Pulley vs. Carta: Production Points Are Not Company Equity

Backend points, a share of a specific production's profit, are a contractual right tied to one project's revenue and costs. Company equity is ownership in the studio itself, with rights that extend well beyond any single production. A producer can reasonably hold one without the other, or both, but the terms of each need to be documented separately.

The most common failure is a founder promising points on a show and equity in the studio in the same sentence, without ever writing down which is which. The producer walks away believing they have more, or different, upside than what actually gets formalized later.

Say a founder tells a producer, over a celebratory dinner after a show gets picked up, that they will get a piece of the profit and a piece of the company. Six months later only the points agreement gets drafted, because that is the one tied to a specific, trackable revenue event. The equity promise quietly disappears, not out of bad faith, but because nothing forced it to become a real document the way the points agreement did.

Neither Pulley nor Carta tracks backend points on individual productions. That belongs in each production's own profit participation agreement and its own accounting, tied to that show's revenue and costs. What both platforms do track is company-level equity: real stock, options, or a phantom plan tied to the studio's overall performance.

If your studio's biggest administrative headache is reconciling points across a dozen active productions, a cap table platform will not solve that. It solves the separate, narrower problem of who owns the studio itself.

Pulley can be a reasonable fit for a studio that is a single entity with a small group of owners and wants to issue equity or options to key producers and executives, alongside a current 409A valuation.

It has no role in tracking production-level points, so if that is the primary thing driving your team's compensation conversations, expect to manage it entirely outside whichever cap table tool you choose.

For a young studio with one or two founders and a handful of equity holders, this narrower scope tends to be the right amount of tool. The bigger administrative lift at this stage is usually getting points agreements written down consistently, not managing a complex cap table.

Carta becomes more useful once a studio has raised outside capital from a media-focused fund that expects institutional reporting, or once it wants to let an early producer sell part of a vested equity stake for cash before any acquisition talks begin.

For a studio still funding productions mostly through its own revenue and a small ownership group, this is more infrastructure than the company needs yet.

Revisit the choice once a fund investor actually enters the picture, rather than switching preemptively. Moving an existing cap table between platforms is a manageable project, not a reason to over-provision before the need is real.

For every producer or executive who has been promised upside, write down separately whether it was points on a specific production, company equity, or both, and get each one into its own written agreement. A profit participation agreement for points, a grant agreement for equity.

Only the equity side goes into Pulley or Carta. The points side stays in your production accounting, tracked against that show's actual performance, and reviewed the same way you would review any other production cost.

Where a producer holds points on several active productions at once, keep a simple running summary of which shows, what percentage on each, and how those points are calculated, since net profit definitions vary and a producer who assumes a simple revenue share will be surprised by deductions they never agreed to see.

Sort each promise into the right document with these steps:

• Record backend points in a profit participation agreement tied to one production's revenue and costs, tracked in that show's own accounting.
• Record company equity in a grant agreement, since ownership in the studio extends well beyond any single production.
• Enter only the equity side into Pulley or Carta, and keep production points out of the cap table.
• Write down separately, for each producer or executive, whether the promise was points, equity, or both.
• Consider a phantom plan tied to overall studio performance when you want to share upside without issuing stock.