Who prepares the cap table for a startup seeking financing?
Just curious: for the startups here, who prepared your cap table--the Excel spreadsheet showing ownership of your equity, and reflecting conversions of debt, future financings, etc.?
- You (your company, including your CFO)
- Your accountants
- Your lawyer
- Someone else
Who is in the best position to do a cap table? Why would someone ask the company's lawyers to prepare a cap table when they are words people, not numbers people?
2 Answers
As founder of the company you should know how cap tables work and have the skills to build one in Excel. You'll use them all the time, especially during financing rounds when you will need to constantly evaluate different scenarios and adjust shares to reach certain goals.
Lawyers working with startup financing are also qualified to build cap tables. In a modern American VC-funded company, the company's lawyers would maintain the cap table and keep track of who owns what.
At my startup, I wasn't around in the beginning so I don't know who did the initial cap table, but when I came on post series A, it was our corporate attorneys who were in charge of maintaining the cap table. These attorneys were definitely numbers people.
