I recently came across a great blog for start-ups and venture capital companies, called Altgate. It’s written by Furqan Nazeeri, who is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Softbank Capital of Newton, MA. He talks about “Startups, Venture Capital & Everything In Between.” His short articles are practical, useful and easy to read. I’m a big fan, not because he recommends our software, but because if you’re someone like me, a CEO or CFO or an entrepreneurial, high-tech company with very little time, you will find it useful.

Furqan helps Softbank evaluate and source investment opportunities, works with Softbank portfolio companies, has been a key person in a number of startups, and is continually searching for the next opportunity. In the process of researching equity compensation for startups, he came across Two Step’s Equity Focus stock option management software.

He was so intrigued by the product claims of being an easier way to manage options and create capitalization tables that he called Two Step and asked for a demonstration. His opinion: “I was very impressed. In the past I have used shrink wrapped, desktop software to manage options, as well as just Excel files and shared directories. I think Equity Focus is superior to both.”

Here’s his unsolicited review which you can read on his blog.

The solution is delivered as a service like Salesforce.com and provides an easy to use yet very sophisticated tool to create and manage your company’s capitalization table. It allows you to create a comprehensive archive of all the events and related documents that influence your cap table and it provides an audit trail.  The reporting looks very powerful and the pre-built work flow and forms are comprehensive and flexible enough for most startups.

And to boot, it is priced very reasonable – cheap enough, in fact, that every startup should use this tool or one like it from inception.

My unsolicited review of Altgate: Don’t just read his blog. Trust him one step further. Read the blogs he reads. I do.