The story of why Canva worked: Zach Kitschke shares his lessons from early hire to current CMO

Zach Kitschke: I think I'm so desperate to be involved with Canva that I always felt just excited to work on whatever I could. I liked cooking. I was excited to cook lunch. I was curious about support. I think the most important thing is to ultimately focus on what's going to have the biggest impact. It's really, really critical to actually being able to grow with a company is to not be attached to a particular area and just to be excited about having the biggest possible impact and learning.

And there's always going to be someone better than you at a particular field. And so I think not being threatened by that and seeing that as an opportunity to grow yourself is really important.

Brett Berson: Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, bounders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies, and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first. And we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

We've shared standout company, building advice, the kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it with our new podcast. In-depth you can listen into these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe [email protected]

for today's episode of in-depth, I'm really excited to be joined by Zach kitsch key CMO of CAMBA, which is 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 2000 employees and evaluation of over 40.

Zach has been there for that entire journey, holding a really interesting mix of positions. He started out as one of canvas, first employees, leading comms efforts around their initial launch and fund race. 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 since the beginning of this year.

However, he's been overseeing all of canvas international brand and growth efforts as their CMO. If you've listened to the podcast before you know, that I'm really interested in the underexplored success stories in tech, and I think Zach's career history gives him a really unique vantage point on why Canva worked and the unique moves that helped their success compound over.

We start off by focusing on the early days from unpacking all the work that went into their launch to talking through how they leverage design workshops, to improve the product. Zach shares some really interesting tactics, including how they shaped the narrative for journalists and how they got guy Kawasaki to join as canvas chief evangelist.

Next, we dig into all of the work that went into supporting and scaling the team during hypergrowth. Canva has several practices around onboarding, learning, and development and keeping the team connected that were really interesting to hear about from vision decks, strategy docs, and a specific skills framework to their chaos, to clarity, spectrum and season opener ritual for making company planning.

Just a bit more fun. There are also some really interesting startup lessons from the story of his own. And 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, I think there are tons of helpful takeaways for everyone in this conversation.

I really hope you enjoy this episode. And now my conversation was Zach. All right. Well, Zach, thank you so much for joining us. 

Zach Kitschke: Great to be here. 

Brett Berson: So I thought one of the ways that we could divide up the time is try to go back in time, go chapter by chapter through the company's life and pick up. Some of the different insights and things that you figured out along the way.

And I thought maybe the place to start, we could go all the way back to zero through 12 or 18 months of the company's life. And the product was developed for quite a period of time. It wasn't something that it was four weeks and then ship a product startup journey. And so I'm curious what that early time looked like.

And maybe when you go back and dissect it, what do you think you got right. That enabled such a special company to be creating. 

Zach Kitschke: I first started at Canva in a contract role to come in and help with our very first funding announcement. And so I think it was March of 2013 when I first met Mel and cliff and started contracting at that point.

And I remember the outsized ambition for Milind cliff and cab. At that point, I think we were planning to launch the products within the next sort of month or two lo and behold. It ended up being August of that year. So months and months later. And I think the. We did really well then, which has been something that has continued, you know, the whole way along was that obsession with making sure that the product was actually perfect.

And I think it went against the wisdom of the time. This was when books, like the lean startup were really invoke, you know, Mel in particular really persevered and didn't want to launch the product until it was perfect. And I remember for the first period, everyone was so excited about this product that we were building this idea that we were going to transform design, but it was actually months before I, um, I even saw the.

Version of the product itself. The engineering team are working really hard on actually building it. And from a marketing point of view where we're planning to launch it. I remember the first experience. One day, we all got access to the alpha version and was really, really excited and went down. I was actually going to say some friends in my hometown where I grew up, sat down to give them a demo of the product.

And I started designing and invitation to a party as, as a bit of an example. And of course the product crashed and it was pretty buggy at that point. I'm sorry. You know, it was this period of really sticking out at making sure that it was actually perfect. And we did a lot of early user testing and spent a lot of time seeing people experienced the products and ultimately didn't launch it until we had something that we really felt comfortable with.

How 

Brett Berson: did you know that it was time to ship it or that it was in a state that would resonate with customers? 

Zach Kitschke: We had spent such a long time building this product. The core idea for Canva was you take this incredibly complex fragmented process of creating a design, which in the past you'd have to go and purchase expensive design software.

You'd have to spend months, if not years learning how to use it. You actually get into programs like Photoshop or InDesign. And then the actual prices of designing means you have to go to stock photography, website, stock layout, website, stock, font websites, do all of the design process to actually collaborate or share it with anyone would involve emails back and forth and PDF versions that you lose track of.

And so we launched Canva with this view of bringing that all into one place and making the experience simple. And so I remember we'd spent all of this time building the product and we were really, really excited to actually get it into the hands of some of our. And at that point, we actually set up some design workshops in Surry Hills where we're still based today and had some real people come in.

We also used a tool called usertesting.com, which really helped us out along the way. And they're also excited to see what people thought of the product. And the first response was really disappointing and underwhelming for this. We'd all spent months and months in the case of melancholy include for years working on and people got into the product and they just could not understand how to use it.

