Pre-seed advisor equity

Author:

Peter Walker

Advising pre-seed startups is big business - for small slices of pie.

Advising pre-seed startups is big business - for small slices of pie.

In 2023, pre-seed companies on Carta issued equity to more than 7,000 advisors.

That's across the 11,000+ companies currently live on Carta Launch (free cap table for all founders until you raise $1 million, wow what a deal). So adding an advisor to the cap table is a very common occurrence at this stage.

So - how much equity are these advisors typically granted?

Many companies default to the guidelines laid out in the FAST document (Founder / Advisor Standard Template). The starting point is usually 0.25% of fully diluted company equity. That's the whole grant, not annual.

But company industry comes into play, even at this nascent stage. The median grant for Biotech advisors is 0.29% which compares favorably to the 0.20% median for SaaS startups.

Makes sense—I'm assuming technical advice on new drug development is a little harder to come by than, say, go-to-market wisdom for SaaS platforms.

Perhaps the bigger takeaway is that across most industries, the 75th percentile advisor is only granted half a percent of equity. Founders take note!

Peter Walker

Author: Peter Walker

Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.