Startup Resources: How Many Shares Should You Issue?

If the company is acquired for $5m , the preferred stock holders get all of the proceeds and the common stock holders get nothing. One of the advantages of incorporating is the ability to raise money by issuing shares. Your articles of incorporation can authorize as many shares as you think you’ll need.

Maximilian Fleitmann is a passionate founder and entrepreneur. For the last 12+ years he has successfully launched several businesses in the areas of education and digitalization. Max purpose is to enable growth and therefore he shares his experience in building startups. If you are planning on raising funds from venture capitalists, you will need different classes of preferred shares.

How Many Shares Should Your Startup Authorize Upon Launch?

If the company is sold for a higher price-per-share than that paid by all preference shareholders, the spoils are divided just as with ordinary shareholders – everyone participates pro-rata to their stake. As a founder and director, you will be acting as the company’s representative. As its chief executive officer, you are also an employee of the company.

This reserved number of shares is called the “option pool” and is most commonly the number equal to 10 to 20% of the currently issued shares. In order to incorporate in Delaware, you must first determine how many shares your company should authorized upon formation. You should really do your research here and try to authorize as many shares as you will need in the reasonably foreseeable future.

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As the columns move from left to right, additional https://personal-accounting.org/ items are applied to get an understanding of a person’s actual ownership percentage of the company. Most capitalization tables are created at the inception of a business in the form of a spreadsheet carefully structured around a few variables we’ll outline below.

Stocks are pieces of the company that are divided among the company’s shareholders and owners. The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation – a popular book for tech employees. Equity Compensation for Tech Employees – a book I reviewed, written by Matt Dickenson, software engineer at Square. A veto over certain board decisions, particularly any that relate to the ownership and structure of the company.

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Our cooperation How many shares are in a startup companyed from office searches and hiring skilled software developers… However, there are certain advantages that 10 million shares offer that you may not get with other random numbers.

• Also, unlike stock options you exercise, with SARs you typically won’t have ownership in the company after you leave – and you might be left with less if, say, an IPO occurs a year after you left.
• Upon forming up, a startup typically has a very clean “cap” table.
• In general, independent startup advisors account for a maximum of 5% of shares.
• The Secretary of State of Delaware provides a franchise tax calculator you can use to estimate your tax liability.
• That means that there’s a total of $5m of Series A preference in the company.

This would be harder to achieve if the founder only owns ordinary shares because the shares sold by the company in Series A and beyond are likely to be preference shares. It’s likely these would have a liquidity preference, and perhaps other advantages over ordinary shares, making the founder’s shares unappealing by comparison. If this is something you want to explore, be aware that there may be tax implications, unless you issue them on day one. When incorporating a new Delaware corporation, I recommend authorizing 15,000,000 shares of common stock. Of the 15,000,000 authorized shares, divide only 10,000,000 shares initially between the co-founders and an option pool.