grow into over the coming 12 months?

David: Yeah. I mean, okay, I want to start all the way back when you were a kid. So, I understand that your first online sale was a holographic Pokemon card and that the buyer mailed you a money order and you cashed it at the post office and then you shipped the card. So, this was like a what age was this? This is like a formative young age.

Grant: I must have been in third or fourth grade I want to say. So, I don't How old are you there? Like seven, eight, nine, something like that.

David: Yeah. Okay. So there's there's all these stories, you know, of a founder kind of finding their market like this early. Like tell me about like you kind of um having that experience and making it a formative piece of, you know, starting whatnot eventually.

Grant: Well, I think like all kids back then, like there was just a Pokemon craze. Pokemon cards became big, you know, get my dad to go bring me to the shop,

Grant: open my Pokemon cards. I had my binder, had all my Charizards in it, had everything. And I, you know, down this down sort of this the street from where I was living it was like a little like lake and hangout area and my me and my friends used to go there and we'd like trade Pokemon cards and I'd try and hustle people on like getting the better cards. And then at that point in time was when like eBay was getting started and then their biggest competitor was Yahoo Auctions. And um I I don't know how I found out about it, but I found out about it. I was like, "Wait, you can make money from Pokemon cards? Like I love Pokemon cards. I can make money from doing it." And so I got my dad to help me set up an account and I you know posted my bunch of my holographic cards online. The first one sold for 10 bucks and it was the the holographic um chancy card.

David: It was the Chansy card. Yeah. And the the thing that always like um feels funny about that is that at that point in time the internet was so nent you weren't doing payments online which is just crazy.

Grant: Yeah. Yeah. This is like clunky. I mean yeah early days like you know there was no trust to do it. The infrastructure didn't exist but there was no trust either obviously. So

David: yeah and it's but it's also pretty wild that like there was enough trust that someone would send you

Grant: the like money order in the mail and sort of like hope you would then send the card back. So, I I remember I got the money order like, "Okay, I can send the card now. Dad, can you bring me to the post office? I'm gonna wrap it up and and um you know, send it off and uh and so that is that's probably the true origin stories of whatnot. Whatnot's pretty funny in that uh almost all of my experience in like a life like the big the big bits, all of my like core jobs have come full circle and whatnot."

Grant: Yeah. like Pokemon cards and I worked at YouTube for a long time and so did video and then I worked um I was I was working at Facebook and I was working on marketplace stuff and so I did some of that and then whatnot. Sort of the amalgamation of all those things.

David: Yeah, the perfect combination of all those trends. Yeah, it's awesome. So, um there's different stories about how you and Logan decided to start the company. How did you guys settle on doing this?

Grant: Yeah, so there's Logan's story and there's my story.

David: Yeah. Okay.

Grant: And and look, both of both of them are like actually correct. I I think Logan's just more um nostalgic about like Logan's story is actually like I don't know, [clears throat] maybe it's like slightly better. So I was Logan's origin story start in like January 2019, I want to say. We we did a trip to Tokyo over the holiday over like New Year's and we were drinking in a bar and we both of us had started businesses before and so like a couple drinks we just started talking about oh you know what could we do one day and then we started talking about you know building some marketplace business we bought like 30 or 40 domains and then like the trip ended we got back to the real world and like you know sort of nothing happened for six seven eight nine months basically And so that that's all true. Like we talked about it and like we said we're gonna do it, but then there was like this

David: that wasn't the launch moment. Yeah.

Grant: Yeah. There was this like huge intervening period. And so

Grant: um you know mine really was sometime around like um you know October of 2020 or 2019. Yeah. Uh, and um, you know, I was like, Logan, remember we talked about doing those businesses and we brought those hundred domains when we were drinking in a bar in [laughter] Tokyo that we never that we never used? Uh, maybe maybe now is the time. Logan was like wrapping up his job. And um, you know, I still had mine, but I was like, you know, I need to go back to to building some stuff. And we could see a bunch of our friends getting back neglecting. So it was like Funko Pops and comic books and sports cards and I was like you know I know a little bit about that that industry and you know I'd always dabbled even after you know Pokemon cards I did um sneak I got into sneakers for a while and then I was doing some of the Funko stuff for a while and so I sort of like knew that market and it just like just hasn't changed in a really long time and like everyone uh like us now is is is older. They're starting to have some disposable income. They grow up on a mobile phone. I think there's something around collectibles and social commerce. Like, you know, if someone's going to figure it out, maybe why not us? Let's see what we can do.

David: Yeah.

Grant: Uh, and so then December 2019, we both quit our jobs and then we went full-time and launched our authenticated Funko Pop marketplace.

