Grant LaFontaine has been into collecting since he was was seven years old, when he started selling Pokémon cards on eBay. In his twenties, he and his friend Logan Head got into finding and selling cool sneakers. But he felt like the online interfaces on eBay and other sites were clunky and boring, and the safety features were lacking.
In 2019, he left his job at Facebook to start Whatnot with Head, hoping to offer collectors the chance to buy and sell baseball cards, rare toys, comic books and other coveted items in a live, interactive online setting where they could chat with each other and score new items for their collections.
“We had this hypothesis that a new generation of collectors were entering the market,” said LaFontaine, 34, Whatnot’s CEO. “And we thought this generation, which grew up on an iPhone, was not going to be happy with the existing players because a lot of them hadn’t evolved.”
Source: Forbes
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