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Using a Cap Table Spreadsheet to Track Investments in Tech Companies
If you've run into any potential funding sources that you have had to talk to, then you've probably had to fill out a cap table spreadsheet for them. This is simply a spreadsheet that lists the companies you have pitched to and the amount of money they want to give you based on what you have to offer them. It's also used by some of the best capital firms and venture capitalists to screen out the people they are willing to invest in, sort out the leads, and to find the best match for a specific deal. In this article, we'll look at how you can use it to help you with your own investment pitch to a potential funding source. We'll go over how to format the spreadsheet so that it looks more professional (we'll also cover why you should format your spreadsheet this way).

First, lets look at how a cap table spreadsheet is formatted. Most investors have default formats for their sheet in which columns are labeled with the amount that they are willing to invest in terms of pounds, or dollars. Sometimes, the spreadsheet will have other columns to label the other metrics from the investor's perspective. You will need to customize your own Google spreadsheet to the exact ways that the VC and the financial institution would like to view it.

In most cases, you won't have to customize your spreadsheets very much. The standard format is one of rows for each category of capital, with a column for each individual investment category. There are some advanced cap tables that actually have other columns for additional metrics, including the percentage of ownership for each category. These type of spreadsheets are often customized using template options available online, or even Excel. We'll take a look at those two types further below.

Most of the spreadsheet apps that you find online will allow you to have several different versions of your Google cap table spreadsheet, with each version having its own set of metadata. Metadata is information about what characteristics about the portfolio it contains. Some examples include the investment size, industry, end state of capital (e.g. current, long-term only, short-term only), investment types, allocation to risk, and EPS revisions among others.

One of the things you may notice about a typical cap table is the rows where you can see the amounts of money that the early stage venture capitalists are putting into the pot. These numbers can vary widely between investors. If you're looking at multiple startups, this can give you an idea of which is most promising. The reason is that during the earliest stages of business development, most startups are still using primarily initial funding sources. This is especially true of later-stage companies that are more dependent on financers for their advances.

Many investors use simple cap tables, or very basic spreadsheets, when they're tracking only a handful of startup s. The advantage to this is that it's possible to focus on a small number of investments, which makes it easier to evaluate them against one another. You can also use simple cap tables to compare shares of common stock among different founders. By default, some investors prefer to use very simple spreadsheets, since it's often the case that the same investors will have differing expectations about how their portfolio will turn out.

However, there is another scenario where you may want to use cap table spreadsheets to track many different startup s, as well as common stocks held by individual founders. In this case, you need to be able to generate a summary of how each entrepreneur's investments are faring against the other. Excel provides several different indicators, including the Sortino Ratio, to help you do this.

There are some risks associated with this approach, which we'll discuss in more detail below. One of these is related to the way that investors who own more shares of a given company may try to manipulate the price by pushing up the price above other investors. Another risk is related to how even the best corporate governance software may not always be accurate, especially if it isn't updated regularly. This is why it's important to ensure that the company you're working with has frequent access to and uses a cap table, so that you'll have easy access to the most recent numbers. Finally, it's important to note that the current state of technology can make it difficult for you to determine which startup s are performing well, especially if you don't have comprehensive data on the stocks held by each individual founder.
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