One of the perceptions of bootstrapping is that founders must be less ambitious than those that take on capital. This absolutely isn’t the case for many startups.
For the first four years of Mash, we bootstrapped the entire business. We simply didn’t need external capital to reach MVP: we already had a proven prototype. We were profitable and growing by over 90% every year.
For startups like us, using profits to grow is a very conscious choice. We had a lot of investors approach us, including angels, VCs, and private equity firms. All saw the potential of our business model, all saw the upside for growth. However, in line with Mash’s brand ethos, we decided to take charge of how we wanted to create. Whether it was safeguarding our remote working culture, building our incredible team, or nurturing our relationships with clients, Mashers and broader society — we did through with the lens of creating lasting impact. We were calling the shots, and that gave us the confidence to back our own decisions.
Recently however, we changed that and announced a $2 million pre-series A funding round, the first outside investment since we started the business five years ago.
We didn’t need funding to maintain the status quo. But we had an opportunity to have an impact on a much bigger scale – and investment was necessary to fully grasp the moment. Money is meaningless without purpose. If you don’t keep the magic, what’s the point of growth? So, when it came to the decision to seek investment, we built a framework that guided us through the investment-seeking process.
This investment will allow us to expand our leadership team across Asia-Pacific, and transform our tech stack by building a cutting-edge infrastructure platform to support team curation, collaboration, and remote work.
Our purpose has always been clear: to empower and enable creatives. Before COVID-19 our operating model was the exception to the norm, embracing hybrid working and the gig economy to curate distributed teams of top-tier creative talent. But lockdowns forced the entire industry to work remotely. The pandemic brought our vision of hybrid creative work to the mainstream.
Today, our way of working is no longer an unusual choice: it’s an assumption. This shift and our amazing body of creative work gave us a seat at the table. As a result, we faced rapidly increasing demand from all sides: from creatives looking to become Mashers, and clients looking to work with us on campaigns across Asia-Pacific.
Our first decision was that any investor we brought on board had to align with our vision for the brand, and how our business should operate. We flip the traditional recruitment mindset at Mash so we took the same approach to seeking investment that we take when recruiting. Usually, the goal is to fill a specific skillset or gap — so someone’s qualifications and past experience are most relevant. But for us, cultural fit is always the first criterion, followed by impact. When it comes to someone’s previous role, what was the actual impact they generated?
This was how we looked at potential investors too. Coming from the right industry or having the right startups in their portfolio was less of a concern than the impact they could generate, and how they would work with us. They needed to align with our values of freedom, fulfilment, and ownership.
Any investment would need to supercharge our capabilities in the areas we’re currently in, rather than be used to expand into different ones. We had investors who wanted us to offer new services, rather than build on our core competencies. We wanted an investor who saw the potential for Mash in our core business and wanted us to focus on it.
Everyone has their own reasons to raise funding. For us, we had a five-year-old business with its own personality traits and a proven prototype — we knew ourselves well. So, in some ways, choosing to seek investment and deciding which investor to work with was like choosing what school you’re going to send the five-year-old to. Ultimately we weren’t looking for money, connections, and what it could do for our business, but rather what this investment could do for our purpose and culture. We found the perfect partner who can help us evolve into our next stage of growth — whilst elevating our strong culture-first lens.
