How much do startup founders make in a $1B acquisition?

5 points

3 years ago

The Loom acquisition for $975M today got me thinking... how much of that do the founders see upon exit?

Here's my guess, but would love to see what people think:

- Seed Round - Y Combinator (Mar 22, 2012). - Seed Round (Oct 7, 2016): Raised $600K. - Seed Round (May 22, 2017): Raised $3.2M. - Series A (Feb 19, 2019): Raised $11M. - Series B (Nov 26, 2019): Raised $30M. - Series B (May 28, 2020): Raised $28.8M at a pre-money valuation of $321.3M. - Series C (May 20, 2021): Raised $130M at a pre-money valuation of $1.4B.

My rough guess of the dilution is 93% -> 78% -> 66% -> 53% -> 42% -> 39% -> 35%. I tried taking into account option pools and standard dilution.

Assuming all investors had 1X liquidation rights participating, then they get the $203.6M invested back, and the founders split the 35% of the $771M which comes out to about $90M per founder (3 co-founders). After CA tax (assuming 48.5% take-home) that's ~$44M.

I found this nice blog explaining founder dilution: https://dri.es/founder-dilution#4

LMK where I went wrong in my calculation.

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