And so of course, that showed us that we weren't ready to launch. And so we then went into this process of iterating and iterating and iterating, basically running different tests of our onboarding experience and the insights that we gained from that actually helped perfect the UI to make sure that people intuitively understood how to use the product.

And it was simple things like we built out a set of, we call them the five star challenge. The guide you step-by-step through creating a design. So on the first page, it would say change the color of the circle to the color red. And, uh, we'd sort of test that out. And so people couldn't figure out our color picker and so small things in the UI, like changing the color picker to a circle that was blue, the same color as the circle on the page.

And so people then figured out that they needed to click that, to change the color to red. I'd find things like explaining how to search within Canva. So we had a photo of a monkey on the page and said, search for a hat to put on the monkey and when people would do that. And so through iteration, after iteration, we were able to get to the point where everyone that we tested it on really deeply understood the product and had a real, a lot of fun using it.

Brett Berson: How did you think about your ideal customer in the early days? And one of the reasons I'm so curious about that is that I would assume that figuring out who this new design tool is for. Was really important in the sense that if you went out of the gate and you targeted high-end photographers that were doing photo retouching in New York on multi-million dollar shoots and they picked up this tool, they wouldn't be satisfied with it relative to what they were doing in Photoshop.

And so my guess is that you picked a specific type of customer and then over a very long period of time, kind of expanded that aperture as functionality and feature set grew. And so I'm interested. What are those early customers look like? Or how did you figure out who it was right for today versus tomorrow versus the next.

Zach Kitschke: That's exactly right. And in those early days, we did spend a lot of time with folks getting them into the product and, you know, talking to a lot of people. Uh, I mentioned that we started to run design workshops and we'd invite different groups of people that we could kind of rustle together, uh, into our office in Surrey Hills.

We'd actually get down to the local library and sort of advertise these design workshops and would get a mix of people in and would teach them some fundamentals of design. But at the same time, it was literally the best possible way to understand the experience that I would have with the platform. And in those early days, I started to identify.

This group of people that had a really frequent use case for visual content, and that was social media, marketers and content creators. And so, uh, we really started to zero in on that community. In those early days, we really made sure that it was a great experience to actually create social media posts in the product.

Things like graphics for Twitter, Pinterest Facebook at that point in time created a whole lot of templates that were perfect. There started blogging writing about social media topics and trends going to conferences and events in that space. And we really had this groundswell. What area I'd 

Brett Berson: love to spend a little bit more time.

And you touched on this is obviously you've had a whole variety of roles over the course of the incredible growth of the company, but most of it has touched different parts of distribution, PR comms, marketing, et cetera. And you talked a little bit about this when you were talking about workshops, but I'm really interested in what are the things you did to go from one user to 10, 10 to a hundred, a hundred to a thousand, a thousand to maybe 10,000, kind of the little tactics or things that you did in the early days that really drove that early.

Zach Kitschke: I'll talk about payoff. Firstly, you know, that was ultimately what I, I was hired firstly, to do, I guess, prior to joining Canberra, I was riding for a small publication covering startups in Sydney and around Australia. And that was actually funded by one of the local incubators here. And so that would have become a really fantastic way for me to meet a whole lot of founders and local investors and folks like that.

Like a lot of startups that ended up filing. And so I was out of it. I'm looking for work. And so reached out to a few people and fortunately, Nicki Shevock one of the investors from Blackbird, a local fund here introduced me to Mellon cliff and sort of said, we've just invested. And I think they're looking for anyone right now, but you should connect and have a chat.

And so I met up with Mellon cliff and it sounded really exciting what they were building. I was really keen to get involved. I could tell after that first coffee at the cafe, around from the small Haley office that I hadn't done a very good job of selling myself. So I went home that night and put together a big, long list of ideas that I thought I could come in and help them out with one of those being, helping with their first funding announcement and ultimately the launch.

And so PR in the early days became a really great way for us to get the word out, particularly here in Australia, in the U S as well. We had a really interesting story at that point in time for a few reasons. The first reason being we had just closed a $3 million seed round, which was the largest seed round ever raised by an Australian company.

At that point in time, you know, there were some other interesting parts of this story too. Melon cliff had spent months and months and months back and forth between Sydney and San Francisco. Melad slept on, uh, her brother's floor for months pitched hundreds of investors. But ultimately that first round came together from a whole bunch of folk associated with the Mai Tai network, which is basically this caught surfing on unconference.

And so it was a few really interesting. Um, the story that just made a sort of it sort of intriguing startup at that point in time. And so the way that we ended up approaching it was we knew there was going to be a little bit of time between the funding and actually launching, and so decided to take a bit of a stealth approach.

And so we had announced the funding ground. We talked about the fact that we have this vision to change the world of design, and we're able to talk about the interesting community of investors that had come together to invest in this startup from the other side of the world. And so I was able to drum up some early coverage of our funding round and something else that we did really well at that point, I think in hindsight, was we used that as an opportunity to drive people to a waiting list that we created.

