Startup & equity

Founder and startup planning: vesting schedules and cliff math, cash runway from burn rate, equity dilution after a round, option value estimates, SAFE conversion scenarios, SaaS break-even MRR, CAC payback months, LTV:CAC ratio, and simple cap tables. Built for early-stage modeling — not legal or tax advice; term sheets and local law override these estimates.

Equity arithmetic is simple; equity documents are not. Dilution maths assumes a clean common-stock cap table, while real rounds bring liquidation preferences, participation rights, anti-dilution provisions, and an option pool that is usually expanded pre-money — meaning existing holders absorb it before the new investor’s percentage is calculated. SAFEs add valuation caps and discounts that only resolve at conversion, so two notes with identical headline amounts can produce very different ownership. Runway is equally sensitive: it assumes flat burn, whereas hiring plans and collections rarely hold, so model a pessimistic case alongside your base case. Use these outputs to prepare questions for your lawyer and to sanity-check a term sheet, never as a substitute for reading the actual documents.