YouSaid · the spoken record

Grant LaFontaine

lines on the record: 41
first: 2022-03-23
most recent: 2022-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The biggest social commerce marketplace in the Western world. We've had the biggest IPO ever. This has been so much fun, Steve. As I said, I had so many great things from so many before this. So thank you so much and I can't wait for 2032. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Har That discussion with Grant and really loved a bit on AB testing in particular, a huge thanks to Grant for giving out the time today to be on the show. If you'd like to see more from us, you can on 20VC”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things. I don't know if a total mind change, but thing that I'm having to adjust to is we scale the company. We really have to empower everyone to solve problems. And I'm that type of person when I see a problem, I just like run at it. And I've had to slowly, I see a problem. I let it burn for a little bit so we can get the team focused in on that problem and actually solve it on their own. I know that is correct, but I haven't been able to avoid the urge in a lot of instances. That's one where I've probably now taken a more extreme view where my initial view would have been like, but it's a really big problem, fix it. Now my view is like, okay, but if I do that again, the team's never going to solve it and we're going to have 10 more big problems. And so I guess my view on like letting problems simmer so we get the organizational muscle to have people solve those problems. And I would probably give credit to our VP of engineering Ludo for pushing me and changing my opinion on that. Final one for you. It's a tough one. Next 10 years for you and for whatnot, if we do this in 20”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't set a really hard guardrail and you can find yourself going down and down that rabbit hole. If you do one investment, then you do three, then you start to do five and ten. And there's no way you're getting value from 10 investments. It's very hard to actually understand the inner workings of a company unless you're actually really in it. And then if you're trying to learn, there are better avenues for learning. Go get advisors. Go find someone in an industry that actually matters versus, and who's the best at what they do. Most startups will not be the best at what they do. I just think there's better avenues to solve that problem. You can have a billboard anywhere. Where would you have it? And what would it say on it, Grant? I'm not a super flashy person, so I would never have a billboard anywhere. I like to keep my head down and do the work. I think if I were to have like one message, you know, people come and ask me for advice. It's just like, do the hard work, keep your head down, remain focused. So it would be something along those lines, but would probably be very averse to having a billboard because I think it's not my style or personality. What did you believe that you've changed your mind on recently? Probably one of the”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't do it, never. I think there are founders I know who do it, and some of them have reasonably good logical reasons for why they do it. I think if you're a founder, it's incredibly important that you fully optimize the success of your company. We have 120, 30 people working for us now. We have investors who have put a lot of money and to some extent a lot of their career on us. And I think any ounce of effort outside of that that you direct to another thing to not focus fully on the success of the company is just not correct. I don't think that I could look my company squarely in the face if I wasn't putting everything into it. And I find it would just be a distraction. So I totally agree. And I say this too. And I get people say, I learn from the investments that I make. I make angel investments and I see things that work. I see things that don't work and I can bring them back to my company. How would you respond to that? Again, I think there are reasonably logical things you can construct there. I think there's just very slippery slopes.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds great The foundations trilogy. I love sci fi books because I think it just helps me think differently. I think it's just a really interesting way to change my mind and help me look in a different direction. It's like when I read books, I read books to give me a different perspective on things and stress test my thinking and view of the world.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have moments of very high anxiety when it's unclear exactly what will happen. I'm a little bit further along my career. I'm 33. You know, I've been working in tech for like 10, 12 years. I think it'd be really tough to be a young founder who just hasn't been through the ringer a little bit. I've been through the ringer a little bit. I've seen some things I've had ups and downs. There's fewer things that phase me. Success is breed confidence. You know, we've been really fortunate in less than two and a half years. We've built a really, really large business. We are one of the biggest marketplaces period of time where the fastest growing marketplace ever. That does give us a high level of confidence. When I'm overly confident or overly underconfident, I always try and switch the equation around and try and rethink it. Am I being too confident? Do I have it right? What could go wrong? And then some of those cases, you can fall back on advisors, whether it's Matt, you know, other folks that, you know, help.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem I have, which typically tends to be organizational or people because those are just the hardest problems to work back from because people are complicated. He's got a good framework that's been tried and tested in other scenarios that have worked.