Whatnot

Whatnot landed at #8 on CNBC's 2026 Disruptor 50 list. We’re grateful to the sellers, buyers, and Whatnauts helping build a different kind of commerce company. Commerce got incredibly efficient over the last decade. But it also became increasingly impersonal. What’s happening on Whatnot shows there’s a different path forward. Every day, sellers go live to share expertise, build communities, and grow real businesses around the things they know best. More than 500,000 hours of live shows are hosted on Whatnot each week, and 1 in 8 sellers now sell full-time on the platform. The format is proving, at scale, that the future of retail will be built around human connection and real-time interaction. And we’re still early. There are new categories to expand into, new markets to grow, and an ambitious product roadmap ahead of us. We’re hiring across nearly every team for people who want to work on hard problems and help shape the future of commerce. If that sounds exciting to you, come build with us. #Disruptor50 #Whatnot #LiveShopping #Hiring https://lnkd.in/gM86HBNG

Six years ago, Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head rented a house in Phoenix, locked themselves in to build live video infrastructure from scratch, and sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops on Whatnot's first show. Fast forward to last year: sellers on Whatnot generated over $8B in live sales, and Whatnot now holds nearly 60% of the live shopping market in the West. Jennifer Conrad at Inc. Magazine talked to our founders, sellers like Wild Ginger Vintage and Pursuit Farms, investors, and analysts for this profile on how Whatnot made live shopping finally click in the West and where it goes from here. A few things from the piece that we think about a lot: you can't fake community, the next decade of commerce will be built on real human connection rather than algorithms, and dogfooding the product (every employee goes live once a quarter, answers customer service requests, gets a monthly buying budget) leads to better decisions. From Grant LaFontaine: "If your culture recedes, you end up doing things like every other company, and you're not going to be, by definition, an exceptional company." https://lnkd.in/gwnK_nCF #LiveShopping

How do you use AI to scale a platform built on human connection without erasing the thing that makes it work? Our CPO Tom Verrilli sat down with Fast Company Tech Editor Harry McCracken at Web Summit Vancouver to dig in to how Whatnot is using AI to improve the buying and selling experience. Our approach: use AI where it removes friction, and leave the human parts human. We're building smarter discovery for buyers and tools that help sellers spend less time on logistics, so they can focus on what only people can do: showing up live, answering questions, and building real communities around what they sell. Vancouver is a fitting backdrop, with Canadian sales on Whatnot up 7x year over year and sellers from across the country turning live shows into thriving businesses. Thanks for the conversation, Web Summit. #WebSummit

Some of the best engineers, PMs, and designers in the industry came together in NYC this week, and walked out buzzing about the future of live commerce. Our chief product officer Tom Verrilli and head of engineering Daniel Bear talked about what it actually takes to build at this scale. We're processing 500,000+ hours of live shopping video every week. Real-time auctions. Multimodal systems. Problems that haven't been solved before, because this category didn't exist before. This isn't your traditional e-commerce. Static listings and overnight batch updates? That world is behind us. What we're building is genuinely new, and the energy in that room proved there are a lot of people who want to be part of it. The momentum is showing up everywhere. Whatnot has ranked as the #1 shopping app in both the U.S. and U.K., we did $8B+ in live sales last year, and we were just named Forbes' #1 Best Startup Employer in America for 2026. Thanks to everyone who came out. We're hiring across product, design, and engineering if you want to help build what comes next.

Robert from Arajo Rarities spent decades in the coin trade and at one point owned 12 retail stores across three states. He sold them off in 2019 and scaled back to a one-person operation out of Florida, moving about 20 high-value coins a week through small-batch wholesale and online sales. Then in 2024, Hurricane Helene destroyed his home and upended the business with it. Instead of rebuilding what he had, Robert decided to try something new. A fellow coin dealer told him about Whatnot, and after working one-on-one with the team to prepare, he went live for the first time. He planned to do $50K in his first full month and sold $220K, five times what he expected. Four months in, Arajo Rarities crossed $1M in sales and grew from a one-person operation to a team of four. He's since grown the team further, the shows pull hundreds of viewers, and the community has grown to over 100,000 followers on Whatnot. "I've grown so fast because I actually want to build a community," Robert says. "I don't want to get customers. I want to get more people into collecting as a hobby." #LiveShopping #Coins

The most interesting thing about AI and product management isn't the tools. It's which teams were already built to use them well. Our CPO Tom Verrilli's argument is that the ones built around managing people are about to get exposed, and the ones built around doing the work are about to pull ahead. He uses our team as the case study: 20 PMs supporting 1,000+ employees, co-founders still in the code, and PMs mapped to customer problems rather than to engineering managers, so they're working across the full customer experience instead of optimizing a slice of it. His full case below. https://lnkd.in/gmVn8Biv #ProductManagement #LiveShopping

Whatnot has thousands of live shows running at any given time, and each one only lasts a couple hours before it's gone. Vintage denim, Pokémon cards, snacks and more, all happening at once. What's available shifts constantly, and so does what you want to shop for. The feed has to keep up. Our Discovery team just published a post on how they make the feed keep up, moving the system behind feed ranking from daily updates to hourly ones. They cover what went wrong along the way (one process quietly ran half as often as it should have for a while) and how they keep things reliable now. They're working toward updates in under a minute, so the feed keeps pace with you in real time. We're hiring engineers who want to build this kind of real-time tech with us: careers.whatnot.com https://lnkd.in/gyyJC7gR #MachineLearning #LiveShopping

What happens when you put people back at the center of commerce? That was one of the questions our co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine discussed with retail expert Alexander Graf yesterday at OMR in Hamburg, Germany's largest digital and tech festival. On Whatnot, sellers interact with buyers in real-time, show their products live, and build deep customer loyalty. In Germany, that model is turning into something bigger. Brick and mortar stores are finding audiences they could never reach from a storefront and converting them into customers. Established businesses are opening new revenue streams. A new generation of entrepreneurs is building live-first businesses from the ground up. Our business in Germany more than tripled in 2025. Behind that growth: 3 in 4 German buyers chat with the seller before they purchase, the highest engagement rate of any Whatnot market globally. When buyers know who they're buying from, they come back. Thanks to OMR for having us. #OMR26

Momentum is what separates good shows from great ones on Whatnot. We’re seeing it play out in real time. Sellers are adjusting their pacing by category, with nearly half of auctions now running at 10 seconds or less. Shorter formats can drive more sales per hour in faster-moving categories, while others benefit from more time. To support this, we introduced a 7-second timer as another option. In just one week, 17K sellers used it to drive $14M in sales. At the same time, discovery is getting sharper. This month, we expanded and refined categories to better match what buyers are already searching for, from movie memorabilia to vintage bags to men’s formalwear (wedding season anyone?). And the best sellers are consistent. They show up often, run structured shows, and keep energy high from start to finish. Read more about our latest product updates: https://lnkd.in/gZee8xzR #Auctions #Whatnot #LiveShopping

Plenty of tech companies say they "eat their own dog food." We make it a real requirement. Every Whatnaut, from a new hire to our CEO Grant LaFontaine, has to buy and sell on Whatnot, and answer support tickets. And as we've grown past 1,000 people, we've doubled down, not eased up. It gets easier for people to drift from the community at scale, so we lean harder into staying close. It works. When people across the company have run a show, shopped the app, and handled support tickets, everyone has better judgment and can fix what's broken for our community. Product builds features that solve for friction they've felt themselves. Category and community teams give better advice to sellers. Marketing tells truer stories. Grant talked with Fast Company's Stephanie Mehta about why this only matters more as we grow. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/g_9iAdj7 #Dogfooding #LiveShopping