How do we earn real world cash from equity?


1

This question is about how does an owner of company who own n% equity of company as a technical co founder makes real world cash. This is not about regular share holder who buys share to make money. This is about company founders.

This is regarding a company which will be registered as per Indian Laws and which is a private limited company. That means only 3 founder + investing organization. No other shareholders. It is not a public limited company. We are not going to public to raise funding. We will not be listing ourselves in share market or stock market.

When we get equity in a company that means we get n% ownership of that company.
But how do I earn the actual real world 'cash' out of this equity?

Assuming that I own n% of the company,

  1. I will get n% of total income of company per month paid at the end of each month? Do I have to manually write this in agreement? or this is default accepted? OR
  2. I will get n% of total income of company per year paid at the end of each year? Do I have to manually write this in agreement? or this is default accepted? OR
  3. I will get equity converted to cash only when I will sale the equity to someone in future? OR
  4. I will get a mutually agreed salary for the life time of company? How to calculate the salary?

In case of salary who will decide my salary before getting funding, after funding and once we become profitable?

Equity Income

asked Mar 26 '13 at 19:31
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Abhijit Navale
245 points
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  • Please try to edit your question down. This site does not accept multiple different questions asked in a single post. Your main question is "How do we earn real world cash from equity?", please edit down the question so that it's more narrowly centered on that. – Jesper Mortensen 11 years ago
  • Thanks, that's good. To the extent that your related questions haven't already been answered on this site, you could open separate questions for each of them. http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/how-to-askJesper Mortensen 11 years ago

1 Answer


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Assuming you own N percent of the company you will be default get ... nothing from your ownership. Nothing.

Ownership most commonly results in money being paid out in case of:

(If you don't recognize those words, then follow the above links.)

About dividends:

  • They're generally primarily used by older, well established companies which are profitable.
  • There are many kinds of 'tricks' which a majority shareholder - or a group of majority shareholders - can play with dividends. For example, a majority shareholder can hire himself as a CEO in the company at a very very high salary, and then pay out less in dividends - effectively keeping more money to himself. You need good company bylaws or a Shareholders Agreement to protect against that.
About liquidity events:
  • In many cases, the national Laws provide some protection of minority shareholders in the event of a sale to another company or Initial Public Offering (IPO). (Typically by ensuring that minority shareholders get the same per-share price as large shareholders.) You need to investigate this for your own country.
  • If you are using vesting (follow link), then look at trigger events.
Edit: This answer is about how shareholders earn money from their shares, as the question was asked in the title.

In addition it's common that founders or investors work in the company -- say, as CEO / CTO / advisor. For this they're often given a normal salary matching the fair market price for an employee with the required qualifications. One important exception is that institutional investors (VCs) will often want startup founders to have next-to-no salary in the early stages.

Additionally, in some cases where there are very few shareholders, tax planning may be important. Often dividends are taxed lower than salary, so structuring the payouts can reduce taxes for the recipients.

answered Mar 26 '13 at 20:28
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Jesper Mortensen
15,292 points
  • Don't forget classes of shares, which can complicate matters (not sure if Indian private limited company allows that). – Steve Jones 11 years ago
  • This is a private limited company. That means only 3 founder + investing organization. No other shareholders. It is not a public limited company. We are not going to public to raise funding. That means we are not going in share market and we will not be listed in share market or stock market listing. – Abhijit Navale 11 years ago
  • @Abhijit Navale: IPOs are not only for raising growth capital for young companies. They're also sometimes used when a company has succeeded and matured, as a way of getting 'payday' for early investors and founders. – Jesper Mortensen 11 years ago
  • Then how does this work in case of only single owner of company who own 100%? How does he get money for his day to day expenditure? Same like this? dividends and liquidity? I thought owner get some kind of salary. – Abhijit Navale 11 years ago
  • as I said we are 3 founders + investing organisation so who will how much salary I should get? me? all founders? or investing organisation? who will decide my salary once we become profitable and will not rely on investing organisation? – Abhijit Navale 11 years ago

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