Free cap table template for CFOs who like to plan ahead
Even the cleanest spreadsheet can hit its limits. This free cap table template by Fidelity Private Shares can help early-stage teams track equity clearly and correctly, while setting the stage for a seamless transition to a more scalable solution when needed.
Pre-formatted for equity events (ex: SAFEs, options, dilution)
Audit-friendly and investor-ready structure
Fully editable, built for early-stage use
Easy migration to the Fidelity Private Shares (FPS) platform when you’re ready to scale
Yo, it's CJ! Welcome back to my newsletter for current and aspiring CFOs. My goal is to make YOU better at your job by covering
SaaS metrics
Fundraising
Finance + GTM ops
All in a way you can actually understand.
I also help with two things that keep CFOs up at night: picking the right software and hiring the right people.
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The Era of Capital Intensive IPOs (and the $14B IPO You Probably Forgot About)
There's a ton of chatter about the potential SpaceX and OpenAI IPOs, both of which are expected to happen over the next 12 months (if the capital markets gods permit).
Both are incredibly capital intensive businesses. To date, SpaceX has raised $11.9 billion in primary funding across 30 (!?!) rounds since 2002. That's a TON of money. But when you think about it in terms of dilution, it's all relative; the company currently holds a valuation in the $800 billion ballpark, and is expected to IPO around $1.5 trillion. At IPO, SpaceX execs have told investors they plan to raise about $50 billion, which would more than double the largest IPO to date.
OpenAI, on the other hand, has raised $57.9 billion in primary funding over just 9 rounds, with the largest being its $40 billion Series F in March of 2025. That represents the most ever raised by a company in a single private round. The company is in discussions to raise as much as $100 billion more in primary capital later this year before going public, which could peg their valuation in the $750 billion ballpark… and would be a nice setup for a $1 trillion IPO (it’s feels funny even writing those words).
These are massive fundraises that will set a new bar for IPO size. But let's not forget about the companies that paved the way for raises like this. After all, an IPO is just another form of fundraising.
Below are the largest fundraises on US equity markets in the last 25 years:
Source: Rivian’s green shoe took them from ~$12B to ~$14B
I spoke to the CFO of #5 on that list: Rivian's Claire McDonough. I wanted to understand how a pre-revenue company ends up raising nearly $14 billion in a single day. So I asked her:
"I want to go back to the IPO. You raised nearly $14 billion, which, by my count, was one of the largest IPOs for a US company at the time. This may come across as a totally stupid question… how did you get to that number, Claire? Can you take us into the room of how you figured out how much capital you would need to fund the business?"
She explained that when they originally filed the prospectus, the suggested range of proceeds was in the $7 billion to $8 billion zip code. But there was a ton of hype around the brand at the time, and the macro tailwinds of low interest rates created a lot of capital looking for places to invest.
So when they launched the IPO, the cover of the prospectus already had $5 billion to $7 billion accounted for, coming from their pre-IPO investor base. That put them in a strong position to go tell their story to new investors, build a high-quality book of demand, and ultimately price the deal well above expectations:
"There was a lot more focus, originally, on the minimum that we needed, which was really the $7 billion — the bottom end of our initial range. It was really through the momentum of the process and the execution that enabled us to reach the $14 billion."
All of this ties back to a company's capital roadmap. What are they using the proceeds to fund? Does raising more money just dilute them, or does it unlock other initiatives on the roadmap?
Per the Information, Musk has spoken publicly about capital-intensive projects SpaceX plans to take on, like building factories on the moon and launching data centers into space to address potential power and land shortages on Earth (which also feels like an absurd thing to write).
And like any fundraise, you can opportunistically upsize when the demand is there. Claire explained:
"We had so many new initiatives in our purview that we could deploy additional capital towards, and so we wanted to use the momentum of the IPO and the ability to increase prices as part of the process to help us fund deeper into our longer-term roadmap."
On that point, I asked if there are any frameworks she'd impart on younger CFOs aspiring to run a capital intensive business. How do you choose what to fund from your proceeds?
"Capital roadmap in a capital intensive business like this one is a big part of the job. It's always looking ahead and also thinking through risk mitigation opportunities. The challenge with capital raising is it's not just determinant on your own company's performance — it's also based on market conditions in the broader capital markets arena."
"I would encourage everyone to really think about taking opportunities when you don't necessarily need capital. Be raising off the front foot, so to speak. Make sure that you're building deep relationships with investors — both your existing investors and new potential investors — as you think about the building blocks of building a really robust cap table for the business."
And here's the proof that philosophy works. Rivian's stock is down roughly 80% from its IPO price. In a different timeline, one where Claire raised the $7 billion minimum instead of the $14 billion, that story might end with a company running out of runway. Instead, Rivian ended 2025 with $6.1 billion in cash, another $2 billion coming from Volkswagen in 2026, and R2 deliveries starting this quarter. They're adding 2,000 jobs at the Normal, Illinois plant for the R2 ramp, with another 7,500 planned at their future Georgia facility. They just posted their first full year of positive gross profit.
The oversized raise did more than just fund the roadmap. It bought them the time to survive a brutal market and still launch the product that could define the next chapter of the company. It’s nice to have a war chest.
