Every line on your cap table is a promise. Most founders don’t know what they’ve signed.
Andy Walsh sat down with Joris Delanoue, founder of Fairmint, to unpack why equity, the core of startup ownership, is still managed through systems built for a different era, and why that matters more now than ever.
The central tension: companies are staying private longer, secondary markets are growing fast, and the infrastructure holding it all together is, in many cases, still a spreadsheet.
Joris has spent two decades on both sides of this, as a founder frustrated by the cost and complexity of bringing people onto his cap table, and as an angel investor watching his capital sit trapped in paper with no clear path to liquidity. That frustration became Fairmint.
This episode goes deep on what a cap table actually is, what it costs when it’s mismanaged, and what programmable equity infrastructure looks like when it’s built correctly from day one.
Topics covered:
Why cap tables are still broken and what it actually costs founders to manage them badly
The standardization movement that changed early fundraising, and why it hasn’t gone far enough
How blockchain turns equity from a static record into a programmable, transferable asset
The secondary market, who it serves, how it works, and why most founders aren’t set up to benefit from it
Why liquidity is infrastructure, not an exit event
What founders building right now should do differently before the complexity compounds
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
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Founder and operator with over two decades of experience building and scaling companies across tech and finance. Co-founder and CEO of Fairmint, a platform rethinking how companies raise capital and manage equity, using software and blockchain to modernize the cap table from incorporation to IPO. Previously founded and exited Nexteem. He now focuses on simplifying capital markets and reducing friction for founders.
Andy Walsh
2× exited founder, advisor, board member, and host of Startups Decoded (500,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).
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Web: startupsdecoded.com
Music Credit
“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)
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