The $11.5B Startup 100 Investors Turned Down | Term Sheet

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Paris Hilton** (0:26)
Hey, babes, it's Paris Hilton. So I was checking my points balance in the Hilton honors app the other day, and yeah, I've got about a billion, which feels excessive, even for me. Just kidding, you can never have too many Hilton honors points. And I want to do something iconic this summer, so I'm giving away all my Paris points. Just find somewhere you've always wanted to stay, then go to my socials or Hilton's and tell me about it. Just make sure you're a Hilton honors member, and I might be sending you Paris points, because when you want points that make your summer even hotter, it matters where you stay.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:56)
Ow, ow, alive, oh my gosh, yes, this guy is selling lobsters right now.

**Allie Garfinkle** (0:59)
This is one of over 70,000 sellers on Whatnot, a live shopping platform valued at over $11 billion.

**Grant LaFontaine** (1:07)
There's 20 plus items sold every second on Whatnot.

**Allie Garfinkle** (1:10)
Live shopping turns buying into a sport, and in China, it's dominated e-commerce for a decade. That's a market 10 times bigger than ours. But in the US, it kept flopping. So originally, nobody bet on a two-person startup.

**Grant LaFontaine** (1:23)
I have a spreadsheet that has the first 100 investor notes. It feels terrible. It's truly awful.

**Allie Garfinkle** (1:28)
But Whatnot has recently reached 1 billion orders from Pokémon cards to seafood.

**Grant LaFontaine** (1:33)
It's just wild to comprehend. You look to me slightly deliriously. A billion orders is a lot. The vast majority of that has happened in the past six months.

**Allie Garfinkle** (1:40)
Today, it's among the biggest shippers in America.

**Grant LaFontaine** (1:42)
And we've raised about 1 billion in finance.

**Allie Garfinkle** (1:44)
I love that you were like embarrassed about that.

**Grant LaFontaine** (1:46)
It's a big number to live up to. We'll live up to it for sure.

**Allie Garfinkle** (1:48)
Beanie Babies, Labooboos, Pokémon. If it's gonna be hot, Whatnot CEO Grant LaFontaine sees it first. Welcome to Term Sheet. I'm Allie Garfinkle.
So before we dive into the interview, I've been reading your comments. Thank you so much for the comments. I actually want to read some of them now. We got a lot of Josh Wolf love. One person said, I thought Josh was correct on a large number of issues. I would not bet against him. Honestly, I wouldn't either. He's been right about a comical number of things. And part of the reason I wanted to have him on the show is I think he's also genuinely an original. So thank you for that. Another commenter pointed out something that I thought was really interesting. And this is only a small section, but this is what the person said. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are actually very anti-AI. I think Gen X is the most AI positive generation. Younger people just look at this stuff in horror. I thought this was really interesting because there's definitely a narrative out in the marketplace that, oh, Gen Z, they're growing up with this. They're going to love it. But I agree. I actually don't know if that's unequivocally true. There is also one last thing somebody said that I thought was kind of profound and like it was a section from a, one of those little books of wisdom that has like one section every day. What the wise do in the beginning, the fools do in the end, which I think is actually true. So thank you for all the comments. Thank you for watching. Keep them coming. I actually really want to know what you think, even if you hated it.
Grant, tell me about your first collection. What do you consider your first collection?

**Grant LaFontaine** (3:13)
The first thing I ever got really into collecting was Pokémon cards when I was in fourth or fifth grade. And I can just remember having my blue binder, but it had all the pages in it. Me and my friends, there used to be a lake at the end of my street. We used to go down, like hang out at the benches and like trade cards and try and get stuff. And then that's actually how I ended up starting to sell online. It was probably the first step to actually getting to where we are with Whatnot.