Transforming Private Equity With Blockchain Rails – Joris Delanoue.

Episode Overview

Joris Delanoue is the co-founder and CEO of Fairmint, a pioneering platform that is reimagining how startups issue, manage, and distribute equity in the digital age. With a deep belief in the power of decentralization and transparency, Joris has led Fairmint in developing blockchain-native infrastructure that replaces outdated cap tables—traditionally static documents locked in PDFs or legacy SaaS platforms—with dynamic, programmable smart contracts. This shift empowers founders to seamlessly tokenize company shares, automate legal and compliance processes, and unlock new forms of liquidity for investors and contributors alike.

Joris brings a strong entrepreneurial background and firsthand experience with the operational pain points of private equity. Before launching Fairmint, he co-founded multiple companies, giving him a comprehensive understanding of the financial and regulatory hurdles startups face. He has used this insight to build a platform that doesn’t just digitize existing processes, but fundamentally transforms them. Under his leadership, Fairmint has helped lead the charge for industry-wide standards like the Open Cap Table Format (OCF) and has become a respected name among innovators in fintech, blockchain, and equity management.

Joris is deeply committed to building infrastructure that enables community ownership, democratizes access to investment opportunities, and fosters a more open and inclusive financial system. His work is grounded in the belief that the next generation of successful companies will be those that are transparent by design, resilient through regulation, and powered by technology that puts ownership in the hands of people—not intermediaries.

Episode Transcript

Joris Delanoue: There is a rush right now, like all those actors players in the financial world. Yeah, they are all now considering using blockchain. And of course, if you come to them with, you know, a brick, a layer that is heavily regulated, fully compliant and already working, then for them, it’s like a very interesting track. You know, like, , okay, these guys, they know how to do that. They are already a sec. Registered transfer agent. Let’s use their service and see how it goes.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there. Welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is  Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for joining me today. Private equity today is stuck locked inside PDFs, static databases, and outdated workflows that haven’t evolved with the internet. Joris Delanoue, co-founder and CEO of Fairmint, thinks it’s time to unfreeze it. This company is reimagining how startups raise capital and share ownership by putting equity on chains, turning cap tables into smart contracts, and creating new paths to liquidity for founders, investors and even communities. Today, we’re going to talk about how old fundraising models don’t work anymore, how Fairmint’s tech quietly solves the UX problems that have plagued crypto, and why resilience is the most important trait for any founding team. So please welcome Joris Delano. Why do you believe that the current private equity market is broken?

Joris Delanoue: Well, it is fundamentally broken because when you think of this market, you have now over 6 trillion in equity that is trapped in static PDFs, spreadsheets, private databases of SaaS that charge thousands of dollars every year to process those data. And the reality is founders have a fatigue with this type of SaaS. Lawyers are sometimes really, uh, feeling a huge friction when they need to go back to, you know, to, uh, sending email, waiting for a PDF to be signed and for, uh, then settling a movement. And finally, investors are the ones that now feel that there is no path for liquidity. There are less and less companies going IPO. So for them it started to be a bit hard, you know, to invest thinking, okay, maybe it will be five years, seven years, ten years. But actually what is the real path. So yeah it’s broken because of that. Like we need to offer equity to a new rail so that it can move easily, especially at the internet era. And we saw it on many other markets, you know, like, uh, the, the stablecoins is probably the best use case for what we call the real world assets. I think it’s time now for equity to have these rails that make it move faster.

Kevin Rosenquist: And how does Fairmint kind of change the dynamic between startups and their investors?

Joris Delanoue: Well, so first of all, Fairmint start to be a company that has lots of experience. And of course, we saw all the waves that came in the crypto industry. You know, I remember the ICOs, the the NFT craze, the, uh, social token governance token.

Kevin Rosenquist: Remember how high those bored apes got?

