You will not get a valuation here, and you should not accept one from anywhere else. Every tool that hands you a single number for what your equity is "worth" gets there by multiplying an exit price somebody invented by a probability somebody else invented. We hold no data on exit outcomes and neither does anyone offering you a figure for your company. So the exit price below is yours, shown as a what-if rather than a forecast, and everything else on this page is arithmetic on facts you can verify. Nothing you enter is uploaded.
The grant
What sits ahead of you
Investor money comes off the top at exit before common shareholders see anything. This is the part almost no offer conversation covers, and it decides more outcomes than the share count does.
Your what-if
Not a prediction, and not ours. Try a few: the number that usually matters is not the optimistic one.
You own
-
of the company, fully diluted
Below this exit, you get nothing
At your what-if exit
Questions this offer has not answered
A blank field here is a gap in the offer, not in the tool. These are worth asking before you sign.
Copied. It is plain text, so it will paste anywhere.
No expected value is offered, on purpose. Multiplying your what-if by a probability would produce a number that looks like analysis and is a guess with a decimal point. Treat equity as upside on top of a base you would accept on its own.
How to read it
Your percentage, not your share count. Twenty thousand shares of ten million is 0.2 per cent. The same twenty thousand of two hundred million is 0.01 per cent, and the offer letter looks identical. If the fully diluted count is not in writing, you have not been told what you were offered.
What it costs you to exercise. Options are a right to buy, not ownership. Twenty thousand options at a one dollar strike is twenty thousand dollars of your own money, before tax, to convert them into shares. Against a 180,000 salary that is about six weeks of gross pay, and it is due whether or not the company is ever worth anything.
The preference stack. Investors take their money back before common shareholders see a cent. A company that has raised 10 million and sells for 12 million leaves a common pool of 2 million, so 0.2 per cent is worth four thousand dollars rather than twenty-four. This single mechanism is why equity that sounded valuable turns out not to be, and it is almost never raised in an offer conversation.
The exit price below which you get nothing. Add the preference stack to what it costs you to exercise, and you have a floor. Under it the grant returns zero however many shares you hold. Most people have never seen this number for their own company, which is why it is the one printed in red above.
It will not tell you what your equity is worth, because that depends on an exit that has not happened and nobody knows. Any calculator that gives you a single figure got there by multiplying two invented numbers, and the confident presentation is the problem: it converts a guess into something that looks like a finding.
The exit value above is a field you fill in. Move it around. The useful exercise is not finding the number that makes the equity look good; it is seeing how high the exit has to be before the equity is worth as much as a pay rise you could have negotiated in cash.
Our own position, since it is relevant: we are a recruitment agency and we are paid on base salary, not equity, so we have no stake in talking you into or out of a package. What we see across a lot of offers is that equity is best treated as upside on top of a base you would accept on its own. If the base only works because of the equity, the offer is asking you to fund the company's risk out of your own salary.
Check the base against the market with the salary checker before you weigh any of this.
Common questions
You cannot, and neither can anyone else, because it depends on an exit that has not happened. What you can work out is what you own: your shares as a percentage of the fully diluted count, what it costs to exercise, how much investor money comes off the top before you see anything, and the exit price below which the grant returns nothing at all. Those four have real answers, and most offer letters contain none of them.
Because a share count means nothing without the total. Twenty thousand shares of ten million is 0.2 per cent. The same twenty thousand of two hundred million is 0.01 per cent, twenty times less, and the offer letter looks identical. Ask for the fully diluted share count in writing. A company that will not give it is telling you something.
It is the investors' right to take their money back before common shareholders get anything. If a company has raised 10 million and sells for 12 million, the preference takes 10 and the entire common pool is 2 million, so a 0.2 per cent holding is worth 4,000 rather than 24,000. It is the single biggest reason equity that looks valuable turns out not to be, and it is almost never mentioned in an offer conversation.
Usually you have a post-termination exercise window, commonly 90 days, to buy your vested options at the strike price or lose them. That means leaving before an exit can cost you the entire grant unless you can find the exercise cost in cash, and possibly a tax bill on top. It is one of the most consequential terms in the whole document and one of the least discussed.