A shortage of McDonald’s curry sauce is an unlikely place to look for a career. For Karl Mak and Adrian Ang, it supplied an audience before they had much of a business. In 2012, the two university friends made a joke about a small Singaporean calamity and put it on a Facebook page called SGAG. People understood it immediately. No explanation, no introduction, no market education. Just the pleasure of discovering that somebody else was annoyed about the same ridiculous thing.
The memorable part is the sauce. The revealing part is what happened after the joke worked. Mak would spend years figuring out how to employ people, sell creative work, cross borders and change direction when a promising business stopped behaving as expected. Today he is co-founder and CEO of HEPMIL Media Group, the regional company behind SGAG. Its history contains two acquisition stories: one that collapsed and forced a rethink, and another that brought the business into Publicis Groupe.
A friendship before a business plan
Mak and Ang were already trading jokes as junior-college classmates before they arrived at Singapore Management University. Mak graduated in economics in 2013; Ang studied business. The friendship gave their enterprise something a pitch deck could not supply: years of shared references. Ang, known online as Xiao Ming, became HEPMIL’s chief creative officer. Mak took on the chief executive’s work. One friendship would have to accommodate two rather different sets of daily decisions.
Entrepreneurship had appealed to Mak before SGAG offered a route into it. He had tried a fashion blogshop and real estate, as well as a technology startup. His first startup, Televate, grew from a final-year university project in 2013. It attempted to improve the experience of calling banks and telecommunications companies by reducing the waiting involved. It failed. The experience gave him a practical education in building a company before the business for which he became known.
He had also grown up between different worlds. His parents moved from Hong Kong to Singapore in the mid-1980s, and he initially mixed with an international community before attending local primary school. Family stories included grandparents who had worked carrying rice and cleaning apartment blocks. In his telling, those stories helped explain his parents’ frugality and their respect for opportunity. An enterprise based on jokes was being built by somebody who had heard quite a lot about the value of money.
The joke needed a way to pay
SGAG’s early appeal depended on recognition. Train breakdowns and local controversies could become material because the audience arrived knowing the background. The founders did not have to teach people why the subject mattered. Yet attention came in bursts. A post could travel, then the excitement could subside. Recognising a shared irritation was a creative skill; making the resulting audience commercially useful required a separate set of experiments.
One experiment involved selling SGAG merchandise. Thousands of T-shirts brought an accompanying assortment of sizes, addresses and delivery complaints. Popularity, it turned out, could arrive wearing a parcel label. The founders eventually moved towards branded content, giving companies a way to reach the audience through the humour that had attracted people in the first place. A business could buy participation in the joke. The delicate part was keeping the joke worth sharing.
A partnership with Scoot helped make that proposition concrete. Mak has recalled a marketer asking the team to make memes around the airline’s upcoming routes and promotions. He priced the work at a thousand dollars a meme, with the campaign bringing in twenty thousand dollars. There was still cold calling afterwards. Even a useful early client did not abolish the sales problem. The discovery was that a company could have a budget for precisely the sort of work the founders had been making for amusement.
Three stages in HEPMIL’s development, from SGAG’s 2012 beginnings to the network launched in 2020.
Making room for somebody else’s idea
By 2017, Mak and Ang had been named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia list in media, marketing and advertising. Recognition made the unconventional career easier to describe. It did not make the working week particularly abstract. Mak described dividing his time between hiring, business development and international expansion. Asked for three words about himself, he chose optimistic, driven and compassionate. The answer sounds less decorative when set beside the management choices a growing creative business requires.
At SGAG, he favoured collaboration over star behaviour. Brainstorms had rules, including one conversation at a time, so quieter people could contribute. The team also removed an approval bottleneck by letting staff publish directly instead of making Ang the gatekeeper of everything. That is a consequential concession for founders: the page has your reputation attached to it, and somebody else gets to press the button. Growth requires a tolerable answer to that discomfort.
