Startup Tools: equity and investment (cap table) model

by Giff on November 6, 2009

equityscenarios

As an entrepreneur, have you struggled to figure out what your ownership stake looks like over multiple rounds of dilution from investors and employee options?

In the spirit of sharing modeling tools I use when thinking about a startup, here is an Excel spreadsheet for modeling out cap table equity and dilution across a number of capital raising rounds.  There’s a cool online tool for this purpose at OwnYourVenture.com, but I prefer Excel because it lets me directly model out the quirks of a particular situation.

As always, the inputs are in blue and are all placeholders.  You can customize it however you want to fit your circumstance.

The equity model shows exit multiples at the bottom, but does not build in any special treatment of investor shares such as participating preferred, etc.  I did, however, toss in an extra tool: the second tab in the spreadsheet has a simple exercise I created long ago for a training session I did on VC structures. It shows the results of liquidation and participation preferences, if you (unfortunately) have to consider those options.

vc-preferences

I hope  it is useful, and if you spot a bug (hope not — I’ve tried to give it a thorough review), please let me know!

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equity scenario v1.3.xls

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  • Lynn

    Small issue, but in the downloaded spreadsheet; Cells “F113 & F114″ ” A & B Investments. u00a0A Investor Investment” the total should be the “A” round investment plus the “A investor re-up” from Round “B”. u00a0Investor “A” total investment should be $3,580 ($2,500 from the A round + $1,080 from the Re-up on the B round). u00a0Also then the “B” round investor investment would only be $2,920 not the full $4,000. This will then also affect the multiples section.

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    Thanks for bringing that one to my attention Lynn. I’ll take a look at that.

  • Sean

    Hey Giff, great model. Did you update it recently to include previous round investors doing their pro-rata, which is what I think Lynn was pointing out? I downloaded this two years ago and just plugged in all the numbers to that version to run it and noticed the A round didn’t take into account Seed round investors keeping their pro-rata percentage in the company. It basically assume they all chose to be diluted.u00a0

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    thanks for the reminder Sean (good to hear from you again since that panel we did ages ago). u00a0I have not updated it yet but need to get it on my todo list!

  • Sean

    Cool, thanks Giff. I will let you know if I beat you to it:-)

  • http://twitter.com/SanelBabic Sanel Babic

    Newby question, why is the (thousands) on top of the page… saving zeros or dollars?

  • Craddock1906

    Have the file been update within the past 6 months?  Thanks for your excellent work

  • http://www.asoftwarestartupguy.com David Miller

    Here’s another free Cap Table spreadsheet that I created to help startups.  Check it out here:  http://www.asoftwarestartupguy.com/2012/12/cap-table-calculator.html