Salaried employees at Indian startups who have been granted options and never had them explained. Candidates comparing two offers where one pays less cash and more equity. Early employees deciding whether to exercise before leaving. Founders and first-time managers who have to explain a grant to the people they are hiring, and advisors taking equity instead of fees.

It assumes no finance background and no accounting vocabulary. It does assume you are willing to do small amounts of arithmetic, because equity questions are arithmetic questions wearing legal clothing. If you can work out a percentage and follow a sequence of subtractions, the hard parts of a cap table and a liquidation waterfall are within reach. Nothing here requires a spreadsheet you do not already know how to build.

One question at a time, with an explanation the moment you answer. Equity is a subject where people nod along to a lecture and then still cannot say whether a 1x participating preference eats their payout. Answering a question forces a commitment, and the explanation lands while you still care about the outcome.

The AI guide tracks which parts you keep getting wrong and returns you to them, which matters here because the failure modes cluster. Someone who misreads vesting start dates usually also misreads exercise windows; someone who forgets preference stacks usually also overvalues a headline valuation. Getting returned to the same weak spot from three different angles is what turns a definition you can recite into a document you can read.

Video courses on startup equity are strong at the narrative — a founder explaining how their cap table evolved is genuinely useful context. They are weak at the arithmetic, which is where equity decisions actually go wrong. Watching someone else compute a waterfall does not tell you whether you can compute one. Practice questions invert that: you do the calculation, get it wrong, see why, and do the next one. Use a video course to understand why option pools exist; use practice to work out what your own grant is worth after a pool top-up and a 1x preference. The two are complementary, not competing, and this course is deliberately the second kind.

Most equity losses are not caused by the company failing. They are caused by paperwork and timing:

• Letting a 90-day exercise window lapse after resigning, and losing fully vested options
• Reading a valuation headline as a payout, when a liquidation preference sits ahead of common shares
• Paying perquisite tax at exercise on shares that never become liquid
• Assuming a cliff has been crossed when the vesting start date is not the joining date
• Missing Schedule FA reporting on foreign-listed shares

Each of these has its own labels in the course, because recognising one in a document is a different skill from knowing it exists. The questions are written to present the document first and the trap second, the way it arrives in real life.

Start with the vocabulary, then do the arithmetic, then read real documents. The vocabulary is small — maybe thirty terms — and this course front-loads it so the later maths is not fighting unfamiliar words. The arithmetic is where understanding actually forms: percentage after a round, price per share, waterfall order, tax at two separate points.

Once both are in place, your own grant letter and your company's cap table become readable, which is the point. The sequence matters: people who start at term sheets without the vocabulary tend to memorise clause names without understanding what any of them do to their own number. If you also want the broader salary picture, Taxes for Salaried Indians covers payslip and ITR mechanics, and Personal Finance Fundamentals for India covers saving and investing around them.