Overview
PrivateTechShares is a tooling and information resource for holders of illiquid private-company equity: founders, co-founders, current and former employees with ESOP options, and early angel investors. It targets a gap institutional secondary platforms generally skip — small stakes in unlisted startups across the US and Europe. Free, no-signup calculators sit alongside sourced plain-English guides, with paid downloadable toolkits and a personalised Equity Position Report layered on top.
Key Features
- Free equity estimator: prices a holding from the last-round preferred price, then discounts for common-share status, exercise cost and company liquidity, returning a range rather than a single figure.
- Option exercise calculator: computes the cash required to convert vested options into shares plus the paper spread, with a US variant modelling AMT and ordinary-income exposure.
- "Can I sell?" readiness check: a four-question flow covering instrument type, vesting, right of first refusal or board approval, and deal size; nothing is stored.
- Equity Toolkit ($39 / €39): an eight-phase A–Z deal map with STOP points for lawyers, tax advisers and notaries, a net-proceeds calculator, a Deal Room panel, editable drafts and eleven ready-to-send messages; the Europe edition adds tax playbooks for Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.
- Equity Position Report ($129): a generated PDF covering valuation scenarios, exercise cost, dilution, exit waterfall, country tax treatment and a conversation pack, built on a published methodology.
- Coverage index: 250+ company-specific guides and eight national tax guides, referencing names such as OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks and Revolut.
Use Cases
Founders and early shareholders use the estimator to build a defensible valuation range before negotiating a secondary sale, and to map the ROFR and board-approval steps that gate a transfer. Employees with vested options weigh strike cost against paper value in the exercise calculator, which flags the roughly 90-day post-departure window. Leavers seeking partial liquidity use the readiness check to establish whether a grant is transferable at all. Angel investors and small stakeholders whose deal size falls below the minimums of Forge, EquityZen or Nasdaq Private Market benefit most, since the toolkit targets transactions between roughly €10,000 and €750,000.