And so by the time we actually launched, we've gathered 50,000. People's emails that we're excited to get on Canva. And so between the funding and actually rolling out the products, we did a second announcement, which we actually unveiled what the product was and what it would do. And so, you know, did a whole range of interviews and provided a UI of the platform and demoed it to journalists at that point.

Um, and so by the time we launched, we actually had this sort of hype and excitement from a community of people that were ready to get involved. And, um, we're really excited to get on the product. What 

Brett Berson: type of publications did you pitch? 

Zach Kitschke: Ah, literally everyone. I tried pitching every single report that I could find at that point.

I had some connections here in Australia, folks that I'd sort of worked with or come into contact with. And so I pitched them and the Australian press tech crunch PandAI daily at the time, did some really great coverage of the funding round story. Uh, you know, there was a lot more reporters that didn't respond to me, but ultimately there were some that did, do you 

Brett Berson: think that strategy still can work today?

I just feel like it's so much harder to get anyone to write about an early stage technology company today. 

Zach Kitschke: I think at that point in time, that was also the feeling as well. Ultimately pay off, comes down to the story that you're able to tell. And I think it's uncovering what is interesting or unique about what you're doing that sets you apart.

Brett Berson: Maybe you can talk about what is the story that you crafted that you think captured some of the interest or attention of reporters in those early days? 

Zach Kitschke: Sure. A good story is something different or unexpected or unique. And so. For us that was identifying the elements of the canvas story that set us apart, I guess, from other companies, maybe in Silicon valley or even in Australia and the prevailing wisdom at that point in time was that you had to be in Silicon valley.

You had to be in San Francisco. And that was something that Mellon Cleveland heard time after time from various investors. The. Are the really interesting story of how male had pitched hundreds of investors in order to pull the round together, this story of determination and persistence battling through everything that went with actually getting the round together there as well.

And I guess the other element was just how long the idea for Canva had been brewing. Mel and cliff started their first company fusion books back in think it was 2007. So it actually built this really successful school yearbook business, which became the largest school yearbook platform in Australia, France, and New Zealand.

They demonstrated that I could build a business they'd bootstrapped that the whole way along. So ultimately there was these four really interesting elements of the story, which set them apart and might have an interesting story to unpack for, for journalists at that time. 

Brett Berson: How did you then approach the evolution of that story between years one and two and three?

Because I assume what happened is you found these unique angles to kind of repackage the narrative of the company. And then you tell that story and then you have to go find another story to get people interested again, as the company evolves. And what did that process look. 

Zach Kitschke: It felt like we told the same story over and over and over again.

Uh, and people were really interested in the journey. However, I think what we did to try and evolve the narrative over time was looking for milestones of growth along the way that gave us a reason to reach back out to reporters. And so following the launch, the next big announcement I can remember was when we brought guy Kawasaki on as our chief evangelist, we had, I think it was a couple hundred thousand users at that point.

You know, it was a very, very small company compared to what we are today. And so people were asking like, why has guy joined this company from Australia? And then of course there was at the next funding round. I mean, something that I think we did really well at that point was. We started to learn that reporters don't cover product and less your Hey major tech company.

And so the thing that at that point, everyone was interested in was funding rounds. And so whenever we announced a funding round, we would actually tie or hold it off until we had a product announcement to go out as well. And so when we launched, what's now Canva pro at the time it was canvas for work, our premium pro subscription.

We actually announced that we, the funding round at that point in time. And so reporters wanted to cover the funding. But when we were asked, why, if you raise this round, we were able to talk about the product and what we were setting out to do with Canva for work at that point in time. 

Brett Berson: What was the story behind guy Kawasaki becoming the chief evangelist.

Where did that idea come from? And what was that role in the early days? I don't think it's something that a lot of startups think about these days. 

Zach Kitschke: It was really opportunistic. I think, you know, we're in now first office space sitting there building the product and trying to figure out how to spread the word and, and, you know, one afternoon I remember someone else on the team.

I think guy Kawasaki has been using us for his graphics and we actually jumped on and there was this post, which was a graphic that, that he'd posted. And someone had replied to him and said, are you using camera? I love it. And so we were like, oh my gosh, we need to chat to him. And so cliff actually reached out.

We ended up jumping on a call with guy and found out that it was actually paid he's social media manager. Who'd been a huge fan of Canva and have been using it for a lot of his graphics. And so a couple of weeks later, coincidentally, we were going to be in the U S and so actually went up and met with guy and talked through the vision for kava and the product.

And he loved it and totally saw where we were going. We were keen to bring him on. You obviously have this large community that followed him online. I've done a lot of speaking perfect in the social media space. And so there was a lot of great alignment there and we talked about it and he ultimately decided to come on board and we're thinking about the story and how do we frame that up?

He had been chief evangelist at apple, which he was well known for. And so he ultimately agreed to become chief evangelist for kava, which is only the second time that he'd had that title. And so we were able to generate some awareness of that and that people were really interested to find out why he joined.

Brett Berson: And he originally came on in a full-time. 

