In my work, I often speak with founders who have made good money or hold a large stake in a business worth a lot. When you ask why they started, you rarely hear money as the main reason. Some wanted to change the world. Some wanted to solve a problem they had, and found that others had it too. Some just like building good products.
We hear about unicorns (there aren't so many of them). Far more people run normal businesses and have built £10m, £20m or £50m of value.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we are also in business to make money. Money is not the end goal, but many of us took risks and went through years of struggle because we wanted a better life, for ourselves and especially for our families. I feel this myself, as do many immigrant founders who came to the UK (or any other country) with nothing and built something from scratch.
This Week in 30 Seconds
- Enough is a number on your own balance sheet. The valuation belongs to the market and the cap table. Your share, after dilution and tax, is what pays for the life.
- Dilution shrinks the number fast. Carta's median founding team holds 56% at seed and 16.1% by Series C, less than the option pool. A £50m company you half-own can beat a £1bn one you hold 3% of.
- Write it down before you get near it. The number in your head moves the week the money lands. The one on paper, with a plan attached, holds.
- On the Radar. The SEC's plan to open private markets to ordinary investors, continuation funds at half the secondary market, and a strategist grading his own year in public.
Why founders keep betting after the money is made
When you are building, it's easy to lose track. You want the business bigger. New countries, new product lines, new ventures. Your tolerance for risk goes up, and you are ready to bet everything on the next one. Most of us don't turn that appetite down once there is something to lose. The next bet gets made with the money meant for a better life.
I have also met people who made some very bad money decisions later in life. They had already made it: a good life, assets, wealth. Then they made a risky bet. And problems don't come alone. Market volatility, a liquidity crunch, an unexpected event - all together and at the wrong time.
How this plays out after an exit, deal by deal, is in $10M Trap: Why Founders Destroy Wealth After an Exit. It is why a financial plan matters, and proper structuring for asset protection and tax. It means planning two or three levels ahead of where you are now.
Founder dilution: how much you own by Series C
Think in absolute terms. Many founders want to reach, say, a £1bn valuation. After all the investment and dilution, you might end up with 3–5% of that company. You can also build a smaller business, say one worth £50m, and still own 50% or 100% of it. The second number is usually easier and faster to reach, and your chances are higher.
Carta's data from March, covering rounds raised in 2021–2025, shows what dilution does to the median founding team:
- At seed, the team still holds about 56% of the company.
- By Series A, it is 36%.
- By Series B, it is 27.3% at AI companies and 21.8% at the rest.
- By Series C, it is 16.1%, which is less than the employee option pool at 16.8%.
Carta gives medians only, with no sample size. Read them as the shape of the thing; your own cap table will differ.
Run the £1bn example through those numbers. At Series C ownership, £1bn is £161m to the founding team. Split it between the founders, take off the preference stack and tax, and remember it only arrives if the exit happens. A £50m company you own half of is £25m, and it is yours in a way the first number never was.
Enough is a number on your own balance sheet. The valuation belongs to the market and to the rest of the cap table. Your share, after investors and the option pool are paid, is what becomes the house, the school fees and the cushion for when something goes wrong.
Why your number moves once you reach it
Conventional wisdom says to have a number in mind for when you can retire. That rarely works in practice. When you reach the number, you want more. Bigger company, bigger house, more toys, new ventures, adrenaline, you name it.
Schwab asks Americans every year what net worth makes someone wealthy. In 2025, the answer was $2.3m, down from $2.5m the year before. The figure for "financially comfortable" went the other way, from $778k to $839k. The number moves in both directions. And the people you compare yourself with keep changing: 89 people a day cross the $30m line, on Knight Frank's count. Whoever you measured against when you set your number has moved on by the time you get there.
That is when taking some chips off the table comes up: a partial sale or a secondary round, with the proceeds put aside in a few buckets. Some founders think taking some (not all) money off the table is a show of weakness or betrayal. I made the opposite case in June in Taking Money Off the Table Doesn't Mean You've Stopped Believing. The more I think about it, the more sensible it looks. It gives you a cushion and peace of mind to focus on the business without worrying about the downside. You can still grow the company, raise more money, or reinvest in your ventures. The part you put aside is your number of enough, and it takes care of your financial life and your family.
