Fair equity shouldn't require
lawyers, spreadsheets, or broken friendships.
We're building the infrastructure for fair ownership — so founders can focus on their business, not fight over who owns what.
We've been there.
Equity Matrix started because we made all the mistakes ourselves.
The 50/50 split that felt fair on day one. The awkward renegotiations when one founder invested cash and the other couldn't. The co-founders who joined, contributed little, then left — but kept their equity forever.
We found Slicing Pie and it helped. But it also brought new problems: dead equity from departed contributors, no cliffs or thresholds, a model that was designed to freeze once you raised money.
The system is broken. Early-stage founders are expected to navigate complex equity decisions with no guidance, no tools, and structures designed for companies that have already raised millions.
That's why we're building Equity Matrix. Not because we read about the problem — because we lived it.
Why existing solutions fall short.
Founders deserve better than the options they've been given.
Spreadsheets
Manual, error-prone, and no one takes them seriously when real money is on the line. Try showing a handwritten Google Sheet to an investor.
Slicing Pie
Great foundation, but the implementation stopped evolving. No cliffs, no loyalty protection, designed to freeze at fundraising.
Traditional cap tables
Delaware C-Corp with 10 million shares when you don't even know if you're raising. Designed for post-funding companies, not bootstrapped founders figuring things out.
Lawyers
Expensive, often don't understand dynamic equity, and will charge you thousands to tell you that you set up your business wrong in the first place.
What we're building.
Professional-grade dynamic equity that takes the best ideas from contribution-based models and adds what was missing.
Loyalty protection.
Cliffs and thresholds built in. Equity earned by people who left doesn't drag down everyone else forever.
Built for bootstrappers.
Not everyone is raising VC. We support lifestyle businesses, agencies, and SMBs too.
Continuous equity sharing.
Dynamic equity doesn't stop when you have revenue. Ongoing ownership distribution for employees, contractors, and partners.
Clear path forward.
Convert to a fixed cap table when you're ready, not when you're forced to.
Built-in guidance.
Educational resources so founders understand what they're doing — not just mechanically entering numbers.
This is about more than software.
Over the past decade, startups have given employees 35% less equity. Option pools are shrinking. Founders are keeping more for themselves. And no one's really talking about it.
Meanwhile, wealth concentration keeps accelerating. The default equity models reward early presence over sustained contribution. People who show up for a few weeks get ownership forever. People who build the company for years get diluted.
If we don't make fair equity easy, nothing changes. In a hundred years, we're back to kings and peasants — wealth concentrated in the hands of whoever happened to be there first.
That's not what we're building for. Someone has to create the tools that make broad, fair ownership the default instead of the exception.
That's what Equity Matrix is for.
"We built Equity Matrix because we needed it ourselves. Every feature exists because we hit a wall that nothing else could solve."
Sebastian Broways
Co-founder, Equity Matrix
Read the full story
Ready to build on a better foundation.
Start tracking contributions today. Convert to a fixed cap table when you're ready.
14-day free trial. No credit card required.