Most firms treat fair value as an output. A number to report. But the more interesting question is: What can fair value teach us about our portfolio? When used well, it becomes a lens into the economics of your investments, not just an accounting exercise. It can help answer questions like: • Which investments are most sensitive to assumptions? • Which companies have the widest range of outcomes? • Where is value concentrated today? • Where is uncertainty concentrated? At the

After working across hundreds- if not thousands - of cap tables and their underlying documentation, one pattern is unmistakable: 👉 Around 20% of cap tables contain at least one material question that, if unresolved, means the cap table is incomplete or inaccurate. 👉 A meaningful subset goes even further- into genuinely complex and problematic territory We regularly see issues such as: Conversion prices and conversion ratios being swapped (yes this happens) Share price incon

➡️ 1. Your cap table is not just a ledger, it’s latent math. Most teams treat it as a record of past transactions. In reality, it’s the foundation for modeling how value will flow in the future. ➡️ 2. Breakpoints are the cap table in future tense. A breakpoint is the moment when the next dollar of value switches lanes to a different share class. Ownership today. Distribution tomorrow. ➡️ 3. Value allocation is not linear. Preferences, participation rights, ESOP, SAFEs, warran

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