The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
23 Mar 2022
Grant LaFontaine is the Founder & CEO @ Whatnot, the fastest-growing marketplace in the US, empowering people to make a living off their passion. To date, Grant has raised over $225M for Whatnot from the likes of CapitalG, a16z, YC, Scribble Ventures and Wonder Ventures to name a few. Prior to Whatnot, Grant was a PM @ Facebook working on the Oculus App Store and before that was the founder of Kit.com, ultimately acquired by Patreon. In Today’s Episode with Grant LaFontaine You Will Learn: 1.) The Founding of Whatnot: How did Grant make his way into the world of tech and startups? What were some of his biggest lessons from Facebook? How did that impact how he has built Whatnot? 2.) Impossible To Hire Product Managers: Why does Grant believe it is impossible to hire product managers today? How does this impact the decision-making powers of engineers? How does Grant test for this product knowledge in all engineers he adds to the team? What are clear signals of 10x engineers in hiring processes? 3.) A/B Testing and Risk Mindset: Why does Grant not believe in the effectiveness of A/B testing? Why does it not work? Why does Grant believe one of the biggest reasons for startups failing is they do not take enough risk? How does Grant try to ensure that his team takes as much risk as possible with everything that they do? How does mindset to risk change with scale of company and with leadership? 4.) AMA: Why does Grant disagree with founders angel investing? What are the biggest challenges Whatnot has faced in scaling? CEO coach? Who? When? What is the biggest lesson? What is the single driving metric of Whatnot? How does Grant advise founders to determine their North Star metric? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Grant LaFontaine Grant’s Favourite Book: Foundation: 1/3 (Foundation Trilogy)
No persons identified in this episode.
This episode hasn't been transcribed yet
Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.
Popular episodes get transcribed faster
Other episodes from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Transcribed and ready to explore now
20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
17 Oct 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital
04 Apr 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
28 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: The Insane Story of Glovo: Selling 30% of the Company for €100K | The McDonalds Deal That Saved Them | Running out of Money Three Times | Burning $1M Per Day | Being Acquired for $2.2BN with Oscar Pierre, Founder @ Glovo
26 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML
24 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
20 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch