Why the Founder of ButcherBox Refused to Raise a Single Dollar of Venture Capital
AUG 3, 2026
“I lost my integrity.”
That’s Mike Salguero describing what it felt like to run his first startup under the thumb of its investors. When he built his next one, ButcherBox, he refused to take a dollar of outside money. He’s now expecting more than $600 million in revenue this year.
On the latest episode of Masters of Scale, Salguero describes what happened at his first company, CustomMade, a custom-goods marketplace he scaled to 60 employees on roughly $30 million in venture funding. When the marketplace model stopped working and he wanted to change course, his backers pushed hard the other way.
“I thought I knew what was better for the business, but when you have top VCs telling you what to do, it carries weight,” he said to Masters of Scale host Jeff Berman. “What they don’t talk about is the phone calls where, ‘if you guys don’t do what we say, you’re probably going to be blackballed. You probably won’t be able to raise money again.’”
CustomMade was acquired by Wayfair in 2015. When Salguero started ButcherBox weeks later, he took no outside money at all. “I don’t think I’d be around right now if I had raised money,” he says. There are three reasons his bet paid off. Each one is echoed by other founders who made the same call.
1. Bootstrapping can still reach real scale
The belief that you need venture capital to build something big doesn’t always hold. Ben Chestnut built Mailchimp without raising a dollar, and then sold it to Intuit for roughly $12 billion. He walked away from VCs for a reason Salguero would recognize: They wanted a different company.
“It felt like they were more like alien beings from another era trying to tell me how to run my business,” Chestnut said on his 2019 Masters of Scale episode. They pushed him toward enterprise clients; he wanted to “empower small businesses to scale out of the kitchen.”
2. Constraints force discipline
Without outside money, you can’t buy your way to growth. You have to earn it. Salguero made ButcherBox profitable on the very first box, spending less than $20 to acquire a customer because that’s all a box earned. The constraint pushed him toward influencer affiliates instead of torching cash on Facebook.
The founders of Chomps grew their meat-snack brand toward $1 billion the same way. “We wanted to build a profitable business, and we didn’t want to have to raise money,” co-founder Rashid Ali said on Masters of Scale. His advice to other founders: “Wait as long as you can before you have to take outside money.”
3. Independence protects the company
Money comes with strings, and those strings can pull a company away from its values. When Chomps finally needed cash for a large Trader Joe’s order, the founders took on debt rather than selling equity. Todd Graves funded the first Raising Cane’s by working grueling hours in an L.A. refinery and spending a summer fishing in Alaska, and then refused private equity — because, he argues, cost-cutting owners quietly erode the culture that makes a business work. He calls it “death by a thousand cuts.” Salguero made his commitment formal. In 2020, ButcherBox became a certified B Corp and rewrote its bylaws so the company isn’t run for shareholders alone.
The takeaway for founders
Bootstrapping isn’t right for every company; some genuinely need capital to survive. But Salguero’s story is a reminder that raising money is a decision with real tradeoffs. The founders who skip it trade speed for something they may value more: the freedom to build the company they actually want. As Salguero puts it, “I wanted to do it my way.”