ALT The comparison to his Twitch years is the sharpest part. At Twitch, a stream under a thousand viewers was dead weight, because entertainment economics run on CPMs — ad rates per thousand viewers. On Whatnot, a seller with 50 people in a stream is like a shoe-store owner with 50 people in the shop: "you'd literally never shut down the store." He felt the cultural difference in his second week, when a seller complained on camera that the seven-second "sudden death" auction timer was too slow and wanted three seconds. Two engineers in the office heard it, changed a config in real time, and told the seller to refresh the app. "I'm with my people," he remembers thinking.

ALT His favorite example comes from Twitch: the discovery team and the ads team were perpetually at war over feed impressions. The fix was structural. He put the same PM accountable for both organic and paid impressions, with a single metric — GMV (gross merchandise value) generated from the feed — and months of politics disappeared.