Tom Verrilli: uncertainty

Transcript context

…What's a context where you have said to someone, "Hey, go play the accordion," or, "We're playing the accordion." What are they usually doing wrong? It tends to be that you're shipping something in a very local sense without necessarily understanding impact. So an example right now is the core of most marketplaces is listings. If you try and think about Amazon.com, without listings, there's basically nothing there. It's a left rail or right rail and some videos. In video commerce and live commerce at Whatnot, you don't really historically need listings. If I want to sell you a pair of AirPods, I could literally hold them up to screen and show you them and describe them and say they're AirPods. I'm going to start them at a dollar. And as a buyer, you now have all the information you need in order to make a purchase decision, which is great. And so you may not have to invest in making listings the way that someone else does. And that's probably net good for a seller because it takes three and a half minutes to make a listing and it takes zero minutes to describe a thing and hold it up. But you then zoom out, and say, "Oh shit, new buyers are going to come to live commerce and expect search to function. If I don't know what you're selling until after you've sold it, there's no possible way that I can put somebody in the right stream for AirPods because we didn't know you have them and I therefore can't direct people to it. " And so you go through this exercise of like, "We don't need to fix it. It works." And then you're like, "Okay, great. What does that have implications for other things?" Okay, then what would we do? Oh, we're going to make everyone make listings. And you're like, "Zoom back out again. If every seller is now spending three minutes for every listing that they're making, the number of things they can sell per hour is now dramatically, dramatically lower, which means it's bad for sellers. Okay, shit, we can't do that again." And so you have to keep stretching through the what are the longer term implications or what are the knock-on effects of things we're building? That is extremely helpful. What's interesting about Whatnot is there's this spectrum of Whatnot, and then there's this whole trend of agentic commerce where agents are going to be buying the things for you and just working with each other, create a whole new agentic economy. And this is the opposite. Humans live talking to each other, buying from each other. Thoughts on that trend and how that might impact you guys?…

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