What Kapitable is for
Why the platform exists — turning the coordination sprawl of an LBO closing into one controlled process, and the three things it deliberately does not do.
Overview
A subscription round means onboarding, KYC, documents, signatures and payments — for a lot of people, across several entities, at the same time.
Spread across email, spreadsheets and shared folders, the hard part is not any single one of those tasks. It is that simple questions become difficult to answer.
Kapitable's answer is to put those activities into one process, with one view of where everything stands. This lesson explains why the platform is shaped the way it is, so the rest of the Academy has something to attach to.
What you'll learn
The five questions a subscription round makes hard to answer, and why
What Kapitable brings into one place
The three things it deliberately does not do
Why a build-up makes all of this a scale problem rather than a one-off
The five questions
None of these is a hard question in principle:
Who has completed their KYC?
Whose information is incomplete?
Who still needs to sign?
Which payments remain outstanding?
Which participants could delay it?
They become hard when the answer lives in five places. That is the problem the platform is built around — not the difficulty of any individual task, but the cost of assembling an answer from scattered pieces.
What the platform brings together
One place where:
Every participant has a state you can see — invited, in progress, complete, incomplete — rather than a state you have to ask about
Documents are generated from the transaction data rather than retyped from it
Signatures and payments are tracked against the transactions they belong to
Closing the process writes the result into the company's permanent record — the transactions, the documents evidencing them, and the updated cap table
Three things it does not do
Worth being precise about the boundaries, because they shape how everything else in the Academy reads.
It does not move money. Payment instructions are issued and proof of payment is recorded. The transfer itself happens at the participant's bank.
It does not replace your advisers. Legal documents are generated from templates your advisers prepare. The drafting judgement stays with them.
It does not act on its own. No request reaches a participant until someone chooses to send it. That principle matters enough to have its own lesson — see A1.6.
Where the scale comes from
A firm running a build-up does not do this once. It does it for the platform company, then again for each add-on, with a management package that grows each time.
A single participant subscribing across three ManCos is one person with three transactions, three payments and three sets of documents. Multiply that across a management team and several add-ons, and the repetition is what separates a workable process from an unworkable one.
That is why the platform is organised around a repeatable process rather than a one-off checklist — and why the lessons that follow describe processes you will run many times.
Related
A1.2 — How Kapitable is organised · projects, companies, shareholders and how they nest
A1.3 — One project = one LBO · what a project represents
A1.6 — Nothing is sent without you · the principle behind the third boundary above