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things our executive team, most of the people who report directly into me is like very new. So we've hired four executives in the past six months. It's challenging sometimes to get people to work really well together, share information in the right way. Talking with Matt about this, like how do we get our team to gel? How do we get our team to build trust? He's like, oh, let me help you out with that. And he's like, I will do three executive coaching sessions with your whole team. We'll go through issues. We'll go through feedback. He's got a really good feedback framework. And then he'll kick it off with me where it'll be like, all right, you can go and roast Grant on all the bad things he's doing. Give him the toughest feedback you can give him. I'll sit there and listen to it. And most of the time it's accurate. And so I'll acknowledge it and that's fine and allows me to improve. And I think doing that builds a higher trust environment and we can do that amongst everyone and we can improve versus never been in a situation at the scale of company with this level of executive and people who have far greater experience than myself. I'm not sure I would have the confidence to do some of those things. Being able to go, hey, Matt, here's a”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely amazing. I was very lucky to start working with him last year. You know, when you come across these hard problems, like all the people problems that you run into, they're not like the business problems where you can work back from first principles. People are really complicated. When you start to run those conflicts and getting like organizations to work well together, it's really hard to fall back on first principles in a lot of instances. And so you need other systems and things and tool set. And so the thing that I love about Matt, he's got a really great framework for how to deal with a lot of the problems that will pop up as a founder. And there'll be tons. When I look back on the past year and the set of problems that have popped up that have shocked and surprised me, I still can't comprehend. And so having someone like Matt where I, you know, he coaches so many amazing founders who have through so many amazing companies, he just has a really good tool set to solve problems.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do have a management coach and I do have a couple people who mentor me. My management coach, his name is Matt Moshari.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my greatest weakness probably developing a team and dealing with some of the hard situations that pop up. I think as I said earlier of founding team, I'm the softie. And so when we get to things that are like really hard decisions like, hey, this person's underperforming, I'm the one that's going to like let's give it some time. Let's like work with the person. Then as you scale your company, what starts to happen is you start to bring in a lot of people who actually have much more experience than you at lots and lots of different things. And sometimes even they have performance issues or be stuck on a problem. I find mentoring and upleveling them to be difficult. And so if I were to like sum it up, it's the scale of kind of people management dealing with people issues and those things. And I actually think it's in part largely because I just want everyone to succeed.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's probably not a huge difference, if I'm being honest. I think it probably depends on the business. Certainly for our business, our business is very, very seller oriented. And so we do spend a lot more of our time on the supply side. When we do switch over to the buy side, we are able to do pretty amazing things that like move the needle. You know, we ship the feature a couple months ago. I thought was cool. It was kind of fun. We shipped it and it had like, it increased our viewership on every stream by like 30%. I was kind of shocked, but that is part of the reason why like if you have a group of smart people, let them build stuff. do it fast as long as they're oriented on user problems they'll surprise you”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your top line metrics, then you have a lot of your health metrics and your input metrics into it. At the end of the day, you have to think about the entire user experience. What makes a great user experience from the buy side and the sell side? And make sure you're looking at pretty actively all of those things so you can isolate any problems that arise as early as possible.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, one, it's an obvious one that we do track quite significantly. You know, as we were thinking through whether we had product market fit in the early days, seller retention and buyer retention, probably the two most important metrics for us to gain high confidence on that. You could really clearly see in the numbers that people love to experience. One of the problems with that is it's probably just like a lagging indicator of the value of the platform. People will leave once there are problems and you want to like isolate the problems earlier on. You know, one of the big things for us is like trust. And we have to have really trusted sellers on so people feel confident in their purchases. Let's just say we accidentally went on a bunch of sellers who provide a really bad experience. It could be from bad shipping to not poor packaging to lying about the items and the quality that they have. You'll get all of those people on. You'll have a bunch of our buyers have a really poor experience. They will then start to leave their retention will fall. Only once their retention falls and sellers stop making less money in each show, the seller retention will fall. You know, you have to like take like a really holistic picture.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Item. And it's very clear you'd probably want the latter, which is why I say probably no good North Star ever. You do have to look at other parts of the experience. Some things are softer. Trust is really important to us. That's not really a thing you can quantify.