What would you actually take home?
Every round of funding sells a slice of your company. That’s dilution: your share shrinks each time you raise. This tool shows where that ends up on the day that matters, the exit, when the company is sold and shares finally turn into money.
Pick the exit you’d honestly be happy with and how far you’d raise. The defaults already give you an answer; tune them to your own numbers.
The catch this maths hides: venture money is meant to buy a bigger exit. 11.4% of $500m beats 85% of $5m. So the honest question isn’t which percentage is bigger, it’s which exit your business can realistically reach, and what you have to give up to chase the bigger one.
And some fine print: most funding deals also give investors a liquidation preference, the right to take their money back first, before anyone splits what’s left. At smaller exits that can pull the founders’ share towards zero. This tool shows the plain split; the book covers the fine print.
At a $10m exit after a Series A, the founding team’s median share is about $3.6m. On the third path, it’s about $8.5m.
- Team keeps
- 36.1%
- Take-home
- $3.6m
- Exit to match the third path
- $24m
Median founding-team ownership by stage: Carta, State of Seed, Winter 2025 (rounds raised 2020–2024). The third path’s 85%: the book’s model of a typical small angel round, not Carta data. Medians, not your term sheet; the team’s share is split between co-founders.
Next: is the third path right for you?→
The book goes deeper in Chapter 1 (why the default path costs you the company) and Chapter 14 (eight funding sources ranked by what they cost you).
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