What is the difference in the time, expense, and complexity between listing on CartaX and going public, and how do the benefits of each compare?

Yeah. I would say it's a lot less than when you go public, you have to hire a team of people, you have to hire somebody to head up investor relations for you, you have to start working on all the compliance issues and the regulatory issues related to the public markets. I think with us, the nice thing is, in the process for launching this product, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting for ourselves, Carta, since Carta is going to be the first company that goes live on the CartaX platform. 

And so we've set up a really clean and easy framework for taxes, and the accounting treatment, and also the 409A impacts, the optimal way of setting it up to have less of an impact on your valuation. So we've done a lot of the leg work already. A lot of the heavy lifting on the company side for setting up CartaX is going to be working out a framework for disclosures.

The companies that we're talking to, they know how they're telling their equity story today, and so we'll have some feedback for them. We'll tell them, hey, we think that it may be helpful if you do a quarterly or an annual investor day recorded presentation, where your CEO and your CFO will speak and answer curated questions, then we can put that into the data room.

And so there's different examples like that. That would be a little bit more lift from the company than running a typical tender offer transaction. But in the sense of what it looks like compared to an IPO, I think it's not even a fraction of the work. But it's definitely more towards that direction than what exists today in the private markets.

They're going to have to figure out a regular cadence for disclosures or framework for that. There is work to set up, and the tax impacts, and make sure that's in direct accordance with the expectations for how that will impact the 409A. 

And then other than that, it's just figuring out who's going to be on your white list for buy-side institutional investors. And so that process is an iterative process, but companies, sometimes they have a list of investors that they already know have [an interest] in buying their stock. And so they'll give us their list, plus their existing investors, they want to double down on the company. 

And then in addition to that, we'll supplement it with these hundred plus institutional investors that we've now onboarded into the CartaX platform that we think may be a good fit for the company based on the files that we're collecting. So we're collecting profile information for these institutional investors and we're determining what type of companies they want to invest in, what average check size is they're looking for, what their average holding periods are typically. And then based on that information, we can go back to the company and we can say, hey, we recommend including these 10 or 20 investors into your buy-side participation white list because we think that's going to drive the most efficient price discovery and most competitive environment and help drive the most successful auctions for you.