Start-up Equity and Cap Table Essentials

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 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 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 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.

If you would like Continuing Education Credit (e.g. CPE, CE, CPD, etc.) for this course, it is available if you take this course on the Illumeo dot com platform under course title: Start-up Equity and Cap Table Basics. Illumeo is certified to provide CPE in over two dozen different professional certifications covering finance, accounting, treasury, internal audit, HR, and more. However, in order to receive CPE credit the courses must be taken on an ‘approved-by-the-governing-body’ CPE platform, and for over two dozen corporate professional certifications, that is the Illumeo platform. Go to Illumeo dot com to learn more.