Interview with Maggie Mo, Staircase Ventures Advisor and executive at Clutch

The Advisor Series – Featuring Maggie Mo

Staircase Ventures has an outstanding team of Advisors supporting our portfolio companies. In this blog series, we introduce you to our Advisors, share their stories, and highlight some of their insights and advice on building startups.

Introducing Maggie Mo!

Maggie is the VP of Expansion and Real Estate at Clutch, Canada’s largest online retailer of pre-owned vehicles, where she has helped scale the company from an early-stage startup into a national brand. She has been a steady hand through hypergrowth, market headwinds, and Clutch’s recovery, including the company’s recent $50 million Series D round and its strategic partnership with iA Financial Group.

Maggie is an exceptional operator and a trusted finance leader.

In an interview with Staircase Ventures, Maggie discusses her background, fundraising perspectives, AI, and advice for early stage founders.

1. What did you do before you joined Clutch? How did that help you prepare for life as a leader at a fast-growing tech company?

Before joining Clutch, I earned my CPA, CA designation at PwC and then worked in investment banking in the Global Metals & Mining group at BMO. I later moved into corporate development at a medical cannabis distribution company.

Those experiences gave me a strong foundation in finance and a broad base of business judgment. I learned rigor—how to analyze financial performance, make structured decisions, and operate within large, complex organizations. I also saw both sides of scale: the benefits of discipline and process, and the downsides of bureaucracy.

In contrast, my time in corporate development gave me the opportunity to be part of building a business from the ground up through to exit. That was a very different experience — faster, less structured, and much more hands-on. It’s where I realized I really enjoyed building and wanted to continue operating in that kind of environment, which ultimately led me to Clutch.

2. You moved to Vancouver and launched the Clutch business. Tell us about that experience and what you learned.

I moved to Vancouver during COVID to help launch Clutch’s operations in BC. There were three of us on the ground — we had no office, no local network, and no existing infrastructure. Over about four months, we set up our warehouse and office, secured our dealer license, built vendor relationships, hired and trained the local team, and bought and sold our first cars in the province.

There wasn’t a playbook. We were figuring things out in real time. It was both exciting and uncomfortable. Looking back, there are many things we could have done differently, but that’s part of building something new.

The biggest thing I took away from that experience was getting comfortable with that feeling. When you’re building something from scratch, it’s never going to feel like you’re fully in control. Over time, I’ve come to recognize that discomfort as a good signal; it usually means you’re working on something meaningful.

3. You have been involved in several fundraising rounds at Clutch. What are your major lessons from that experience?

There’s a lot of standard advice around fundraising – running a tight process, keeping a well-organized data room, and tailoring your pitch to your audience—all of which matters. But the biggest takeaway for me is more foundational: regardless of the market environment, businesses with strong fundamentals, clear growth potential, and a credible path to execution will attract capital.

Everything else supports that. Process and storytelling are important, but they don’t replace the underlying quality of the business.

4. How is Clutch using AI across its business today?

AI is being used broadly across Clutch today, primarily as a way to drive efficiency and help

teams move faster. What’s been most interesting is that it hasn’t been centralized—teams across the business are building their own tools and workflows. That ranges from automating manual processes and internal operations to building tools for data analysis and reporting, and improving areas like fraud detection, inspections, and vendor management.

On the product and engineering side, AI is meaningfully accelerating how quickly we can build and test. Teams are using it to spin up internal tools, iterate faster, and solve very specific problems without needing large, coordinated efforts.

I think the way we’ve approached it has been very pragmatic. It’s not a separate “AI initiative” – it’s embedded into how teams work day-to-day. At the same time, we’re mindful of the limitations and risks and ensure there’s strong human oversight. Over time, I think the biggest impact will be how much it compresses the time from identifying a problem to actually solving it. Teams that can operationalize that well will have a real advantage.

5. What advice do you have for early-stage founders?

Know yourself – your strengths, your gaps, and how you operate under pressure. From there, be very thoughtful about who you bring around you. The best teams are built with complementarity in mind – not just around the needs of the business, but around you as a founder. Hiring people who strengthen your blind spots and elevate your decision-making is one of the highest-leverage things you can do early on.