understanding stock, preferred stock,

options, convertible notes

and other fundraising instruments

can be truly overwhelming.

We actually didn't find a single video

that covered this, so here we go.

This is Fundraising for Startups 101.

If you are an early-stage startup in the tech space,

and you are looking for money to grow your company,

the official term for that would be raising capital.

The most commonly recommended instrument

to do so is called a Convertible Note.

However, to understand how those work,

we first need to understand how equity

(or stock) works.

By the way, if you are lost

with one of the fancy words we are about to use,

just rewind,

or check out the video description for a glossary.

Also, a shout-out to our investors

at Carao Ventures,

for validating our legal documents here.

Ok, so Stock.

You are probably semi-familiar with the term

'stock.'

Stock is what represents the company ownership

and it is distributed in parts to reflect

how much of the company each owner

or shareholder possesses.

Each shareholder, receives a certain number of shares of stock.

The number of shares a person

or entity owns in the company,

divided by the total number

of shares that have been issued,

reflects that person's percentage ownership

of the business.

That ownership is often acquired

with a cash investment,

but it can also be acquired

through other forms of value contributed,

like your hard work.

The percentage owned

normally determines a shareholders' claim

on the company distributed profits,

(the term used is dividends)

and the voting power

on certain key company decisions.

But, for you to understand better,

use an example of a company

we'll call...

FounderHub.

Let's say that FounderHub has two founders,

who came up with the concept together,

and have both committed

all of their professional time

to develop this business,

so they'll be equal partners.

The Co-founders,

Walter and Jesse

go ahead and incorporate FounderHub.

Startups are usually incorporated

with about 1 million shares of stock.

Why so many?

Because it's complicated to break a share in half.

We'll get to that in a second.

So, after incorporating,

each one of the founders

owns 500,000 shares of stock

which represents 50% of the 1 million total.

Most startups are incoporated as

Delaware C-Corporations,

and they just are.

It's the legal structure that is

most familiar to investors,

it is easy to set up,

it's easy to manage

and is very tax friendly.

So let's look at a Price Round.

Raising money for stock.

The 'traditional' approach

towards raising capital

is with what is called a “priced round”.

Meaning, a round in which both the founders

and the investor are able to agree

on an accurate valuation for the company,

and so the investor gets shares of

company stock in return for his investment.

Let's imaging that FounderHub starts

generating sales, starts operating and

things are going very well.

Let's say they're selling $10,000/mo,

and subscriptions are growing fast,

so they decide to raise money.

They calculate a nice round number of, say,

$500,000 in investment that they need to raise

to accelerate their business,

so they seek out an investor.

Remember,

companies rarely raise money

without traction;

we made a whole video about that.

Check it out.

So, how many shares do they offer an investor

in exchange for those $500,000?

That question really relates to the business valuation.

How much is this business worth?

If instead of FounderHub,

Walter and Jesse owned,

let's say a car wash

its value would be calculated using a multiplier

of their revenue or their profits;

it's really, their EBITDA, but who has time to

explain what that is?

If Walter and Jesse are making $10,000/month,

that's $120,000/year,

a traditional business could be worth

maybe 1x or 2x this,

depending on how profitable they are.

This means that an investor could literally

buy the whole carwash business

for $250,000 or so

(excluding the value of the land or the building).

However, tech startups are different.

Tech startups could have

tremendous scale potential

and fantastic margins,

so it's extremely hard to measure

how large and fas they can grow

in revenues and in value.

A software product or an app, for example,

can realistically serve millions of customers

around the world, with a minimal staff.

Think of Uber,

who raised $500,000 on their first round,

and are now worth,

well, close to $80B of dollars.

They did not need to invest billions of dollars

on buying a car fleet, for example.

So the value of a tech startup

is not related directly

to their current assets or revenues,

but to their upside potential,

their capacity to innovate

and transform those innovations

into value.

Some variables to take into account here are:

- The addressable market size.

So, how many customers are there

for the company to serve

and how much would they be willing

to pay for this product

or service.

- The technology variable

Is there a unique piece of tech

that nobody else has,

or that optimizes a process drastically?

- Potential margins.

How much does it cost me

to serve an additional customer?

For example,

when Instagram had 300 million users,

their staff was only 13 people.

However,

all these numbers are variables and estimates,

and nobody really knows for sure.

But based on them,

along with some credible early results,

the valuation of the startup

is defined by how much potential

an investor sees in the business,

how risky it is,

and how much upside do they expect

in exchange for risking their money,

just like a bet.

So, these days,

an average valuation in Silicon Valley,

for a tech company like our theoretical FounderHub

would be around

$4million pre-money valuation.

Again, assuming this is a high-scale,

high-margin business, not the car wash.

So, let's say that Gus,

our investor, accepts these terms,

and then he is willing to purchase

a $500,000 chunk of this business,

as an investment.

Simple math tells us that if

the full company is worth $4 million,

then $500,000 would represent

about 11% of this company.

We are gonna dig deeper into this.

Remember Walter and Jesse

both have 500,000 shares of this business.

Shares of stock

Typically, the original shareholders

do not transfer or sell their shares,

what's gonna happen is the company will

issue new shares to Gus.

In businesses stock rarely changes owner,

unless the business is actually acquired.

On the contrary,

companies often issue new stock,

which dilutes the original shareholders

percentage ownership.

I'm gonna explain this in the easiest of ways.

Let's say that if Walter and Jesse

had one share each,

they would each own 50%

of a 2-share business.

If the company issues a new share of stock to Gus,

then everybody still has one share,

but it's no longer 50% of the business,

it's 33% of it.

So, in this case

for the math to work,

FounderHub will issue

125,000 new shares of stock to Gus.

When the company does this,

it will no longer have 1 million shares,

it will have 1,125,000 shares.

So, Walter and Jesse will still own

500,000 shares each,

but they no longer represent 50% of the business,

but around 44.4% of it..

The new 125,000 shares issued to Gus

now represent 11.11% of the company.

The post-money valuation of FounderHub

is now $4,500,000.

And this is why we had 1 million shares to start with,

so that we don't have to issue fractions of shares.

If the company would have been incorporated

with only 100 shares, for example;

50 for Walter and 50 for Jesse...

then it would have had to issue

12 or 13 stocks to Gus,

so we'd need to round up or down.

That round up could be worthless now,

but a 0.01% equity stake

in a company like Uber

that's actually

$8 million today.

Now, the challenge with raising money this way,

a priced round,

is that there are a lot of things to figure out,

for example,

How many votes

does each share get in certain discussions?

Usually, the standar is that you get one vote per share,

but investors will often want

more control over certain

key company decisions

considering that'll have

a minority ownership in the company.

If the company goes bankrup, for example,

and needs to liquidate assets,

do investors get paid first?

That's another thing,

that you'll have to agree on, on a price round.