How many outstanding Shares in a start-up

This question has come up quite often, most recently when I was having lunch with some co-workers last week.

While evaluating an offer at a start-up have you wondered whether your 10,000 shares was a significant chunk of money or a drop in the ocean?

Have you ever wondered how many shares are outstanding in a start-up you heard about?

This is a non-issue for a public company, the number of outstanding shares is a matter of public record. But not all start-up’s want to share this information with you.

I can’t say this for every state in the union but in MA, you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the Annual Report that every organization is required to file. It won’t be current information, the best you can do is get the most recent annual information and that means you can’t know anything about a very new company, but it is information that I would have liked to have had on some occasions in the past.

The link to search the Corporate Database is http://corp.sec.state.ma.us/corp/corpsearch/corpsearchinput.asp

Enter the name of the company and scroll to the bottom where you see a box that allows you to choose “Annual Reports”. Click that and you can read a recent Annual Report which will have the information you need.

If you find that this doesn’t work or is incomplete, please post your comments here. I’m sure others will appreciate the information.

And if you have information about other states, that is most welcome.