Pulley is a cap table management company that provides companies with tools to issue, track, and manage equity, workflows to maintain compliance with critical requirements, and in-house services for 409A valuations. Backed by investors like General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and Stripe, Pulley supports thousands of pre-IPO companies and their employees. Doris Zhou, Pulley’s Director of Strategic Finance, manages reporting to critical investors on a quarterly basis (a process that, until recently, lived entirely in email).

Problem

Before Standard Metrics, Pulley’s investor reporting process was fully manual and fragmented across platforms. When a data request came in from an investor, it arrived as a bulleted list via email. Zhou would transcribe the questions into Slack so Pulley’s co-founders could review them and draft a response. This would trigger back and forth discussions via Slack and email both internally and with investors that would take multiple days of iteration before Zhou could submit her final response.

The process was time-consuming. “It was a lot of searching through emails to find the exact chain and exact email with data,” said Zhou.

From the time a data request arrived to the time she received final sign-off from company co-founders and returned an investor request, the process typically took a full week.

Solution

Pulley came to Standard Metrics through one of their investors, who requested their Q4 2025 performance update via the tool.

Set up was easy. When an email invite to the platform arrived ahead of her scheduled onboarding call with the Standard Metrics team, Zhou logged in early and had Pulley’s profile fully configured all on her own.

“The set up process was actually very easy,” said Zhou. “I jumped the gun a bit with it because it was just so seamless. It took me about 10 minutes to set everything up and I was good to go.”

Pulley’s first reporting cycle through Standard Metrics was equally smooth. The questionnaire from their investor was comprehensive but Zhou could only fill out certain fields. Standard Metrics allowed Zhou to submit a returned request without filling in every field and gave Zhou a place to preemptively explain why certain data points were missing via its built-in commentary feature.

“One thing I’m really concerned about in traditional electronic forms is they just refuse to let you submit if you don’t fill out everything,” said Zhou. “But one thing I liked about Standard Metrics is you can leave commentary and you can walk investors through your thinking process as you fill out the form. So after I had submitted with commentary, our investor came back in a day and said, ‘This looks good to us.’”

Two other features stood out. First, Standard Metrics offers a detailed explanation of each metric a company is asked to report on as well as the underlying math of each metric, helping Zhou to eliminate the definitional back-and-forth that used to happen over email. Second, with everything laid out clearly in the platform, Zhou can now share a screenshot of her proposed responses with her co-founders for review via Slack, rather than building a separate PDF for review from scratch herself.

Results

Doris estimates that Standard Metrics saves Pulley roughly three days per reporting cycle:

• 1 day saved on clarifying metric definitions with investors
• 1 day saved on co-founder review (screenshot vs. a manually assembled PDF)
• 1 day saved on the submission and commentary process

Going forward, Pulley is excited to continue to use Standard Metrics to save time and build accuracy in their reporting, to try out features like investor updates, and to have a centralized record of financial reporting over time that anyone on the team can access.