Mallory Contois on Why Spending More on Community Gets You Less

The Lowest-Budget Team at a Freshly-Funded Startup

Most teams celebrate a major fundraise by opening the spending floodgates. Mallory Contois did the opposite.

When she joined Mercury as head of community right after their raise, she made a deliberate choice: run the leanest team at the company. Her conviction? More money spent on events doesn't equal more word-of-mouth.

My goal, especially in my first year and a half at Mercury, was really like, how far can we get on almost no money? What can we do by showing up as human beings in this ecosystem who understand our users and understand what founders are going through and show up for them in a way that's actually useful, not like buying them drinks and like taking them to Knicks games.

— Mallory Contois

Two months into the role, SVB collapsed. Suddenly her job shifted from community-building to trust-building. She flew around the country throwing pop-up events with massages for stressed founders. The tone wasn't transactional. It was human.

What Pinterest Taught Her About Real Organic Growth

Before Mercury, before Maven, Contois was one of the first 100 employees at Pinterest. She joined when you still needed a waitlist invite, before the platform had any revenue model.

Pinterest wasn't trying to be another performative social network. It was a space where you saved things for yourself, not to show off to others. That positioning changed everything about how the product and ads were built.

I remember loving it because it felt so clearly like it was for me, not for everyone else. You didn't even think about if people were looking at your Pinterest profile. You weren't curating things for other people, or at least I wasn't.

— Mallory Contois

The magic wasn't in the features. It was in the user psychology. People planned weddings a year out, researched vacations months in advance, created boards titled "vacation in Japan." Pinterest sat on genuine purchase intent data that felt human, not invasive. Brands could see exactly what people were planning to buy and when.

That genuine word-of-mouth engine became Contois's blueprint. She watched superfans talk about the product so authentically that she'd get stuck in 30-minute conversations every time she mentioned where she worked.

Conviction Plus Enthusiasm Equals Your Best Work

At Mercury's first in-person conference, the granddaughter of designers Ray and Charles Eames shared a diagram: designers do their best work at the intersection of enthusiasm and conviction.

Contois applies this to jobs. Conviction means you believe the business will work—solid fundamentals, job security, good for your resume. Enthusiasm is the part you can't manufacture. It's either there or it's gone. Once depleted, it's nearly impossible to get back.

Early in your career, finding both in the same role is rare. You take jobs with high conviction because that's smart. But as you gain experience and build your network, you earn the right to be pickier. You get to live in the overlap.

I think the dream job is something where you both have conviction that the company is going to work and like it's a good business. And also you have the overlap of personal enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is something that you can't manufacture. It's either there or it's not.

— Mallory Contois

That's what brought her to Maven, where she's now VP of Growth. Her mission: get more smart people teaching more smart people. After teaching her first course on community-led growth earlier this year, she found the overlap. Smart adults having strategic conversations, learning high-context skills, getting paid fairly for sharing knowledge.

Why Adult Learning Matters More Than Ever

The pressure to get an MBA persists, but Contois sees a different path. Most people don't need all those courses. They need specific skills, taught by practitioners who've done the work, at a fraction of the cost and time.

She's betting that upskilling will become critical as AI reshapes entry and mid-level roles. The question isn't whether those jobs disappear—it's who becomes the executives in 15 years. Learning how to make decisions in context, solving problems with soft and hard skills combined, will matter more than credentials.

Maven lets instructors with deep expertise teach cohort-based courses without going the university route. It's the same trade-off Contois optimized for at Mercury: show up as a human, share what's actually useful, skip the performance.

She ran the lowest-budget team because she knew organic growth doesn't come from bigger bar tabs. It comes from understanding your users deeply enough to show up for them when it matters. That's the play she's running again.