Show HN: Startup funding simulator (opens in new tab)

I'd also love to see how much employees would get, not just me. I know people generally care more about themselves, but seeing how it would work if you gave a lot more to employees would be great.

Also, on landing page, just go straight into the New Startup screen so you don't have to click "New Startup" since there is no other option when you have none listed.

Was looking for a "Run Simulation" button, but it was not at all obvious that I should hover over the blocks added to see the "output". Just show the output on-screen :).

This is where I see a lot of people make - very costly - mistakes in terms of dilution, they start a hardware startup or some other capital intensive track but use SaaS levels of capital requirement and timing to plan their liquidity. This obviously can impact the business in very negative ways (or can even cause it to go under). So to inject some realism into the figures at various phases using templates might be a useful thing.

Another thing you may want to consider is to put sweat equity and funds supplied by the founders in there, as well as a way to administer friends-and-family rounds, and to be able to play through a founder departing scenario. I realize those are complex things to do, and obviously you're under no obligation to do any of this.

Thank you for making this and for putting it out there.

This is MUCH cleaner/nicer than e.g. Carta's simulation tool. My co-founders and I will definitely be using this.

Thank you for putting this together.

All-in-all quite cool.

And as an angel investor, it would be great to have a viewpoint to see how your investment in a company is doing. E.g. you enter how much the company has raised on SAFEs, then series a, b, etc, to see where you end up. This can be more complicated than you think, as you often see companies raise on a SAFE/CLN, then a priced round or two, then a bridge on a SAFE, then another priced round, etc.

Ta! :)

1. Enable multiple branches to show different simulations

2. Allow me to save it and share it via a link

May you please do the same from a hiring employee's perspective, in such a manner where, the Founding Folks can use this to understand their funding, then also understand what it means to bring on Founding Engineer, Founding Sales, etc... and then all the child departments and their impact in liquidity/stock/options RSIs etc?

And then have an ELI35 print out for the Prospectives?

I've been using Note Genie[1].

[1] https://notegenie.io/

That would make learning about a company way more interactive. Although I'm not versed enough in startup culture to know how much of this data is even public.

Very illustrative for new founders to learn how much revenue they'll need to generate to see any useful return if they raise venture money.

To that end, I'd add some of the more annoying aspects of priced rounds, like liq pref, etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Zz-Nkkaxc

How about if we go for an IPO and then generate profits?

Thank you!!

If only building the company and going through all those funding rounds was as easy!

SAFE raise $750k, cap $4m

Series A raise $8m, val $40m, options 10%, pro-rata

Series B raise $20m, val $100m, options 10%, pro-rata

Exit $300m

Single founder keeps 49% of equity which is $147m. Three founders each keeps 16% and $49m.

pretty limiting. will keep my eye on this.

I don’t understand why people are so quick to start giving up control out of the gate for software companies. Servers are cheap, it’s not like in say, manufacturing where you need a factory.

You’re gonna let some VC bro tell you what to do for a SaaS product? Why exactly? Just go to market on the cheap.

I’ve had every quarter profitable since founding, and never taken a dime in VC. I’m not going to be a billionaire, but that’s fine, I want to chart my own path.

Jokes aside, it's actually a pretty good tool

Completely disregarding the ownership complications that arise, just a few clicks in to your webapp (super nice work btw) shows how much bloated knowledge you need.

Does it make sense for early stage startups to hire a CFO to make sense of all these things? Absolutely not. So better make sure your angel package includes their budget. /s

Funding isn't there for your best interest, it's there to make other people money. It lets you borrow time, and you still work for someone else.

very well done site though, maybe i will be smart enough to use it some day.

It's like saying using a calculator to add up the last few months of income/expenses is a "financial simulator".

That's a surprising result, and not very user friendly.

Some ideas to make it better:

- make it impossible to get into that state

- tell me what I did wrong so I can correct it