Joris Delanoue: Yeah. Well, the thing is, that is a lot of the stuff. We’re cool and offered a lot of data point. But at the same time, when the thing started to be extremely hard, like, , it’s security, you need to deal with a regulation, that’s where basically a lot of the people either dropped or tried to find shortcuts. And at Fairmint we kept grinding, okay. We kept grinding so much that, uh, yeah, because we believe since day one. I remember my first chat with my co-founder Thibault, that I say hi, by the way. And yeah, it was 2018 and I remember how clear and obvious to us it was to bring private equity companies that are private and all their share convertible note and all on chain. And finally it’s coming. It’s coming. So the way Furmint processed, that is pretty simple in like we decided to go from the basic, which is the cap table. And so the cap table is the source of truth. It’s where, you know, you incorporate your company. The first thing that you do will be to define how many authorized shares you will have to split the commands among the founding team and maybe the first employees. And then you will start to onboard investors, uh, by, uh, fundraising. And so we decided to not just say, hey, let’s take the share when they exist for years, and we turn that into a token, or we wrap it, or we do a synthetic asset and then we promote that on any crypto and blockchain. At Fairmint we decided to say, no,we need to go from the source of truth. So we turn the cap table itself into a smart contract or a series of smart contract. And by doing that, we are literally offering the entire stack to leave Unchained. And we give back a lot of power, I think, to founders, to investors, to lawyers, because from a day to another, everything is easy to move.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s really cool. You know, we talked a little bit before we hit record about how you guys have changed so much in the past. As you said, you’ve been around for seven years. You focus and all that. I mean, it’s crazy, like, you know, to your point about when you said that, you know, all these bigs up and up and downs and crypto and all these this craziness and all that. What has been the biggest change that has forced you guys to pivot or change how you look at your business.

Joris Delanoue: Well, I like to say that the reason pivoting. We matured.

Kevin Rosenquist: Matured. Yeah.

Joris Delanoue: And and, uh, mostly because we never really change our goal and mission. We still want to do pretty much the same as day one. I think there was two things like, uh, the first iteration, we were eating the moat of compatible software, uh, big SaaS companies that were literally rejecting any idea of integrating what we were doing. And I think what was absolutely instrumental, uh, in making what we do possible, was the day a group of, uh, US securities law firm, like the top tier law firm decided to break the moat of those, uh, big players by creating an open source startup for cap table, because that day we were not, like, in our silo, all doing our own cap table mechanism. No, we were literally working on the same standard, talking the same language. Whatever the solution that a company would use for its cap table. Now we have the, uh, the same language. It’s called OCF for open cap table format. And we are a group of basically 35 industry players that came up with this format. And we took this format. We put it on chain and we turn it into a protocol, making it even more immutable, uh, easy to track, way more transparent. So in a way, yeah, I think I think this coalition and the work that has been done with the coalition was absolutely key.

Joris Delanoue: And it also offers something very interesting in our market, which is commoditization. Like I remember 15 years ago, you know, creating a company was expensive. Then stripe arrived with Atlas and said, now incorporation is 500 bucks. Fundraising was expensive. You know, you were doing a save. Yeah. And you were paying $5,000, $8,000. And now it’s literally free when you want to do it safe. Uh, series A prices are also going down, but cap table. Well, since more than ten years now, you were paying nonstop for something that you barely used. You know, you are a founder. You don’t use that so often. And so I think that’s very interesting to imagine this market moving to uh, yeah. The commoditization pass. And with Fairmint, by leveraging the DLT, the blockchain technology, we basically have an offer to our customer with cap table as a simple feature. Hey, this is the commodity. This is part of the flows. You need it. We build it for you so that you have it. Uh, day one. And you can literally control all your data control and manage all your investors. And I think that that’s what we’re missing. Like, uh, dropping the price and making it very accessible to everyone.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you see a future where community stakeholders like users and fans can own meaningful equity in the platforms they help grow.

