How to Grow With a Company That's Changed So Much

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I was so desperate to be involved with Canva that I always felt just excited to work on whatever I could. The most important thing is to ultimately focus on what's going to have the biggest impact in a company that's changing so much. There's always going to be someone better than you at a particular field. So I think not being threatened by that and seeing that as an opportunity to grow yourself is really, really important. We've had a lot of different advisors over the years for everything from figuring out how to internationalise Canva through to building people in culture.

Today’s episode is with Zach Kitschke, CMO of Canva, an online design and publishing tool. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown from an Australian startup to a global company, with 60 million monthly active users, over 2,000 employees, and a $40 billion valuation.

Zach was one of Canva's first employees, leading comms efforts around their initial launch and fundraise. But since then, he’s done everything from answering support tickets and cooking the team lunch, to serving as a product lead and spinning up the people function.

This career history gives Zach a unique vantage point on why Canva worked. The discussion starts off focused on the early days — from unpacking all the work that went into their launch, to how they improved the early product and focused on the use case for social media managers and content creators.

Next, we dig into supporting and scaling the team during hypergrowth. Canva has several unique practices around onboarding, learning and development, and keeping the team connected — from vision decks, strategy docs and a specific skills framework, to their ‘chaos to clarity’ spectrum and ‘season opener’ ritual for making company planning more fun.

Zach also shares what he figured out personally along the different chapters in his career at Canva, including how to leverage advisors and when to bring someone else in to take over your role. Whether you’re a marketer, a founder, a people leader, or a product manager, there are tons of helpful takeaways for everyone in this conversation.

You can follow Zach on Twitter at @zachkitschke. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.