What holds is the number you wrote down before you were anywhere near it, with the plan attached. The one in your head gets renegotiated the week the money lands, usually upwards.
Two objections: dilution varies, and early numbers are set blind
Dilution varies a lot by lane, and Carta's own data shows it. At Series B, AI founders hold 27.3% against 21.8% for the rest. At Series A, founders in digital industries keep 37.5% against 30.5% in physical ones. So "you'll only own 3%" has an answer in lane selection and round discipline, without shrinking the ambition. And a £1bn company is rarely a £50m company scaled up. The capital that diluted the founder is what bought the scale.
Timing is the second objection, and I have no data for it, only reasoning. A number written in year three is set with the least information you will ever have about how big the company could get. Pre-commitment protects you from greed. It also stops you from updating when you learn about the ceiling. That's fair, and I'd rather concede it than pretend otherwise. So the number gets reviewed on a schedule, on paper, with the reasons written down. The worst time to change it is mid-round, in the heat of the moment.
How to set your number, and when to act on it
The founders who come out of this well have a few things in common. They set the number early, as their own share, in absolute terms. They wrote it down and built the plan around it. And when they reached it, they did what the plan said.
If you carry a number in your head, this week's job is to put it on one page:
- Write the number as a figure on your own balance sheet, in pounds or dollars.
- Write the ownership you expect to hold at exit, and what the company then needs to be worth.
- Put a date on it.
- Add one line on what happens when it arrives: how much comes off the table, and where it goes.
It takes an hour. If you've never written yours down, that hour is probably the most useful thing in this email. And if yours is already on paper, when did you last check the ownership line against the current cap table?
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On the Radar
SEC wants private markets opened to ordinary investors.
The SEC has sent the White House a plan to let ordinary investors into private markets through registered funds, and to widen who advisers may charge performance fees. It is not yet a proposed rule. Professional or accredited status has mattered partly because it was scarce. If the same exposure arrives in a registered wrapper for anyone with a brokerage account, the scarcity drops and the fee model follows the money down. Worth asking what your own access is buying: the deals, or the label. Read more →
Family offices are automating processes nobody has written down.
Simple describes how AI is landing inside family offices: someone wires the quarterly reporting process into a chat window, two colleagues copy it, and by Friday that is how reporting gets done. No diagram, no specification, no list of steps. A solo setup is more exposed to this, not less: every automation carries the assumptions of whoever built it, and nobody else can reconstruct them. Their exercise takes an afternoon: ask three people to describe the process, then map where each step touches other data and tools. Read more →
Continuation funds now carry half the secondary market.
Secondary deal volume passed $120bn in the first half of 2026, a fifth above last year's first half and a record, on Evercore's numbers via PitchBook. GP-led deals were nearly 54% of it, and single-asset continuation vehicles alone were $34bn. This machinery decides whether a private stake turns into cash, and the route is widening. Worth knowing which side of a continuation vehicle you would be on if your company's backer proposed one: selling into it, or rolling and waiting another five years. Read more →
Cembalest grades his own year, in public.
Michael Cembalest's back-to-school Eye on the Market is a post-mortem on his own calls over the past year, sectors, rates, currencies, published under his name with the misses left in. Public scorecards are rare in this business. Reading one shows what an honest annual review looks like, and sets a standard to hold your own decisions to when nothing else forces it. If you keep a decision log, borrow this format. Read more →
The middle of wealth management is being squeezed out.
Jan Voss at Cape May applies Everett Randle's 2021 split, low-cost vendors, luxury retailers and a dead zone in between, to wealth management, and argues the German market is already sorting that way as wealth passes to a younger, more self-directed generation. It gives you somewhere to put the next firm that pitches you: scale player, specialist, or neither. Dead-zone firms charge specialist fees for vendor service. Read more →
New on the Site
Last week's memo is the other half of this one. Once the number exists and some of it has been put aside, that money needs a job, and the four buckets are how it gets one before the first deal turns up.
Read it: Four Buckets Before the First Deal: How to Organise Post-Exit Capital
This was Capital Signals — weekly briefings on what's reshaping founder strategy on wealth.
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