How to export everything from Pulley before December 8

Pulley shuts down on December 8, 2026. After that the application is inaccessible, and your data is available “in a limited format” through the app only until January 31, 2027.

Pulley does not define what “limited format” contains. That single unanswered question is the whole reason to do this now: you cannot plan a migration around a format nobody has described. This is the checklist, and it takes an afternoon.

The deadlines, in order

Date	What it means for your data
November 30, 2026	Last day to opt in to the Carta migration offer, if you want it.
December 8, 2026	The app goes away. Self-service export ends here.
January 31, 2027	“Limited format” access ends. Undefined scope — do not rely on it.

If you are moving to Carta, Pulley describes a direct migration with “no lift required”, and Carta does the work. Export anyway. A migration you cannot audit is not a migration, and your own copy is the only version that survives both companies’ decisions.

If you are moving anywhere else, Pulley is explicit: it is “unable to assist a migration to a different provider in any capacity.” Everything below is yours to run.

What to export

Work top to bottom. Save everything into one dated folder — pulley-export-2026-10 — with a subfolder per section.

1. The holder ledger

Every shareholder, every security, every certificate. You want columns for holder name, security type, class, share count, issue date, certificate or grant number, price paid and any transfer history. CSV, not PDF, wherever the option exists — you will need to sort and total this later.

2. Every grant, with its full vesting schedule

This is the part people get wrong, because a grant summary is not a grant. For each option, RSU or SAR you need:

• Grant date, board approval date and, if different, the date vesting starts
• Total quantity, strike price and the 409A it was priced off
• The complete vesting schedule — cliff, frequency, total duration, and the vested quantity as of the export date
• Post-termination exercise window
• Exercise history, including partial exercises
• Cancellation or forfeiture records for anyone who has left

A vesting schedule that arrives at the new provider as “4 years, 1 year cliff” loses every non-standard grant you ever made — the advisor on a two-year schedule, the founder with a back-dated start date, the employee whose cliff was waived. Those are exactly the grants that cause disputes.

3. Valuation reports

Download every 409A report, not just the current one. They are PDFs you already paid for, they establish the strike price of every grant priced off them, and they are the first thing a diligence process asks for. The same goes for any board-approved fair-market-value determinations.

4. Signed corporate documents

• Board consents and written approvals for every grant and issuance
• Stock purchase agreements and option grant agreements
• The equity incentive plan document and every amendment, including pool increases
• Stockholder consents and voting agreements
• SAFEs and convertible notes, with caps, discounts and whether they are pre- or post-money
• 83(b) elections and their filing proof
• Form 3921 filings, if you have issued ISOs

5. Anything in the data room

Whatever you uploaded, download. Data rooms are where the documents nobody indexed end up, and they are the first thing to vanish.

The four numbers that prove it worked

Before you leave, write these down from Pulley. After the import, produce the same four from the new system. They must agree exactly.

Control total	Where it comes from
Shares outstanding	Issued and held by someone today — the denominator for ownership
Fully diluted shares	Outstanding plus all options, warrants and the unissued pool
Total pool authorised	Whatever the plan document, as amended, says
Pool remaining	Authorised, minus granted-and-outstanding, minus exercised

If those four terms are not second nature, read that first — reconciling numbers you cannot define is how migrations go wrong quietly.

Two of them fail far more often than the others. Pool remaining breaks because forfeited options may or may not return to the pool depending on your plan’s language, and the two systems may assume differently. Fully diluted breaks because SAFEs and notes are not shares yet, and every platform makes its own choice about whether to show them.

If a number disagrees, do not adjust it to match. Find out which system is right, using the signed documents you just exported.

Then spot-check three grants

Control totals can agree while individual records are wrong — two errors cancelling out is not a rare event in a cap table. So pull three grants by hand and check them line by line against their original signed letters:

1. The oldest grant on the table. Old records carry the most migration scars.
2. A grant with a non-standard schedule. An advisor, a part-time hire, a waived cliff, a back-dated start.
3. A grant belonging to someone who has left. Post-termination windows and forfeiture are where systems disagree most.

