Tag Archives: Equity

Data about equity of 600 startups – comments (2)

2 Replies

Second post of comments on (updated) data on 600 (former) startups, about (what I think) are interesting or intriguing results.

After venture capital in the first post, here are elements about founders.

The 600 startups gave me data about 1016 founders, al though there is an average of 2.3 founders per startup. I did not have the age of all of them, neither their role or ownership. The average age is 37.9, the median is 36. (This is age at foundation, I added this after a comment I received on April 9, 2020).

The following figures show some striking results about the age related to fields: founders are much older in the health-related fields, much younger in digital technnologies. It is more than 45 in biotech and 43 in medtech in comparison to 33 in software and Internet.

Data about equity of 600 startups – comments (1)

Leave a reply

As a follow-up to my recent post on (updated) data on 600 (former) startups, here is a first post about (what I think) are interesting or intriguing results.

Without doing too much self-promotion, let me add that I have in the past already dealt with the topic as I mentionin the document or through the following illustration:

My first comment is that the differences linked to fields or geographies are not that big, whereas data evolved more over time (fifty years). Amounts of venture capital, years to IPO, sales, profits, employees are not that different for example except in biotech maybe, for sales and employees at least.

One important note: in my list of 600 companies, only 15 did not have venture capital (or at least private investors). Is there a bias here? I am not sure, but I could be wrong.

These “comment” posts will be short and I finish this one with a look at Series A, the 1st investment round. The amounts are substantial, $8M on average. I did a new analysis, i.e. to find out how much VCs take at this stage and on average, it’s … 47%. A little less in IT, a little more in healthcare, a little less in Silicon Valley, a little more in Boston.

If I bring it back to the percentage per million, that gives 22%, I let you think about this astonishing result … but we must also look at the median values, because all this is not gaussian as I have often say, but follows a power law. Median values are $4.5M for Series A in exchange for 45.5% and 10% for $M.

Updated data in equity of 600 (former) startups

Leave a reply

The Covid19 virus has an indirect effect, we have more time at home and in front of computers. So I updated my data in startup equity from 600 companies for which information was available, mostly because they had filed to go public. Here is the full list of individual data.

If you cannot visualize the document on scribd, here is a direct link to the pdf entitled Equity_in_600_Startups-Lebret-April2020.

At the end of this 600+-page document, you’ll find some statistics, here they are again. I will probably come back to some results I find interesting not to say intriguing. Enjoy an react!

Some addtional comments in later posts:
1- About venture capital: on April 7 comments 1.
2- About the age of founders: on April 8 comments 2.
3- About the equity of founders: on April 9 comments 3.
4- How is equity shared: on April 10, comments 4.
5- About the equity of non-founding CEOS: on April 11, comments 5.
6- About valuation of startups: on April 12, comments 6.
7- What have they become: on April 16, comments 7.

Basic data about startups (funding, sales, profits, employees at IPO and years to IPO) by fields, geographies and periods of time.

Data about founders (age, ownership and nb. by startups) and other stakeholders by fields, geographies and periods of time.

Data about ownership of non-founding CEOs, VPs, CXOs, board members by fields, geographies and periods of time.

New data about ownership of series A investors by fields, geographies and periods of time.

Bubbles, bubbles, they have always been around! Here is Casper…

Leave a reply

Speculation, bubbles, yes, they have always been around. I entered the VC world in the late 90s. Now we are in the unicorns era. Or were we?

I did my 537th startup cap. table a few days ago (see below). I had hesitated a little as I was not sure a company selling mattresses, even online, could be classified in my list of tech companies. But with VCs like NEA, IVP, Norwest on board and leading banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as underwriters, it had all the needed pedigree. Or at least it looked like it.

Then I read Casper’s IPO is officially a disaster on CNN and Here’s why Casper’s disappointing IPO could spell disaster for other unicorns on Business Insider Nordic

What happened? Well the initial IPO price on the table below should have been $18, then it was fixed at $12 for the first day of trading and this morning CSPR is at $10.26. The unicorn is now a $400M company. And you may want to have a look at the price of the B, C and D preferred rounds on the table below. Yes disasters happen from time to time.

As a quick remined my latest list to be updated when I will have reached 550 tables.

