LTSE Equity - Plan, manage, and collaborate on startup equity

LTSE Equity was built by founders, for founders. We realized that there needed to be a better way to manage start-up equity in-house and always wanted to be on the side of the next generation of leaders. As a part of building LTSE Equity, we have seen again and again that if you want to build a purpose-driven company that’s got a meaningful, long-term mission, you have to get your governance right as soon as possible. I am excited that we are now offering every one of our customers the opportunity to get advice from our team of experts on on how best to build their team, treat their customers and community with respect and how governance can serve your strategy at every stage.

When I first heard about the Long Term Stock Exchange, I was immediately filled with questions. What does a world look like when every public company is long term minded? How does that impact our every day lives? And most importantly, how could I get involved as a founder?". When I asked the team this, there was a simple step that i could take that ensure I was on the path to building a company for the long term. That step was singing up for LTSE Equity. 2+ years later I am not just a happy customer of LTSE Equity, I am an evangelist for it. The cap table management platform itself is beyond powerful, including every feature I need to do my job like equity tracking, fundraise help, and exit scenario modeling. In addition, LTSE is one of the founding members of the Open Cap Table Coalition, and the first to support full export in the portable open cap table format. This trust is one of the reasons I probably will NEVER leave LTSE Equity. I encourage you to try out LTSE for yourself so you can get the short term functionality that you need as a founder, and so you can be aligned in a long term oriented ecosystem as you grow. Enjoy!

Hi Product Hunt! 👋 Maker of LTSE Equity here. When @ericries, @marceire and I first started working on the Long-Term Stock Exchange, we wanted to solve typical problems founders face at different stages of their company journey. Cap table management was a clear place to start. As repeat founders we lacked the tools to feel fully in control of our cap table and to use it as a strategic tool for company building, starting with fundraising and equity-based rewards. We set out to make cap table management simpler, put founders in control of their startup data, and above all improve how startups are built. Our MVP was launched under Captable.io in 2015. It has been a part of the LTSE’s ecosystem approach ever since and has tracked over 40,000 startup cap tables to date. Through a parallel process of building a national securities exchange and reimaging the public market incentive system, we’ve had an opportunity to advise startups and publicly-listed companies on best ways to align how they run their company with their mission and benefits for all their stakeholders (what lawyers like to call corporate governance). Today, we're announcing new services that let us share our learnings with all our customers. 🚀 For startups that have raised a priced round (Series A+ funded), we now offer integrated consulting on core company-building activities: from fundraising strategy and equity-based compensation planning to helping founders set up mission-protective by-laws and frameworks for reporting. (For earlier stage startups, we’re rolling out a series of resources, including do-it-yourself guidelines, best practices and simple tools - and you can still get your cap table set up for free on our Basic plan.) Our advice spans the following stakeholder categories: ✅ Rewards, People & Culture ✅ Customers, Community & Environment ✅ Governance, Transparency & Reporting To provide this advice, we depend on getting your cap table up to date. Your cap table is not just a ledger of equity ownership but also records the most important corporate governance additions over your startup’s lifespan. ⚡You can record your cap table on your own or with our assistance. LTSE Equity is a complete cap table management platform to help startups meet their fundraising, equity compensation and financial management needs, including: ✅ Cap table management. ✅ On-platform security issuance for investors. ✅ On-platform issuing and exercising stock options for employees. ✅ Stakeholder and financial reporting. ✅ 409A valuation and tax-related reporting. ✅ Scenario modeling for convertible instrument conversion, priced round fundraising and exits. We believe in fair, transparent pricing and we also offer a simpler, free plan for earlier stage startups. We are also a founding member of Open Cap Table Coalition. and we are the first software platform to support full data export in the Open Cap Table format. We believe that founders should own and control their company data. If you’re one of over 60,000 founders who have used LTSE products to date, we’d like to thank you for your support. 🙏 if you're new, feel free to explore our fully-featured interactive public demo and sign up for free to get started. I look forward to getting your feedback and answering your questions.

Salutations! Great job on getting LTSE Equity on Product Hunt! That looks pretty interesting! The commentary mentions that the product was created "from the founder for the founder". I would like to ask one question. Who else might need your service?

Kudos for the open-cap table coalition! As a (commercial) open-source founder aspiring to one day go public this story really resonates with me. Developing in the open, interacting with users and clients in the open is much harder than with traditionally-packaged software. To have someone invest in projects like mine and not be quarter-obsessed sounds very appealing. One question though; when will the other players in the coalition have full support?

