Ask HN: Assistance determining seed round equity for advisors/angel investors

[havoc2005]

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.

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.

[taa]

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.

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.

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.

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?

I hope this helps.

[havoc2005]

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.