Zach Kitschke: It wasn't full time. So at that point, guy was traveling the world, doing keynotes almost every week and doing a lot of content online, but it was actually because he was doing those things that he was able to help spread the word about kava. It sort of drop us into every presentation that he was doing, or if he was running a workshop or opportunities to share the word he would be doing that.

Brett Berson: That's so clever. So we talked about leveraging guys and evangelist. We talked about some of the early press strategies and just basically pitching and we're begging any reporter anywhere to write a story. And I actually think probably the long tail of that is a little bit under appreciated in that I think everybody's like, oh, I want a story in New York times or whatever, but the compounding benefit of having lots and lots of long tail publishers linking back to your product, writing about your product can be super powerful.

But I'm curious, what are the other things that you did in those early days to go from like a hundred to a thousand thousand to 10,000, 10,000 to a hundred, then. 

Zach Kitschke: I'd say the focus for us always started with the product. And I think that Spain, ultimately the key to our success, I think that obsessiveness with the early experience, seeing people, you know, in UserTesting or in workshops and not being satisfied until they had a seamless experience and the product lived up to our hope for them, we've always invested in a really.

Incredibly generous free product. And so, you know, these days we have more than 70 million people using kava, literally every country around the world in a hundred different languages to create content every month. And the vast majority of those people still use Canva for free. And that's intentional. We want to make sure that no matter who you are, wherever you are in the world, your financial position, where you live, shouldn't prevent you from accessing a tool like Canva.

The secondary benefit to that has been that all of these people that use and love Canva ultimately are advocates for the products as well. And we'll tell, tell other people about their experience. And so to this dilute word of mouth continues to be one of our largest drivers of growth. How 

Brett Berson: did the freemium model fit into the early growth strategy and how did you figure out what to charge for, or to how to charge for it and maybe how that might've changed over time?

Zach Kitschke: Sure. I have been out there as a product from the tail end of 2013. I haven't had really focused on that core experience for that first period of time. We set out to build our pilot offering and. We're looking at different features and functionality that we could offer. The idea was always that we would offer things that real power users would need, or would, would be additive I've run above the fray experience there.

It was actually really interesting. I think how we partnered with our community to help build that product in the same way that we invited people in early on for those design workshops, we actually worked with a number of larger organizations as we were building the product for work. I remember I was still running out customer support at that point in time.

And we had an email come through from a graphic designer at Huffington post and they said, you know, can we chat to someone were big fans of Canva, but we've got some real challenges in the newsroom that we'd love to see if we could help solve. And so ended up connecting and got over to New York and spend some time with the newsroom ad there.

And what became really, really clear was that they have this problem. You know, they had hundreds of journalists creating content, social media, editors, et cetera, creating content to get their work out there. And the pace meant that people were creating a huge number of graphics every day, but they were finding that people were posting stuff on their, their social profiles that had the wrong colors or outdated fonts or totally off brand.

And so. We spent some time with them understanding that problem. And at that point, we have templates in Canva that we created that anyone could use. And it was really, really clear what they needed was actually branded templates for Huffington post. And so sat down and in the space of probably a dial to, we actually figured out how to hack something together for them.

And so what we did was we created some designs based on what they wanted for their social posts and turn them into templates. And we actually put those graphics with the links into kava on a very hacky WordPress page at that point. And I ended up sharing that within the newsroom. And so that hacky WordPress page ended up becoming effectively the prototype for our team templates in Canva.

It was amazing having Huffington post, uh, able to kind of respond and give us real feedback. I mean those early days. And I'm very proud to say that still using canvas today, 

Brett Berson: is that how you approached the early days of product building? You would go deep with a specific type of customer, maybe figure out what they needed or maybe most importantly, what they would pay for prototype.

And then. 

Zach Kitschke: Yeah, it was definitely a matter of understanding what people really struggled with or what would help them be more effective or efficient. I know the feature that we came up with as part of that early Canva for work product was called magic resize. And similarly, we saw this challenge. Uh, anyone that's creating content is generally not just creating a post for social media, but they're also creating a blog graphic and an email header.

There's a variety of formats for every social platform. And so one of the really time-consuming processes for folks at that point was to actually manually re create every graphic that they needed in all the different dimensions with the different layouts. And so that became the seed of an idea and we thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could resize your design to all of the formats that you need with one button.

And that was how magic resize was born. So. 

Brett Berson: I want to talk a little bit about going from a super small team, your first few hundred users scaling in your first few thousand and what the organization looked like at the time, and maybe some of the ideas that you all implemented as you started to grow, whether it be how you approached hiring your first handful of folks, how you approached organizing the team or things that really enabled you to continue to grow the business.

At 

Zach Kitschke: every stage, along the way, you're constantly needing to rethink and evaluate the best way to operate as a team to get things done. And there was some really pivotal shifts that we saw, you know, over time that come with a team that's growing in the early days, we literally would all fit around one desk in the first office.

And I remember getting to the point where we no longer fit and we, we had to split into two tables and, um, there was debates over which table should be code table number one, and which type would, should be called table number two. So we ended up with table one and table a to keep everyone happy, but there were some other shifts that we saw.

