In public markets, valuing a company is straightforward: take the latest share price, multiply it by the number of shares, and you’ve got the market cap. That works because every share is economically identical and the market is continuously pricing the business based on real fundamentals. In venture-backed startups, that logic collapses almost instantly. Yet many founders, employees, and even some investors still fall into the trap of thinking: “Our last round was at $X per

1️⃣ Breakpoints bring clarity to complexity. They show exactly how value flows across your capital stack at different outcomes. Not confusion. Not guesswork. Clarity. 2️⃣ Your cap table tells a growth story. Every round reflects increasing confidence, evolving risk, and shifting expectations. Breakpoints simply turn that story into something measurable and visible. 3️⃣ As outcomes grow, economics tend to align. At lower exits, protections matter. At larger exits, participa

In my last post, I introduced  breakpoints —a concept that sits at the center of cap‑table economics, yet almost no founders, CFOs, or even VCs ever look at directly. And that’s exactly why this series exists. Breakpoints aren’t a feature of exotic spreadsheets. They’re the hidden logic that determines  who actually gets paid  at different exit values. They are the inflection points where the distribution changes. Most people raising or investing capital never model them. Man

Most founders and investors treat the cap table as a static artefact, a tidy ledger of who owns what, how much they paid, and how those numbers stack up today. Useful, yes, but also deeply incomplete. Over the past months I’ve written a lot about fair value and how it offers a window into what might be , not just what is. Recently people have asked me: “If you’re doing this for VCs, what about the other side of the equation - the company?” The Traditional View: A Backward-Loo