TL;DR: Just use Carta, and spend your time on more important questions. Before your seed round closes, Excel is usually OK too.

Years ago we were one of the first early-adopter firms to promote what was then-called eShares, and now Carta, as an option for reducing costs on 409A valuations and also getting scaled cap tables in order. See: 409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered (from early 2014). Today, Carta is a much bigger company, with far more adoption across the country and world. Brief humblebrag about my track record at early-picking legal(ish) tech winners. Doxly also just got acquired by Litera.

Over time, I’ve seen cap software competitors come and go. Sometimes it’s fun listening to the arguments they make for why you should use their whiz-bang-pow tool over something that’s easily becoming a market standard.  Let’s keep this simple: there are very few pieces of technology that lend themselves to fundamental network effects like cap table software. Cap tables are math. Math, unlike subjective and contextual human-oriented things, scales very well with technology and automation. You want the cap table tool that is most recognizable, and most widely adopted, because every single person on your cap table is going to have to interact with it. That’s A LOT of people who might bug you because some random feature isn’t working, or they simply don’t understand the interface.

Less-known options, no matter how incrementally better they may be at this or that little nuance, are just full of enormous headaches. There are a few candidates, most of them concentrated in Silicon Valley, that have tried to use their connections to some well-known accelerator or law firm to corner a distribution channel, but tech nepotism (which seems to be surprisingly common in Silicon Valley and other tech ecosystems) is a poor substitute for facts. When clients ask us what cap table software they should use, we say Carta, and move on. It’s a tool for tracking routine math at scale; not a financing or M&A deal contract with tons of variables to consider. Not that complicated of a decision, and if founders start to make it complicated, that’s often a red flag.

Start with random B-player cap table tool just because your accelerator’s leadership knows a guy who knows a guy (they’re usually guys) at another cap software company, and there’s a 99% chance someone will eventually make you switch to Carta; which will cost you money and waste time relative to having just made the right decision from the start. Buying the nonsense advice of people who in the background are just referring startups to each other in a self-interested tech bro circle often gets founders into huge problems.

All that being said, I’m not going to lose an opportunity to share some love for our tried-and-true old friend, Excel. Yes, it’s old and isn’t in the cloud, and it doesn’t give you that slick “cutting edge” feel that techies love so much, but where Excel has won, and will continue to win, is its simplicity of use and flexibility when the number of parties involved is fairly small; or when you’ve got some really nuanced situation that requires maximal flexibility to model future scenarios and a universal template isn’t going to work fast enough. There is always a fundamental tension between automation and flexibility, and sometimes flexibility really matters; particularly on high-stakes legal issues.

While Carta has started offering their new pre-seed free tool (in Beta) through law firms (of which we are one) – which I know is in response to other bottom-feeder tools offering free versions – Excel isn’t going anywhere. We will continue to use it for pre-seed companies who don’t need outside valuations, and really just have a handful of people for whom a basic excel model is perfectly fine. Excel goes off the rails at scale. At very early-stage, it works, and keeps things super simple. I don’t expect Carta to fully agree with me here, and the incentives there make that disagreement perfectly reasonable. As a power user unencumbered by economic loyalties, I can talk freely about when tools are useful, and when they’re not.

But once you’re closing a seed round and/or need a valuation, and it’s definitively time to get off the Excel train, Carta is the only realistic option for anyone who knows what they’re talking about; and how the dynamics of cap table software require there to be one dominant player.

This is not a sponsored post or paid advertisement for anything. Don’t hate me if I just disappointed your friends offering that random cap table tool you’ve been shilling for. This market has been won.