And so we ended up going through a few phases. It was only a few of us that were in engineering. So we had engineering and we divided engineering into front end and backend. And we soon learned that that wasn't great because you need front-end and back-end collaborating around problems. And so. Then we formed into small teams and we organize teams around very clear goal or mission.

And we ended up growing with that approach. And that became a really effective way to manage for the startup as it was, as it was scaling. Then at some point we ended up with a hundred different teams and of course that became unwieldy and impossible to manage. And so we started to form into groups. And so the groups have really been the basis for which we've continued to scale.

What are examples of. So I remember when we first formed the groups at that point in time, some of the groups that we brought together with things like our app store and now have still a group is responsible for all of the different integrations. You know, we've got apps that plug into Canva, you know, to bring you content in from different places or allow you to publish to platforms like Dropbox or Facebook or others.

And so we kicked off the app store group. We had a group dedicated to our iPhone and Android app experience and a range of others digging 

Brett Berson: in a little bit to some of these ideas around scaling and people. But I thought would be fun to explore some of the stuff you've done around learning and development and coaching.

And you have this idea of Canva university, and maybe we could talk a little bit about. 

Zach Kitschke: Sure following my involvement with the product space, the next sort of chapter for me, was stepping in to build our people group. And so at that point in time, we had a recruitment team and we had one or two people in HR, but there was no formal people group.

And so, you know, and cliff asked me to, to take that on and to start thinking about building out our people group. And so I spent a lot of time, I guess we, a couple of us went over to Dreamforce and I ended up arranging a bunch of different meetings with different companies and companies that we thought did people in culture really well.

And I learned a lot, read a lot, listen to a lot of podcasts. And so then started to build out the team. And one of the first things that we did was to launch Canada university. And I guess the idea for that really came about for a few reasons. The first being that as a company that growing, uh, doubling year on year, The thing that just stood out to me was that first period of someone coming into the company is actually pivotal to them getting up to speed, feeling confident, getting a context that they need to do their job well, and also to manage pre load some of the challenges that come with scale.

And so we started to build caviar diversity with the idea that it would run all of our internal learning and training and onboarding with onboarding specifically, we definitely saw some patterns as paperwork coming in. And one of the very first exercises we did was actually to sit down and did a focus group or a web.

We have different cohorts of people. So people that had just gotten, say an offer for Canva people that were in wake one, people that were in month, one month, three month, six. And it was really interesting. We ended up getting people to plot how they were feeling. If you imagine the axes being sort of happy or sad, um, you know, positive or negative or whatever it might be.

And we'd see this really interesting S-curve. And so know when people took on the job and first started, there was this excitement and this enthusiasm and people were so keen to get involved and be part of this thing. Uh, the onboarding, you know, first couple of weeks, people would start to realize. The things that they didn't know and start to get further in, and you'd sort of see sometimes some imposter syndrome or feeling like they didn't have all the context.

And so you'd see this dip that would happen this period there. And then slowly over the, you know, the following few months people's experience would pick up again, as they got more confident, they got some wins on the board. They started to understand how the pieces all fit together. And so as we started to think about our first onboarding experience, I guess we designed it in a way that.

Targeted the experiences that people were having at different points in time to try and make sure that we were giving them the workshops or the information to read, or the coaching or the check-ins with their mentor, um, at the right points in time and would sort of measure ourselves against that JD.

So that was onboarding. And then I guess with Kevin university, that's really helped us scale out our whole learning program. Internally we've ended up evolving this framework called the 12 skills, the, of the 12 skills that we've identified over time that we really see as making people really successful at kava.

And so we've built targeted workshops and training on, on specific skills like giving great feedback or writing strategy docs. That's continued to scale as we've added more offices and different types of challenges along the way. You 

Brett Berson: mentioned a couple of the modules or skills. Can you expand on that a little bit and talk about maybe the most salient ones or.

The ones that are maybe most unique or important to the way that you behave as a country. 

Zach Kitschke: It's really interesting how that framework evolved. So when we were in the sort of early hundreds, we actually did our very first feedback process for the team and we ran a 360 degree feedback process. And so everyone, I could nominate a few people to, to give them feedback that they worked with together.

And it was all sort of open texts. So the question was, what is so-and-so superpower or what did I do really, really well in? And the second question was what can I do to improve? And it was really interesting seeing all of the feedback that came through now with her system, sort of thinking started to unpack and wait.

We started to look really closely at that. And it was interesting saying that the favorite. Well grouped into similar themes. There was either things that people were struggling with or that could improve on or that people were doing well. And so that ended up evolving into this set of four categories that we identified, you know, the first being your craft, how technically strong you, uh, your experience as an engineer or a designer or a product manager, or in columns, the second being strategy, how are you able to break down a problem?

You know, figure out how to get from a to B, make things happen quickly. Things like. The third being communication. Uh, how proactive are you? How effective are you? You know, you're emotionally intelligent in the way that you communicate and you're sensitive to others. Can you write well, can you speak well, things like that.

