jeronpaul

I completely agree with this. 1) I have never seen a startup pay anything close to that. 2) you are so right--you generally only need 1 every 12 months (at most!). There are some exceptions but they are rare. Some valuation providers sell 409As as if you need them monthly or something. That is absurd.

Btw, full disclosure I founded and sold Scalar Analytics, a valuation firm and am currently the CEO of Capshare.

The fact is that nobody can really know with certainty the true valuation of an early-stage company. Even venture investors just come to a negotiated deal and subsequent events often prove them wrong. That said, the definition of true value is probably whatever price is implied by a market deal between a willing seller and buyer both of which have access to all relevant facts and neither of which is under any compulsion to do a deal (so basically a venture capital transaction would qualify). The article correctly points out that valuation firms aren't market participants (i.e., actual buyers) so they are just doing their best to guess at a value--not establishing a value. The article also points to false precision--which most honest valuation folks agree to. They still have to do their best to come up with a defensible valuation but they recognize that it is just an educated guess. Finally the article points to the difference between common and preferred stock prices as if that is a scam. While you can definitely debate how close the two should be relative to each other, it's totally crazy (IMHO) to say that common should have the same value as preferred.

Biased but this is exactly why we built Capshare (www.capshare.com). Happy to walk you through it if you want to check it out.

Actually believe it or not, as some other commenters have said, Section 220 gives every shareholder the right to get all of the information they would need to estimate the value of their shares. This would definitely include financials and cap table. The reasons so few invoke (IMHO) their rights include: --They don't know their rights --Most employees want to stay on the good side of their company --Companies can and usually do fight these requests making it costly (in time and sometimes legal fees) for the employee to get the information they need --The request for information has to be done in a very specific way for it to work. For example, you may have to go "inspect" a physical copy of the company's records at the company rather than receiving anything electronically

--Jeron @ capshare.com

In general, I think that telling relatively early employees in a startup their fully-diluted ownership percentage has become the norm.

I assume that this is the 0.75% worth of shares at the current valuation they promised you. You should confirm that this represents your share of the fully-diluted, as-converted shares of the company.

Here is more detail on what fully-diluted, as converted means: https://www.capshare.com/blog/how-many-shares-are-on-my-cap-....

If you confirm that this represents your share of fully-diluted, as-converted shares, then you can calculate the total number of shares on the cap table by simply dividing the number of shares you receive by 0.75%.

Regarding your other questions, every startup has a different approach to levels of transparency about equity.

Most companies do not grant full access to the cap table to employees beyond the founder group.

Many companies will give employees, especially key employees, a sense of their ownership percentage after future rounds.

Companies will typically provide less information to former employees who have left the company.

Exceptions to all of these generalities are somewhat common.

I wrote an article on this subject based on our experience with the 5,000+ companies and cap tables we manage on Capshare: https://www.capshare.com/blog/will-cap-table-transparency-he....

Apologies in advance that my response is somewhat scattered. At Capshare, we are actively working on all of these problems. Here are some of our thoughts on early liquidity for founders: https://www.capshare.com/blog/finding-early-liquidity-6-thin.... Here are some thoughts on cap table transparency: https://www.capshare.com/blog/will-cap-table-transparency-he.... Finally some thoughts about optimizing options for tax efficiency: https://www.capshare.com/blog/how-to-structure-stock-options.... Many of the online equity / electronic stock companies are anticipating new ways to transact that will increase private stock liquidity.