How LTSE Equity streamlined PostHog's equity administration

Learn how PostHog, the open-source OS for product and data teams, uses LTSE Equity to automate their equity process management and save significant time and money. 

“LTSE gives people the ability to choose how many options they want to exercise, understand the associated costs, and proceed without the back-and-forth paperwork. It just saves so much time and money for us.”

- Grace McKenzie, Operations Manager at PostHog’s review of LTSE Equity

What is PostHog?

PostHog is an all-in-one platform for building better products. Their suite of tools includes session recording, A/B experimentation, and feature flagging to help businesses understand how customers interact with their products. Last year, the company raised a Series B round led by Y Combinator. Today, they’ve doubled down on converting their open-source community members into paying users. 

The equity challenges

The search for an equity management software that streamlines, simplifies, and reduces the costs of equity + options management

There are three primary challenges that PostHog struggled with before onboarding with LTSE Equity.

• The first was time – manually managing equity was incredibly time-consuming for PostHog, as it required sending grant and exercise notices, collecting signatures, and storing documents.
• The second was cost – hiring law firms to manage equity for them also proved expensive. PostHog’s lawyers completed paperwork over and over again, and the costs began to rack up.
• The third was complexity – managing equity increases in complexity as companies grow and add investors to the cap table. Manually tracking share structures and equity options grants further complicated matters.

While seeking for equity management software solutions to automate away these pain points, PostHog struggled to find a tool that worked for their fully remote and internationally distributed team.

“The manual processes of sending out notice of grants and exercise, getting all those things signed, returned, and stored in some legal folder is quite expensive for us – we’re having our lawyers do all of that paperwork over and over again.”

- Grace McKenzie, Operations Manager at PostHog recalls the equity challenges faced before onboarding with LTSE Equity

The solution

01 - Reducing complexity: LTSE simplifies the equity administration journey

Grace McKenzie, Operations Manager at PostHog, shares why her team decided to go with LTSE Equity. In her words, “We went with LTSE over other providers due to their close relationship with the YC community, and the excellent customer service we received when onboarding to the platform and as we tailored it to suit our complex multi-scheme system.”

She adds, “We currently support 77 stakeholders: a mixture of current and previous employees, owners, and preferred shareholders from our seed, Series A, and Series B fundraising rounds.”

According to Grace, onboarding with LTSE Equity was “the most organized and easy-to-do onboarding approach that I've experienced,” and it was incredibly helpful to have an LTSE Equity manager directly walk them through the process, especially with equity administration and shareholder management.

After the setup and rollout, the PostHog team — wherever they were globally — could tap into personalized, self-explanatory options exercising paths. This made it painless to keep up with vesting and strike pricing processes in equity options management. With LTSE Equity, employees can easily create accounts, log in, view their options grants, and track them over time. 

02 - Conserving cash: Employees benefit from self-servicing & greater visibility

Team members can log onto LTSE Equity to better understand their equity. As a result, when PostHog conducts compensation reviews, LTSE Equity enables more teammates to take a percentage or even the full amount of their pay raises in equity and options. This is great for the company because it saves cash in the present since employees clearly believe in PostHog’s future success. 

It also redirects money in two ways: PostHog gains access to the cash their employees are keeping in the company as well as the money they’ve saved in the equity process with LTSE Equity. 

03 - Saving time: PostHog automates away tedious work using LTSE’s platform

Instead of manually organizing and maintaining their files, PostHog simply places them within LTSE Equity’s centralized platform. Eliminating that busywork saves valuable time and enables PostHog to extend their ops and legal teams — without needing to hire more people, spend more resources, or impact their runway. 

“It’s very helpful for people to understand the full scope of what their compensation looks like and to have a centralized place to do so. LTSE Equity provides both of these elements.”

- Grace McKenzie, Operations Manager at PostHog on the LTSE Equity onboarding journey

The results

Grace estimates that using LTSE Equity saves PostHog the People and Operations team one full quarter’s worth of work annually. She explains the time (and money) saved is enormous since LTSE can automate equity and streamline everything from collecting employee documentation to sending out grants to having lawyers manually update their cap table. At a glance, LTSE has helped the PostHog team:

“That operational time saved is huge – the more we can automate, the more we can optimize, the further we can extend our operations and legal teams without having to hire more people, spend more resources, or impact our runway.”

- Grace McKenzie, Operations Manager at PostHog’s review of LTSE Equity

The future

Looking forward, PostHog expects a high-ROI, long-term partnership with LTSE Equity, especially as many team members have been vesting for years and anticipate exercising their options. LTSE helps employees choose how many options they want to exercise and understand those costs easily. That seamlessness even extends to a potential IPO or M&A. Beyond that, LTSE Equity will easily scale as PostHog grows, providing annual cap table health checks, and offering validated 409As. 

Ultimately, Grace emphasizes the valuable, high-touch support PostHog receives from their dedicated LTSE Equity account manager. In her words: 

“We have that helping hand at LTSE Equity that is directly impactful. It just feels like we’re working together as a team, as opposed to reaching out into a black box of customer service.”

- Grace McKenzie, Operations Manager at PostHog on working with LTSE Equity