David: So, I got to ask, was not one of the domains that you had bought?

Grant: Uh, no. That would have been Can you imagine? Um, [laughter] pretty good. That would have been amazing forite. Yeah, it would have been amazing actually. So the the the origins of whatnot name which everyone always asks cuz like whatnot's like a very very memorable good name. We've had it for a very long time.

Grant: Um so actually one of the domains we bought again think we were drunk in a bar in Tokyo so it wasn't as if our judgment was [laughter] immensely good was like always legit. And I'm not joking because that was the first domain for whatnot. And the reason it was the first domain for whatnot is we're always just obsessed with like let's just make progress.

Grant: Yes. Let's just do a thing. I was like we don't even have a product. We don't have anything. I don't want to sit here and talk about a branding exercise.

David: Yeah.

Grant: For days.

David: Just go.

Grant: Let's just go.

David: Yeah.

Grant: And so it was always legit. And then our the first designer on whatnot, this guy John, who I worked with on my my prior startup before we were about to launch, he's like, I cannot be associated with a company called Always Legit. That is a horrific name. And it was I named it and it was a horrific name. But I was like, it doesn't matter. We don't have a product. Who cares what it's called if you got nothing?

David: Yeah.

Grant: Um and and so he made us uh get into a room, do a brainstorming exercise for like an hour. We we got to like a list of 10 names. We're like, "All right, we'd be comfortable if we got any of these. Let's go see if we can buy the domain." And so I got like three, John got three, and Logan got like three or four. And um Logan got whatnot. And of all those domains, all of them, you know, would have cost like $100,000 plus dollars and we had raised no money. Logan got a hold of the guy who had whatnot. And he, the guy goes, I'll sell it to you for a Bitcoin. So I was an early Bitcoin investor, so I had Bitcoin. [laughter]

David: This is amazing.

Grant: And Bitcoin back then was worth $10,000. So not like what it's worth now. And Logan haggled them down to half a bitcoin.

David: No way. Yeah. For five grand.

Grant: Yeah. For five grand. And so

David: I hope you guys held on to it. [laughter]

Grant: I hope so too. I mean, it was a killer price for the domain. And then, um, the escrow service we used was kind of weird because they had never done Bitcoin before. So, we sent the Bitcoin over, he sent the domain over, and he sent the wrong domain. He sent us Whynot, not Whatnot. And we were like, I mean, Whynot is okay. It's a decent alternative. But we were like, let's see if we can get Whatnot because we had this idea that we were going to sell a lot of different categories of things and collectibles, so Whatnot always felt better.

David: Yeah.

Grant: And the guy realized he messed up. He was like, "Oh, I sent the wrong one." And he sent Whatnot, and we gave Whynot back to him. So, that was that.

David: Wow. So, did you end up getting both of them for half a bitcoin, and then you just sent it back?

Grant: Yeah, we sent it back. We probably could have kept it, but because it was through escrow, they were like, "No, this has to go back." So it ended up going back.

David: That is amazing. So, December 2019, you guys quit. You started Always Legit. And then the name changed to Whatnot, right?

Grant: Yeah, it was before we launched. We launched as Whatnot. And it was a traditional e-commerce site. We had authenticated products, which we vetted, because we felt like at the time, that was the biggest issue for buyers was getting fake items.

David: Yeah.

Grant: So, we would have them shipped to us, we'd authenticate them, and we'd ship them to the buyer. And we did that for probably nine or ten months. And then in 2020, things changed.

David: Yeah, when we first talked in early 2020 or mid-2020, we saw the project. We were tracking it. We thought it was a creative idea. But when did you realize that live commerce was the key, rather than an authenticated static marketplace?

Grant: Transactions weren't integrated well. Shipping wasn't payments discovery CX. Um, and we just thought we could build a better one of those and it would solve uh the problems of the customers we had in the platform. Um, Logan locked himself in his room for a few weeks, came out with the first version of the product and um, I went live, sold out, sold a lot of items and the rest is sort of, you know, history from there.

David: What month was that of 2020?

Grant: We launched live in October or November of 2020. Actually, if you look at it, we had hit a wall. We had raised a tiny bit of money, like a million or 1.2 million, and we were trying to grow. And at that time, we were stuck. We were doing maybe $100k a month in sales, but we couldn't get it to grow. And listing items in collectibles is a huge pain, and it's a terrible process. You have to take all these photos, write all these descriptions. You put them up, they don't sell, and then buyers try to lowball you. It's a painful process.

David: Yeah.

