ybot Uses Cake for Issuing ESOP and Modeling Future Rounds

From Carta to Cake

Garzberg is currently based in Florida after having raised a round in the state. Prior to this round, their pre-seed rounds were managed through spreadsheets under Carta. “Spreadsheet warriors,” Garzberg jokingly called themselves. However, when raising for their seed round began, they found challenges in issuing and managing stock options to their employees outside the United States. Garzberg says, “It's a good product; there's nothing wrong with it actually. The primary issue that we ran into was the fact that we're a distributed workforce around the world. We've got team members everywhere and Carta is really good for America–it's solid as a product. But once you start wanting to issue or manage stock outside of jurisdictions that it supports, you run into some problems.”

Issuing ESOP to their employees abroad is something that matters to ybot. Garzberg explains, “We wanted everybody at ybot to participate and some of the people that we onboarded have never been issued stock in their life. And this is pretty phenomenal. This is where Cake came in handy.

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“We needed a way to elegantly manage our stock options in a way that wasn't going to be complicated. And the cool part about Cake and the reason why we actually switched is we can do all that in one piece of software. And that's honestly why we switched. It's been awesome. We've obviously migrated our cap table there. We've got different types of stock options that we issue to the board versus employees. It's been something that I actually really enjoy using a lot.”

Now, it’s all a piece of Cake!

Since switching to Cake, Garzberg has realized there’s plenty of extras that come when using the product, “I think because there's so many great features in that platform, it can be relatively overwhelming, even if you know what you're looking for.” Thankfully, he’s found some great help from the people who’ve been making life at Cake super sweet! He goes on, “You've got some really great people on your side. We've been working really closely with Shannon and I have to say she's an absolute legend… I think the depth of her product knowledge made the experience. Everyone had to be involved there and it was just pretty seamless, and I think it comes down to people. So that's a testament.” 

Cake Co-founder and President, Jason Atkins, doubles down on that, “This is a cool problem to solve and it's just so wonderful to see people like yourself now enjoying that and being able to help empower your business.”

Confidently serving Cake on your captables

With every use of Cake, Garzberg bites into something new almost every time! He says, “What I really love is there's a tool in there that allows you to model future rounds… The other cool thing about this is that you're able to plan your subsequent rounds really nicely. And I think this is a really cool tool because we're currently in the process of planning a series A… The ability to determine at different valuations the type of funds that you're looking to raise versus what happens to the cap table at that point is really nice.” 

He continues, “It's a really nice thing to literally continue to iterate on where we think we're going to be by the end of this year based on our needs for the next three years, what we're thinking of raising, what the impact is on the cap table. That's really beautiful. It's a fun tool to use because you can think into the future.”

Cake isn’t just here to make work fun and easy! It can also inspire confidence.

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"The other great thing about this is the confidence that you have around diligence at that point. Once you've got your house in order with your accounts, you've got all your legals lined up. Everything's nice. It's almost like the final frontier is to make sure that everything on your cap table is accurate. And you can show the journey of impact that your pre-seed and seed round had and where you're going to go. The story that you could actually put together with relative ease when you're planning that, I think there's a lot to be said about it.” 

A product by people, for people

For Garzberg, maintaining a yin and yang element–understanding how IQ and EQ meld–in ybot is how they keep a peaceful and healthy company. This boils down to always checking in on your people and how they are, not just at work but mentally and emotionally as well. He explains, “Some of our employees are in high stress situations and my Discord is on 24/7. They can reach out, they can wake me up if they want to let me know what's going on. We're always there to help them out, no matter what. We've become almost extremely people-obsessed without having a culture that was defined around that. It was this necessity of having really high performance people and trying to protect them in this organization.”

And with a culture that fosters taking care of one another in a team, it comes out in the product as well. Garzberg goes, “We've got a piece of technology that is extremely high tech… But our tool is actually designed to uplift the way that people work. So our why really does extend to people. We're using technology to help people in a way that's never happened before. And so we really love the fact that this kind of energy actually travels through from both the founders all the way through to the team, and into the way that we sell. We love that.”