In 2016, when I founded Mast, I wanted a way to enshrine the mission into the untouchable core of Mast. Make it measurable. Make it a commitment to our customers and employees. I wanted us to be a Public Benefit Corporation. Our legal counsel talked me out of it. The structure was only three years old, untested, and the valid question was whether anyone would fund a VC-backed company legally structured that way.
Ten years later, I’m immensely proud to announce that Mast is officially a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
What that means is that our board is now legally required to balance the company’s public benefit—its mission—alongside its other fiduciary obligations. We’re joining many other well-known companies structured as benefit corporations like Patagonia, Warby Parker, and Anthropic, as well as fellow carbon project developers like Funga and Native.
Mast has always been mission-focused. We’ve hired every person with a lens on mission alignment. We’ve repeatedly evolved our business model, but the north star has always been our mission, and that has never wavered. Becoming a PBC cements this focus on mission for our board, our customers, and our employees, and puts it in our metrics.
Why now
Since our founding, PBCs have become far more established. This summer, the structure was tested in court and now has case law behind it. Delaware’s top business court ruled for the first time that a PBC’s board can balance shareholder returns with the public benefit—in this case in a sale process.
Second, Eric Ries published Incorruptible, PhD-level research on corporate governance written so approachably that a budding entrepreneur in high school could follow it. Ries answers the objections I heard from lawyers and investors, and it shows how companies have built governance structures that protect their mission from financial gravity, career equity, and general “enshittification,” as Cory Doctorow coined it. Eric documents the successes (Costco, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg, Bosch, Hershey, IKEA, Zeiss, Newman’s Own) as well as the companies that drifted or were forced away from their mission and founding culture (Whole Foods, Twilio, FedMart, Cadbury, Snapple, Kodak, Blockbuster, Joann, Vectura, Johnson & Johnson, Men’s Wearhouse… and the list goes on).
Eric has advised Anthropic on governance since 2021, and you can see those lessons in its S-1: Its governance borrows what worked, avoids what failed, and innovates new protections for the company’s mission and focus on safety. And as a foundation for it all, Anthropic is a PBC.
What we’ve grown into: More to protect
Our responsibilities have grown since we started. In 2020, we identified a major supply chain bottleneck in reforestation: not enough seed and grow space for seedlings compared to the macro need. So in 2022 we acquired and became the stewards of Cal Forest Nurseries, which grows the majority of trees (conifers) planted in California, and Silvaseed Company, a 150-year-old Washington-based seed processor and nursery.
Together, they hold the largest private native tree seed bank in the U.S. and manage seed for 155 entities across the supply chain, including timber companies, tribal nations, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies. As stewards we’ve expanded seed supply for customers by increasing collections whenever natural systems allow. The macro need for seed and seedlings in our ecosystems doesn’t mean there are customers with demand and capital as Nik Larum, our General Manager at Cal Forest, eloquently stated at The Understory Conference in December of 2025. That’s what we at Mast are continuing to work on now—the funding.
Today, we’ve zeroed in on the most expensive part of reforestation after wildfire: removing the fire-killed trees that would otherwise be pile-burned. We bury the carbon those trees pulled from the atmosphere in underground vaults. It’s extremely costly and, in our view, the step in the process with the least capital available. When carbon buyers pay us to bury tonnes, they’re covering that cost and paying for the logging like a mill would have if one had been within transport distance. They’re also paying for tree planting, work that we include in our projects and intentionally earn no credits from, but work that directly helps landowners meet their objectives with the land—getting their forests back.
A bigger mission
Today, Mast’s public benefit, as named in our charter, is officially, measurably, a bit bigger as a result of our expanded focus on site preparation and removing fire-killed trees:
Make ecosystem restoration scalable to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and ensure human flourishing for generations.
Keeping score
What comes next: reporting on that public benefit. For now, the number we’ll report is how many tonnes of carbon we’ve put underground. So far, we’ve buried and delivered credits for 4,277 tonnes from our first project, which sold out rapidly to Bain, RBC, BMO, CNaught, and SE Advisory Services. This puts us at #28 globally on CDR.fyi for CDR retirements. Projects two through four, now in diligence, should move us to #6 globally or higher. (We like a scoreboard.)
There’s a lot of fire-killed trees to get to. We estimate Oregon alone has 395M tonnes of fire-killed trees that can’t pay their own way out of the woods and will be pile-burned. That’s a lot of tonnes to keep out of the atmosphere, and a lot of landowners to compensate and help get their forests back.
Cattle taking a break from grazing at MT1.