Grant: And at the time, we saw people doing this on other social platforms, like Instagram Live or Facebook Groups. And because those platforms weren't built for commerce, people would have to say, "Oh, first one to write 'buy' gets it," and then pin their payment link in the chat. So, we felt like, if there is a real audience for this, we should build a vertical platform built for live commerce.

David: Yeah.

Grant: So, Logan built it. And like I said, we launched the beta. At that time, Logan did the dev and I did the hosting for the first live stream. We had maybe 10 or 15 people in the stream, mostly my friends. I sold all of my Funko Pops. And all the transactions, including shipping and payments, happened in a single second. That was the first time we felt like we had something.

David: Wow. So, you hosted the very first live stream on the platform.

Grant: Yeah. It was crazy. I was nervous. There wasn't a professional setup, just a crappy table. I put the camera in front of it, showed the pops, and did the stream from my living room. People were bidding right on the screen. It was amazing.

David: How much did you sell?

Grant: I think it was around $800, maybe slightly under a thousand. But that was a massive amount of sales for us back then, because before that, it would take us weeks to do a thousand dollars in sales. And now we did it in an hour of streaming, and the experience was great, without anyone worrying about payments and shipping.

David: Yeah, I'd love to know, once you brought live in and saw that it could do in an hour what used to take weeks, how did you onboard sellers and scale the supply? Because with a new format like live, onboarding sellers and getting them to stick around is hard. You have to help them make their first dollar.

Grant: It took a lot of unscalable work. For the first few hundred sellers, I knew almost all of them. I would DM people who were doing live sales on Instagram. I would say, "Hey, we built this new platform. It solves the payment, checkout, and shipping issues you have on Instagram. And if you come over, we will guarantee you make a few hundred dollars on your stream, so there is no risk to you."

David: Yeah.

Grant: So they did. And once they tried it and realized they didn't have to keep track of buyers on a piece of paper or send PayPal invoices manually, and everything was automated and they could just talk to the audience, the experience was game-changing. They would tell other sellers, "You have to use this platform. It's a hundred times better than Instagram."

David: It was word of mouth.

Grant: Yeah, that's how we scaled the supply side. And the buyers followed the sellers, because for buyers, they didn't have to deal with annoying payment processes anymore. It was seamless.

David: Got it. So, what was the month-over-month sales growth look like during that phase?

Grant: It was basically explosive. We were doubling month-over-month. From the month we launched live, the sales chart went vertical. Within the next few months, our GMV exploded 10x, 20x, and every metric was growing exponentially.

Grant: uh proliferates, it's just going to expand that market. So, not only could it be 30 or 40% of that market, um that market is going to get a lot bigger.

David: Yeah. It's sort of like it would be more akin to not so much like e-commerce, but the creation of like department stores or malls. Right.

Grant: It is.

David: Traditionally, you went to the high street because you needed to buy something specific. It was like, "I need black pants, I'm going to that shop." You went, bought it, and went home. That's traditional e-commerce - it's transactional. A mall, or a department store, is "I'm going to spend time there. It's social. My friends are there. There's entertainment. I want to see what they have this week that's new and exciting." And that's what, when people say, "Oh, you spend 95 minutes on it a day," that's the picture that paints for me. It makes sense. You're not paying attention for 95 minutes straight, in the same way you don't spend three hours in a mall trying on clothes. You're just spending time there, talking, hanging out. It's a social activity.

Grant: Spot on. I think people use the word "e-commerce" because that's the readiest framework for getting goods to your house. But I prefer to describe it as a "digital mall" or "entertainment shopping."

David: Entertainment shopping.

Grant: Like, when you're bored at home, you might open Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, or you might open Whatnot. That's the slot it occupies. It fulfills that need for entertainment, but it's also connected to social interaction and buying. You see all these crazy interactions, giveaways, auctions. You meet people with similar interests and chat with them in real-time.

David: That explains why Whatnot keeps users engaged in many ways. But at the same time, you are leaning heavily into authentication and trust guarantees, which is a massive challenge in a live platform dominated by individual sellers. Because maintaining trust in a decentralized live ecosystem is incredibly difficult.

Grant: Yeah, it's very challenging.

Grant: The ultimate conclusion around trust is you measure everything. And we invest a lot of resources. At whatnot, specifically trust and safety, is about 40% of the company headcount. Yeah, it's a massive investment for us. Because it's a challenge, right? You don't want to sell junk to your customers. That destroys the business. People get scammed, they don't come back. So, we've done a few things in this space that I think are core.

David: 40% of the company on trust and safety? That's shocking.

Grant: Yeah, absolutely. And we implemented seller vetting and identity verification early on. At the same time, we built a real-time automated risk engine. For example, if a seller who usually sells $10 Funko Pops suddenly starts promoting a multi-thousand-dollar vintage Pokemon card, or if there's an anomaly in their payout accounts, our system triggers a real-time alert and intervenes.

