Blazel

"Don't try to start a company with a cap table on spreadsheets." Zain Jaffer, Founder & CEO, Blazel

At a glance

• Company: Blazel, an AI platform that helps founders and executive teams manage their voice on LinkedIn

• Team: Zain Jaffer (Founder & CEO), Ryan Gaines (Fractional CFO, N6 Finance)

• Before Mantle: Google Sheets and manual CFO templates

• Onboarding time: Under two weeks with concierge onboarding

• Results: 20+ hours saved, $5K+ in direct savings, board-ready cap table in under five minutes

About Blazel

Blazel helps founders and executive teams manage their voice on LinkedIn. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is the top go-to-market channel, but the options for running it well are limited. Agencies are expensive and rarely get an executive's voice right. Blazel built a platform and AI agent that works alongside marketing leaders to make LinkedIn a top-performing channel.

Zain Jaffer is a serial founder who has also spent years on the VC side, which means he has seen the cap table problem from both directions: as the founder maintaining the spreadsheet, and as the investor squinting at it.

The challenge: spreadsheets, lawyers, and six-minute billing increments

Every company Zain started followed the same pattern. The cap table began in Excel, "graduated" to Google Sheets, and eventually hit a wall.

"You struggle with cap table modeling, then you hire a fractional CFO and they have a template, but it's not very dynamic because there are lots of changes happening."

As an investor, Zain saw the other side of the same problem. Requesting a cap table from a portfolio company meant getting CC'd with their law firm.

"These lawyers are billing in increments of six minutes at a time. The founder, who should have been able to just click a button, turns it into investors individually emailing attorneys back and forth. There's a cost to doing things manually. It's not free. Your attorneys aren't a charity."

Blazel had gotten quotes from incumbent cap table platforms and walked away. The fees didn't make sense for a startup, and past experiences had left the team wary. So they stuck with spreadsheets, until one of their lead VCs mentioned Mantle.

Why Mantle

The timing was right. Blazel needed a 409A valuation, and Mantle offered it as part of its Growth plan with startup-friendly pricing. But the team did their homework first, evaluating Pulley, Carta, and others.

"What attracted me to Mantle: a lot more transparency, a lot better customer service. The platform is really sweet too. It's just a very clean, coherent way to visualize my ownership," said Zain.

For a founder navigating SAFEs, convertible notes, and equity raises, modeling mattered most.

"Being able to model - that is so critical for a founder or CEO. And no one's there telling you to do that. Investors just want you to sign a term sheet. Lawyers are happy to review the documents. What's missing is a strategic view of what my ownership is going to look like. That's a question many founders struggle with."

The team knew choosing a challenger over the incumbent carried perceived risk. A cap table platform touches every stakeholder: employees, investors, counsel. But the product gaps they had seen elsewhere, plus a shared investor connection, made the decision.

Onboarding: under two weeks, zero CSV nightmares

Ryan Gaines, Blazel's fractional CFO, has onboarded companies onto cap table platforms before. He knows the failure mode well.

"I've had these nightmares where you have these big CSV files, and you have to put in all these acronyms for what type of vesting schedule they're using, and you get one wrong and it rejects the import."

With Mantle's white glove onboarding, that entire step disappeared.

"This was: drop my agreements into an upload link, and then the Mantle team completely built out the cap table. That white glove service was very differentiated."

End to end, the process took less than two weeks.

The setup even improved Blazel's equity practices. Configuring grant agreements in Mantle surfaced decisions the team hadn't finalized yet, like early exercise terms.

"It forced us to have a conversation about those terms in our template agreement and which employees should get them. It was helpful in establishing our templates, and it made it really easy to customize templates when needed," said Ryan.

Life with Mantle: five-minute board reporting

Today, Blazel's most frequent cap table tasks are issuing option grants for new hires and pulling cap table exports for investor reporting.

Before Mantle, board prep meant a manual scramble to update the cap table for new hires and vesting right before the meeting. Now:

"It takes me less than five minutes to log in, look at the cap table, download it. It's always real-time, up to date. There's nothing that needs to be done to give the report," said Ryan.

Employees noticed too. Grants go out on time, and everyone has transparency into their equity.

The results

Ryan puts the savings at six to eight hours on onboarding alone, plus a few hours every few months on new employee grants. As an hourly contractor, his time is a direct line item for the business.

"Probably at least $5K, maybe more, in time savings."

Advice for founders still on spreadsheets

Ryan's advice targets the biggest myth about switching: "The biggest switching cost is the time investment in getting completely set up in a new system. And the white glove onboarding service took that cost completely out of the equation. It's a lot easier to switch than you might assume. That's something I wish I had known ahead of time."

Zain's advice is the one he wishes he could give his younger self.

"Don't try to start a company with a cap table on spreadsheets. Mantle has great tools, a freemium model, and an amazing team. Why would you do things the old-school way? We're living in a world where everything's being automated. You want a partner that shares the same values."

Ready to get off spreadsheets? Get started with Mantle for free or book a demo.