Whatnot Is Now Worth More Than Wendy's, Harley-Davidson, and American Airlines Combined

Source: My First Million | Published: 2026-09-21T13:30:36Z

Six and a half years after starting with a Funko Pop booth, Grant LaFontaine has built Whatnot into a $20 billion company — surpassing the combined market caps of Wendy's, Harley-Davidson, and American Airlines.

A Tokyo Bar, Fifty Domains, and a Bad Idea

In late 2019, Grant and co-founder Logan were on vacation in Japan, both burned out on their jobs. Over drinks at a Tokyo bar, they decided to start a company together and promptly bought fifty domain names.

The first idea: a "premium Craigslist" — a full-service secondhand marketplace that would handle delivery for users. Grant started cold-messaging everyone he could find on LinkedIn who ran logistics operations: the delivery director at Bob's Discount Furniture, supply chain managers at furniture retailers. These people actually picked up the phone. They walked him through per-unit costs and scale economics.

Two calls in, the math was clear. The average value of secondhand goods was too low to survive delivery costs. No margin. The idea was dead — less than twenty-four hours after they'd started taking it seriously.

Kill It in Twenty-Four Hours, Then Keep Going

By that point, Logan and an engineer were already building out systems. Grant told the team: this direction is wrong, I'm going to find another one. No drama — the payments infrastructure and order management systems would be needed regardless, so they kept building.

Grant started combing the internet for marketplaces that felt broken. He kept landing on eBay, where the most active category was collectibles. His friends were rediscovering childhood hobbies. He and Logan started visiting every comic shop in Los Angeles — every single one was packed with Funko Pops.

They pulled historical sales data across all eBay collectibles categories using a tool called Terapeak. Every curve pointed up. Funko Pop transaction volume beat comic books; Pokémon cards were right behind. The data made the decision for them.

Become Your Own Seller First

The demand was there. But Whatnot ran straight into the classic two-sided marketplace cold-start problem: no sellers, no buyers; no buyers, no sellers.

Grant's solution: be the seller yourself. All early inventory on the platform was their own. But they weren't warehousing anything — after a user placed an order, they'd source the item across various online channels, authenticate it, and ship it with a "verified" label.

To price quickly, they built a scraper that pulled historical transaction prices for every Funko Pop on the market and set a liquidity threshold: if a figure had fewer than a certain number of sales in 30 days, it wouldn't be listed — too hard to source reliably. He assembled a small team in Brazil to scour the internet for qualifying inventory.

First Giveaway: 104 Entries

To build the buyer side, Grant turned to giveaways: every week, they'd give away a "grail" — the rarest pieces in collector culture, like a flocked Tony the Tiger Funko Pop worth $500 to $1,000. Entry was by referral. Bring in one new user, get one more ticket. No limit.

The first giveaway drew 104 entries. Nothing sold. Grant remembers the feeling: money was leaving his personal account, no revenue, no other job, balance going down.

His read wasn't "this direction doesn't work." It was: "We have 104 accounts now. Next time we send a push notification, they'll participate, and they'll bring in new users. If we can go from 100 to 300, there's a path." The second giveaway got roughly 250 entries. The curve was starting to look like a curve.

Meanwhile, they were flooding every Funko Pop subreddit and Facebook group they could find — they could afford to, because what they were giving away was genuinely the best stuff out there.

From Thirty Transactions to $1B GMV

In December 2019, the platform's first week live produced one sale. Second week, one more. Third week, they brought on a Funko Pop YouTuber and hit thirty transactions in a single week — including an instance where a pricing algorithm bug let users spot mispriced items and buy hundreds of dollars of inventory at 50% off.

In July 2020, they launched live auctions. Growth went vertical. By year-end, annual GMV hit $2.3 million with 17 to 18 employees.

2021: $163 million. 100 employees.

2022: $1 billion.

Don't Chase Big Markets

When fundraising, nearly every mainstream VC said the same thing: the Funko Pop market is too small.

Grant sees this differently. Look at the history of great companies, he says, and almost every single one started in a tiny market. eBay's first sale was a broken laser pointer sold to someone who specifically collected broken laser pointers — that's the real story. The Pez dispenser origin myth was a PR fabrication. PayPal started as a payment tool for eBay sellers; Elon Musk resisted the pivot, but user demand won in the end.

A four-person team cannot win in a large market. You have to go somewhere small, make the experience perfect, build density — then expand outward.

Hiring From Big Companies Is Usually Wrong

Whatnot made this mistake early: assuming that because someone did something at a well-known company, they must know what they're doing.

Grant eventually concluded that was wrong. "Did something impressive-sounding at a big company" and "actually knows what they're doing" are two different things. His method became: regardless of background, can this person explain concretely what they plan to do and why? If they can't, keep asking until they can — or until it's clear they can't.

He now tells executive candidates outright: your methodology is at best neutral here, not a plus. Come in and build credibility from scratch.

"Can You Explain It to a Middle Schooler?"

As Whatnot scaled, a recurring pattern emerged: the recommendations team would run a battery of A/B tests showing everything was fine, while macro-level metrics Grant was watching showed a decline.

He'd sit down and decompose it layer by layer. What exactly happened to each seller's impressions? By category? By region? For sellers who gained visibility, how much did their business actually grow? For those who lost it, how much did they lose?

He explained why A/B testing is particularly unreliable on network-based platforms: change the recommendation algorithm, user flows shift, seller behavior adapts, and both test groups are contaminated. The conclusions you're reading are mostly artifacts.

What they eventually mapped out was sellers' elasticity curves — for certain sellers, the business contraction from losing exposure was far steeper than the growth from gaining it. That asymmetry was completely invisible in short-term engagement metrics.

Grant's observation: put a lot of smart people in a room and they start reaching for jargon. Jargon makes things complex. Once things are complex, nobody actually knows what's true. His habit is to keep asking "why" until something can be explained to a middle schooler. If it can't be, there's a good chance nobody's really figured it out yet.

If You're Wondering Whether You're Moving Fast Enough, You Aren't

Grant puts it directly: "Almost everyone who says they're moving fast is moving too slowly. If you still have time to say it, you have time to do more."

This isn't just about execution speed. Whatnot's consistent habit, he says, is this: even if you're mid-build and realize the direction is wrong, as long as you're willing to admit the mistake and turn, nothing is wasted. When the full-service Craigslist idea died, their engineer was already writing payment system code. Grant's response: that's fine, we need payments anyway — keep building.

Live Commerce Is in the Single Digits. It's Going to 30%

Grant's view on the industry: over the next decade, live commerce will account for more than 30% of global e-commerce. Today's numbers — adding up the largest platforms across the US and Europe — are around $30 billion, still in the single digits by share.

The reference point is China, where live commerce already accounts for 40% of total e-commerce. If Western markets follow a similar trajectory, this is a market measured in the hundreds of billions, potentially trillions.

Whatnot's largest sellers are already doing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual GMV. Grant says the platform has multiple nine-figure sellers, many of whom started as two- or three-person operations. One now has 150 to 200 employees and has built nearly its entire business on Whatnot.

He expects the next few years to produce an entire ecosystem of businesses built around live sellers: wholesale platforms that supply sellers directly, MCNs that handle operations. He's already seeing companies like this raising significant capital, with much of their incremental growth coming directly from the Whatnot seller ecosystem.