David: It's like credit card fraud detection.

Grant: Yeah, very similar. Because we guarantee that if you buy on Whatnot, you are 100% protected. If you get a counterfeit, we refund you fully and penalize the seller. We also offer physical authentication for high-value transactions. We build these hubs near logistics centers to ensure we verify items without adding too much shipping delay.

David: That's a heavy operational investment.

Grant: But it's necessary. If you want to build a digital mall where people feel safe shopping, trust is the foundation.

David: Yes. I think that's why you've held your ground despite competition from major social media platforms and e-commerce giants.

Grant: Yes. Large platforms struggle to focus on this kind of vertical, detailed trust and safety system. They are used to generalized traffic, but in collectibles and high-value social commerce, details determine survival.

David: That's very true. And I've noticed your community effect on both the seller and buyer sides is very strong. Many users are there to chat with like-minded peers as much as they are to buy.

Grant: Yeah.

David: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You get to see the identity of the person on the other end of the screen, you can ask questions, you can see how they pack it.

David: yeah [laughter] that's true that is very true okay so if you think about the platform and you've talked about the scale that you guys are running it's just massive massive scale um and so you one of the things I've used to describe you and Logan is relentlessness like you guys are relentless in execution. What are some of the things that you encounter with that amount of scale that you constantly have to be on top of? And I think this is a big like obviously now you're big and you have a network effect, but I think this is one of the big underrated things that allowed you to win in the early days is that you guys were constantly on top of anything that could break. So I'd love to understand some of those big things.

Grant: Yeah, it's what we talk about the most. There's a classic startup advice like, "Don't sweat the small stuff." But I think a more accurate representation is "You have to know which small stuff is actually big stuff." In the beginning, we had some incredibly painful moments where streams would drop, or we'd have a high-value authentication miss.

David: Yeah.

Grant: For us, things like shipping, checkout success rates, and even a 50-millisecond latency on the video stream are life and death for live auctions. Because in a live room, when the hammer goes down, if there is lag, it ruins the fairness. So Logan and our engineers would spend nights optimizing the streaming engine and transaction pipeline to ensure stable performance under high concurrency.

David: That's the value of dogfooding your own product.

Grant: Exactly. We spend a lot of time on the platform ourselves. Even now, Logan and I buy items every week and sometimes host streams. That's the only way to feel what is clunky for a seller or laggy for a buyer.

David: That's not easy, especially now that you are leading in multiple categories like cards, toys, vintage clothing, comics, and expanding further.

Grant: Yes, so as we expand categories, we rely on systematic methods to maintain execution. For example, we've introduced LLM-based AI assistants and rule engines to quickly flag non-compliant behavior and answer logistics questions.

David: What role does AI play in your operations today?

Grant: Two main areas: first, compliance and safety monitoring. AI helps monitor thousands of concurrent streams, identifying fraud, prohibited items, or inappropriate content. That's impossible with human moderation alone. Second, discovery and recommendation. AI maps user interests to push relevant live rooms at the right time, increasing conversion.

David: It makes the traffic much more efficient.

Grant: Yes. We are also experimenting with AI to help sellers generate product descriptions and analyze their stream performance, showing them when engagement peaked.

David: That's cool. It's like a data copilot for sellers.

Grant: Yes, because our philosophy has always been that we only succeed when our sellers make money and build healthy businesses.

David: That's why sellers are so loyal to you.

Grant: Yeah, it's going to be um it's going to be amazing. It might be not good for um uh my bank account. [laughter] Um and I'm I'm obviously obligated to to try it out. You got to dog food it. Um, and so, so I think there's a, you know, just a huge amount of investment just continuing to make sure make people help people build better businesses. Uh, and then, you know, in order to do that, we have to have a really great buyer experience.

Grant: Yes. Because we in order to build a good business, people have to come back. And so, we're going to continue to make sure we're investing in customer support, trust, and safety, bringing down shipping prices, improving the selection and quality of the products on the platform. And that's that's really it. Now, maybe we'll launch in some more countries. We'll do some cool stuff like cars. You know, eventually we'd like to get into liquor, beer, and wine. So, there's a whole litany of things that we we're we're excited to do, but fundamentally it boils down to help more people build businesses and make sure that the people transacting those businesses are having a great experience.

David: That's an awesome way to close. Your maniacal, relentless focus on the seller experience obviously drives the buyers and then making the buyer experience as affordable and as good as possible is clearly working. So, um, thanks for the time, Grant. So fun to be with

David: you. [music]