I’m glad to see open source alternatives emerging. That said, a lot of the value in existing cap table software is in the auxiliary services, particularly 409a valuations.
I would love to see 409a valuations unbundled from the table management software, so the ideal case is for vendors to emerge who can work with data from open-source cap tables.
There are tons of independent 409a providers, but the problem is that most charge absurd rates (for early stage startups at least), which is one of the ways vendors like Carta get startups hooked in and paying. You're basically getting "free" cap table software as a perk for paying for a reasonably priced 409a.
That said, as a data point, our startup recently did an independent 409a with EQVista, who had very reasonable pricing. They also have their own cap table management, but we don't use it.
I'd imagine the valuation software is actually pretty straight forward and maybe libraries iike this could be used for the various 409a valuation methods:
https://github.com/topics/discounted-cash-flows
Then you could build a network of third party advisors who would sign off on the valuation.
This seems like a growth experiment for your main domain or you are looking for a pivot and validating demand.
Both is fine however if you wanna do this type of product OSS, it needs to very serious, stable almost complete and secure. Hence you might wanna relaunch this later to get a proper launch and signup flow
That makes complete sense! Thank you so much for your suggestions! The project is very new and it seems like there is a lot of interest! We are gonna relaunch this soon with proper sign up flow with cloud hosting for people to try! There are more things that are needed to be built, so currently coordinating with my open source developer friends and gonna relaunch with a different brand name.
Carta platform for startups/companies to manage their equity, valuations, and cap tables. Cap table is a table (People also use spreadsheet for this) showing and tracking who has ownership and in what proportion at a startup/company.
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I would love to see 409a valuations unbundled from the table management software, so the ideal case is for vendors to emerge who can work with data from open-source cap tables.