Joris Delanoue: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think community ownership was really one of the big stuff when we started Fairmint, and we had a lot of people supporting us for that, and we ate our own dog food. Fairmint today has a lot of, uh, people supporting us for a long time. And I think it’s fantastic. I think what the main issue was, if adding a new investor is expensive, then you want to make sure that the one that you integrate to your cap table will invest a large amount. The moment that you start dropping those costs to almost nothing, yes, it makes total sense to let more people access it and to access that, uh, the type of companies you have two ways. Either it’s you do what I call general solicitation. So that’s different exemptions that you have in the States. Uh, Reg D 560 uh reg CF but you can also imagine a way, a path where going on chain offer a way faster path for a more public company without falling into the IPO craze. And, and, you know, like the heavy cost of the EV intermediated, uh, rail. The moment that you go on chain as a founder, as a board, you get an opportunity to offer a way faster path to liquidity. And by saying that a faster access to all the retail people to, uh, get a stake in the company, uh, that they want to support. So, yes, I think I think it’s big and I think it’s one of the crypto theses, you know.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you feel like because you’re talking about the rise of on chain companies versus traditional rails, the private rails, do you see do you think this will continue this trajectory?

Joris Delanoue: Yeah, I think I think it just starts.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s just starting. Yeah.

Speaker3: Yeah, yeah I think I think the.

Joris Delanoue: There is something that happens right now in the States is, is pretty unexpected. Like during years for regulated agent people in Wall Street. It was it was tough to conceive working on chain okay. Because of the reputational risk that came with it. You didn’t want to have a subpoena from the SEC because you do a proof of concept or things. And I think this reputational risk is gone, totally gone. And there is a rush right now, like all those actors, players, uh, in the financial world. Yeah, they are all now considering using blockchain. And of course, if you come to them with, you know, a brick, uh, a layer that is heavily regulated, uh, fully compliant and already working then for them, it’s like a very interesting track, you know, like, , okay. These guys, they know how to do that. They are already a sec. Registered transfer agent. Let’s use their service and see how it goes. And then we will start to see more and more players, large players coming on chain.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Because I’ve talked to other people about that before. It seems like those large players are resistant to changing to getting off those traditional rails and, and going to the blockchain. Why do you think that is? Is it just fear? Is it is it if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? Or what is the reason that they don’t want to move faster on it.

Joris Delanoue: Well I think they were really scared by the previous SEC and administration. I think it’s gone. I think right now they are more ready to take risk. And that I want to echo the speech of Esther Pierce, uh, from yesterday, uh, I mean, from May 8th, I don’t know. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, because she’s literally creating a crypto task force. Okay. And she’s conceiving a whole sandbox where there will be room for innovation, where events won’t be, you know, trusting everything, and they will be finally able to embrace innovation. , I think it’s fantastic. During years, I heard everyone living in the US telling us, , guys, why are you doing that in the US? It’s crazy. You imagine the regulation, the risk. And I was like, no, no, no, I think there is a path. You can respect the law. And anyway, at one point the industry would be, , so obvious to the rest of the world that the regulator will start, you know, offer clarity. And that’s that’s happening now. , and it goes fast. Like, literally in the last couple of months, we started to see a huge trend changing with all those players that were reluctant before coming to us saying, hey, we want to do this, we want to do that. How can we leverage your technology? And that is new. That is new. And I think it’s definitely, uh, due to the fact that it is at the intersection of crypto and clearing agency. Transfer agent. Today there is a regulatory pass coming.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I’ve heard several other people obviously say that the previous administration here in this country was sort of anti crypto anti blockchain. Do you think that’s a fair assessment? And just I don’t want to get political. But why do you think that was.

