Key Insights from Analyzing 5k Cap Tables (2016)

Based on this data, we identified what we call the Employee Ownership Formula:

where Y is the fully-diluted employee + founder ownership on the cap table, and

X is the number of series of fundraising rounds your company has

You can use this formula to predict the average total employee ownership of any startup or benchmark your own. Using assumptions from the previous section about splits between founders and other employees, founders should expect to own 16-21% of their company at exit. In other words, at Series D+ stages, the founders are filthy rich at “star” companies but only just cracking the million dollar mark in the more typical startup.

Source: www.capshare.com