If you can turn your business into a platform, you probably should. There are amazing multi-billion-dollar products out there, but any one product has limits. Companies that run platforms, by contrast, cultivate ecosystems that make it possible for other businesses and many products to thrive. That is a much bigger market.

Deb Liu knows a ton about platforms. It took years of advocacy and strategy, but she literally invented Facebook Marketplace and ran Facebook’s entire platform group, helping monetize the different ways users wanted to leverage the network. Now she’s founded an AI startup helping small businesses go from zero to fully automated.

Like platforms, Deb is multifaceted, so this conversation also goes deep on payments, the trust gaps that have to be filled to make online transactions possible, and some of the differences  ...