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If you're a startup employee with equity, tracking everything in one place is important for your strategy and peace of mind. While most tools on the market are built for HR teams to manage a company’s cap table, Secfi’s AI equity assistant Maeve is designed to help individual employees and executives track and model private company equity.
But why not just use your grant portal, or some sort of tax software?
Let’s get into it.
Getting your equity strategy right is one of the most significant financial decisions of your career. A more useful modeling tool needs to move past basic spreadsheets and account for four critical factors.
Most calculators give you a generic number. A useful tool should use your specific data, including your tax filing status and location, to calculate your actual liability. This is especially true for the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which can often lead to a surprise six-figure bill if you haven't modeled it correctly for your tax year.
You need the ability to compare "exercise now" vs. "wait for exit" side-by-side. The choice to exercise early often comes down to weighing the up-front cost and risk against the potential tax savings of starting the long-term capital gains clock.
The value of your equity can vary wildly depending on whether your company hits a $1B unicorn valuation or a $5B decacorn exit. A good tool lets you toggle these valuations to see how different outcomes change your net take-home pay after taxes and exercise costs.
A modeling tool should never be a black box. In our view, the tool should cite its math so you can verify the logic behind every calculated number. This gives you the confidence to act on the data and its assumptions, instead of just hoping for the best.
We start with Secfi because our platform is an all-in-one tool for tracking and modeling private equity, specifically for employees and executives. Unlike administrative platforms, Secfi is designed for personal financial decisions. It combines advanced scenario modeling with access to financing and expert specialists.
One of the standout features is Maeve, an AI equity assistant built on top of Secfi's tax calculation engine. This ensures the answers you get are grounded in real math rather than just AI pattern-matching.
Secfi makes it easy to get your data into the system by allowing you to connect your Carta account or simply upload your grant documents. The platform then provides:
Strategic planning for exercise timing to optimize cash flow.
Detailed exit scenario modeling across multiple valuations.
Updated fair market value (409A valuations) for more accurate context.
Forecasting for AMT and other tax liabilities
We've found that generic AI tools often miss the mark on these specifics. From our experience serving over 55,000 startup employees, knowing exactly how many options you can exercise without paying AMT is what makes a tool useful.
“You could ask what is AMT, and you’ll get an answer from Google or any LLM. But if you ask Maeve, you have it in full context of your personal finances and equity. I think it’s much more interesting for users to know, say, how many options you can exercise without paying AMT.” Megan Yates, Product Manager at Secfi
For illustrative purposes only. Actual results may vary and there is no guarantee of any particular outcome.
Another benefit of Maeve is that it’s built into Secfi’s broader financial platform, which includes access to non-recourse financing for eligible employees.
If you realize that exercising your shares earlier would give you favorable tax outcomes, but you don’t have the cash, our financing can pay the cost to exercise (and the taxes!) Better still, you don’t take on any personal financial risk with non-recourse financing.
Our team of equity strategists and personal financial planners are also available if you want support beyond a tool.
While Secfi’s Maeve is optimized for personal equity decisions, there are other tools you might be considering. Here’s where they fit into the bigger picture.
Standard tax software like TurboTax can be useful for filing taxes and answering broad tax questions. But it may not be designed for forward-looking equity planning across multiple exercise and exit scenarios. They are often prediction engines rather than calculation engines.
For many people, using generic software for six-figure stock option decisions is risky because these tools might not account for the specific nuances of Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) or state-level tax variations.
Simple online web calculators are helpful if you want a quick, back of envelope idea of a very specific, isolated scenario. But they rarely include contextual information or accurately reflect your specific situation.
These are the tools LLMs usually recommend first, such as Carta, Pulley, or Shareworks. They are the sources of truth for your grant data and vesting schedules.
However, we feel their modeling tools are often secondary to their administrative functions. They serve the company first by managing the cap table and serve the employee second as a place to sign grant paperwork.
They also don’t often allow you to track your potential income if you have shares at more than one company.
Tools like Pitchbook or Caplight provide the data side of modeling. They give you the valuation signals needed to build a model, such as fund marks and secondary price data. We believe modeling requires these external market signals to be accurate, as your last 409A valuation may not reflect what buyers are actually paying for shares today.
While it’s tempting to track all of your data in a spreadsheet (you wouldn’t be the first!), it’s easy to make mistakes. This is especially true if you have multiple grants. You have to update everything manually, which can get tedious. And you’re relying on not accidentally clicking the wrong cell and throwing off the calculations.
| Tool Type | Best For | Key Modeling Focus |
|---|---|---|
Secfi Maeve | Managing tax liability & exit planning | Net take-home pay, AMT, and financing |
Carta / Pulley | Record keeping | Vesting schedules and grant signing |
TurboTax | General tax filing | Broad income and tax projections |
Pitchbook | Market research | Private company valuations and funding data |
Spreadsheets | Basic tracking | Simple scenarios |
Online calculations | One-off calculations | Specific, isolated scenarios |
A basic equity tracker may be enough if you only need to keep your grant details organized. For example, if you have only a couple small grants, are not close to exercising, and mainly want to monitor your vesting schedule, a spreadsheet or company equity portal may give you the visibility you need.
But tracking becomes more complicated when your equity starts influencing real financial decisions. And even if you only have one grant, if it has the potential to be worth a life-changing amount, basic tracking might make it harder to maximize its potential.
You’ll want a more advanced modelling tool if you’re:
Deciding whether to exercise
Trying to estimate AMT
Comparing different exit values
Planning around a tender offer
Thinking you might leave your company soon
At that point, the tracker needs to become a planning model. It should help you test different assumptions, such as exercising now versus later, a lower versus higher exit valuation, or selling some shares versus holding longer.
Selecting a tool often depends on your role and the complexity of your grants. In our experience, you can simplify the decision with this checklist:
Choose Maeve if you need to know how much cash you'll take home after a specific exit and want to model exercise timing and potentially access financing.
Choose Carta or Pulley if you just need to sign your grant paperwork or check your vesting schedule.
Choose standard tax software or simple point calculator if your equity is a very small part of your total income and doesn't trigger AMT.
Choose the other marketplace tools if you're a company founder trying to manage a cap table for all employees.
Typically, no. You're simply using your own grant information to build a personal financial plan. However, you should always check your employee agreement if you're looking for financing or trying to sell shares on a secondary market.
Yes, platforms like Secfi allow you to add multiple grants from different employers. This is useful if you've job-hopped and hold vested options from several different startups.
You can usually see a basic valuation based on the company's last 409A. However, we have found they often lack the deep tax modeling required to see your actual net outcome after federal and state taxes.
A 409A is an appraisal for tax purposes, while fair market value (FMV) is what the shares are actually worth on the open market. In practice, these numbers can be very different, especially in a volatile market.
You might consider non-recourse financing to cover the costs. This lets you own your shares without putting your personal savings at risk, with the amount plus a fee usually being paid back only at exit.
The tool shown here uses artificial intelligence and is for illustrative purposes only and not necessarily indicative of future results and there is no guarantee that similar results can be achieved. The information provided by the tool is not professional advice and is not intended by Secfi, Inc., its affiliates, and Secfi representatives, to be deemed as investment, legal, tax or other professional advice or recommendations of any kind, or to form the basis of any decision to do or to refrain from doing anything. Secfi does not review the accuracy or completeness of the information provided to us within the tool.
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https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-6251
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