Equity Calculator
What are your startup options actually worth?
Your offer letter says how many options you're getting. It almost never says what they could be worth. Put in your grant and see the whole range, from nothing to life-changing, with the math laid out.
An example
20,000 options at a Series B company worth $200M
Say she exercises all of them today at a $2 strike. If the company sells for less than about $131M, she loses money: investors are repaid first, and what's left doesn't cover what she paid. Past that point her stake climbs quickly: at ten times today's value she'd take home about $1.2M after tax.
The shape matters more than any single number.
Why this exists
I'm a VC and have had the good fortune of being at the inception-if-not-the-early stage of several breakout winners. In that role, I sit on the side of the table that holds preferred stock: the kind that gets paid back first.
The people who actually build startups mostly hold common. Over the last decade, I've found that those people usually don't know how to parse through the information they're given about their equity package let alone understand the questions they should ask of their hiring manager.
An offer letter tells you how many options you're getting but it rarely tells you out of how many, what investors are owed before you see anything, or what it'll cost you to exercise. None of that is secret. It's just rarely explained.
I built the calculator I'd want a friend to use before signing: context, honest scenarios, including the one where it's worth nothing, with every assumption out in the open.
It won't tell you what to do but it'll help you understand and ask better questions.
Santosh Sankar
Co-founder, Dynamo Ventures
Before you start
All you need is your grant letter: the type of equity, the number of shares, and the strike price. Not sure whether you have ISOs, NSOs, or RSUs? Here's the difference.
If you know the company's last valuation or share count, even better. If not, we'll use typical numbers for its stage and show you exactly how much they move the answer. You can also drop your offer letter into Claude or ChatGPT and ask.
Start with your grant