That's the playbook SpaceX and OpenAI should be studying, and if the market gives them the window, it's the one Rivian wrote first. Raise off the front foot. Fund deeper than you think you need to. Hell, it’s even a lesson for private companies raising in 2026. Because by the time you need the capital, it might not be there.
TL;DR: Medan Multiples are DOWN week over week.
The overall tech median is 3.1x (DOWN 0.1x w/w).
What Great Looks Like - Top 10 Medians:
EV / NTM Revenue = 13.2x (FLAT w/w)
CAC Payback = 32 months
Rule of 40 = 48%
Revenue per Employee = $812k
Figures for each index are measured at the Median
Median and Top 10 Median are measured across the entire data set, where n = 144
Recent changes
Added: Navan, Bullish, Figure, Gemini, Stubhub, Klarna, Figma
Removed: Jamf, OneStream, Olo, Couchbase, Dayforce, Vimeo
Population Sizes:
Security & Identity = 17
Data Infrastructure & Dev Tools = 13
Cloud Platforms & Infra = 15
Horizontal SaaS & Back office = 17
GTM (MarTech & SalesTech) = 18
Marketplaces & Consumer Platforms = 18
FinTech & Payments = 28
Vertical SaaS = 17
Revenue Multiples
Revenue multiples are a shortcut to compare valuations across the technology landscape, where companies may not yet be profitable. The most standard timeframe for revenue multiple comparison is on a “Next Twelve Months” (NTM Revenue) basis.
NTM is a generous cut, as it gives a company “credit” for a full “rolling” future year. It also puts all companies on equal footing, regardless of their fiscal year end and quarterly seasonality.
However, not all technology sectors or monetization strategies receive the same “credit” on their forward revenue, which operators should be aware of when they create comp sets for their own companies. That is why I break them out as separate “indexes”.
Reasons may include:
Recurring mix of revenue
Stickiness of revenue
Average contract size
Cost of revenue delivery
Criticality of solution
Total Addressable Market potential
From a macro perspective, multiples trend higher in low interest environments, and vice versa.
Multiples shown are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value / NTM revenue.
Enterprise Value is calculated as: Market Capitalization + Total Debt - Cash
Market Cap fluctuates with share price day to day, while Total Debt and Cash are taken from the most recent quarterly financial statements available. That’s why we share this report each week - to keep up with changes in the stock market, and to update for quarterly earnings reports when they drop.
Historically, a 10x NTM Revenue multiple has been viewed as a “premium” valuation reserved for the best of the best companies.
Efficiency
Companies that can do more with less tend to earn higher valuations.
Three of the most common and consistently publicly available metrics to measure efficiency include:
CAC Payback Period: How many months does it take to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer?
CAC Payback Period is measured as Sales and Marketing costs divided by Revenue Additions, and adjusted by Gross Margin.
Here’s how I do it:
Sales and Marketing costs are measured on a TTM basis, but lagged by one quarter (so you skip a quarter, then sum the trailing four quarters of costs). This timeframe smooths for seasonality and recognizes the lead time required to generate pipeline.
Revenue is measured as the year-on-year change in the most recent quarter’s sales (so for Q2 of 2024 you’d subtract out Q2 of 2023’s revenue to get the increase), and then multiplied by four to arrive at an annualized revenue increase (e.g., ARR Additions).
Gross margin is taken as a % from the most recent quarter (e.g., 82%) to represent the current cost to serve a customer
Revenue per Employee: On a per head basis, how much in sales does the company generate each year? The rule of thumb is public companies should be doing north of $450k per employee at scale. This is simple division. And I believe it cuts through all the noise - there’s nowhere to hide.
Revenue per Employee is calculated as: (TTM Revenue / Total Current Employees)
Rule of 40: How does a company balance topline growth with bottom line efficiency? It’s the sum of the company’s revenue growth rate and EBITDA Margin. Netting the two should get you above 40 to pass the test.
Rule of 40 is calculated as: TTM Revenue Growth % + TTM Adjusted EBITDA Margin %
A few other notes on efficiency metrics:
Net Dollar Retention is another great measure of efficiency, but many companies have stopped quoting it as an exact number, choosing instead to disclose if it’s above or below a threshold once a year. It’s also uncommon for some types of companies, like marketplaces, to report it at all.
Most public companies don’t report net new ARR, and not all revenue is “recurring”, so I’m doing my best to approximate using changes in reported GAAP revenue. I admit this is a “stricter” view, as it is measuring change in net revenue.
OPEX
Decreasing your OPEX relative to revenue demonstrates Operating Leverage, and leaves more dollars to drop to the bottom line, as companies strive to achieve +25% profitability at scale.
The most common buckets companies put their operating costs into are:
Cost of Goods Sold: Customer Support employees, infrastructure to host your business in the cloud, API tolls, and banking fees if you are a FinTech.
Sales & Marketing: Sales and Marketing employees, advertising spend, demand gen spend, events, conferences, tools.
Research & Development: Product and Engineering employees, development expenses, tools.
General & Administrative: Finance, HR, and IT employees… and everything else. Or as I like to call myself “Strategic Backoffice Overhead.”
All of these are taken on a Gaap basis and therefore INCLUDE stock based comp, a non cash expense.
Please check out our data partner, Koyfin. It’s dope.
Wishing you credible EBITDA adjustments,
CJ
