The Plan for AngelList Equity

AngelList Roll Up Vehicles (RUVs) changed how companies issue equity with investors (read launch post). However, RUVs were only the first step in a long term plan.

Equity is a broken currency

Companies use equity to attract investment and talent, but equity is still a deeply inefficient currency.

The process of selling equity to investors can involve dozens of people and weeks of effort. Founders use instruments like the SAFE to defer some of the overhead costs, but that’s only temporary until their next equity round. Similarly, to grant employee equity, it can take months and thousands of dollars in admin costs to manage equity incentive plans, get board consents, and formally paper the grant. Even after an employee receives their equity awards, the value is often opaque.

While liquidity is distant for most companies, equity transactions should still be frictionless so that companies can extract the most value from their equity.

AngelList Equity

Transforming equity into a frictionless currency requires a modern cap table solution, which is why we built AngelList Equity. Other cap table management tools were built for the last era of cap table management by taking spreadsheets & paper certificates online. Cap tables on AngelList Equity today have all of that basic functionality improved by innovations like RUVs and AI powered legal document review.

AngelList Equity outperforms other cap table solutions today because of innovations like RUVs that clean up the cap table and pricing that does not penalize companies for adding investors.

AngelList Equity's AI powered legal document review

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Mature companies like Stability AI, Magical, and more trust AngelList Equity to:

• Grant: Set up equity plans, configure grant document templates, draft and sign equity awards.
• Manage: Record complex cap table updates, hires, terminations, amendments, and option repricing. Give employees and shareholders secure dashboards to track vesting and access their important documents.
• Transact: Leverage infrastructure and money movement for fundraises, option exercises, repurchases, and secondary transactions.
• Stay Compliant (409A): Stay under Safe Harbor with audit-ready 409A valuations, Rule 701, Form 3921, and ASC 718 reports included in certain pricing plans.
• ‍Report: Full reporting center for cap table, equity plans, and compliance.

What founders are saying

As you continue to scale your company, you end up with dozens of vendors. However, you only rave about a select few, and AngelList Equity is at the top of that list! Their service is top notch, and their software continues to release features weekly where you can see their vision become a reality. They are serious in catering to the complex structures of a scaling company, and they've made the transition from [our previous provider] effortless.

The Plan

Even so, does the world need another generic cap table solution? Probably not. However, that’s not our long term plan.

The strategy is to enter the market with a cap table solution for private companies that are unhappy with the status quo, then build on that foundation to enable equity to act more like a modern currency.

Over the next few weeks, you will see us make a few strides toward that long term plan with:

• AI powered functionality to help you and your law firm maintain a correct, transaction-ready cap table.
• A new streamlined structure for granting equity awards will remove friction from building and incentivizing your team.
• New connections between your cap table and your extended team (investors and law firms) that will open up new opportunities for putting equity management and fundraising on autopilot.

So, in short, the plan is:

• Give companies trustworthy, beautiful, and usable cap table software
• Make it 10x easier to transact in equity
• Build the network that every stakeholder uses to transact in equity.

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Learn more about AngelList Equity.