I saw a blog post this weekend that looked at the IPO filings of 79 tech companies and calculated the ownerships of the founders and the VCs at IPO.
The result of that analysis is that the average founder ownership at IPO was 17% and the average VC ownership at IPO was 56%.
I’ve written a bunch on this topic and here are two posts that address this exact issue:
Founder Dilution – How Much Is “Normal”?
In both posts, I lay out how the equity gets shared with employees and investors as the company grows and scales.
Here’s the most important quote from those two posts:
In my experience, it will generally take three to four rounds of equity capital to finance the business and 20-25% of the company to recruit and retain a management team. That will typically leave the founder/founder team with 10-20% of the business when it’s all said and done. The equity split at 20% for the founders will typically be; 20-25% for the management team, 20% for the founders, and 55-60% for the investors (angel all the way to late stage VC).
I wrote that seven and half years ago, but on this topic, not much has changed over the thirty years I’ve been doing VC.
Raising round after round of venture capital is expensive. There are some entrepreneurs who figure out how to get profitable and not raise round after round (or avoid VC altogether), there are some entrepreneurs who are able to raise a very high valuations and avoid a lot of dilution, and there are many entrepreneurs who choose to sell the business before they take a lot of dilution. But for the entrepreneurs who raise four to six rounds of VC before going public, the math is the math. If you end up owning more than 20% at IPO, you are beating the averages.