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't explicitly have a single North Star metric. The metric that we look at the most is GMV. It stands for gross merchandise value, which is the value of all of the products sold on what we'll say is there is no perfect North Star metric, which is partly why I'm slightly averse to even saying we have a North Star metric. There are always other things that you have to look at and understand. But if we were to have one metric, and probably the one that we look at the most is GMV, it's because it's the best encapsulation of value across the whole business. If we have higher GMV, our sellers aren't making more money. They're building bigger businesses, which is the biggest value add for them. The more in GMV, the more people are purchasing on whatnot, which is a huge indicator that they're getting value from the experience and the platform. Our business model is such that we take a percentage of all transactions. If we make those things happen, our business gets stronger. And so let's just like a really nice alignment of incentives. Now, it's not perfect. You get to some weird situations where would you rather have 100 people buy a $10 item or one person buy a thousand dollar?”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The snap was a company that kind of successfully did this. As they got to scale, they did start to implement A-B testing. And there will be certain areas where we will A-B test, like our feed, for instance. I think when you start to do personalized discovery, it's very hard to intuit how people are going to understand that because there's like millions of variants of personalization. You need to use A-B testing as a tool in your tool set. And you shouldn't use it for everything. It is not an appropriate tool for everything that you're doing.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If what I'm trying to do is maximize the percentage gain in GMV for our business, if you were to look at equation where you slowly A, B tested everything and got high confidence versus an equation where you can say, all right, I think with this one I got 95% confidence, I have 90% confidence with this one, and I can like ship 10 things versus the five things with AB testing. Your expected value equation in the first one is much higher. That's just how I think about it. And then the other thing, there's no inherent reason why this has to happen, but it's certainly what I observed at Facebook is as soon as you start AB testing everything, you get into this world where everything you do has to be quantifiable in a short period of time. And as things become quantifiable in a short period of time, you end up pushing more towards sure things and then linking that to your performance of the company. And so in like very, very quick order, what you get is incredible incrementality versus really focusing on deep user products.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it just slows you down, encourages incremental thinking. I'll dive into both those. In terms of slowing you down, what ends up happening, all right, you're going to build this thing, you then have to implement the A-B test. You have to think about the testing. You have to let it sit in the market for two weeks. Then at the end of it, you have to get into a room with people, review the metrics, decide if it solved the problem and it's really good and then go. And so I think about shipping product is just an expected value equation. And so AB testing is largely useless if you have high confidence the thing is going to solve user problem. By way of example, we just shipped a new browse experience on whatnot. It allows people to like go down on subcategories like I'm interested in seeing VHS shows where I can buy VHS. VHS is a big category on whatnot. And they can go down and see all the shows that have VHSs and DVDs. We just rolled it out two days ago. We did an AB test. It was a huge, huge change. If we have 95% confidence that that is going to be a step change improvement for the entire”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think again, it comes back to what I said earlier. It's we build quality stuff fast. And so there's no excuse to build anything that isn't of quality with a couple exceptions. So if we were building like a new zero to one product and completely new business line, we're happy to spaghetti code it, validate that there's users love it. But anything in the core product, that growth is working on, it's built to scale. You can build things to scale. In a lot of cases, particularly now given our size, working on quality and making sure it scales, you've got some level of testing in there actually just enables us to move faster because we're spending less time on problems.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can scale the business, find issues and diagnose issues in the product later on. But the metrics are a second order phenomenon. I think in the past year, there's probably been like three really interesting consumer companies. It's been Clubhouse, OpenSea, and us. Two out of three founders OpenSea founder and Clubhouse founder all came from Pinterest. And a huge chunk of our team is actually now from Pinterest. And what I've observed talking with people from Pinterest is they can make much more grounded user-driven decisions. Let me think about the product and how it solves problems. So I'll give you an example. Brought on this guy, Jeff Chang. He's running our growth team. At most Fang companies, the growth team is heavily oriented towards AB testing and metrics. Our growth team is just building things and doesn't test anything and ships it fast. And that's because it's the right way to do it at our stage. And there's few people who understand that can go user first, be really oriented on speed and problem solving.