More data about equity in about 525 start-ups

Leave a reply

Here is an updated version of my equity tables from startups which filed to go public at some point. There are about 525 individual companies as well as just below statistical synthesis relatively to fields, geography and periods of time about VC amounts, time to IPO, levels of sales and income at IPO (as well as PS and PE ratios), age of founders, number of founders, ownership in companies by catagories. I think ths may be of interest for some of you…

The analysis of 500+ startups

Leave a reply

Following my traditional analysis of startups through their IPO filings documents (you can check my 2017 analysis on 400+ documents here or the tag #equity on this blog), here is an updated analysis with 500+ start-ups.

You can have a look at the full 500 cap. tables on scribd or look at a shorter synthesis which follows.I hope this is self-explanatory enough.

Uber finally files to go public – Here’s my cap. table

1 Reply

Uber’s S-1 has just been released. I jumped on the opportunity to analyze the shareholding of the startup, a thing I had tried to do in 2017 (with much less information – check here). Here are the figures that I found (subject to errors related to my possible too much eagerness…)


Uber cap. table – from the SEC S-1 published on April 12, 2019

And, if you do not have the courage to read my post What is the equity structure of Uber and Airbnb?, here is what I understood in March 2017:


Uber cap. table – A speculative exercise with very little information available

2019, the year of Unicorns IPO Filings: is Lyft the beginning of the end?

Leave a reply

Lyft is the first Unicorn which published its S-1 document, i.e. its IPO filing. Is this good news or bad news? Lyft is impressive, two founders who were 22 and 23 when they co-founded their start-up 12 years ago have reached more than $2B in sales with a little less than 5’000 employees in 2018. This is the good part. The less good piece is it took the company more than $5B in equity investment and the reason is simple: Lyft has lost $900M in 2018, and more than $600M in both 2017 and 2016. This is more than $2B cumulative loss. I assume losses were pretty high in the previous years too. YOu can have a look at the cap. table I built from the S-1:

I read recently an article by Tim O’Reilly: The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy. O’Reilly has doubts about Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh’s claiming that Blitzscaling would be the secret of success for today’s technology businesses. “Imagine, for a moment, a world in which Uber and Lyft hadn’t been able to raise billions of dollars in a winner-takes-all race to dominate the online ride-hailing market. How might that market have developed differently?” I have the same doubts about this crazy strategy but who am I to say?…

Some thoughts about European Tech. IPOs

Leave a reply

As some of you may know, I love to crunch data. Among my hobbies are cap. tables of startups which went or at least filed to go public. I have now more than 450 such companies and you can have a look at a recent summary of 400+ such companies in Equity in Startups. In the recent days, I had a look at startups going public on European stock exchanges (Paris, Amsterdam) through their IPO prospectus. What a difference to Nasdaq based S-1 filings! So much less information that it was frustrating to me. Here are the examples of Cellectis, Kalray and Adyen.

I am not sure you will take the time to have a look, but knowing how much founders, employees, investors own in these startups is more complex than Nasdaq-based ones. Just have a look at the difference between Cellectis going public in PAris in 2007 and then in 2015 on Nasdaq.

How can you read who are the people behind all these stuctures in Adyen shareholding?
And why are the past rounds not available more systematically…?

Should you want to have a look at more data, here are the 450+ cap. tables!!

Equity Structure in 450+ Start-ups by Herve Lebret on Scribd

Finally, an explosion of new IPO filings in IT

Leave a reply

In the recent years, there had been regular filings in the biotech field, but IT had suffered. then Dropbox and Spotify filed and successfully went public. This probably gave confidence to “unicorns” and many have filed recently such as Smartsheet, DocuSign, Zuora. Carbon Black is the latest one with an interesting history. here is its S-1 filing and below my computed cap. table.

Carbon Black was founded in 2002, has raised close to $200M since inception (not counting the money raised by 4 startups is has acquired, Confer Technologies, Objective Logistics & VisiTrend). It has a royal list of VCs, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Highland, Atlas or lesser know funds such as .406 or Accomplice. I do not know who the founders were, but I could get the name of Todd Brennan who has left in 2008. Who else, help me! Finally the company is based close to Boston, not in Silicon Valley… This is just the latest of my compilations, that you may find in a previous post Equity in Startups.