Cap Table

“You want to have someone that has potential to lead your next round in the round before, even if it's a small check, because what you want to be able to do is give them Insights into how you're doing before you go to them for the next round.”

“At the moment, around 70% of employees abandon their stock options, and employees tend to own 10 to 15 points of the cap table of a given startup.”

“Any number in a system, you should be able to x-ray vision it, click on it should take you to a document where the data is, and the data should have encompassed in it a document that has a signature or something that you look at it and go, okay, that is the re…”

“If you're not one of the key players, the minute you move away from the cap table to, you know, making it up as you go along, if you're not one of the key players, you're very vulnerable to, you know, you're basically, Depending on the kindness of strangers, a…”

“After series A, after series B, you start every round, you know, you're taking probably between, you know, 20 and 30% dilution to the whole cap table. So that, that compounds pretty quickly.”

“Just make sure you raise it from people who you think you can help you along the way, because money now, especially, is easier to find than people think. And so maybe be patient also with who you're raising money, because sometimes you'll get on your capital p…”

“The best companies want to control their cap table. The best companies have unlimited demand. Right. And so in that essence, you don't need a broader market to have random buyers and sellers to do price discovery. Right. And so I think the best companies gener…”

“Having nonprofits and squeaky wheels like myself on your cap table is a little bit of reputation laundering”

“Shareholder infighting can kill, destroy companies, and, you know, we had some of that in our second company, so I really just wanted equality across the cap table. You know, one class to share”

“We have raised 1.5 million dollars to date from a mix of VCs, family offices, and angels, and we have over 50% women on our cap table, which we're really proud of.”

“When a company is a wild success and you don't see us in the cap table, Chances are at some point we screwed it up.”

“It's one of the only irreversible mistakes is messing up your cap table.”

“I think it's important to acknowledge that most of the time you don't have a choice.”

“If you have a multi-stage firm on your cap table that can lead your next round, and a new multi-stage firm shows up to explore your next round, very rarely are they like, will you get the answer from the other firm?”

“And like the way that we talk about it internally is don't make the cap table a risk to your business, right? Build a business the old fashioned way, raise smaller amounts of money, right? More frequently that are more milestone based. Where, when you raise a …”

“Your cap table, I think, is the one thing in your company that is irreversible for mistakes. Besides that, most every mistake that you make, most mistakes, not all, most mistakes you can reverse or you can fix. Cap table, the one thing you can't fix.”

“I like to see as much money on the cap table in the hands of active investors as possible. And when a lot of the money is in the hands of passive investors, it's very hard.”

“One of the things that they did is what I call kind of cap table as a growth strategy where they did a great job of getting a large number of, you know, early stage founders and other influential operators and advisors onto the cap table at the company. And ma…”

“You realize actually the cap table doesn't matter if the company is like, whoever holds the password is the owner of the company.”

“Not only will VCs have to get comfortable having other folks on the cap table who are, let's say, individual investors, they'll have to get comfortable with, like, a bunch of random strangers on the internet who have just bought into the token. Who are totally…”

“At the early stages, it is important to pick investors who you think will be value adding beyond capital. So craft the cap table carefully of funds that can bring large checks and continue to support through various rounds. But also funds who are value adding …”

“It's a huge mistake some startups make, and to be honest, it can decimate the company. You know, it can mean that you can't raise future funding, that you can't take on future co-founder level people. It really messes up your cap table. So on that specific iss…”

“A friend of mine has a theory that any decision or any investment can be whittled down to like One single most important question. And for me in venture capital, that's like, will great entrepreneurs consider working with us? You know, there are lots of good p…”

“Today this ecosystem has matured to a point where if you're too small on the cap table things are starting to get a little hard, right? Are you going to get information? You know, some people want you out. How are you going to be more meaningful?”

“They're selling cash to get on your cap table and they're really good at that. But it's like the second they sell you the car. They, they're, they've sold you the car. I mean, they, you know, they've done the 90% of the work, you know, sort of pre-seed investo…”

“We have about 40 people on the cap table, which our lawyer always tells us, like, that's a lot of people on the cap table. And anytime we need to get people to sign documents, it's a big headache to get everyone to sign. But what that's meant is that for the p…”

“The best scalable way I've seen to leverage your cap table is sending out, whether it's monthly or quarterly updates, and putting your explicit top two or three asks at the beginning of that email.”

“Once you are successful to any degree, there is a large amount of advice and help that people will be willing to give you for free. I've experienced this twice in my startups, and I see it every day with YC startups. So, someone doesn't have to be on your cap …”

“It's not so much the features that usually get in the entrepreneur's way. It's usually the fact that things are not linear. So you start, the company grows, maybe at some point it has a setback, and then you end up doing a down round, and that becomes a real p…”

“The cap tables that we see, and we've now seen thousands of cap tables, it's surprising how many times the lawyers actually get the conversions wrong.”

“One bad apple on your cap table can really spoil or even ruin the company.”

“You look at the cap table when somebody comes to you and you say, okay, well, we're going to have to do another raise. And if we do another raise, we're going to dilute by this much roughly, right? And if we do dilute by this much roughly, how much do we then …”