Equity design

Equity is the most expensive thing you’ll ever give away, and the easiest to get wrong. The equity design tools help you decide who gets what deliberately — using standard benchmarks and real math — instead of guessing in a room with co-founders.

The tools live in the Equity design section and follow one flow: design the plan, map it to your hiring, evaluate specific offers, then run what-ifs on the outcomes.

Design your equity plan

Equity type advisor — tell it the role and seniority you’re hiring for, and it recommends an equity type (incentive stock options, non-qualified options, restricted stock, RSUs) with a suggested grant size and vesting structure based on market benchmarks.
Option pool designer — a guided wizard: size the pool (typically 10–25% of the company), allocate it across role buckets, and see the dilution impact on existing founders plus how much pool remains.
Hiring plan mapper — feed in your hiring plan over the next 24 months and see cumulative pool consumption, per-hire dilution, and whether your pool will run out before you finish hiring.

Evaluate an offer

Offer evaluator — enter every parameter of an offer: equity type, share count, strike price, fair market value, vesting, acceleration, and salary. The tool answers the question that matters most to an employee: what is this actually worth? It shows ownership percentage, value at several exit levels, tax outcomes, and how many years it takes to break even on any salary gap.
Salary-to-equity converter — the math that turns a salary shortfall into the equity percentage that makes an offer fair.

Run the what-ifs

Vesting acceleration scenarios — compare a standard 4-year schedule with 1-year cliff against single-trigger, double-trigger, and partial acceleration at different exit dates.
IPO modeler — project IPO proceeds including lockup and underwriting assumptions, with a sensitivity grid, and compare an IPO exit against an acquisition at the same value.
Liquidation preference comparison — line up up to five preference structures (1x non-participating, 2x participating, custom, and more) side by side and see what common and preferred shareholders each gets at every exit level — including the break-even exit where founders start to see real money.
Equity math converter — five linked conversions (dollars to shares, percent to shares, shares to percent, price per share, and pre/post-money) that all update live as you change one input.
ISO/AMT analyzer — model the alternative minimum tax impact of exercising incentive stock options, so the tax bill never surprises you.

Where the numbers come from

All calculations follow published frameworks from standard startup equity references and role-based benchmark tables. You don’t need to know the formulas — you just need to know your inputs, and the tool handles the rest.

A suggested first session

Run the equity type advisor for each founder role.
Size your pool in the option pool designer.
Map your hiring plan and check the pool doesn’t run dry.
Evaluate one real offer end to end to get comfortable with the tool.
Run an IPO vs acquisition comparison to see what a good outcome looks like.

Working with the results

Treat every output as a decision aid, not a verdict. When numbers surprise you, that’s usually a signal to dig in: a pool that empties before your hiring plan completes suggests an earlier raise or a smaller team; an IPO value below an acquisition offer suggests the market’s ceiling is lower than you hoped. The tools give you the same model the other side is using, which makes conversations with co-founders, employees, and investors far more productive.

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