Your Cap Table Is Your Credibility: What Investors Actually Look At

VCs and angels can read a cap table in 90 seconds and know whether to spend the next hour with you. Founders rarely realise just how much signal — about discipline, foresight and judgement — sits in that one spreadsheet.

What they check first

• Founder split — extreme imbalance (95/5) or perfect equality (50/50 with no tiebreaker) both raise flags.
• Founder vesting — unvested founders are a deal risk; un-vested founders are usually a deal-breaker.
• Option pool — is there one? How big? Pre- or post-money? Who has been granted what?
• Dead equity — ex-founders, advisors with too many shares, family members holding 5% from a £10k loan three years ago.
• SAFEs and convertibles outstanding — are the conversion mechanics modelled?

Option pool sizing

Standard pre-seed: 10%. Standard seed: 10–15%. Series A typically tops it back up to 10% post-round. The pool comes out of the founders' equity, not the new investor's, so size it before you negotiate valuation — not after.

Dilution modelling — the conversation you need to have with yourself early

Founders who model their dilution to Series B before they raise pre-seed make better decisions about how much to raise, what valuation to push for, and when to take secondary. Founders who do not, end up owning 8% of their own company and being unhappy at the exit.

Why we built Signal Equity

Spreadsheets break under pressure — option grants get lost, SAFEs are not modelled, dilution scenarios take half a day to recalculate. Signal Equity is our internal cap table tool we run for portfolio founders: live ownership, scenario modelling, automatic SAFE conversion maths and investor-ready exports. No more cap table embarrassment in DD.

Three things to do this week

• Get a single source of truth — not three spreadsheets across two laptops.
• Confirm every shareholder has signed something (subscription letter, SAFE, share certificate).
• Run a dilution model assuming you raise twice more before exit. Live with the answer for a week before raising anything.

Rewarding collaborators with option awards for tasks delivered

Signal Equity also lets you do something most cap table tools cannot — innovatively grant option awards to collaborators for the discrete tasks they actually deliver. Designed a logo? Closed a pilot? Wrote the white paper that won an investor meeting? Each contribution can be tied to a small, pre-priced option grant, automatically tracked against the pool, vested on completion and reflected in your live cap table. It turns your wider community of advisors, fractional operators, designers and domain experts into properly aligned long-term backers — without burning cash you do not yet have.