Jeff Wenzel, CEO of Pre-IPO Hype, tells early-stage founders to stop obsessing over a messy cap table. A cluttered cap table with many early investors signals traction, not failure. Clean it up later, when it actually matters.
A lot of young founders I find are always worrying about stuff that are like, would be a good problem to have. So something that I hear quite a bit around is founders who are very early in their fundraising journey, freaking about, freaking out about cap table management. If you don't know what that is, it just means your cap table is who's all the investors that have invested and making sure that it's, it's all clean. Now, obviously you do wanna keep it clean, but a lot of times founders will be talking to me and they're gonna be, they're saying things like, well, I don't wanna do it this way because I wanna keep my cap table clean for future rounds, you know, when VC comes in down the road. Yeah, it's like the chances of VC coming in on this, very, very slim. And what an amazing problem that you have is that you have all of these investors that have given you all this money, right? And like, you know, like, wouldn't that be an amazing problem to have? You know, and again, there are things that you can do to clean it all up and there are steps to take, but I just find that like so many people are focused on that so early in the conversations or so early in the journey of their whole company. It's just like, yeah, you heard that, you saw that on Google, some— somewhere you saw a video, you saw a guy like me spouting off on how it was the worst thing that's ever happened. The reality is, boy, that if you had thousands of investors who gave you lots of money, like, wow, what a problem to have, right? So again, I don't want to belittle it or say that it's not an issue. It's just where is that issue and how much should you really be worrying about it if you're early in your fundraising journey. Hey, if you don't know who I am, I'm Jeff "fuzzy" Wenzel, CEO of Pre-IPO Hype. If you're thinking about doing a raise, go over right now, preipohype.com, book a call, and you talk to me. All right, have a good one.
