What we talked about
Kim Hansen is CEO and co founder of Cake Equity, a platform that helps startups manage ownership for founders, employees, investors, and advisors with clarity and less legal and spreadsheet chaos. Kim shares the personal pain that sparked Cake, signing complex shareholder contracts he did not fully understand, and later watching employees miss out on ownership because equity felt too hard, expensive, and poorly timed to implement.
Show notes
Kim Hansen signed a 50-page shareholder contract he did not understand, then spent two years trying and failing to convince a CFO and CEO to give employees ownership, only to watch those employees miss out when the company was sold. That experience became Cake Equity, and it shaped a philosophy about what equity can do when it actually works.
What we covered
- Cake Equity lets founders set up employee option plans with a single click. The engine handles vesting updates automatically, and employees log in to see their ownership stake and watch its value move as the company hits its OKRs, with valuation set at a simple 10x ARR so the math is transparent to everyone.
- The most dangerous equity mistake founders make is skipping the one-year cliff. Without it, an employee who leaves after six months walks away with options, creating what Kim calls “dead equity”, and cleaning that up with lawyers is expensive and time-consuming.
- Kim believes equity works best when it creates mini founders: team members who think about the company’s success as their own, adapt faster to market shifts, and stay committed through the long grind that most startups actually are, not the shooting-star version people read about on LinkedIn.
- On hiring, Kim argues that attitude and the ability to learn now matter ten times more than specific technical skills, because AI tools have changed what skills are even required. He looks for people who are “hungry and humble” and assesses not just where someone is, but how far they’ve come from where they started, a lens he borrows from Adam Grant’s work on hidden potential.
- Kim described a detailed personal health system he calls Creative Healthy Lifestyle, built on data from a Whoop device, a smart scale, activity tracking across surfing and mountain biking, daily self-assessments of presence and calmness, and deep blood tests, all synthesized with AI. He said he now feels “a hundred or a thousand times more intelligent” about his health than a reactive doctor visit would allow.
- On AI and software development, Kim’s approach is to resist “pumping as much information into a gigantic prompt” and instead build structured markdown files that codify every decision rule in his head, an externalized brain that steers LLMs with precision. He was emphatic that humans should not ask AI for advice or offload intelligence to it, only use it to synthesize information so they can make higher-quality decisions themselves.
About Kim
Kim Hansen is the CEO and co-founder of Cake Equity, a platform that simplifies equity management for global startups. Before Cake, he grew a tech and startup incubation agency to 60 employees, working with clients including Google, Samsung, Roche, and Fairphone.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimhansencake
- Website: http://cakeequity.com
Episode 131 of the PreVetted Podcast.