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While digital live shopping has been popular for years in Asia, the phenomenon has only recently begun to take off in the U.S., thanks in large part to the rise of retail disruptor Whatnot. The platforms cofounder and CEO, Grant LaFontaine, shares how his team has managed to evoke the feel of in-person shopping inside an online experience, and how Whatnots breakthrough is influencing other retailers and brands. LaFontaine also digs into the startups response to deep-pocketed rivals like eBay, and why he believes the viral Labubu trend is here to stay. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Whatnot has seen some real dramatic growth this year in the top 15 among free apps in the App Store, and No. 2 in shopping apps. For listeners who haven’t spent time on Whatnot or taken part in live shopping, can you explain a little bit about what the experience is like? People often make the comparison to a digital QVC. Yeah, I started thinking about it a little bit differently. To me, live shopping is the best in-store shopping experience, but online. So, a lot of the people who are on Whatnot have either had their own brick-and-mortar shops or they’re streaming all the time. It’s like welcoming you into their store. So, you tap into their livestream. You’ll see a bunch of the inventory they have. You’ll see people in there. You can chat with the person, ask them questions about the product. I sort of view it as the shift of experiential commercenot just in a brick-and-mortar world, but bringing it online. Part of the Whatnot experience is … it’s almost like it’s entertainment on your phone too, right? I mean, the best sellers have to be engaging hosts. Do you train new sellers about how to be effective in live selling? You don’t have to be the world’s best entertainer to put on a good show, because what people value can be really different. The shopping experience itself is entertaining. The people that you can talk to are entertaining. It is a format that I think any seller or anyone who has a business can get advantage from. You’ll see a lot of the same people. You can chat with them. It’s like, maybe you go to your local bakery or your local pub, and you sort of know the people who frequent it. And you know the host, and you have a relationship with them. It even carries over to extremes. There’s a trend on Whatnot called Bless the Chat, and people will buy gifts and giveaways to have people who are just hanging out in the shows win. And it’s completely funded by the audience. And if you go into any of the big shows, it’s actually very, very common. Your team told me that while you use AI in the back-end for efficiency and other things, that you only consider deeper AI in the customer experience if it really solves customer issues. As a CEO today, do you feel pressure to be using AI maybe more than you need to be? Yeah, I think absolutely. I think one of the most inherent human characteristics is that there’s always some pressure by looking at other people and feeling like you need to do what they’re doing. If you’re in tech these days, you probably can’t go more than a one-hour-long period of time without hearing about something in AI. And so I think it makes you constantly question whether you’re doing the right things. Now, the truth with every new technology is, it either solves a problem or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t solve a problem, no one’s going to use it, so it doesn’t matter. So I think, despite all of the noise, we try and stay relatively grounded. We’re not doing AI for AI’s sake. I’m curious whether there are any trends that you see on the platform about where collectibles are going. Are there any predictions about what might be hot next? I think people have always viewed collectibles as niche markets, but what we’re seeing is that those markets are getting much bigger. Historically, when you look at collectibles markets and you think about the Beanie Baby that had this meteoric rise and meteoric fall. That’s what happens in collectibles. If you look across our collectibles business, we’re 6 years old now, and I don’t think it’s ever grown under 100% a year. I think in a world where everything’s sort of mass-produced, very digital, I think having unique things and being able to resonate with folks on those things is just providing more value. And so I think these markets are going to be more enduring. The Beanie Baby of the day is what they call the Labubu. My prediction is that that market keeps growing for a really long time. The Labubu is not going the way of the Beanie Baby? I think people want more unique experiences today. I think social media amplifies them. And so I think the Labubu is going to stay strong. EBay launched a live shopping feature two or three years ago, right? Did you look at that as, like, “Oh, here’s a competitive threat.” Or as a validation of your model? Or maybe a little bit of both? The way I look at a lot of these things is, I try and understand the historical context on incumbents versus startups. As a business, running a business that’s growing very fast, there are so many different things that you have to worry about at any given point in time. And so if you’re not really clear on what matters, you can get really distracted. And if you look at consumer markets in the U.S. over, I don’t know, 20, 30 years, it is pretty rare the incumbent wins when you have a fast-growing consumer company, as long as you execute really well. Have I, at times, worried about competitors? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a very human emotion. Like, “Oh, here’s this company that has a gajillion dollars and they’re coming at something that we’ve spent a huge quantity of our life building.” But ultimately, I tell this to the team now, and it’s true: Every second I’ve spent worrying about a competitor has been a second wasted. And so I think now we just try and stay really, really, really focused on delivering. We are the largest in the market by a significant quantity, and we don’t want to get complacent. Sometimes the competition is doing things better than you. And if they are and it’s an area where you are competing for customers, you’d better deliver better than them. Or at least as good as themotherwise there are risks. Are there things that you’ve learned about today’s consumer that traditional rtailers or e-commerce players are missing? In many ways, Whatnot is like the polar opposite of the e-commerce players of the past 30 years. It’s not an efficient form of purchasing. You’re going to sit around and watch things for hours. I think the fundamental truth is that shopping’s always been an activity that people have enjoyed doing. A lot of shopping is experiential. I used to hang out with my friends in the mall. People are craving an experiential online e-commerce experience. That’s definitely going to be a thing that over the next five or 10 years, every brand, every retailer is going to end up investing in. I read that you and the Whatnot team have this feeling of being perennially underestimated. I’m sure some of that is motivating. Is there a downside? Or would the downside be like losing the underdog feeling? I think we like to be underestimated. The first time we tried to raise money … I have a spreadsheet with all of the investors who I talked to, and it got to 100 no’s, and I stopped keeping track of it. And I still have the spreadsheet and all of the reasons why. So I’m not going to lie, that’s motivating. At least for me, there’s nothing more motivating than someone saying, “Oh, you can’t do the thing.” I’ll always carry a little bit of chip. And I think a little bit of chip is helpful because it keeps you going, keeps you motivated. Now, it’s helpful to remain underestimated so that we’re not distracted and can just build. And then when the thing’s great, it will speak for itself.
