Outsite

Outsite is a global network of coliving spaces and boutique hotels built for people who want to live and work from anywhere. The idea started in 2015, when Emmanuel Guisset, tired of paying San Francisco rent, decided he could just as easily work from a beach house in Santa Cruz and go surfing between meetings. Stijn Beauprez, a software engineer from Belgium, was one of the very first guests. He stayed to help with the website, which eventually led into becoming Outsite's co-founder and CFO.

A decade later, Outsite operates a global network across the US, Latin America, Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, still run largely as a remote company that, in Stijn's words, tries to give its own team the same freedom it sells to its members. Getting there took a mostly angel-funded runway, a handful of pivotal institutional raises, and, until recently, a cap table held together by one very overworked spreadsheet.

The Challenge

Eleven years of angel investors, option grants, and spreadsheet versions

For most of Outsite's history, its cap table lived with outside counsel: the lawyer who handled each funding round kept the master spreadsheet, and the team would email in whenever they needed the latest numbers.

• Version chaos. Multiple copies of the cap table were floating around at once, and it wasn't always clear which one was current. Often the only way to find out was to ask the lawyer directly.

• High stakes for a small mistake. With a large, long tail of angel investors on the cap table, a single miscalculation could meaningfully change what everyone was owed, especially in priced rounds where a batch of SAFEs all had to convert at once.

• Complexity without a system. With over a decade of angel checks and a broad employee option pool, the spreadsheet became difficult to maintain accurately.

• Existing tools felt oversized. Stijn looked at cap table platforms early on, but they were too expensive for what Outsite needed at the time. The cap table includes roughly 100 stakeholders, many of them small angel checks, spread across multiple countries and entities, and platforms that priced by stakeholder count didn't reflect the actual size of the business.

• A previous migration attempt stalled out. A few years earlier, Stijn tried switching to a cap table tool and gave up. The onboarding required mapping the old spreadsheet into a rigid new template by hand, and with a cap table that large, the import became its own project. Attention drifted elsewhere, and the team fell back to the spreadsheet.

The Solution

Free to start, and no spreadsheet mapping required

Stijn came back to the cap table problem, found Mantle, and signed up for its free plan, Mantle Starter. Stijn had Outsite's cap table uploaded and organized within a day, turning years of scattered spreadsheet versions into one working system almost immediately.

• Fast migration, zero cost to start. Stijn uploaded Outsite's existing cap table documents and had the cap table up and running the same day.

• Unlimited stakeholders from day one. Because Mantle doesn’t cap or price around stakeholder count, Outsite's roughly 100 angel investors and option holders weren't a barrier on the free plan, despite the company's relatively lean team size.

• Visibility for employees. Employees could also see their own holdings directly, rather than asking the team for an update.

"With Mantle, I had the feeling it was much simpler. You upload the PDF, Mantle extracts the information, and there's your record."

Upgrading to Essentials as the next round approached

As Outsite's priced round conversations progressed, the team upgraded from Starter to Mantle Essentials to support what came next:

• Modelling the round. With a priced round on the table, Outsite needed to see how existing SAFEs, notes, and accrued interest would convert, and what that meant for every stakeholder's ownership.

• Bringing counsel onto the same platform. Instead of the lawyer maintaining a separate master file, Outsite's law firm got access to work from the same live cap table as the team.

• Keeping other equity work in one place. Option grants, share classes, and board materials all moved into Mantle alongside the cap table itself, rather than staying spread across email threads and drives.

The Results

A single source of truth

• No more "which version is right?" The cap table now lives in one place that the whole team and outside counsel can trust is current.

• Fundraising math without the guesswork. SAFE conversions and dilution scenarios, historically one of the riskiest parts of Outsite's spreadsheet era, are now modelled directly in the platform.

• A plan that grew with the company. Starting on the free Starter plan let Outsite fix its cap table at zero cost, then step up to Essentials exactly when a live round made that necessary, rather than paying for capability it didn't need yet.

Stijn's Advice for Founders

Stijn's advice to early-stage founders: stay investor-ready at all times. That readiness paid off directly during the round: when investors asked for cap table records, ownership breakdowns, and SAFE terms, Stijn could pull up a live, accurate account instead of piecing one together over weeks.

That same instinct applies directly to equity. His guidance for founders setting up ownership and their cap table for the first time:

• Use a tool, not a spreadsheet, from the start. Pre-money and post-money math, SAFE conversions, and multiple share classes are easy to get wrong by hand. A platform means the calculations are already tested.

• Get everyone working from the same source of truth. Onboard your lawyer and anyone else who touches the cap table onto the same platform you use, rather than maintaining parallel copies.

• Model ownership before you formalize it. Stijn has seen companies divide equity into equal thirds, only to hit gridlock later when someone needs final say. Running that scenario in Mantle before signing anything makes it easy to see how different splits play out, rather than discovering the problem after the cap table's already set.

His view: when your books and your cap table are both current, a diligence request becomes a link you send over instead of a three-week scramble.

"The moment you start a company with a few founders, you already have a cap table. Use a tool from day one to make sure you don’t make any mistakes. The only mistake was not putting the cap table in a proper tool from day one.”

Looking Ahead

Outsite's mission hasn't changed since that first house in Santa Cruz: give more people the freedom to live and work from wherever they want, backed by a real, connected community rather than an anonymous hotel stay. With the round closed, the Outsite team is excited to keep ramping up its number of properties and tapping into new countries.