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Step back. Like, when I be a little bit explicit about what I mean there, when you look at the broader VC market right now, almost everything's in B2B. There are very few consumer companies that are growing very fast with material businesses and material metrics. I think the kind of meme around it is like the air has been sucked out of consumer a little bit by the fang companies. And I just think that there's probably an element of truth there, but I think there's a lot more to it. Again, relates to this point of not being able to hire PMs. Building great consumer companies is not a mathematical equation. It's like when I go and look around all of the materials about how do I build product, how do I think about this? There's so much stuff on retention and cohorts and metrics and this and that. And that is just like not how you build consumer products. It comes from deep empathy of users, an ability to devise good solutions. The metrics come after that. Once you build something great that people love, then you can start to look at the metrics, make sure the business”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The move fast principle is a double edged sword as it was at Facebook as well, which is why they went from move fast and break things to move fast and build things on stable infrastructure. You know, I think in February of this year, our app went down every day, literally every single day. Everything we do fast, but that we can't substitute quality. Setting that minimum bar, that B plus student. And so that's one thing that I think we didn't push enough on in the early days and definitely one caused issues in some of the business metrics at various points in time and also burned the team out quite a bit. Team was dealing with Sev after Sev after Sev or like app going down after app going down after app going down. There was, you know, like our DevOps team in particular, they weathered an incredible storm this year. It's a testament to how great of a team they are. But we definitely put them a bit through the ringer as a result of that. And we've had to like push much more on quality both because it's good for our users, but also for the sanity of our team.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I am. We don't like doing it. But what I can say is after everyone that we have done, the teams actually improved quite drastically. And it's kind of surprising and kind of jarring. What we've tried to do, like one of our principles is transparency. We just try and be really transparent about how those things work. So it's not a black box to people, which is to say, we obviously don't comment on any individual person situation, but we comment on how we handle these things. Like if someone's underperforming or it's not a fit, we always try and work with them. If at the end of not being able to work with them, we handle things humanely, we give people good severance, we help them find the job that may be a better fit for them just because you're not performing or love whatnot doesn't mean you're not really good at your craft or skill. Like this is a very specific environment. And so you may be better off somewhere else. And so I think as a function of that, the team rebounded always stronger thus far.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Luckily for us, it was never a huge wave of people. I give my co founder a lot of credit here. He's always had a lot of the way we hired our team was through referrals, both me and him, probably more of his referrals than my referrals, if I'm being honest. He had very good judgment in people. And so despite us not interviewing explicitly on the principles, we kind of intuitively found ourselves bringing on people who are well aligned. And so what ended up happening was that a small number of people who weren't aligned, the impact of that ended up being smaller. I can also say I hate having to let people go. I like deeply care about everyone in the team. I think it's terrible when it has to happen. We try and do it really humanely. I'm a little bit me versus my co-founder. I'm kind of the softer one.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Month, everything was on fire. We just started hiring people based on referrals. And there's a good chunk of folks in that kind of timeframe because we didn't interview and explicitly vet on our principles that weren't a great fit. People who are not a great fit at the company cause a disproportionate amount of harm to the culture and the team. Whenever I tell people, like if ever people are getting to like the scaling stage, like they've got it working, they think they got product market fit and they're about to hire 20, 30, 40, 50, however many people. My first bit of advice is like really well articulate your principles and make sure you interview everyone on them because probably the biggest thing you're going to fail on interviewing and what you'll get wrong is because it won't be a cultural fit. People won't be aligned to the way that you're working. And so I think we messed that one up.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you what's been hard at whatnot. A couple of the things that we've probably messed up. We are a remote company. It's hard to spread culture in a remote world. You can't sit next to someone, see what they're doing, have those deep conversations, build as much trust. This is going to be a challenge for the new wave of companies that are like probably remote first like us. I think what we've done to combat that is a lot of our culture is just like written or in video. Everyone who goes for the company and onboarding reads it. It's emphasized everywhere. It's just a constant team meetings. And as a function of me talking about it all the time, then the team talks about it all the time. So it's kind of like the culture is how you hire, how you reward people. And then in the unfortunate cases, it doesn't work out. It's typically like the reason you part ways with someone. So which is very kind of Amazon like in how they approach it. And so it's woven into anything. In terms of what we've messed up in culture, when we first started scaling the company, we had not like well articulated our culture. The thing was growing 100% month over month.