Start-up Equity and Cap Table Basics

This course provides a basic overview of equity concepts in a start-up company, focusing on corporations, and in particular, technology corporations. 

We start with a brief overview of equity, including a discussion of ownership vs. control in a corporation.  From there, we will look at differences between common stock and preferred stock.  After that, we explore some of the rights to acquire equity, including stock options, warrants and convertible notes.  After that, we look at company rights to re-acquire its outstanding stock, including rights of repurchase and redemption rights.  Then we will look at rights that track to equity, but are not rights to acquire equity, such as phantom units and stock appreciation rights.

The course provides examples of authorizing common and preferred stock in the Charter, and the development of a capitalization table.  We will work through several examples of capitalization tables, incorporating common stock, stock options, preferred stock series, and warrants, and determine percent holdings by class, by outstanding stock, and by fully-diluted stock.