How much money do you want? What is your idea worth? Plan whatever investment you need to make your fortune!

Home > Tools > Investment planner

You can use this tool to work out, from your investment requirements, how much of your company you need to give away, and how much you'll have left for yourself at the end. Starting with your idea at the bottom (which you own 100% of), your plan proceeds in a series of phases (proof of principle, beta, rollout, etc.) At each phase:

you accept investment from a backer (which dilutes all the existing shareholders' stakes),
you do some work which will be financed by the investment, and
eventually (if you're lucky) you'll reach a new milepost, and your company will be worth a bit more than it was when you started. You're now ready to start the next phase by securing a new round of finance.

You'll need to know the chance of success involved at each phase, and you'll need to decide how much return you're going to offer to your investors at each point. (You can see the theory behind these calculations, and how to determine your offer, in our course; The Next Big Thing.)

To use this tool, key in your estimate of the value of the company at the time when your investors will exit (You'll be able to work this out from the projected accounts). Then, for each phase, key in:

the name of the phase,
the Return on Investment which you want to offer,
the odds associated with the phase (i.e. 25% means there's a 1 in 4 chance you'll succeed), and
the amount of cash you need.

(If you don't understand any of this, please check out The Next Big Thing)

You can create more phases by splitting. You can split a phase into two by pressing the Split button beside the phase description. You can merge two phases back into one by pressing the Merge button between two phases.

NB When you split a phase, the individual odds become higher than the original, and when you merge two phases, the combined odds become lower - that's because for the merged phase to succeed, both the original phases must succeed.

The program will work backwards, calculate the value of the company at each point and the share dilution associated with each investment. The bar at the very top will show (roughly) the relative holding of each of the final shareholders.

You can save the entire calculation by pressing the Save button at top right. The page will be saved in your 'favorite bookmarks' section - you can also email it to a collaborator or use it as an href (a reference back to this page) if you wish.

All the calculations are being done by your browser. Except as described above, no information you enter here will be transmitted to or saved on any other machine.