What You Need to Replace to Replace Your Pulley

What a Cap Table Actually Is

A cap table is not a spreadsheet. It is the running ledger of who owns what in a company, backed by the documents that make each row legally effective. Every share, option, SAFE, warrant, and convertible note on a cap table exists because a specific document was signed by specific people on a specific date, and those documents together form the capitalization history of the company. When founders say they need to replace Pulley, they usually mean they need to replace the visualization on top. What they actually need to replace is the underlying event ledger, the document library that supports it, and the practice of keeping both current. Story.law builds that ledger from a company's documents rather than asking founders to type it in.

Why Replacing Pulley Correctly Matters Right Now

When a cap table platform goes away, founders have a narrow window to move their data somewhere that will not corrupt it in transit. Investors, acquirers, and future counsel will rely on this record for years. A bad migration surfaces as a diligence problem two years later when someone cannot find the board consent that authorized a specific option grant, or when a converted SAFE shows the wrong price per share. The pressure to pick a replacement fast is real, but picking one that requires paying a lawyer $700 an hour to update it correctly is worse. Story.law says it built Aegis because founders kept asking it to update Carta and Pulley for them the right way, and it could not justify the workflow those products impose.

Common Challenges in Replacing Pulley

Most of the pain in a Pulley migration is not the cap table numbers. It is everything attached to them. These are the challenges founders raise most often.

• Document sprawl across tools: Signed documents live in Pulley, DocuSign, email, Slack, Rippling, and a shared drive. There is no single source of truth.
• Manual data re-entry: Most replacement platforms ask you to retype every stakeholder, security, and transaction. That is where errors get introduced.
• Board consents that got skipped: Option grants issued without a matching board consent, or SAFEs converted without proper documentation, show up as unresolved rows.
• Convertibles that were never fully mapped: SAFEs and notes with MFN provisions, discount rates, and valuation caps that no one has tracked across rounds.
• Terminations that never propagated: Employees who left but whose vesting was never stopped, or whose post-termination exercise window was not enforced.
• Warrants and unusual securities: Investor warrants adapted by counsel that do not fit a standard template.

How Aegis Handles a Pulley Migration

Story.law's approach treats the documents as the source of truth. A customer exports the zip file from Pulley's data room function and uploads it to Aegis. Story.law's lawyer-in-the-loop process identifies what each document is, what the key dates are, and whether the right people signed it for it to be legally effective, and only then uses it to build the event ledger and data room. AI makes a first pass on content and extracts it into a graph; humans review. Story.law says onboarding takes about one to two days for every 50 material documents, and that it is not charging onboarding fees during the current Pulley migration window.

Key Components of Your Cap Table You Must Replace

When founders ask what to look for in a Pulley replacement, the honest answer is that they need every one of these components, backed by documents, and updated as new documents get signed. Missing any of them creates a diligence problem later.

• Stakeholder ledger: Every founder, employee, contractor, investor, advisor, and safeholder, with their contact details and their relationship to each security they hold.
• Security types supported: Common stock, preferred stock, RSAs, NSOs, ISOs, SAFEs, convertible notes, warrants, and options plan tracking. Story.law says Aegis supports every kind of startup security it has seen in a twenty year practice.
• Transaction history: Issuances, exercises, repurchases, contributions back, SAFE conversions, secondary sales, terminations, and vesting acceleration.
• Vesting schedules with a data visualization: Cliffs, monthly vesting, acceleration triggers, and current vested versus unvested for every grant.
• Convertible instrument mapping: SAFEs and notes with valuation caps, discount rates, and MFN provisions pulled out and tracked so a conversion is not a scramble.
• Document library tied to every row: The original option agreement, the exercise agreement that turned it into stock, the board consent that authorized it, the equity incentive plan, the current 409A. Every row must trace back to the document driving it.
• Board consent generation: A working practice for authorizing new grants without drafting the consent, attaching it separately, and hoping nothing duplicates.
• Pro forma modeling: Scenario modeling for new rounds, exit waterfalls, and dilution analysis when a raise is on the horizon.
• Counsel access: A dedicated window into the company for lawyers so they are not digging through email for files, which cuts billable hours.
• Excel export in a lawyer-friendly format: On demand, whenever an investor or counsel asks.
• Termination handling in one action: Terminate the employee, stop vesting, and generate a severance agreement from the same button, rather than as three separate steps.

Why a Document Graph Matters

Story.law says Aegis covers all of these because its cap table sits on top of a graph database where each document exists as a node with relationships to every stakeholder and every security. The visualization is downstream of the data. That is the opposite of how Carta and Pulley work, and Story.law says it is why customers face less onboarding work and less ongoing maintenance.

How Founders Transitioning off Pulley Use Aegis

According to Story.law, this is how a migration from Pulley to Aegis works in practice.