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we make bets. The live shopping component of whatnot was a bet. We didn't know if it was going to work. Those are some of the things that we do to try and shift the human bias to avoid risk versus actively take risk. Grant, the best CEOs are the best resourced allocators is a statement often said. You said they're about making bets. How do you think about the bets that you want to take versus the ones that you don't? I think that's probably true for a lot of founders. Like we like to build new things. That's the joy. The joy is in building new things, which is in the new bets and bringing something from zero to one. I have a document with all the bets that I want to make and whatnot, and it's very, very, very variable. Because you can very easily go in one direction or the other, I kind of think about 10 to 20% of resource should be on new and exciting things. I actually believe”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Risk averse, but it's amazing the number of things that we've pushed out and we thought would be higher risk. Something else would pop up. And it just never does. I think there's a couple of layers to how you solve the risk taking. And again, I don't think we're perfect because it's a very deep-rooted human bias to avoid risk. I think one is talk about it a lot, take on risk. I talk, you know, I can give that story. That's to me was when I switched from Facebook to whatnot. One of the hardest things that I had to unlearn. We interview on it. We want to see people who have taken on big projects. We want to see people who are comfortable owning things. And I think, you know, everyone on What Not gets interviewed on our principles, it's probably, it's the single most important thing to interview on. I think we reward big upside. We actually don't explicitly reward failure because I also don't think you want to reward failure. We make sure that failure is not punished, right? It's fine to fail. And in fact, the narrative is like, you're going to have to fail before you do some big things. We don't want to fail. You should never want to fail. You should want to win. You should want to, you know, do the best you can. One of our principles is.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aren't scared of ramifications if it goes wrong. Yeah, it's a really tough one. I don't think we've nailed it entirely. One of the more interesting observations that I've had in building this company is the level of risk aversion. When you're coming from, let's just say a big tech company to whatnot, you kind of have to like, one of the biggest things that I see people having to do is they have to like shift their whole judgment model a little bit. When you're building a product at Facebook, for instance, you write up the product spec and there might even be like a section there about like key risks. And you're going to go have to like de-risk a bunch of those things. You probably spend the vast majority of your time actually like de-risking things. Whereas like the optimal way to do things, particularly at our stage is to like invert that. What is the thing with the highest upside as long as there are no existential risks? Don't worry about them. Most of the risks that you enumerate are never real. And so instead you kind of have to just push something out there and understand what the real risks are. My co-founder is a little bit better at this than me. I'm a little bit like more.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That users on the platform have then be able to devise a solution to those problems. Then the third action, I think, is a comfort taking real ownership because we're in a world where we basically don't have PMs, there's so many decisions and bits of ownership that engineering is required to take control of. We don't have JIRA. No one writes tickets. There's no set processes. No one hands you anything. So I think it's a real excitement about the product, a real empathy for users, and a real desire to take ownership. And if you have those components in like an engineer or engineering manager, it's a really, really powerful combination. How do you create a culture whereby engineers and team members feel that ownership and are excited by it to go big into think ambitiously?”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we honestly just give them like a product design interview question pretty similar to what a PM would get. It can take a couple different forms, probably the most common one is like walk me through the whatnot app. Here's an example. Tell me how you would redesign the feed to make it better for users and literally come up with product solutions and then maybe even talk a little bit about the implementation details. And the signals you're looking for there, one, it's funny how this one always falls off, but someone who's actually used the Whatnot app significantly. If someone's going to be able to make sound product decisions, they need to have the initiative to actually use the app be excited about it and be into it. You'd be surprised at the number of people who can hardly speak to the product. You know, I think a lot of people come into the interview process like, oh, there's this unicorn company. It's growing really fast. I want to be on the rocket ship. And so they look at it from that perspective. But if you're going to work on something, you have to be really into it. So I think that's number one. Number two is just like extreme user empathy. So like they can articulate some of the problems.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You brought up this question of how come hiring PMs is so hard. This is part of the root of it. You need to have exceptionally good taste and judgment to make those decisions. There isn't a scientific formula for it. And so I think the best that you can do is deeply understand your users and be incredibly empathetic to them and also deeply understand the business. Things do trade off against the business. If you have people with sound judgment, you kind of unleash them to make those decisions and they can make them. If they're really good judgment, most of those decisions will be good. 10% of them might be bad, but we live in a world of two-way doors so you can walk those back and you can learn from them. And then over time, you're basically just tuning your judgment. We're pretty lucky because we built a product for us. And I do think that is like a hack to the system.