I would like to know if there are any spreadsheets I can use which have prefilled cap table calculations to help me determine equity distribution to investors and advisors during the seed round.<p>For example, say you determined to give out 15% equity for your seed funding but you are obtaining the total amount of funding from multiple investors, what can I use to assist me in making sure that I do not give up too much equity to each investor.
When we raised our seed funding, I used several cap tables - none of which worked for me because they all made certain assumptions and didn't allow for reverse-calculations, which is what I needed. I found that a simple spreadsheet worked best in the end, but I had to review it a few times to make sure I didn't mess up the numbers.<p>In our case, the investor said: we value your company at X, we're willing to invest Y, and we need ESOP of Z%. From that, I had to reverse engineer the percentage and number of stocks that all involved would get.<p>The method that worked for me was to convert everything to number of shares and price per share before and after investing, and then calculate percentages based on shares / total shares for each party. This way, it's easy to calculate how many shares the investor gets based on the valuation (which determines pre-money share value), and final percentages based on total number shares after all is said and done.<p>A few things make a generic spreadsheet hard to create, and you should keep in mind:
- Is the investor paying based on % or share value?
- Are the ESOP stocks issues before or after the investment? (you get ripped off if it's before)
- Are you issuing new stocks or giving up a percentage of existing ones?<p>I hope this helps.
Capitalization tables are commonly used for VC deals, ie: Series A, B, etc. What I am looking for is something similar that would be suited for an initial seed funding round.