Canva's Distribution and Marketing at an Extraordinary Scale

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The Canva all hands meeting started as an in person event. It's shifted online over the last 18 months, two years. And we were spending time as a company on Zoom for the first time with our weekly all hands. We made the decision to do it virtually and it actually became this really different experience being able to have everyone at the same time. So that's been really fun as well. The theme more recently just because everyone sort of on a screen, it sort of felt like it was a bit of a TV show. But one of my favorite things about the most recent campaign that we launched with Canva you can is the fact that it's all centered around three stories of

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.