Matt Lanter is OpenStore’s Head of Product and Co-Founder. Matt served as an engineering and product leader at Opendoor, Facebook and Apple. He was the Chief of Staff at Founders Fund where he worked closely with entrepreneurs building the next set of companies. OpenStore provides life-changing liquidity to Shopify business entrepreneurs that are ready to sell their business so they can move on to what's next. Anyone can get a free, no obligation offer for their business within 24 hours by visiting open.store.00:14 - Helping entrepreneurs exitMatt explained that just like selling a house, selling a business can be a lengthy and complicated process. He wanted to change that.“We provide liquidity to Shopify entrepreneurs. We provide them with an exit and the ability to sell their business when they're ready to. A lot of these entrepreneurs don't really have other options to sell their business. They're too small for private equity. They don't necessarily have the characteristics that venture capitalists are looking for. And there are brokers and marketplaces they could go with, but similar to all other marketplaces, even selling your house, there's no guarantee you'll be able to find a buyer. You can spend a lot of time talking to potential buyers and waste time. So we wanted to make it really simple for these Shopify entrepreneurs to come to our website, connect their Shopify account, their Facebook and Google marketing data if they have it, and get an offer within a day to sell a business if they're ready to.”04:16 - The problem with private equityPrivate equity tends to go after high-value targets. It’s also very high-touch, with a process and payment terms that can move at a glacial pace.“Private equity tends to be more like $50 million+ in GMV, so it tends to be on the larger side. Whereas for us, our target size of businesses is between $500K and $10 million. Part of it is that private equity firms tend to be very human-based and use a lot of humans to value these businesses and go through that process. Whereas we've built this pricing engine that's able to within 24 hours deliver an offer for your business. So we're able to serve a much wider swath of businesses and really serve as many people as we can….With private equity also, it's usually a multi-year payout. And there’s earnouts over time and all these percentages, and it's a fairly complicated thing for sure. We want to make it very simple. You come to us, you get your offer. It's a very clear price. You actually get 80% of it on the day you close. And then there's a short 1-2 month transition period where you help us learn about your business. And then you get the remaining 20% at the end of that.”15:11 - A streamlined sale processWhen selling on OpenStore, founders immediately get 80% of the payout. After helping transition the business, they get the rest. Meanwhile, OpenStore works hard to maintain brand integrity.“Once you close you get 80% of the cash around then, and then it's a 1-2 month transition period. So the founder works with our team for us to understand how they run their business, transition everything over to us. Domains, all the various parts of the business. And then we run it from there. To that point, as we build out this operating platform we've created a set of OpenStore best practices. Various tools, internal and external, that we use to help run these businesses at scale. And analytics is a very important thing as well. So investing in that and moving those brands to our way of running and growing them. But one thing is we do really want to maintain the brands and grow the brands. We don't want to take a company and then just get rid of the brand. We really want to keep the brand and grow the brand and highlight what the entrepreneur has built.”19:57 - The power of brandOpenStore works exclusively with Shopify brands because they find branding to be important and rewarding work. Shopify provides the tools that the team needs to help brands t