Founders often ask me, “If I own X% after my first investment round, how much will I be diluted through financings until exit?”. There are rules of thumb but there is no good data about what happens to common stock. So, why not survey entrepreneurs and find out? I’ve set up a simple survey using Google Forms. Share your story. I’ll publish the summary data.
Subscribe
About Simeon Simeonov
Events
Get invited to events I am organizing or speaking at.
Top Rated
- The best vesting schedule
- Startup Founder Agreements
- Founder Agreements - Vesting, Vesting and more Vesting
- Metcalfe's Law: more misunderstood than wrong?
- Monitoring Redis with MONITOR and WireShark
- Founder Dilution
- MySpace Doesn't Want You to Make Money
- How to set up reference checks
- Startup Anti-Patterns
- Comparing term sheets
-
Latest Content
- Apache Spark native functions
- Unicorn pressures and startup failures
- Advertising marketplace design
- Angel investing strategies
- JSON and JSONlines from the command line
- My most favorite math proof ever
- Monitoring Redis with MONITOR and WireShark
- Google and the ecosystem test
- Anatomy of an online ad
- Startup anti-pattern: platform risk
@simeons on Twitter
- . @Bill_Gross and I just calculated that the IRR is about 303%. Pretty good. :) twitter.com/Bill_Gross/sta… 1 week ago
- RT @cxgeek: Q: Is the US a democracy? A: Yes...but we must remember we are vulnerable. @staceyabrams #CodeCon 1 week ago
- @Bill_Gross That in itself says so much about how @ajassy and @JeffBezos manage and grow talent. 1 week ago
- Looking forward to @ajassy next at #CodeCon. The AWS growth—in both scope of services and revenue/profit—has been consistently impressive. 1 week ago
- RT @ezraklein: "To me, the very nature of it is that it is a cesspool, it will always be a cesspool, that's how it's built." — @Karaswisher… 1 week ago
- ack09
- Adobe
- Advertising
- AJAX
- amazon web services
- angel investing
- Apple
- Automattic
- AWS
- B2C
- Better Advertising
- Blogging
- bootstrapping
- Broadband
- Bubble 2.0
- business
- cloud computing
- customer development
- Digital Media
- e-commerce
- entrepreneurship
- FastIgnite
- Flex
- founder agreements
- FutureOfWebApps-SF06
- Geotagging
- IE7
- Industry News
- iPhone
- lean startup
- Life
- Long Tail
- Macromedia Flash
- marketing
- Metcalfe's Law
- Microsoft
- Microsoft Office 2007
- MIT 100K
- Mobile
- MySpace
- Nantucket Conference
- network effect
- Office 2007
- OpenOffice
- opensource
- Plinky
- Polaris Venture Partners
- privacy
- Ruby
- Ruby/Rails
- SaaS
- Security
- Shopximity
- Social Advertising
- Social Commerce
- Social computing
- social media
- social networking
- startup anti-patterns
- startups
- Swoop
- technology
- TechStars
- The Long Tail
- Thing Labs
- VC
- Venture Capital
- virtual worlds
- Web 2.0
- Weblogs
- Web Services
- Windows Vista
- WordPress
hi simeon
this is a great thing to do – i look forward to your data
one note – your survey only allows for companies with exits. but to get a better picture of the “market” we should also look at venture funded companies which are still pre-exit. true, founders and common shareholders may end up with further dilution, but knowing how much dilution they have already taken to get to wherever they are would be very worthwhile
Pre-exit would be interesting, indeed – but scenarios vary so much, more questions need to be asked and this should better be left for a deeper, comprehensive survey.
Put 2 past companies but they may be anomalies (by size, sector and geography) and may even distort results if the sample is small – consider excluding.
Final results will be still very interesting –
V.
Steve, it’s very hard to pull any solid data out of pre-exit companies as they are work in progress. That’s why I’m focused on where founders end up.
Vladimir, any and all data is valuable. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Simeon, did you ever post the ‘founder’s dilution’ table? If so, where can we find it?
Unfortunately, the responses weren’t sufficient to create a good data set. I decided not to publish data that could be more wrong than right. New entries are trickling in, though, so hopefully there will be something to report in 2010.
any updates on this?
Not enough data to make the analysis meaningful and cap tables have changed significantly over the past few years with the meteoric rise of capped convertible notes. It now takes much longer to understand exactly how much founders will be diluted.
Noted, but can’t you post with some explicitly stated assumptions and caveats? No response is less helpful than something even directionally accurate.