The colleagues who stayed offered Mak another way of counting progress. In 2025, he celebrated Cassi Yang’s tenth year at HEPMIL. She had joined in 2015 as a fresh graduate, choosing the uncertain startup over a conventional offer, and rose to chief commercial officer. A company’s history can be told through funding announcements. It can also be told through the distance between somebody’s first job and the responsibilities they carry a decade later.
The chairs had almost been chosen
In 2018, about three and a half years into building HEPMIL, Mak and Ang received an acquisition offer from a multibillion-dollar organisation. They agreed to proceed. Six months of due diligence followed. They went through interviews and tests, acquired prospective titles and were even asked where they wanted to sit. It is a wonderfully mundane detail for a potentially life-changing transaction. Before the future had arrived, it apparently needed a seating plan.
Then the deal fell through at the eleventh hour. Mak later described the experience as demoralising and distracting. With hindsight, he also credited it with forcing a pivot and bringing the leadership team together. There is no need to make the disappointment sound pleasant. The useful distinction is between what the founders hoped would happen and what they eventually did with the business that remained in their hands.
“I do not have the experience of buying and integrating companies.”
Karl Mak, on the later choice between raising more capital and selling
From making content to backing its makers
HEPMIL had already taken local comedy beyond Singapore through MGAG and PGAG. Reproducing the model across countries, however, did not automatically reproduce its success. Around the same period as the failed sale, TikTok opened another route for people to find an audience. The question facing Mak widened: what could HEPMIL do for people making their own content, rather than only for the pages the company itself operated?
HEPMIL Creators’ Network launched in 2020. The business connected creators with brands, applying the company’s production and commercial experience to work made by a broader range of people. Bent Pixels Asia, a joint venture launched in 2021, added support for creators and organisations earning through YouTube. The centre of gravity had shifted. Owning a popular comedy page remained useful; helping other people sustain a creative career offered another reason for the company to exist.
In November 2021, HEPMIL announced a US$10 million Series A led by Quest Ventures, Pavilion Capital and Bent Pixels. It was the company’s first institutional fundraising. The plans included further regional expansion, gaming and esports capabilities, and more work connecting content with commerce. The investment followed years spent learning what clients would pay for. The proposition now included a network of creators and the services needed to help brands work with them.
HEPMIL at the October 2025 Publicis acquisition announcement. Group figures, rather than Mak’s personal audience.
A second sale, a different decision
On 29 October 2025, Publicis Groupe announced an agreement to acquire HEPMIL. The company served more than 450 brands and had relationships with over 3,000 creators across six Southeast Asian markets. HEPMIL would continue operating under its own brand. For Mak, the announcement connected the business back to the ambition he and Ang had shared at university. The scale had changed considerably; the partnership was still recognisable.
Choosing the sale also involved recognising a limit. The alternative was another funding round and potentially buying smaller companies to deepen HEPMIL’s presence in its existing markets. Mak acknowledged that he lacked experience in acquiring and integrating businesses. The admission fits a founder who had already watched one transaction unravel. More money would have brought work the team did not feel equipped to execute. Joining an established group offered a different route forward.
By June 2026, he was discussing the practical adjustments of life inside Publicis, including more demanding financial reporting. He also described room to preserve HEPMIL’s creative character. His attention was turning towards creator-led commerce and collaborations between brands and the people audiences choose to watch. These are operating questions with consequences for individual creators: who gets work, how partnerships function, and whether attention can become a dependable source of income.
The person outside the frame
For someone whose company makes people visible, Mak has spent surprisingly little time on screen. In 2022, he said he had appeared only once among the thousands of videos the business had produced over seven years. His leisure interests offer a quieter portrait: fantasy basketball, years spent tracking NBA statistics, Forrest Gump, coconut ice cream. A good deal of his professional life concerns other people’s performances. Apparently the habit continues after work.
The curry sauce remains an excellent opening anecdote because it is specific, funny and resolutely ungrand. But the longer story belongs to the decisions that followed: finding paying clients, giving colleagues authority, accepting a failed deal and choosing where his own experience ended. A shared joke gave Karl Mak a start. Keeping people working together gave him something to build on after everybody had heard the punchline.