Category:
E-Commerce
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It fuels boardroom debates, guides priorities, defines access to information, and nudges consumer experiences. But while AI promises sharper insights and faster action, it also accelerates blind spots leaders already struggle with. The paradox is this: AI can widen vision, but if used without the right insight, it narrows it. And when those blind spots meet the speed of AI adoption, the consequences multiply. Ive seen this play out across industriesthrough my leadership roles at Google, Maersk, and Diageo, and in advising executives shaping some of the worlds largest organizations. The pattern is clear: technology does not pause at blind spots. Instead of alerting us, it often erases tracesuntil the competitive edge quietly slips into commoditization. Here are three ways AI makes blind spots bigger and how to shrink them. 1. Data Without Context is a False Comfort Every AI is shaped by what it has access to. Generative AI is guided by probability. Agentic AI acts on the data it is trained on. Both are only as useful as the context they can see. This is where the first blind spot appears: leaders mistake the outputs of AI for reality itself, forgetting that the system is bounded by its inputs. A dashboard may glow green, or an AI may return precise answersbut precision without context is a false comfort. This may feel like a familiar challenge, where reliance on fixed KPIs can make internal progress look convincing but fail to connect to real shifts in the market. I have seen hardworking teams pull in opposite directions: one rewarded for growing basket size through add-ons, another penalizing customers who adjusted orders, canceling each other out and driving customers away. AI applied to those metrics would only have reinforced the misalignment. If business rules are applied at too low a level in the organization or process, sub-optimization will occur. In an AI context, this compounds at scale, locking inefficiencies into every automated decision. All cases show the same trap: when data is cut off from context, leaders optimize for what can be measured instead of what matters. Availability is mistaken for reliability. How to address the blind spot: Shift from validating what you already track to exploring what you dont yet see. Treat data as a landscape to be tested, not a dashboard to be confirmed. Ask where contradictions appear, where signals conflict, and where the edges of the system reveal something different from the center. Blind spots shrink when leaders are curious enough to explore anomalies instead of explaining them away. 2. Outsourcing Judgment Dilutes Core Value Another growing blind spot comes when too much responsibility is placed on external systems or partners. AI is powerful, but it is not neutral. If leaders outsource judgment without feeding back their own expertise, they risk hollowing out the very value that makes their business distinctive. Think of it this way: you have personal knowledge, collective knowledge within a company or institution, and global knowledge. Businesses naturally try to connect and leverage collective intelligenceso why, when it comes to AI, do so many neglect the need to actively share, contextualize, and update knowledge to keep it valuable? I once debated a leading doctor responsible for defining a regions use of technology. He explained that he relied on his trusted X-ray machine and the same software he had used since the late 1990s. He did not log his evolving insights as structured inputs, nor did he feed edge cases back into the system, assuming vendor updates were enough. His judgment stayed in his head, while the softwareand the sectorfailed to learn from real-world experience. In a field where image recognition is advancing rapidly, that gap leaves value on the table and slows the diffusion of what works. The point is not to develop all AI in-house, but to be clear about what truly differentiates you and ensure that knowledge is not given away. Cost management through outsourcing call centers may deliver quantifiable savings, but it also shifts valuable customer insights outside the business. With AI, those insights compound quickly, and what begins as efficiency can end in commoditization where your uniqueness is absorbed into someone elses model if you are not conscious about how AI is deployed. How to address the blind spot: While AI is essential for efficiency and future operations, strategy must come first. Know your propositionthe value today and in the futureand build your AI approach on that, not the availability of pretrained software, partner rates, or the convenience of what others have packaged. Ask who gains value from the data you hold, and who has access to the data that could help you grow. In many industries, this will become the foundation for new revenue models and deeper partnershipsor the path to eliminate those without strategic clarity. 3. The Cognitive Trap Behind Algorithmic Comfort Even with broad and evolving data and strong strategic clarity, AI can still trap leaders in confirmation loops. Algorithms are designed to learn from patterns, but patterns are not the same as insights. By default they reinforce what is most represented, not what is most revealing. Some models can be tuned to flag anomalies, but in most business settings the gravitational pull is toward the familiar. Of course it isbecause so do we. The danger is that this collides with human blind spots. Neuroscience shows how the brain conserves energy by filtering out complexity, anchoring on what feels certain, and avoiding ambiguity. True neurogenesisthe creation of new thinkingrequires new contexts, yet most leaders default back to the familiar. Behavioral science confirms how leadersespecially experienced onesare prone to confirmation bias, mistaking familiarity for foresight. And the more changeable and unpredictable the world becomes, the harder it is to resist this pull. AI does not correct these tendencies; it magnifies them. It reflects back the certainty leaders crave, accelerating the speed at which untested assumptions harden into strategy. The result is