Why founders.

The idea

A founder who still runs their company and still holds a large stake has something no compensation committee can manufacture: their own money on the same side of the table as yours. When the stock falls, they lose alongside every other holder. When they make a decision, they live with it for decades, not for a vesting schedule.

Most large companies are not run that way. The typical hired chief executive owns a rounding error of the business and is paid instead in options and grants — instruments with a particular shape: upside without downside. An option costs its holder nothing if the stock falls, pays enormously if it rises, and is settled by issuing new shares — which is to say, by diluting everyone who actually owns the company. None of that makes hired executives bad at their jobs. It does mean their incentives are not your incentives, and the difference is worth measuring.

Roughly one in ten S&P 500 companies is still run by a person who started it. This site exists to keep score: who owns what, whether the stake is growing or shrinking, and what each executive actually did with their own money — bought, sold, or merely cashed the compensation.

Who makes this

One person. This is an independent project — researched, built, and maintained by a single individual, not a firm, with no positions to promote and nothing to sell you beyond the site itself.

I'd rather tell you that than let you assume a staff that doesn't exist. It also means the site's credibility can't rest on a brand name, so it rests on the only thing better: method and receipts. The counting rules are stated above, every number links to its source, and when the data can't be reconciled, the site says so instead of papering over it. If you find an error, I want to know — that's how a one-person operation gets to be right: corrections@founderledequities.com.

How the numbers are made

Every figure is computed from structured SEC filings. Nothing is estimated, scraped from an aggregator, or taken from a news story.

The shares held come from the ownership forms each executive signs — Forms 3, 4 and 5 — read in full, every filing since the record begins, with amendments displacing what they restate. Balances are carried per vehicle (a trust reported once keeps its balance until the filer mentions it again), which is how the forms themselves work.

The denominator is the company's own share count from the cover page of its reports (dei:EntityCommonStockSharesOutstanding), carried through stock splits so a split never reads as a change in ownership.

Unexercised options are never counted as ownership. An option is a claim on shares that do not exist yet. They are tracked and reported separately, and when an executive exercises and sells the same day, the feed says so — options cashed — instead of calling compensation a change of heart.

Prices are as filed. Trade values use the execution prices each Form 4 reports. The rare filer error — a price a thousand times off the market — is flagged and shown as filed, never silently corrected, because a number you can trace to its document beats a number someone quietly fixed.

And the standing invitation: every trade on the site links to the filing it came from. You never have to take a number on trust — click through and read the document yourself.

Get in touch

Both of these reach one inbox — mine — and I read everything.

Found an error? Tell me. A number that disagrees with a filing is the most useful message I can get, and the fastest thing on this site to fix. Point me at the company and what looks wrong — the filing link is on every row — and I'll chase it down.
corrections@founderledequities.com

Want something the site doesn't do? This is a young project and the roadmap is genuinely open. A screen you wish existed, a company that should be covered, a column that would make a page make sense, an alert you'd actually want in your inbox — say so. Requests from people who use the thing beat my own guesses about what it needs, and more than one feature here started as somebody's stray remark.
hello@founderledequities.com

The fine print

Nothing here is investment advice. This site reports what securities filings say. It does not recommend buying, selling, or holding anything, and a large founder stake is not, by itself, a reason to own a stock.

Accuracy is pursued, not guaranteed. Filings contain errors, filers are inconsistent, and software has bugs. The confidence marks exist precisely because certainty isn't uniform. Where this site and a filing disagree, the filing is right — SEC EDGAR is the source of truth, and every figure here links back to it.

Figures can lag. Data refreshes from EDGAR on a nightly cycle; insiders have up to two business days to report a trade. What you see is as current as the filings allow.