Serial Founder Takes On Carta With Cap Table Management Software She Says Better For Founders – TechCrunch

Yin Wu has co-founded several companies since graduating from Stanford in 2011, including a computer vision company called Double Labs which sold at Microsoft, where she worked for a few years as a software engineer. In fact, it wasn’t until after that sale that she says she “got all the nuances with a company’s ceiling table.

His new business, Pulley, a 14-month-old Mountain View, Calif.-based capping table management software maker, aims to address that same problem and has so far raised $ 10 million for this purpose, led by the Stripe payment, with participation from Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, 8VC and numerous angel investors.

Wu faces some pretty powerful competition. Paper would have raised $ 200 million in new financing at a valuation of $ 3 billion in the spring (a round the company has never officially confirmed or announced). Last year he raised $ 300 million. Morgan Stanley has strengthened its action plan administration activities, acquisition of Solium Capital early last year and more recently by purchasing Barclay action plan activity.

Of course, startups often manage to find a way to dismantle the incumbents and a distraction for Carta, at least, in the form of a very public gender discrimination lawsuit by a former VP of Marketing, could be the gender. openness that Pulley needs. We emailed Yu yesterday to ask if this could be the case. She didn’t respond directly, but did mention “values” and shared a few more details about what she considers different from the two products.

TC: Why create this company? Has Carta’s press recently created an opening for a new upstart in space?

YW: I left Microsoft in 2018 and started Pulley a year later. We skipped the seed and increased the A due to overwhelming investor demand. Many wanted a better product for their portfolio companies. Many founders are increasingly thinking about choosing with companies, like Pulley, that better align with their values.

TC: How many people work for Pulley and are there people that you took out of Carta?

YW: We are a team of seven and four people in the team are former founders of Y Combinator. We attract founders to the team because they have experienced firsthand the difficulties of running a cap table and want to create a better tool for other founders. We haven’t removed anyone from Carta yet.

TC: Carta has raised a lot of funds and has long tentacles. What can Pulley offer startups that Carta can’t?

YW: We offer startups a better product compared to our competitors. We make every interaction on Pulley easier and faster. 409A assessments take five days instead of weeks, and the integration occurs on the same day rather than months. By analogy, this is similar to the difference between Bandaged and Braintree when Stripe first launched. There were many different payment processes when Stripe launched. They were able to capture a large chunk of the market by creating a better product that resonated with the developers.

One of the features that stand out on Pulley is our modeling feature [which helps founders model dilution in future rounds and helps employees understand the value of their equity as the company grows]. Founders switch from our competitors to Pulley to use our modeling tool [and it works] with pre-money SAFE, post-money SAFE and pro-ratas and discounts factors. To my knowledge, Pulley’s modeling tool is the most complete product on the market.

TC: How do your prices compare to those of Carta?

YW: Pulley is free for start-ups regardless of how much they raise. We are competitively priced with Carta on our paid plans. Part of the reason we launched Pulley is because we have had frustrations with other ceiling table management tools. When using other services, we had to regularly interview our accountants or lawyers to make changes, generate reports or obtain data. Every time we got the lawyers involved it was costly legal fees. So there is easily a hidden $ 2,000 fee when you use non-self-service tools to set up and update your cap table.

TC: Is there a business-to-business opportunity here, where maybe lawyers, accountants or wealth managers give this service a private label? Or are these industry professionals seen as competitors?

YW: We believe there are opportunities to brand service for accountants and law firms. However, this is currently not our goal.

TC: How adaptable is the software? Can he face a complicated scenario, a corner case?

YW: We launched Pulley a year ago and are releasing it today because we have invested in building an architecture that can support complex capping table scenarios as businesses scale. There are two things you need to do correctly with capping table systems. First, never lose the data and second, always make sure the numbers are correct. We haven’t lost any data for any customers and we have a comprehensive testing system that verifies that the ceiling table numbers on Pulley remain accurate.

TC: At what point does it make sense for a startup to work with Pulley, and do you have the tools to hang in there and prevent them from moving on to a competitor later?

YW: We work with companies that have moved beyond Series A, like Fast and Clubhouse. Companies aren’t looking to switch overhead table vendors if Pulley has the tool to grow with them. We already have the features of our competitors including electronic stock issuance, ACH transfers for options, modeling tools for multiple rounds and more. We believe we can win more startups because Pulley is also easier to use and faster to integrate.

TC: Regarding your paid plans, how much does Pulley cost and for what? How many levels of service are there?

YW; Pulley is free for start-ups with less than 25 stakeholders. We charge $ 10 per stakeholder per month when businesses scale beyond that. A stakeholder is any employee or investor on the ceiling table. Most companies switch to our premium plan after a roundtable when they need a 409A assessment.

Managing cap tables is one area where companies don’t want a free product. Pulley takes the privacy and security of our customers’ data very seriously. We charge companies a fixed fee to ensure that their data will never be sold or used without their permission.

TC: What is Pulley’s relationship with venture capital firms?

YW: We are currently focusing on founders rather than investors. We work with accelerators like Y Combinator to help their portfolio companies manage their capitalization picture, but we do not have a formal relationship with venture capital firms.