• Document ingestion from anywhere: Upload directly, email documents to a dedicated inbox, connect Slack to send documents through chat, or connect Linear so tasks automatically become matters.
• Pulley zip export into Aegis: Export everything from Pulley's data room, upload the zip to Aegis, and Story.law's team runs the processing.
• Automatic document sorting and renaming: Each file gets classified, renamed, and checked for legal effectiveness before it powers the cap table or lands in the data room.
• Data room built to investor diligence structure: Story.law uses the structure of a due diligence request list from investor counsel it works with, so the data room is diligence-ready by default.
• Cap table and data room from one dataset: Common stock remaining, plan stock remaining, vesting visualizations, and every driving document are one click away for the founder and for counsel.
• New grants end to end: Issuing options runs a full process. Aegis checks that an equity incentive plan and a current 409A exist, warns if they do not, offers a fixed fee to fix it, and then drafts the option grant and the board consent and prepares everything for signature. E-signing is built in as a click-through agreement, which Story.law describes as the most enforceable form its lawyers will do short of paper and pen.
• Matter management for everything else: A timeline view of every matter, documents attached, tasks assigned to a lawyer, and the ability to ping counsel for an update inside the app.

Software Handles Operations, Lawyers Handle Judgment

The distinction Story.law draws is that it is engaged as the customer's law firm to do this work. Aegis is the practice, not just the interface: software handles operations, and lawyers handle judgment.

Best Practices for a Clean Pulley Migration

Founders who handle this well tend to follow the same habits.

• Export everything, not just the cap table CSV: The documents in Pulley's data room are the record. Take the zip.
• Use a free trial to test the migration: Upload, see how the result looks, and decide before being charged. Story.law offers a free trial and says it extends it for Pulley migrators.
• Keep a current 409A on file: A 409A expires annually. If yours is 12 months old or more, refresh it before trying to issue new grants. Story.law offers 409As on a flat fee basis.
• Reconcile before you cut over: Review the ingested output with the provider and flag anything that does not match your understanding. Fix it once, not every quarter.
• Record terminations through the platform: Click the terminate button once. Vesting stops, post-termination exercise windows start, and a severance agreement can be generated from the same action.
• Use counsel access instead of forwarding files: Give lawyers a window into the company so they stop billing to hunt for documents.
• Prepare rather than pay later: A small amount of ongoing hygiene during the year prevents a scramble that can cost ten to twenty times more at a raise or acquisition.

Advantages of Running a Cap Table Through Aegis

Story.law says the difference between a cap table platform and an AI-native law firm running a company's equity practice shows up in the following ways.

• Money saved: Story.law says it is 70% more affordable than BigLaw for the same work, with break-even on one avoided mistake, whether that is a mispriced SAFE conversion, a missed board consent, or a post-termination exercise window that did not enforce.
• Time saved: Board consents that take 30 minutes to draft in-house take 30 seconds in Aegis. Onboarding an employee, checking prerequisites, issuing options, and generating the board consent runs as one process rather than three.
• Less anxiety: The cap table is built from the documents, so there is less worry about whether it matches them, and a lawyer is already in the loop before diligence.
• No data resale: Story.law says it treats customer data the way a law firm does, as privileged and confidential, and never sells it.
• Cancel anytime: Unlike Carta, which requires a 90-day cancellation notice, Story.law subscriptions can be canceled whenever they stop working.
• Direct lawyer access: Customers work with Story.law's lawyers rather than a support queue.

How Aegis Replaces the Pulley Practice, Not Just the Interface

Story.law positions Aegis as replacing Clerky, Carta, DocuSign, ChatGPT for legal questions, and ad hoc BigLaw work in one practice. The core difference it claims is that the customer does not tell the software what its documents are; Aegis figures it out. Each document, including its component parts, exists as a node in a graph with relationships to all stakeholders and every kind of security issued. That graph is the base for the cap table visualization, the data room, and the pro forma modeling on higher-tier packages.

Published pricing: a cap table only package runs $199/month or $2,000/year. Aegis Start is $349/month, or $320/month ($3,839/year) on the annual plan with two months free. Aegis Raise, which adds pro forma modeling and heavier support, is $1,000/month, or $10,000/year on the annual plan with two months free. For Pulley migrators specifically, Story.law says it is waiving the standard $1,000 onboarding fee and extending its free trial.

Who a Document-Driven Approach Fits

A document-driven approach works for founders who would rather prepare than pay later. Founders who would rather take the risk and pay ten or twenty times more to fix it during a raise are not the target customer. There is a small amount of ongoing work to keep the record current, and it can save substantial legal bills for founders and their investors down the line. Replacing Pulley is a chance to stop treating the cap table as a visualization a lawyer is paid to update, and start treating it as the legal record of the company.