Open Source Carta Alternative – Cap.octolane.com | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Carta Alternative – Cap.octolane.com

cap.octolane.com

76 pointscoffeewithone32 comments

I’m glad to see open source alternatives emerging. That said, a lot of the value in existing cap table software is in the auxiliary services, particularly 409a valuations.

I would love to see 409a valuations unbundled from the table management software, so the ideal case is for vendors to emerge who can work with data from open-source cap tables.

There are tons of independent 409a providers, but the problem is that most charge absurd rates (for early stage startups at least), which is one of the ways vendors like Carta get startups hooked in and paying. You're basically getting "free" cap table software as a perk for paying for a reasonably priced 409a.

That said, as a data point, our startup recently did an independent 409a with EQVista, who had very reasonable pricing. They also have their own cap table management, but we don't use it.

100% agree. 409a valuation is a challenging part. We would love everyone's support building it.

I'd imagine the valuation software is actually pretty straight forward and maybe libraries iike this could be used for the various 409a valuation methods: https://github.com/topics/discounted-cash-flows Then you could build a network of third party advisors who would sign off on the valuation.

Thank you for sharing the library, seems pretty useful as I am going through it!

This seems like a growth experiment for your main domain or you are looking for a pivot and validating demand.

Both is fine however if you wanna do this type of product OSS, it needs to very serious, stable almost complete and secure. Hence you might wanna relaunch this later to get a proper launch and signup flow

That makes complete sense! Thank you so much for your suggestions! The project is very new and it seems like there is a lot of interest! We are gonna relaunch this soon with proper sign up flow with cloud hosting for people to try! There are more things that are needed to be built, so currently coordinating with my open source developer friends and gonna relaunch with a different brand name.

What is Carta? What is a cap table?

Carta platform for startups/companies to manage their equity, valuations, and cap tables. Cap table is a table (People also use spreadsheet for this) showing and tracking who has ownership and in what proportion at a startup/company.

What is the process to migrate Carta to Octolane? Do we need to cancel existing certificates or what are the steps?

With LTSE Equity also closing its doors, it's nice to see open-source cap table management solutions!

Thank you!

This is just the start!

Cool that someone hacked quickly to build something like this amidst all the recent Carta chaos

Love the (not so) hidden rick roll!

^_^ "Never gonna let you down" is going to be our company tag line!

Very promising. Going to integrate with this system now. Founders seem very strong.

Thank you so much!! Will push this project more with our open source contributors!!

I would probably change your site title :)

Cool idea. I'll be watching to see how it evolves.

You are cordially welcome to contritbute

Thank you so much for flagging this! Updating it now!

Co-pillot?

Introducing copilot would be amazing

The site has misspelled co-pilot. :)

Thank you for flagging this! Fixing it now!

Check us out at https://cap.octolane.com

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