Joris Delanoue: Well I think there was two things. One a misunderstanding of where this industry is going. The responsibility is uh, you know, it’s not black and white. Everything is gray here like the industry did a lot of mistakes. Okay? There was a lot of scam when I mentioned, you know, all the crazy waves. I mean, a lot of people made a lot of money, but at the same time, a lot of other people lost everything, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Especially when you hear about the, the, the Silicon Valley bank and, uh, the FTX and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Joris Delanoue: And that are the most known. But I can. I can give you everyday small stories of people who lost everything from a day to another one. So I think, I think ultimately the regulator was trying to protect people. But without listening to the one that we’re trying to leverage the blockchain to build something strong, powerful, and that would serve the investors properly while protecting them.

Kevin Rosenquist: So we’ll leave it to the government to overreact and go big instead of focusing on the true fraud and the true bad actors. Don’t shut down an entire industry just because of that. Yeah, yeah.

Joris Delanoue: Yeah, exactly. And I think it was more like they were passive. They were not trying to be proactive. So they were like, okay, we’ll wait and see where things are going. In the meantime, we just enforce what we consider is the law. Uh, and if the Parliament wants to change the law, then they can change the law. And so what? What I see is different and same. I’m not into politics. I think being an entrepreneur is way more important. And you can change the world by being an entrepreneur every day. But basically, yeah, my vision is today there is not anymore this fear of the industry. There is more like maybe that can be one of the, you know, like economic revolution that exists. We can literally change the rails of the financial world. And I think it’s a smart approach to just try to offer clarity, to consider a sandbox. I mean, many regulators in the world did that, but the SEC is probably the biggest regulation with the biggest market today. And it was very important that they would signal the entire industry like, hey, America is open for business. Hey, we are ready to welcome any crypto builder in the world to build here onshore us. And during four years, yeah, I’ve been seeing people, like moving all their assets offshore, trying to avoid the US as much as possible, finding any loophole as possible. And now they are all like they receive requests from the LPs or anyone in their industry saying, can you bring back your stuff onshore?

Kevin Rosenquist: Back.

Joris Delanoue: Exactly. So it’s fantastic because when they come back, the first thing they do is they make a Delaware C Corp. They try to go through, you know, the players that are here for a long time and that know how to do their stuff, and they come to see it. So it’s fantastic.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s great. That’s great. You know, I’ve made this joke on the show before, like when I talk to someone like my dad about crypto and blockchain. I mean, you know, he’ll be like, , so what are you doing these days? Who are you interviewing? And I’ll tell him about that stuff. And it’s just blank stare, you know? I mean, it’s. And do you feel like, like, does the general public need to be on board? Do they need to understand it, or is it more like all of this has to happen in the background, make it user friendly and they don’t even know the difference. How important is it for the general public to understand it?

Joris Delanoue: I think crypto. Crypto had a UX issue and they add to the entire industry had to solve this UX issue.

Joris Delanoue: I see it changing fast like companies like Privy are doing fantastic job to make it easy, smooth.

Kevin Rosenquist: Even wallets, even wallets like make more sense now. They don’t look so cumbersome and strange.

Joris Delanoue: Yeah. The moment that you can sign up with your Gmail, you know, like it’s like any other web2 style. So if you are able to bridge crypto with the web2 habits, then you are literally opening the game to millions of people, hundreds of millions of people. And this is where we have to go, because the crypto rails will be used. If everyone can be on crypto rails and you need to focus not on the tech, but on the value that you offer to users. And you know, when I started studied Fairmint. I remember very well when my co-founder started to talk to me about the blockchain technology, and I was like, I was at that time I was building an exchange for startups using Spvs. And so I was literally deep into all the regulation and seeing everything coming. And I was very intrigued by how we could leverage this blockchain technology, the DLT, to literally offer new rails. And a good parallel to that is the cloud. So I don’t know if you remember Kevin, but in the in 2007 eight, when the cloud started to be something uh, that’s when, by the way, I decided to create my second company at that time, after discovering the cloud and and during seven years I’ve been, I’ve been building in the cloud. But I remember the first year no one wanted to hear about the cloud.

