What is a cap table?

When you’re determining how much stock an individual owns and how much stock you’re going to give up when you go to raise money, we establish a cap table. It is basically a spreadsheet that has the names of the people who own stock, how much stock they own, and what percentage they own. When we issue additional shares to an employee or to somebody who is investing money, we amend the cap table by adding those shares to it, which dilutes everyone else and shows new percentages of ownership. By looking at the future and asking ourselves what valuation we are going to get for our company (pre-money before we raise more money) and then we add to that the amount of money we’re raising. Using a cap table, we can determine how much we’re going to be diluted. It’s an important tool that everyone should have set up and used on a regular basis when they’re going after additional capital or to build the management team.