About this reference
Who publishes it, how it is put together, what it deliberately does not do.
Who
This site is published by Wall Street Wiki. A reference published by the wallstreet.wiki network. Every figure is stated as a formula and recomputed from it, every convention names the authority that sets it, and corrections are versioned and dated.
Why it exists
Most venture terminology is explained qualitatively and then applied quantitatively, which is where confusion starts. This reference states the arithmetic. Where a term changes who gets paid what, the payout formula is given explicitly. Notation is uniform: E is exit proceeds, I invested capital, x the preference multiple, PRE pre-money valuation, POST post-money valuation, FD fully diluted share count, p a holder's fully diluted ownership expressed as a decimal, R the amount raised in a priced round, s a share count, CP a conversion price, cap a valuation or participation cap, d a dividend rate, t elapsed years in a dividend, interest or vesting calculation, and q a target ownership fraction. Symbols used in a single entry are defined where they appear. Nothing here is a market-terms survey; standard versus off-market language is described structurally, not benchmarked to a dataset. The corpus now also covers employee equity and the 409A valuation, round structures including bridges and venture debt, and exit mechanics from the consideration bridge through escrow and appraisal rights. One continuous share ledger runs through all of it - 8,000,000 founder shares, a 1,411,765-share pool and four priced rounds - so a figure in any section can be traced back to the same cap table rather than to a fresh example invented for that page.
How it is built
Every page here is generated from a single reviewed data file. That has consequences worth stating: the content is a data edit rather than a code change, every page has a JSON twin carrying the same facts without markup, and the review date attached to a page comes from the data file rather than from the build clock - so rebuilding without changing anything does not make the content look fresher than it is.
| Property | This site |
|---|---|
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Content reviewed | 2026-08-27 |
| Machine-readable corpus | /index.json and /llms-full.txt |
| Change feed | /changes.json - poll this instead of re-crawling |
| Network | 9 sibling references, indexed at wallstreet.wiki |
| Third-party requests | None. No fonts, no CDN, no analytics, no trackers on any page. |
| Contact | [email protected], or the form. Corrections get answered first. |
What is deliberately not here
No investment performance figures. Not because there are none, but because an unaudited return published on a commercial site is the specific thing securities counsel warns about, and the antifraud rules reach a publisher whether or not they are a registered adviser. If figures ever appear here they will have been reviewed first.
No recommendations. Nothing on this site says what to buy, when, or in what size. It states how the arithmetic works. That line is deliberate: impersonal, generally circulated financial writing is publishing, and personalised advice is something else with a different regulatory regime attached.
No market levels presented as fact. Every number in a worked example is an input chosen so the arithmetic can be checked, not an observation of where anything trades. Structures and formulas are durable; levels are not, and a stale level stated confidently is worse than no level at all.
Corrections
If a formula or a worked figure here is wrong, that is worth more to fix than anything else on the site, and the fastest route is the contact form. Corrections are recorded in the change feed with a date, so what changed and when is auditable rather than silently overwritten.