For each, verify quantity, strike, grant date, vesting start, cliff, vested-to-date and exercise history. If the vested quantity is off by even a few shares, the vesting engine is interpreting your schedule differently — find out why before anyone exercises against it.

A worked reconciliation

Numbers make this concrete. Take a company with 10,000,000 authorised shares:

Line	Shares
Founders, common	7,200,000
Seed investors, preferred	1,300,000
Options granted and outstanding	620,000
Options exercised (now common)	80,000
Pool authorised	1,000,000

The four control totals fall out of that:

• Shares outstanding = 7,200,000 + 1,300,000 + 80,000 exercised = 8,580,000. Outstanding counts shares that exist. An unexercised option is not a share.
• Fully diluted = 8,580,000 + 620,000 outstanding options + 300,000 unissued pool = 9,500,000.
• Pool authorised = 1,000,000, from the plan document as amended.
• Pool remaining = 1,000,000 − 620,000 granted − 80,000 exercised = 300,000.

Now the failure mode. Suppose an employee with 40,000 unvested options left in March and your plan returns forfeited shares to the pool. Pool remaining should be 340,000, and fully diluted should be unchanged at 9,500,000 — the 40,000 simply moved from “granted” to “available”.

If the new platform shows pool remaining of 300,000, it has not processed the forfeiture. If it shows fully diluted of 9,540,000, it has double-counted those shares as both granted and available. Either way the error is 40,000 shares, which is 0.4% of the company, which is a real number in a term sheet negotiation.

That is why you write the four totals down before you migrate. Without the “before” figures, the “after” figures look perfectly reasonable.

A one-week plan

You do not need a project manager for this. You need three sittings.

Sitting one — export (2 hours). Work the list above top to bottom, one folder per section. Do not evaluate anything, do not reconcile anything, just get the files off the platform while it exists.

Sitting two — control totals (30 minutes). Write down the four numbers, dated, in the README.txt. Open the plan document and confirm the authorised pool figure matches what the platform claims, including every amendment. This is the single highest-value half hour in the whole exercise.

Sitting three — spot-checks (1 hour). The three grants, line by line, against the signed letters. If all three agree, stop; you have enough assurance to proceed. If one disagrees, check five more before you trust anything.

Then migrate, and repeat sittings two and three on the new system. Same numbers, same grants. Twenty minutes, and it converts “the import seemed to work” into something you could show a diligence team.

If an export option is missing

Some objects are easier to read than to extract. In order of preference:

1. CSV or Excel export, wherever offered — always prefer this over PDF.
2. A report or print-to-PDF of any screen you cannot export, especially individual grant detail pages showing the vesting schedule.
3. Screenshots, dated, as a last resort. Ugly, and vastly better than nothing on February 1.

A screenshot of a vesting schedule is not a data format, but it is admissible evidence of what the system said on the day you left. Take them for anything unusual.

Where to keep it

Not in the same place as your old logins. A migration is exactly when access changes hands.

• One copy in company cloud storage, in a folder your board and counsel can reach
• One copy with your law firm, who almost certainly holds the signed originals anyway
• A README.txt at the top: what was exported, from where, on what date, and the four control totals as of that date

That last file takes two minutes and is the thing that makes the archive usable by someone who is not you, two years from now, under diligence pressure.

If you have already passed December 8

Use the limited-access window immediately — whatever it contains is more than nothing, and it ends January 31, 2027.

Then reconstruct from sources that never depended on Pulley. Your counsel’s files are usually the most complete: signed board consents, stock purchase agreements, the plan document and its amendments, executed SAFEs, and the 409A reports the valuation firm also holds. Between counsel’s document set and your own signed PDFs, a cap table can be rebuilt — it is tedious, and it is not lost.

The general version of this lesson applies to whichever platform you choose next: run an export the week you sign up, not the week you leave. The self-audit is worth running against the first export you take, because errors found on a quiet Tuesday cost nothing, and the same errors found during diligence cost a great deal.

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Where we fit, honestly: ESOP.fyi opens its first cohort in Q4 2026, after Pulley goes dark, so we are not your migration target this quarter. Export anyway, move where you need to, and join the waitlist if you want one email when we open.