a narrowing of visionmore convincing, faster moving, and harder to detect. Left unchecked, this is how organizations find themselves trapped in the comfort of familiar patterns while competitors redefine the market around them. How to address the blind spot: The way through is to stay grounded enough to notice when certainty becomes comfort rather than truth. That means questioning and stripping out assumptions that no longer serve and allowing the narrative to be retested against todays and tomorrows reality. Vulnerability is the entry pointnot weakness, but a signal of where assumptions have not been updated. Let these surface, acknowledge what it would take for you to change your mind, be curious about what could fit in, and explore new emerging directions to shape a new frame. Leaders who embody this stance expand their field of vision and prevent AI from hardening blind spots into strategy. AI Tests Leadership The thread across all three blind spots is the same: AI does not remove the limits of human judgment, it magnifies them. It amplifies whether a company is aligned or fragmented, insular or in tune, whether leaders are curious or complacent, wheter strategy is active or passive. The real test is not in the speed of adoption but in the awareness leaders bringwhether they can stay open enough to challenge what feels certain, while holding clear to what truly defines their value. That requires building a platform to connect, where diverse perspectives can feed into the systemconnecting both people and dataand ensuring a data access culture where exploration toward a common ambition is not just welcomed but expected. This paves the way not only for using AI, but for growing with it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Entrepreneurs face more stress, fear, and anxiety in a single day than most people experience in a year. When building something in a crowded market, motivation doesn’t just dipit can disappear entirely. What is the difference between those who burn out and those who break through? Theyve mastered the three fundamentals: finding their real why, setting their own scorecard, and playing the long game. New competitors launch monthly in the vertical drama space where I work. At DramaShorts, we’ve maintained our position among the top 15 apps globally by refusing to play someone else’s game. While others chase viral trends, we focus on building sustainable engagement. Heres the three-step strategy I follow when the going gets tough. 1. Find your real why Before sustaining motivation, you need to understand what’s driving you. Skip the generic mission statements. Go straight to honest self-examination. Take inventory: What do you want to accomplish? Why does this matter to you personally? Dig deeper if your answer feels generic or borrowed from someone else’s playbook. You can’t stay motivated working toward something you don’t genuinely care about. We can quickly turn things around when we identify goals that truly excite us. The passion that comes from knowing your why becomes fuel for everything else. Sara Blakely turned $5,000 and a simple idea about pantyhose into Spanx, now worth over a billion dollars. Blakely didnt try to compete on price or marketing budgets. Instead, she carved out her own category by focusing on a problem other companies ignored: how uncomfortable and unflattering existing shapewear felt. While established brands pushed the exact tired solutions, she redesigned the entire experience from fabric to fit. Her why wasn’t fashionit was solving a problem she experienced personally. That personal connection sustained her through two years of rejections before landing her first retailer. 2. Set your own scorecard In competitive industries, it’s tempting to measure yourself against every competitor. This is motivation poison. You’ll always find someone ahead in some metric; comparison kills focus. Instead, define success on your terms. Set specific, measurable goals that align with your vision and values. Track progress against your benchmarks, not your competitors’. Use the SMART frameworkSpecific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. These give you clear targets and help you channel energy productively. Jeff Bezos ignored the noise about Amazon’s lack of profits for years because he was measuring different metricscustomer acquisition, long-term market position, and infrastructure building. While critics focused on quarterly earnings, he tracked progress toward his vision of becoming “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” 3. Keep the innovation pipeline flowing My motivation hack? I start each week by writing down three things our users will love that our competitors aren’t even thinking about yet. That forward focus keeps me energized when the market noise gets loud. This isn’t about generating random ideas. I maintain a systematic approach to innovation. First, I schedule weekly user feedback sessions to identify pain points our competitors miss. Second, I study adjacent industries for features that could translate to our space. Third, I track emerging technologies and cultural shifts that might create new user needs. The execution part requires discipline: each idea gets a feasibility score, a timeline, and an owner. I review progress monthly and kill projects that aren’t delivering. The key is maintaining this pipeline consistently and not waiting for inspiration to strike. The long game wins Motivation in competitive industries means building systems that help you recover quickly from inevitable dips and sustain focus on what matters. Stop watching the competition obsessively and start building something unique. Focus on your path, definition of success, and reasons for being in the game. The entrepreneurs who thrive long-term aren’t necessarily the most talented or best-funded. They’re the ones who’ve learned to stay motivated when motivation is most complex to find. The race is long. Pace yourself accordingly. The entrepreneurs who win aren’t the fastest startersthey’re the ones who continue to run when everyone else has stopped.
Category:
E-Commerce
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