It’s been a while since I published a cap. Table here, more than one year. And with three recent events, the IPOs of SHEIN and Pasqal and the possible acquisition of Hugging Face by nVidia, my pdf file has just reach 1’000 cap. tables.

Before discussing the 3 latest tables, let me comment briefly the situation. The world has changed !
– First companies do not go public the way they did initially. Usually it took 5 to 7 years to validate a business then a startup went public. Now companies continue to stay private even when highly profitable. They are also acquired by huge private equity funds like in the case of EPFL spin-off Nexthink.
– Second, by doing so, the shareholding does not represent anymore a linear history of the development of the startup until its IPO. There are secondaries, that is the possibiliy for existing shareholders to sell some of their stakes to third parties. So a cpa table at IPO does not represent anymore the intiial stakes of all these actors.
– Third, there has been a small trend of compânies going public through SPACs. To make it simple, startups go public by being acquired by an existing public entity, often an empty shell with cash, which will be renamed with the name of the acquired startjup. This is the case of Pasqal. Pasqal IPO went through a SPAC process with BLEICHROEDER ACQUISITION CORP. II as a sponsor. It made the cap. table a little tricky so it is a best effort more than usual.

So here are 4 cap. tables: SHEIN, Hugging Face, Pasqal and also SpaceX (which IPO occured last May)

– SHEIN is the typical cap. table that I knew of. Four young founders (aged 29, 27, 30 and 26 at the time of the foundation) develop a high-growth company with a lot of venture capital, though they did it many years after inception. The company is highly profitable with a huge workforce, which does not seem to own a lot of equity. So not so typical, usually employees have 20% of a company and venture capital comes early in the development of the company. Any comment ?

– Hugging Face looks a little similar. Three young founders (aged 28, 32 and 31 at inception) with a lot of venture capital since day 1. As the company is still private all the figures are assumptions based on what the press said, and I am missing some crucial elements liked pre-seed rounds and options.

– Pasqal is a different animal. Founders are older (50 on average). The CEO is not a founder. Again there is a lot of venture capital but the SPAC structure has made all this more difficult to analyze !

– SpaceX has been a highly visible IPO last my because of its founder of course. All the numbers are highly unusual. Again this was not an easy exercise given the relatively high age of the company.

So in conclusion, I am happy to have reached the 1’000 milestone and I will try to update the statitics at the end of the pdf and the lessons learned since my previous series of articles :
– the series of 7 articles in April 2020 entitled Data about equity of 600 startups.
– the article Updated data in equity of 800 (former) startups in August 2021
– more generally all the articles with the tag #600startups.

I would have loved to include Anthropic and OpenAI in that list but I fear continuing the exercise will be difficult, gibe my remarks above. It’s been fun though !!!