Hey, I'm Shant Marootian.
My background is a bit unique.
I was raised in New Jersey, earned an electrical engineering degree at Villanova University, started a career at Deloitte Consulting, and left to serve as COO at two crypto-native protocol and product startups.
At Deloitte, I completed 10+ strategic client projects serving and advising F500 C-Suite members: CTOs and CIOs primarily. The most energizing roles for me involved good strategy, deep user research, redesigning user journeys, innovating operating models, and driving product-first ways of working in tech organizations.
Behind the scenes, I've always been a curious internet-native, where I first learned about Bitcoin through early 2010 online communities. Just before the 2017 ICO boom, I discovered Ethereum.
Following DeFi summer, I left consulting and served in two consecutive COO roles at crypto-native frontier startups.
Tessera (fmr. Fractional.art) was a collective ownership digital art company founded in 2021, where I was the first hire of the two co-founders. We went from 0 to 1, raised a $7M Seed and $20M Series A, hired a team of 30, completed a rebrand, and 3 product launches with over $100M+ in onchain transaction volume, reaching 20k unique wallets faster than any prior protocol. When the mid-2022 landscape shifted to a hostile US regulatory environment towards cryptocurrency (e.g., SEC's denial of Coinbase's rulemaking petition [deemed arbitrary and capricious in 2025], OFAC sanctions [deemed unlawful in 2024], Uniswap's ambiguous liability [dismissed in 2025]), we pivoted from NFT fractionalization on DeFi rails to community-owned digital collectibles to a fine art marketplace. I should have pushed harder on compliance scenario planning earlier because our raise valued at $300M assumed a more permissive regulatory environment than the one that emerged, which added existential risk to the addressable market and a venture-scale business model. After close deliberation with our major stakeholders following a confluence of factors: founder personal circumstances that required their full attention, broader industry black swan events, and opaque regulatory boundaries stifling business viability, the board made the tough call to wind down, return the majority of capital to investors, and help place our talented team elsewhere. The product team I coached and mentored went on to land great roles at places like Epic Games, Rippling, and Polygon.
DELV (fmr. Element Finance) pioneered DeFi's first fixed-rate AMM protocol, introducing Principal Tokens and Yield Tokens, through a novel mechanism that reached $200M+ in TVL and $70M in trading volume its first year. After managing Tessera's wind down, I joined the leadership team (previously DOJ, CFPB, MakerDAO, Consensys) as DELV's COO amidst the closing of a 2-year development cycle for their nextgen protocol (redesigned from the ground up to address barriers of the first design, namely liquidity efficiency and UX). Having raised a $32M Series A on the back of early success, the team was spread thin amongst multiple parallel, distinct initiatives and facing significant delays. I helped the leaders realign focus by introducing data-driven business goals, cutting 3 stalled initiatives, defining a partnership strategy, redefining product narratives, and cleaning up core operations. By the time the protocol reached $4M in TVL with $50M of a meaningfully committed pipeline, our monitoring practices discovered a sophisticated vulnerability that went undetected by 6 rigorous smart contract audits, bug bounties, and testing best practices which preceded the launch. Fortunately, our team's mechanism design foresight included a pause feature which prevented an exploit and all users safely withdrew their funds at no loss. Following the incident however, the board ultimately determined the set back was insurmountable and chose to wind-down DELV's 5 year journey.
After facing the reality of structural and technical barriers to innovate on frontier financial infrastructure, I dedicated a year to deepen my knowledge in key areas (stablecoins, policy developments, AI / agentic harnesses, L1 / L2 trends, high finance, and payments) and sharpen my judgement. I'm now determining where I can provide the most value over the long term and am especially interested in conversations with people and teams solving problems at the edge of tech, systems, and society!
In my spare time, I enjoy traveling, reading, meal prepping, working out, practicing a new skill every 6 months (Muay Thai, salsa dancing), and spending time with friends and family.
Why do anything?
My belief is that the meaning of life is the meaning we give to it. We are intrinsically social and happiness is best when shared. People are the purpose behind why it's worth choosing to do anything. Money is a tool for leverage for investing in people, ideas, and opportunities. Revenue is a tangible crystallization of partially captured value, but simply a byproduct, not the goal. Creating value for people is the goal.
Why have a website?
This site offers distilled insights, inspiration, and lessons learned, for others and my future self, since memory is unreliable. For survival, we build systems to navigate our personal and professional lives. As someone who values open-source knowledge, this is my small contribution to the decentralized system we call life.
"Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds."
David Deutsch
"And all those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
Unknown
"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."
Lao Tzu
"Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them. Let's try to figure out why they do what they do. That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. God himself does not propose to judge man until the end of his days."
Dale Carnegie
"Your real home is not your apartment or your house or your city or even your country, but your body. It is the only thing you, your soul, and your mind, will always live inside of so long as you walk the earth. It is the single most important physical thing in this world you can take care of."
Mark Lauren