“How do we split up the equity ownership of our startup?” This guide provides a framework and process to help startup founders answer this common question. Equity ownership affects the culture and sense of wellbeing of a startup. Founders typically sacrifice a great deal of other life opportunities to work on a startup effort. In exchange for that sacrifice, a founder wants to feel the ownership equation with any co-founders is fair. In detail, this Founder’s Pocket Guide walks entrepreneurs though the following elements: • Take The Founder Test to make sure everybody deserves founder status • Review the case for splitting your founder equity into equal parts • Use the Equity Split Scorecard as a fair method to allocate more equity to highly skilled cofounders • Solve common equity problems using founder vesting structures • Answer common equity split questions like IP and founder-investors Note that this guide does not go into how to use equity to attract employees or using equity to pay service providers, advisors, development companies, or other contractors. This guide focuses solely on the best practices of deciding the equity ownership split between the founders of a startup venture.

The goal of this guide is to help you understand the key moving parts of a startup cap table, review typical cap table inputs, and demystify terminology and jargon associated with cap table discussions. Along the way, this highly visual guide provides easy-to-follow examples for the most common calculations related to cap table building. Expanding on these key skills every startup founder should know, this Founder’s Pocket Guide helps you learn how to: • Build your basic cap table step by step, including founder’s shares, option pools, angel investor rounds, and VC rounds. • Decipher cap table specific lingo, such as fully-diluted shares outstanding, preferred shares vs. common shares, Series A, Series B, and so on. • Establish a stock option pool in your cap table and understand the option pool effect on founder dilution. • Understand the simple math behind cap table formulas and calculations, including calculating fully diluted shares outstanding, investor equity ownership percentages, and share price.

This easy to follow guide helps startup founders understand the key moving parts of an investment term sheet, and review typical preferred share rights, preferences, and protections. Along the way, we also provide easy-to-follow examples for the most common calculations related to preferred share equity deals. Expanding on these fundraising concepts, this Founder’s Pocket Guide helps startup founders learn: What a term sheet is and how to summarize the most important deal terms for your fundraising and startup building goals. How preferred stock shares differ from common shares, with review of how each key preferred share right and preference is tied to the investor’s shares. Key terms and definitions associated with equity fundraising, such as pre-money valuation, founder dilution, and down round. How to decipher legalese associated with a term sheet deal, such as pro rata, fully diluted, and pari passu. The full list of the most common term sheet clauses, their plain English meaning, and their importance to an early-stage investment deal. Simple math for the key term sheet financial aspects, including calculating fully diluted shares outstanding, investor equity ownership percentages, and the impact of option pools on founder dilution. Example exit scenarios, showing how term sheet deal points impact how exit proceeds get divided among investors and founders.

This updated edition includes several new features, including: · The Startup Valuation Explorer · Expanded coverage of Valuation Methods · Responding to investor questions about your valuation · Understanding option pool impact on your valuation For many early-stage entrepreneurs assigning a pre-money valuation to your startup is one of the more daunting tasks encountered during the fundraising quest. This guide provides a quick reference to all of the key topics around early-stage startup valuation and provides step-by-step examples for several valuation methods. This Founder’s Pocket Guide helps startup founders learn: • What a startup valuation is and when you need to start worrying about it. • Key terms and definitions associated with valuation, such as pre-money, post-money, and dilution. • How investors view the valuation task, and what their expectations are for early-stage companies. • How the valuation fits with your target raise amount and resulting founder equity ownership. • How to do the simple math for calculating valuation percentages. • How to estimate your company valuation using several accepted methods. • What accounting valuation methods are and why they are not well suited for early-stage startups.

This book is the "Hello, World" tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. It's based on the experiences of the author, Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. Hello, Startup is a practical, how-to guide that consists of three parts: Products, Technologies, and Teams. Although at its core, this is a book for programmers, by programmers, only Part II (Technologies) is significantly technical, while the rest should be accessible to technical and non-technical audiences alike. If you’re at all interested in startups—whether you’re a programmer at the beginning of your career, a seasoned developer bored with large company politics, or a manager looking to motivate your engineers—this book is for you.

Slicing Pie outlines a simple process for making sure that the founders and early employees of a start-up company get their fair share of the equity. You will learn: How to value the time and resources an individual brings to the company relative to the contributions of others ; The right way to value intangible things like ideas and relationships ; What to do when a founder leaves your company ; How to handle equity when you have to fire someone. (4e de couv.).

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.