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back and the engineers stack rank it and figure out what they want to fix and what they want to push out. On two way doors, the difference is you do execution very fast and you try and let nothing get in your way, but you're probably more thoughtful in planning up front, getting all the inputs, getting the feedback of the organization because the decision you make there is harder to pull back. And so that's kind of the way we think about things. But 99% of things that we do every day, you know, one-way doors are like hiring culture. There's few platform level decisions, policy fees, et cetera. Very, very, very few. And so with all things you do it fast, there's some risks in that. Facebook is probably the one who pioneered this the most is like move fast and break things you know what can happen and we run into this issue is like you can use speed as an excuse to slack on some other things and so i think you know one of the things that we try and do is like speed on everything absolutely but that doesn't give you an excuse to do poor quality work i mean we're not a plus students i like to say like we're b plus student it's got to hit a quality”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my punchline is no matter what you're doing, you should always seek to do it fast, at least execution. Every bit of execution should be done fast. It's far too easy to get sidelines, get 100 disparate opinions, just get nervous and risk averse. You know, the framework that I think is the best is Amazon's framework, which is like one-way doors and two-way doors. You know, most things in software are two-way doors. If you make a mistake, you can always walk it back. And so even if that is the case for the decisions that you're making, you might as well slack a little bit on the planning side, push into execution because you tend to learn a lot more in execution than you do from planning because you start to like get rid of the unknown variables. And so you just do those things exceptionally fast and you build. And there's some mechanisms you can have in place to just like make sure you don't mess anything up terribly. So we're really heavy dog food in culture. Once a feature is ready, we just spin up a slack dog fooding channel and the whole company goes at it and everyone sends the”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rely a lot more on strategy and data. But if you are really grounded and empathetic to your users, you can make high quality decisions without huge amounts of data. Ultimately, what that allows you to do is speed everything up. Add value to users exceptionally fast.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Share a little secret are 1 p.m. She did just go on maternity leave on Friday. So we're actually officially zero p.m. and 50 engineers. We are going to build a PM team. We want to build a very exceptional PM team. We'll probably always keep the ratios very high relative to standard companies because we want to optimize for speed. The more people in decision-making process, the slower it goes. It's just like no way to solve that. In terms of hiring PMs, the biggest pool of PMs today are coming from like the fang companies, Facebook, Google, et cetera. And they tend to be strategy and numbers focused. You know, I strongly hear to kind of like why I see this principle of build something people want. And so it just all flows from users at this stage, the greatest superpower you can have is like deeply understanding your users and your user problems. You know, I think at scale, it's really hard to do, which is why Facebook and Google”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think when I look at a huge part of the success of both Google and Facebook, it was really about empowering engineers and allowing engineering to go out and build and solve real user problems. Google is incredibly user problem focused and incredibly engineering focused. Probably taking that to more of an extreme, if I'm being honest. So today we have about 50 engineers in the team. We have one product manager. And so our engineers drive the company, drive the product roadmap, and drive the decision making. You know, we've had to adjust things a little bit. all of our engineers actually go through a product interview so that they can make sound product decisions and judgments but when you have the people who are actually executing and building the thing driving the decisions they're way more empowered you have fewer people in the equation so you can get things done way faster”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably in two ways. One, I think you get an inside view of some of the things that make those companies very successful. And you want to steal that. I think both of those places have like really unique cultures. Being on the inside, you can see the pros and cons of each of those. When we defined our cultural principles, I actually kind of think of them as a mishmash between Google, Facebook, and like, I haven't worked at Amazon, but I admire a lot of Amazon's principles. We actually did a principles-based approach versus values. So we did steal from Amazon too. Whatnot is not what it is today without me working at those places.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's anxiety producing because I think uncertainty is anxiety producing. But I was always grounded in the reality that when you look at most of the really big successes, like the starting point and the ending point are very, very different. I think that was somewhat comforting. So I would say it wasn't like absolutely dying from it, but I had high anxiety.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think many startups, it's a long process in there. I don't think there is an aha moment. I can bring you back to the really early origins. We were going to start a better full-service Craigslist. Two weeks in, I was validating the business model. And I was like, we can't make money from this business. We have to change. And then we switched over to building a collectibles marketplace.”
2022-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source