Grit25 Heinä 2022

CMO Canva, Zach Kitschke: From Employee Number 5 To $40 Billion Valuation

Canva CMO Zach Kitschke was the company’s fifth employee, joining right before the product launched to the public — or, that was the plan anyway. Emerging technologies like HTML5 and negative feedback from early testers delayed the debut of the design startup, but in the 10 years since its launch Canva has become one of the most successful companies to ever come out of Australia. “One of our values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen,” Zach says.

In this episode, Zach and Joubin discuss Zach’s first job in small-town bureaucracy, how he got introduced to Canva before the company was hiring anyone, helping teammates achieve their potential, “culture carriers,” the pressure of comparing your companies to others, Canva’s “underwhelming” launch night and finding product-market fit, the four pillars of success in Canva’s culture, localization as a growth strategy, predictable anxiety, the hypergrowth gap, and “the two-step plan.”

In this episode, we cover:

What Canva does, and where the idea came from (08:08)
Zach’s first impressions of Canva co-founders Mel Perkins and Cliff Obrecht (12:49)
Making bets on unproven people in an organization (16:41)
Setting “crazy big goals” and readying Canva v1 for launch (21:17)
The pre-launch inferiority complex (27:30)
An important cold email from the Huffington Post (33:59)
Wearing many hats in a startup and building company culture (36:17)
Learning on the job and managing a hypergrowth company (45:23)
How does Canva’s growth compare to what Zach expected? (51:09)
Canva’s unique approach to work-life balance, and Mel and Cliff’s philanthropic “two-step plan” (59:23)

Links:

Connect with Zach
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(286)

What It Takes to Build a Generational Company | Anduril’s Trae Stephens

Founder quality becomes more important as startups become easier to build.Trae Stephens, co-founder of Anduril and partner at Founders Fund, has spent years backing founders with strong conviction, in...

18 Touko 56min

How AIG Is Reinventing Insurance With AI | Peter Zaffino

What does it take to run a company where the business is risk itself?In conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan, Peter Zaffino shares what the role demands at AIG, including high stakes decisions, constan...

4 Touko 56min

From Airbnb to Linear: How Karri Saarinen Redefined Product Design

In a market that hadn’t changed in decades, Linear didn’t win by being faster. They won by being more thoughtful.Karri Saarinen helped shape design at Airbnb and Coinbase before building Linear around...

20 Huhti 1h 17min

How Kevin Mandia Built the Most Trusted Name in Cybersecurity

What does security look like when attackers use AI better than you do?Armadin recently raised $200M to build for the “attacker of the future,” where attacks are autonomous and harder to contain.On the...

6 Huhti 1h 2min

The Silicon Valley Insider In The Pentagon | DoW Emil Michael

Emil Michael went from scaling Uber across 600 cities to rewiring the world's largest military.In the midst of the Pentagon-Silicon Valley debate, the now U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research ...

23 Maalis 40min

How Sierra Is Pulling Ahead in the AI Race | Co-founder Bret Taylor

Few founders have seen Silicon Valley from every seat at the table.After co-creating Google Maps at Google, serving as CTO at Facebook, and later as co-CEO of Salesforce, Bret Taylor is now building A...

9 Maalis 1h 12min

The AI Era of Cybercrime: How Malwarebytes Is Evolving Its Security Stack | Marcin Kleczynski

What began as a 14 year old fixing infected computers became Malwarebytes, an 800 person cybersecurity company trusted by millions of customers.On Grit, Marcin Kleczynski joins Joubin Mirzadegan to ex...

23 Helmi 1h 3min

The Truth Behind Automation Claims in Customer Support | Cresta CEO Ping Wu

Can you scale customer support without burning out agents or frustrating customers?Ping Wu shares how Cresta combines AI and human intelligence into a single system that scales sustainably for compani...

9 Helmi 43min