Startup Tools: equity and investment (cap table) model

Giff Constable startups, venture capital

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