Whatnot is worth $11.5 billion—and its sellers just hit one billion orders
· Fortune
The first orders on Whatnot, in 2020, were Funko Pops, sold live by cofounder Grant LaFontaine. For the uninitiated:
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“A Funko Pop is a vinyl bobblehead-like doll, generally built around various IP,” LaFontaine explained in a recent interview we did for a forthcoming Term Sheet podcast. “You can get a Star Wars Funko Pop, or your favorite football players… There’s basically a Funko Pop for anything you can think of.”
That very first Funko Pop-centered livestream was an experiment, and a successful one at that—with LaFontaine selling $5,000 in Funko Pops in a few hours that July 2020 evening.
“We sold every Funko Pop we had, everything that was in the office,” said LaFontaine. “We had more in the house, but were so tired because it was 11 o’clock at night by that point. But we were very excited: it would have been more Funko Pops than I’d have been able to sell on eBay in a year.”
It was the beginning of a live commerce marketplace that, six years later, is one of tech’s sneakiest runaway successes. Whatnot—which in October raised a $225 million Series F, with an $11.5 billion valuation—has been in the midst of a serious growth spurt: The startup says it saw more than 20 million new accounts created over the last year, while the number of first-time buyers on the platform has grown year-over-year by 285%. On Whatnot, a universe of sellers converges, offering everything from Star Wars merchandise, designer handbags, and fresh fish. (Yes, you read that right—@efish_co, who’s based in San Diego and livestreams while he’s fishing, sends customers fresh seafood that they watched come from the Pacific Ocean.)
Now, a long way from one evening of Funko Pops, Whatnot’s sellers have crossed one billion orders, the company exclusively told Fortune.
“It’s wild to comprehend, one billion orders is a lot of orders,” LaFontaine said. “The way the business is compounding today, the vast majority of those one billion orders has happened in the past six months.”
Whatnot’s rise amid the AI boom is counterintuitive not only because it bucks the trend, but because marketplace startups are famously difficult to build. For every Uber, there’s a vast graveyard of marketplace startups. Those companies often fell prey to tricky supply-and-demand dynamics, user retention challenges, and the essentially infinite number of things that can go wrong when your business depends on a wild world of humans thoughtfully and ethically transacting. But Whatnot also serves as a reminder of why the marketplace model retains its appeal: When it works, it really works.
“Once you have a marketplace business and the experience is really good, it just gets better faster,” said LaFontaine. “In the past year, for instance, because we’ve added more categories, that means more and more people have things to go and purchase. They then have better and better experiences, and sellers have more of an audience they can potentially sell things to.”
The sellers have to do the actual shipping these days. So, if I sell Muppet tiki mugs (yes, these exist), I am, after all, the one with the tiki mugs. (The company says it supports sellers by negotiating directly with carriers to get the best possible shipping rates and bundling options.) When it comes to engendering trust at scale, LaFontaine believes the livestream format has made all the difference.
“If you look at live commerce, there’s actually much more accountability baked into it than any other format,” he said. “You’re on camera, you can see the item, and you know if someone’s doing something relatively shady. There’s also a bunch of other people, holding that person on camera accountable.”
When new hires join up, Whatnot shows a photo from 2020, back when LaFontaine and cofounder Logan Head were running the fledgling startup out of that rented house where they hosted the first livestream.
“A big day or orders for us then was 30 orders,” LaFontaine said. “We were fulfilling our own inventory, so the living room was just full of boxes. And now, the average day on Whatnot, we do a couple million orders.”
Among those millions of orders every day: Pokémon cards, crystals, sneakers, coins, plants, and vintage toys. And, of course—as was true at the beginning—there’s still pretty much a Funko Pop for everything.
Scoop… I was the first to report that Roelof Botha, former steward at Sequoia Capital, is joining the board of SpaceX less than a week after the company’s historic IPO. Botha has known Elon Musk since they worked together at PayPal in the dotcom era. More here.
We’re off for Juneteenth, have a wonderful weekend, and see you Monday,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: [email protected]
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com