Kevin Rosenquist: No, everyone was scared of it.

Joris Delanoue: Yeah, exactly. And that was the moment where you had people saying, , we are a cloud company or a SaaS company. And it was just the beginning. But when you were looking at the real value for users, it was so obvious, so clear that you would turn a super high cost day one upfront to a monthly recurring fee. Manageable.

Kevin Rosenquist: Manageable number.

Joris Delanoue: Exactly.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

Joris Delanoue: And and for the user, it was like, , finally, I can have something, you know, that I consent, I stop. I don’t need that anymore. I didn’t spend all my money on this software. Right. And so it was a game changer. , a rail for the entire it. I think blockchain is the same right now. And it takes time. It took time because of the scammy, uh, world of crypto. It took time also because a lot of people, you know, are scared. They are the incbents. They are the intermediaries that live in this world, uh, of finance. And from a day to another one, you are literally replacing them by the blockchain that automate things. Like when before you, you needed multiple intermediaries Trees and a track of record that was literally done manually or semi manually. Well, now everything is at light speed happening on chain. Very easy to monitor. And so you could intermediary. So of course a lot of the people in this industry were like let’s let’s wait.  look that’s scammy. Let’s not touch this tech. I think we are. After that, it’s gone. It’s, uh, everyone now, , that I chat with, whether they are in the banking industry, uh, trading industry, uh, they are all considering blockchain as the new rail.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, they’re paying attention and they’re and they’re they’re taking it seriously.

Joris Delanoue: Yeah, yeah. And and when you remove the reputational risk with the right regulation or the right administration, then you also offer a huge opportunity for the market to grow. And I think we are exactly at this moment.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty, pretty fair assessment. You know, I’m curious how many companies are now for free.

Joris Delanoue: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, uh. It’s my third one. Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: Third one. Okay. Gotcha. Do you consider yourself a serial entrepreneur? Are you. Are you going to just keep going? Are you going?

Joris Delanoue: I don’t know. You know, I like. What I know is that if you want to change the world, there are not many ways to do it. And at one point, you need to focus on a mission, decide that you will make it happen, and then it’s a matter of resilience, you know. So yeah, I think I don’t know if I have a the serial entrepreneur title yet or not. Uh, what matters to me is more like, how can I make sure that the mission that, uh, keep me awake at night will be delivered?

Kevin Rosenquist: What do you think as far as, like, what you’ve seen in the fintech world and new companies that come out, what do founders get wrong at the get go at the start that you think that they could fix that would make them much more successful?

Joris Delanoue: So I would answer two ways. So there is the han component, like the founder himself. Uh, will he be successful, him or not? Or there is the company then. And if I think about the company itself, I think what’s key is to have the right funding team. Like, uh, you need to make sure that the funding team is strong enough, can go through the highs and lows of, you know, entrepreneurship can be resilient enough, because when you launch a small SaaS today, you know, and, uh, you get traction fast and all it’s it’s a pretty, I would say, easy path. Of course, you have your own challenges and all when you start to tap into fintech today. Well, most of the time you eat the compliance game and you need to be ready for that. A lot of the people that dropped was mostly because of the compliance, and I think it’s not a matter of how much money you raise. It’s a matter of like how much, how ready you are to deal with specifications that are designed by a regulator. And interesting.

Kevin Rosenquist: So Interesting. So you think compliance might is one of the biggest roadblocks for people?

Joris Delanoue: Yeah, I think it’s the mode that you can build literally, if you have the expertise, if you’re able to turn that into code and you are able to program that well. Like honestly at the end, yeah, you get a high chance to get the mode that a lot of people won’t be able to build, but it requires to be resilient. Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: Resilience.

Joris Delanoue: Resilience is probably one of the main like characteristics that you want to have when you are an entrepreneur.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I think that’s that’s good I like that. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. The company is Fairmint and I really appreciate your time. This was great.

Joris Delanoue: Thank you Kevin.