When a startup founder looking to raise funds joins a Zoom with Fairmint co-founder Joris Delanoue, the video launches and they find themselves looking at Joris… sitting on the deck of a spaceship. All of a sudden, a jaunty little astronaut floats by, right about when the audio kicks in.
If the founder asks, they’ll find out that the astronaut represents Joris’s co-founder, Thibauld Favre, navigating at the bleeding edge of the tech & crypto space to deliver on Fairmint’s promise to enable startups–or any company, really–to raise money from anyone, while staying in total control of the process. And while Joris’s Zoom background could make it seem like a moonshot, they’ve got their feet planted solidly on the ground.
Thibauld, Joris and the rest of the team have made it so easy that all you’ll see on that new, favorite company’s website is a button:
(And yes, there’ll be more information coming after you click 😉 But to start, if you love a company and think it’s going to grow, that button’s all you need.)
Their obsession with getting the complicated and behind-closed-doors task of fundraising down to a single button comes from their entrepreneurial backgrounds. They’ve built companies with VC money, bootstrapped up to $100M in revenues, and have been engaged with the crypto-world since before most people had ever even heard of a Shiba Inu.
That’s what let them see how crypto could be used to create fully programmable equity and invent whole new ways of investing.
Since founding Fairmint in late 2018, Thibauld and Joris have functioned as co-CEOs (another thing that traditional investors would probably say doesn’t work ;). But it fits their long-standing friendship and, most importantly, their strengths within the business:
- Thibauld articulates Fairmint’s vision with investors and makes sure the product aligns with that vision by leveraging his software engineering skills combined with knowledge and experience in crypto.
- Joris focuses on marketing, sales and recruiting. His proven business sense and experience combined with his unparalleled ability to understand customers make him the guardian of Fairmint’s value proposition, marketing positioning and sales strategy.
It all works because of their shared goals:
The vast majority of startup investing as it exists today is a closed game — most people simply can’t access the private markets where shares in hot startups can be acquired. Technology, regulations, and even tradition have combined to maintain the status quo. So while early users often take risks with the product itself, fueling the startup via their usage, data, feedback, reviews, and money, they’re not usually able to benefit from any financial upside as the company grows.
This hurts founders as well, as they aren’t able to fully leverage what is often their best asset–early adopters who absolutely love their product. Instead, they search for the rhythm of the VC dance, trying to conquer a new audience that isn’t necessarily aligned with where a company, its community, and its founders want to go.
Lately, calls to reform capitalism have only grown in both volume and number. The situation in startup investing reveals one problem in the status quo: a world where larger and larger portions of value added into the system go to a select few, those who can access closed deals at the best valuations for the hottest startups.
Fairmint’s run toward the stars began with the conviction that today, a couple of founders really can design a new way forward, building solutions to problems felt by both founders and their loyal customers.
Want to climb onto the launch pad leading to a better world of stakeholder capitalism? Be the first to know when Fairmint’s newest equity-sharing product goes live.