And then the fourth area that really stood out was leadership and coaching. You know, how do you go. At an individual level in terms of personal leadership, but also how do you go in terms of coaching others or running teams? And so we ended up with those sort of four categories. And within each of those categories, now there's, there's three different skills, but we always spoke about it as being, you would never be, it's almost impossible to be the superstar across all of those areas.

You generally spike in maybe one or two areas and different roles will require that of you. And so it became a really useful framework for us and a language to use internally. And that as we've evolved as a way to scale things like learning and training and coaching and feedback and all of those things.

Brett Berson: It's something we haven't dug into. That is kind of an offshoot of what you just talked about. Zach is your own journey throughout the life of the company and the different roles that you've assumed I'm specifically interested. When you think about these four capabilities and your own areas of strengths and weaknesses and how you chose to grow and evolve within the company, maybe how those things fit together in each of your chapters in the company.

Zach Kitschke: Sure. So I think we've spoken about the first chapter, which is really that comms role. In those early days, I ended up taking on a bunch of other things that fit into the category of if you weren't an engineer, you could do so things like I took over cooking lunches from cliff who was sort of doing that before me and I started cooking lunch every day for the team.

And then, uh, ended up there was no one else to do it. So I took on our customer service early on. And so, you know, we was doing that. And at some point those two things ended up taking up more than half of my day and said, cliff said, we need you to be working on comms and marketing and those sorts of things.

And so that became kind of the first time. Where I hired someone. So Hyde song, who's one of our amazing chefs and he's still here with us in, in Sydney today. Hazel took on customer service from me, responding to our email tickets and messages on social ended up scaling the team around that. I'd say the next chapter was really that period of jumping into product and helping with the camera for work launch.

And that was a mix of doing both the columns there, but also spending time with the customers like Huffington post and the team internally learning a really different sort of aspect of working in and leading a product team for the first time. Then with the people org that chapter, there was a lot of building, a lot of hiring and other strategy, I guess.

Breaking down, what did we need that group to be? And how do we get from a to B and more recently for the last two years, I've been back really focusing on how do we now scale our marketing around the world. As we really set out to realize that mission of empowering everyone to design, how 

Brett Berson: did you figure out at each one of these changes that it was time to change and that whatever you were changing or going to was the highest and best use of your 

Zach Kitschke: time?

You know, definitely my story is a case of. Being a generalist and I've always had a real love of learning and having the opportunity to dive into different areas that I might not have done before. And I definitely done some communications through the blogging that I'd done and, you know, through some previous work in comms, but coming into Canva that was definitely, you know, there was definitely the biggest journalists that I've pitched or, you know, this was definitely the sort of most serious work that I had been doing.

And so, you know, David has shot and was learning along the way, same thing with customer support, same thing with people. It's sort of this interesting balance in a company that's going through hyper growth because there's really two ingredients. I think. To tackling the next big frontier. And it's the right mix of context like that organizational understanding the understanding of the mission of the company, the understanding of how to get things done coupled with what's the right insight or experience or advice that needs to be brought in, in that area.

And so I think the thing that I have had has been that context and that sort of ability to get things done and have had to couple that with ways to fill an experience gap or a knowledge gap. And so I think that's probably the crux of it in terms of knowing when's the right time to bring someone in and sort of learning what great looks like in a different area to one that you're familiar with.

Brett Berson: How did you think about your own wants and needs and maybe your own ego relative to what the company needed at any given point. 

Zach Kitschke: How look, I think I'm so desperate to be involved with Canva that I always felt just excited to work on whatever I could. I like to cooking. I was excited to cook lunch. I was curious about support.

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 change is the only constant. And so it's really, really critical to actually being able to grow with a company is to not be attached to a particular area and just to be excited about having the biggest, possible impact and learning.

And 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. And so I think that's a reality in an organization like Canva is the team's never big enough. You'd ever got all the skills that you need.

You never have people with all of the experience or knowledge. And so you have to supplement that through learning, growing, bringing in advisors in different areas and all of those sorts of things. And it's something we all need to be leveling up continuously looking at those skills and, and how do we grow to actually fill that out?

On 

Brett Berson: that point on advisers. I know that you've leveraged them throughout the company's life. Have you set those relationships up in a particular way, or do you have a philosophy or approach to really getting the most out of different advisory type relationship? 

Zach Kitschke: Yeah. We've had a lot of different advises, um, over the years for everything from figuring out how to internationalize Canva through, to building people in culture, how to hire and build the tame to marketing and building a brand.

And I think the three things that have become. No clear throughout that time is like the first question you really need to ask is what's, someone's super power. Like everyone that's great in a field or sort of has a reputation is generally good at a range of things, but excellent. In one thing. And so what I think we've learned to do is to really zero in on what's that person's super power, how you really get that knowledge, whether it's growing SEO or.

Figuring out how to localize a product at scale or building a brand. The second step is really figuring out what are some practical or tangible goals that, that can help you achieve. Advisers can come in different shapes and sizes. And so for some, it's just sharing context or experience. They're not going to be doing a lot of work with or for you, but they'll be able to talk things through and help you think.

