Marcus Richards
Atlas Rosetta is a branding company with a tech venture builder focus that is both founded and managed by women.
While 90% of our staff are women, our purpose as a business is to provide a platform for all genders to lead a balanced family and work life by being 100% remote.
While we aim to provide the highest quality service possible through continuous improvement and learning, we also actively work towards building a strong workforce that supports the home base, where parents do not have to choose between earning a decent income and enjoying the precious moments with their loved ones.
Tell us about yourself?
Tanu and I run Atlas Rosetta collaboratively. I manage the day-to-day operations and people as the Managing Director for the company, while Tanu fulfils a more supervisory and strategic role as the Chairperson of the Board of Directors.
How far we have come today is testament to our collaboration and fully open communication with one another. Within a year, our team grew from just the two of us to a growing team of almost ten full-time members.
I had my start in a small publishing house in sunny Singapore when I was a young university student still navigating the balance between my studies and freelance work. What started out as a simple passion for the arts has transformed into a career that I love, and look forward to every day.
I was privileged enough to have encountered mentors who encouraged me to try out new things in the realm of design and advertising.
Today, it has been more than a decade since I chanced upon the world of design and advertising, and it still brings me as much joy as the first day I stepped into that little publishing house.
Tanu and I first crossed paths fifteen years ago while in junior college together. In many ways, we are old friends and old colleagues.
Because we started to work together when we were teenagers who didn’t know what we were doing. She built my very first website when we were not even 18. We also co-founded the first girls’ squash team at our junior college together, as there was only a boys’ team.
Since then, Tanu has broken barriers and climbed many a mountain that others have told her she could never climb.
Despite being a young woman of colour, she worked her way up the corporate ladder after graduating from Carnegie Mellon and, within a short span of 9 years, runs a department as VP of Product in a London machine learning scale-up.
A year and a half ago, while Tanu and I were both at a point in our lives where we were transitioning from one country to another and from a stable corporate job to the great unknown of the entrepreneurial world yet again, we decided to join forces and merge our ventures as a new company called Atlas Rosetta, offering end-to-end branding and tech solutions.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Keep working at it, even if almost no one believes in the vision and you feel that you are going at it alone.
If you are sure of where you’re going, and you trust your gut, the hard work will pay off. Find others who believe in you and collaborate closely with them.
What problem does your business solve?
As a team capable of providing product management, design, development, branding, marketing and advertising services, we help a wide range of small to enterprise businesses that don’t have strong in-house expertise to dream up new product ideas and build them into reality, then take it to market with a strong brand and marketing strategy.
This helps them build their reputation and product, and places them in a great position for future expansion.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Before we came together, Tanu and I were working on our individual companies, when we realised that we could benefit from each other’s skills.
I have a creative background, and she is in technical product development.
As the importance of tech is ever-increasing in the advertising world, and elegant and functional designs are crucial to the user experience, our complementary expertise led to an organic partnership to innovate through the intersection of media and technology.
In a few months of working together via company partnerships, we realised we would be much more competitive together.
Atlas Rosetta was thus conceived, offering the full suite of creativity in brand, advertising, marketing, product management and engineering.
What is your magic sauce?
Our magic is in the unique blend of our complementary skills and shared values in our vision of our company culture.
We have a flat organisational structure that has helped us ease communication and workflow. We put a lot of effort into maintaining a human touch in our management approach while at the same time running a tight ship.
Our competitive advantage comes from the deep expertise each of us brings to the table and how we combine them to provide innovative solutions that others will struggle to come up with.
Most importantly, we are open, transparent and truly get along with each other due to the long-term trust that has been built up between us.
This then permeates into our company culture and how our team interacts with each other. It is a team with high levels of psychological safety and collaboration, in addition to clear communication with each other.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We plan on expanding our market share in North America, UK and Singapore. We are also attempting to simultaneously strengthen and expand our branding and tech teams.
Because we are still a growing business, we rely on some external service providers for certain functions. We would like to bring as many of these resources in-house as possible to have more vertical integration of our services in place to scale faster.
In the last two years, we want to bootstrap our own digital products on top of offering our services to our clients. We have some ideas that we have been exploring and are excited to move from R&D to production in the near future.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Our biggest challenge has been recruiting, hiring, on-boarding, training and integrating every single person on our team 100% remotely.
We had to go through the learning process of making the right hiring decisions before eventually acquiring the ability to identify viable candidates from the very first interview.
We have learned that the traditional hiring process does not work. You cannot accurately predict reliability by asking questions such as a candidate’s perceived strengths and weaknesses or career goals.
Furthermore, because we hire across different countries and time zones, we have had to account for language ability, overall cultural fit, and scheduling around time differences.
It definitely takes additional effort to organise team-building activities such as remote get-togethers since we do not meet in person.
Even as a fully remote operation, it is our duty as managers to care for our employees as individuals and as members of a team, as well as foster positive team dynamics among themselves.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We have had significant organic success from doing great work for our initial clients that then converts them into evangelists for us.
We are constantly looking to hire, build new partnerships and collaborate with new prospective customers.
Our vision is to build new ideas into existence for our customers and we highly value those that are associated with a social impact or social good mission while being a for-profit company.
You can get in touch with us at [email protected] or visit our website at atlas-rosetta.com and fill out our contact form there.