I am glad to see LTSE Equity finally get its day to shine, and hope this is the catalyst for this industry. We were an early customer and they pushed this industry forward in a way that made equity management intuitive, founder friendly and affordable. Highly recommend to startups out there!

Congratulations on the launch!! @tihomirb @ericries 🚀 When we started to consider the sale of my previous startup, Tiho was one of the first people I consulted and we used LTSE Equity exit modeling. When I started thinking through what became LeadDelta, and Tiho helped put the angel syndicate, we raised on SAFES and used NoteGenie.io for various scenario modeling. Now that we have our pre-seed round closed, we manage the cap table on LTSE Equity! I love this product and I'd love to see more startups and founders use it. It's a no-brainer!

Congratulations on your launch!

LTSE Equity has come a long way since the Captable.io days. I know - I worked on it for 5 years. When I joined the team, there was a dozen of us crammed into a tiny WeWork in San Francisco. We were emailing our lawyers version 23 of our cap table spreadsheet and paying them $1000 / hour to update it and email it back. We thought, there must be a better way. 5 years, 36k venture-backed startups and 1k YC companies later, LTSE Equity now has more features to automate away busywork and more expert support. And we still help all founders to get started for free. I've since left the team but I continue to use it for my new companies. So proud of what we built together.

LTSE Equity is necessity for startups. Our management team is super happy to have such tool in our tech stack and it makes our life easier and saves a lot of our time. Having advices from @ericries and @tihomirb is next level customer care!

Congrats on the launch! I was playing with the demo, and I especially like the Scenarios modeling capability. We will definitely utilize it in our next fundraise! Do you guys also offer professional advice services along with the equity planning and management?

@tihomirb So many thoughtful, game changing features. Picking up on your mention of “various financing options available to fund the startup and tradeoffs” — there is such a big gap around umderstanding this on both company and investor side. Would be great if you could elaborate on this point sometime in a blog, etc. (and @ K>23).

This is an excellent and much needed tool for startup founders. I have seen founders wasting so much time on dealing with issues stemming from not managing their cap tables properly in early days when their focus goes on building and marketing the product. Tiho - this goes hand in hand with generous support you provided in building the Belgrade & Novi Sad startup ecosystem in Serbia. Your advice, angel investments, input into design of the Katapult Accelerator Program where you are active mentor is invaluable. Thank you very much for all of that and this great product!

The 409A process is faster than I’ve ever experienced before and it’s the first cap table software that’s not intimidating to make changes. Nice work on such a fundamental tool for owning a startup and avoiding costly mistakes!

Greetings on your successful launch! In 2023, what fundraising trends do you anticipate, and how might these tools support founders in the present climate?

I'm really excited to see how much LTSE Equity has evolved since I built its MVP years ago. As a founder without a background in finance, I always found it challenging to keep track of something as important as shareholdings using complicated and error-prone Excel sheets. My time at LTSE Equity (named "Captable.io" back then) was an excellent opportunity to create an accessible solution tailored to the needs of a founder like myself. Since then, Tihomir and his team have done a fantastic job taking the product from a minimum viable product to a very user-friendly one. I appreciate the attention to detail they have put into making it a lovable product. The user interface is intuitive, and the features are comprehensive, making it an indispensable tool for anyone managing shareholdings. As a founder of Vendora, a business in Greece, LTSE Equity has been an very helpful tool during our fundraising process. It has helped us keep track of our cap table, manage shareholder communication, and ensure that we are compliant with regulations. I highly recommend LTSE Equity to anyone looking for a simple, yet comprehensive tool for managing their shareholdings.

Congratulations on the launch of your project on Product Hunt 🤟Goodluck ⚡️

Congrats ! What are the key differentiators vs. Carta or Pulley?

Congratulations on the launch!!! I was looking for intuitive and reliable solution to manage our company's equity but all available solutions seems to be too complicated. LTSE looks like game-changer in this space, will definitely use it! I played a little bit with the demo and found it is ease to use and the interface is user-friendly. I was wondering, what kind of reporting and analytics does the software offer?

As a recently launched startup founder, I found your idea is simply fantastic. Most of the information related to business management in the past has always been very tedious and sometimes even very opaque, which can seriously affect the trust between team members. However, as a small team, we have not yet encountered a situation that requires frequent management of equity, but I will consider your product in our future entrepreneurial journey. Great idea!