Other folks will be really, really happy to actually take on pieces of work. And we've found that to be really, really helpful when you're hiring in a particular area. And it's not something that you're familiar. At getting an advisor to actually help and figure out the job spec or how to interview giving feedback on potential candidates.

Then number three would be the quantity of time and the investment that they're able to make. And the way that we've done that is to generally agree on a time commitment. And so someone might be able to spend a day a month or, you know, all those a dye awake. And then, you know, you could put basically a time value on that either in terms of cash or equity.

And that's worked really, really well. I 

Brett Berson: wanted to pick up the thread that we started just a few minutes ago. When you were talking about the ways that you leveraged documentation, you have this idea of strategy docs. You have this idea of vision Dax and was interested to learn more about those and how you leverage them at camp.

Zach Kitschke: We have a few different tools or mechanisms that we use internally to communicate one of those being visioned decks. Canva's a very mission-driven company at its core. The mission is to empower the world to design empowering the world means empowering, ultimately everyone. So we're constantly looking out what are the big things that are going to take us forward to achieving that mission.

And so we've found vision decks to be a really. Great way we do them in Canberra, of course. And the goal there is really to lay out and communicate a vision, almost like you would pitch a vision for a startup. And we found dreaming about the future and walk the product and the platform will look like it is to come is a really important part of then being able to break that down and set goals around that.

So, you know, vision decks are a way to dream collectively, bring together and tell a narrative and show what the future will look like in terms of strategy docs. And this is something that we've used as well. And so one of the important things in a fast paced fast moving environment is the ability to communicate information, not just in terms of meetings or one-on-one conversations, but also asynchronously.

And so using strategy. For projects or decisions or requests is a really, really great way to consolidate context. And so, you know, you'd tend to answer the key questions like who, what, where, when, how, why you know about something and as a document in the same way as a slack channel, it becomes a, uh, a place that ideas can kind of build and grow, or, you know, as you loop people into a project, because you realize you need someone with different experience or another part of the company needs to be involved, actually having those places that everyone can get up to speed and understand where a project or a decision is and has been really, really important.

Brett Berson: Is there a specific format to these documents or anybody can structure it in whatever 

Zach Kitschke: we've actually ended up evolving a range of different strategy docs for different things. And so these days, one of my favorites is the one page of format. The structure there is giving background or context at the top.

Like, what is this about? Why are we needing to make this decision, putting together a recommendation or a proposed next step, laying out the context or supporting information, you know, things that are helpful there, and then, you know, a place for people to okay, or add comments or, you know, give, uh, an LGBT M and we've evolved.

For example, for features that we'll build, there's a design doc template that lays out how we'll build that feature, you know, the user stories and things like that. And so different parts of the company have evolved different templates that they can use, but ultimately. Principle is capturing the K context in one place visually or in written form and answering those key questions that make up a story who what, where, when, how, why, 

Brett Berson: it's amazing, how valuable something that simple is.

You can cut out so many meetings just by taking a minute to clarify your thoughts in a one-page or I have a bunch of people comment and move forward, and I'm not sure why it's not a part of the way that more companies operate. 

Zach Kitschke: Totally. Everything's about speed and to wait till next Tuesday, to have a meeting with these 10 people or to have to go and individually, talk to folks and explaining all of that context is almost redundant work.

And so it's short-cutting communication because you can very quickly bring people up to speed on context or get input on a decision. And if you do need to have a meeting or a conversation, you've actually got a starting point and that can be really, really focused. It's only the things that you couldn't solve through a document or through slack or more, more sort of asynchronous forms of communication.

Brett Berson: I wonder if it's, for whatever reason people feel like it's actually slow. And more work to write something down. When in almost all cases it's, it's so much more efficient, but there's some cognitive overhead or perception issue that, oh, it's just easier for four of us to get together and talk about it.

And it never is. It never is. I agree. Another idea in this realm that you've thought about and talked a little bit about is this idea of chaos to clarity, and I'd be interested to have you explain that. 

Zach Kitschke: Yeah, we talk about the chaos to clarity spectrum internally. And so I want you to imagine a line as I'm talking and on one side of the page, it's just these big, giant scribble, and you don't know what direction it's going in.

And as you get to the other end, it starts to even out and slowly turns into a straight line that finishes off nice and clean. And I guess this, we realized was a really. Good visual metaphor for pretty much any project or problems, space that's requiring focus. Things always start out a little murky.

There's a lot of problems to solve. Uh, there's a lot of chaos to unpack in order to figure out what are the right steps and actually get to clarity on something. And so we've found this has been a really, really useful framework for driving, you know, projects from start to finish and having a language around something, being more in chaos land.

And that's the start of the spectrum. Chaos land is the land of dreaming big and potential and visionary thinking. And you get more and more refined. And at the other end, it's very, very specific steps or features or things like that. And I guess we found that people actually tend to have a sweet spot along that spectrum.

