F Share
An F share is a special class of stock that grants a company's founders significantly more voting rights than ordinary shareholders — often ten or even a hundred votes per share instead of one. This allows founders to retain control over their company even after selling off most of their shares in an IPO.
Anyone who buys a share acquires two things: a stake in the company and the right to vote at shareholder meetings. Normally, the rule is: one share, one vote. An F share deliberately breaks this rule. It looks like an ordinary share, but carries a multiple of the voting power — ten, twenty, or even a hundred votes per share are possible. This special class is issued almost exclusively to founders, hence the name: the “F” stands for “Founder.” The rest of the investors then buy so-called A shares with normal voting rights. This way, founders can sell off a large number of shares during an IPO while still retaining the final say in the company.
Why founders insist on this construct
An IPO brings in fresh capital, but also new co-owners. Institutional investors — that is, funds or insurance companies holding enormous blocks of shares — can, in doubt, gather enough votes to replace management. For founders who want to lead their company according to their own long-term vision, this is a serious risk.
F shares eliminate this risk. A founder who still holds ten percent of all shares, but each with tenfold voting power, effectively controls the majority of the votes. They can fend off takeovers, block strategic shifts, and make leadership decisions alone. Critics call this a disenfranchisement of the remaining shareholders. Proponents argue that many successful tech companies were able to think so consistently long-term precisely because of this — since no quarterly pressure from outside dictated strategy.
How the voting-rights gap technically arises
During an IPO, a company sets out several share classes in its articles of association. Class A goes to the general public, while Class B — the actual F shares — remains with the founders. Both classes represent the same economic stake in profits and company value. The difference lies exclusively in the voting rights.
Some articles of association provide for automatic conversion: as soon as a founder sells their F shares, they convert into ordinary A shares. This is meant to prevent the special voting rights from passing to outside buyers who had nothing to do with founding the company. However, there are also structures in which the voting rights can be inherited or transferred — which further fuels criticism over the lack of oversight.
An important distinction from preferred shares: preferred shares often carry no voting rights at all, but offer preferential dividend claims instead. F shares reverse this relationship — maximum voting power, no economic bonus. The two constructs are sometimes confused, but they pursue opposite goals.
F shares at well-known tech companies
The best-known example is Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin took their company public in 2004 with a two-class system. Mark Zuckerberg adopted the same principle at Meta — his share class gives him roughly ten times the voting weight of other shareholders, securing him a permanently stable majority. Snap also went public in 2017 with an even more extreme variant: the publicly traded shares initially carried no voting rights at all.
In German-speaking countries, such structures are rarer, because German stock corporation law long prohibited multiple voting rights. Since a legal reform in 2023, they have once again been permitted in Germany under certain conditions — explicitly to offer technology startups more attractive listing conditions and to curb an exodus to US stock exchanges. As a result, the topic is increasingly appearing in news coverage of German tech IPOs.
For investors, this means: anyone buying shares in such a company should check the articles of association beforehand to see which class they are acquiring — and how much influence they actually have as a result. Returns and say in company matters are deliberately decoupled in F-share structures.