Whatnot is generating billions for small businesses — from one-person operations to a couple hundred employees — empowering them in a way that reverses the trend of e-commerce obscuring sellers.
Whatnot's model is the polar opposite of platforms that obscure sellers. Sellers get their own store, brand, and customer relationships. The platform has generated billions for small businesses, with top sellers doing $100M+ revenue at 20-40% EBITDA margins. ✦ AI generated
Grant LaFontaine · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 22:09
“By being a marketplace, you enable all this new business creation or business growth of existing businesses that otherwise would not exist. Talk about the scale you have of sellers.”
Whatnot is fundamentally empowering small business. If you look at what's happened in e-commerce over the past 20 or 30 years, it got so efficient and one of the ways to make it so efficient is to obscure who you're buying from and obscure the ability for people to build brands and businesses around it. Whatnot is sort of the polar opposite. If you're on whatnot, you're going to have your store, you're going to have your brand, you're going to have your customers, they're going to come back to you. We're generating billions and billions of dollars for small businesses. The biggest businesses on whatnot are probably doing upwards of $100 million in revenue with very strong EBITDA margins, 20, 30, 40 plus percent.
verbatim transcript · starts at 22:09
22:09efficient and one of the ways to make it so efficient is to obscure who you're buying from and obscure the ability for people to like build brands and businesses around it. And whatnot is sort of the polar opposite. if you're on whatnot, you're going to have your store, you're going to have your brand, you're going to have your customers, they're going to come back to you. And
22:26so, you know, I think that's one of the one of the best bits of the platform is, you know, we're generating billions and billions and billions of dollars for small businesses. And these are anywhere from, you know, one and two person operations all the way up to maybe a couple hundred folks at the high end. >> That's amazing. Yeah. The uh I I think you've compared it in the past to like a
22:44local shop owner or like a local pub owner. And if you think about what whatnot allows that person to do compared to say Amazon which is like highly utilitarian um you know highly gamified and like competition among first party third party international sellers like it's just an entirely different experience on the sell side >> um that will allow someone who's creative and ambitious to thrive maybe in a way that they wouldn't otherwise on
23:11those platforms. Is that fair? Yeah, I think it just empowers small business in a way where maybe the the prior trend was to almost disempower small business and obscure them away. Yeah. Yeah. That's well said. That's well said. Um so you have really interesting insight into all of these different types of entrepreneurs, right? So, um I'd love to maybe start with just, you know, the original categories
23:36like collectibles, cards, like what are you seeing uh about the behavior in that market? >> Um [clears throat] so I think we're we're seeing a continuation of the trends that we saw when we first started the business, which was one of one of the reasons we we we came back into collectibles. We saw a bunch of people getting back into the market. it was people like us who were had maybe some
23:57money and were buying things that were nostalgic from childhood and getting back into unique um you know things that they loved. Um and that trends basically continued unabated for the past 6 and a half years. And so um you know I think collectibles is is largely going like mainstream now for like lack of a better term. You have you have mainstream celebrities in it. You have athletes in
24:22it. And so I think a lot of people thought collectibles thought think of collectibles like a niche thing, but it's actually becoming a core part of of pop culture. And I think over the past six years, we've just seen that evolution continue to grow and grow and grow and grow. And you know, in fact, you know, a lot of the new art that people are collecting is now like
24:41trading cards with that are going for millions of dollars. And you know maybe your parents if they were doing high-end art or you know you were lucky enough to have parents who could do that they're buying you know famous artists and now people are buying like the one of one you know LeBron James refractor or something like that. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's super cool. Uh yeah and it's obviously there's an