Some people like knowing exactly. To be done. I don't like plans to change. They don't want to be involved in something until it's got some clarity or shape. And then you've got other people that really love dreaming that can operate in that space and that's their preferred state. And so we've used that to understand different types of people in internally.

One exercise we did one time was actually map out across the floor, you know, during our old hands. And we laid out the spectrum and we got people to stand at the different point, you know, in terms of what was their sweet spot in that aspect drum. Um, and then we also used it to describe the process, to get something done, you know, at Canva.

And so the way to move along the spectrum from chaos to clarity is ultimately to try and add more clarity at every step along way. In the early stage, it might be getting a brainstorm together and checking in a whole lot of different ideas, consolidating, you know, everything that can be thought off. You might then move on to a vision deck.

As you kind of whittle it down and know broadly where you're going to go. You might then get to doing some designs if it's user experience or a strategy doc, if it's organizing an event or something to do with the way that we organize as a team and so on and so forth until you ultimately get to full clarity and deliver something, another 

Brett Berson: ritual you all have is this idea of a season opener.

What does 

Zach Kitschke: that. Season openers have become such a pivotal part of the way that we operate in our culture. We started this off years ago now, and basically as we were setting goals, we realized we needed a point in time to rally everyone to set their goals and sort of look ahead together. And so we were thinking about it and we decided to go for seasons rather than quarters, because we could have a bit of fun with that as well.

And so I started launched our very first season opener and the idea is we bring the whole company together once every three months at the start of the season. And. We in the early days would get every team to basically pitch their vision. their next set of goals almost as though they're a start-up pitching.

And so the whole company would do this and it would be a, just the most impactful way to get everyone on the same page about the breadth that was going on. We would celebrate, you know, major milestones or launches, um, and have some fun around it too. So for one of our early winter season openers, the theme was the winter Olympics.

And so everyone came, dressed up as athletes from different sports. We had these kind of ridiculous Olympic torch, relay that culminated in us lighting this cauldron with fire We have this opening ceremony, uh, you know, there's snow inside. It was this big affair and we've done all sorts of different themes.

Over the years, it's become part of a cultural fabric and something that people really, really look forward to every three months now, uh, cavern. And as we've grown, it's, it's obviously evolved as the company's gotten bigger, but we still use it to talk about our dreams and goals, as well as the big major launches.

And most recent one we had, we actually took a five-year horizon and dreamt together about what the next few years could look like for Canva. 

Brett Berson: That is such a cool idea. How do you structure it? Is it sort of like a giant all hands meeting or what's the actual format when you get together as a company?

Zach Kitschke: It's been different. Cause it's a, it's obviously started as an in-person event when we did it in Sydney and then we actually did it in the Philippines as well. So it was, uh, an in-person event in our different offices and it's shifted online over the last 18 months, two years. And that's been really fun too.

And when 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 for the company, actually being able to have everyone at the same time. And so that's been really fun as well and continued to have fun with the theme you know, more recently just because everyone's sort of on a, on a screen, it sort of felt like it was a bit of a TV show.

And so we, um, we came up with Canva TV or CTV and, you know, had a lot of fun with different teams pretending to present different shows as a way to sort of showcase their launch. So I 

Brett Berson: thought we could wrap up maybe by going full circle, we talked about distribution and marketing in the early days, and we haven't really talked that much about your most recent role now as CMO of Canva.

And I'd be interested to learn a little bit about now that you're operating at this extraordinary scale, what are some of the unlocks that you've had or things that have worked exceptionally well as you've grown your distribution as a. 

Zach Kitschke: I think a lot of the same principles that we adhere to in the early days remain true today.

We really do focus on the product experience and ultimately the product is our best marketing to date. You know, some of the things I think that we've done in that space in particular are really investing in building community and creating ways for our community members to get together, you know, share ideas and inspiration with each other and for us to support them.

And so, as an example, our education community in the Philippines is now in the tens of thousands. And that started as just a small community, that the team there set up literally tens of thousands of teachers have got on board and, and use it to share. By some plans and inspiration with others. We started doing webinars and workshops there through that growth organically, the department of education and the Philippines got involved and has been supporting that effort.

So focusing on community has been really important through our marketing as well. Really, what we're trying to do is elevate and celebrate our community and the things that they're achieving this year, we launched our first brand campaigns for kava, which has been really exciting to say, Canva you're out there on TV and billboards and radio and things like that.

But one of my favorite things about the most recent campaign that we launched. Called with caveat can, is the fact that it's all centered around three stories of real kava community members. We had Tiana who started this nonprofit youth advocates for change, and she put together a graphic in Canva and actually organized the black lives matter, walk across the golden gate bridge, the way through that design, she was able to mobilize 50,000 people there and is doing some incredible work.

And so we're able to actually hear those stories and sort of share what they're doing with the world through that campaign. 

Brett Berson: So maybe to wrap up, are there books or things that you've read that have had a really lasting impact on. 

Zach Kitschke: One of my favorite books to share is called the power of moments. And it basically looks at how do people, you know, think about experiences.

And basically it sort of uses a whole lot of different examples, but the core premise of the book is that people are willing to put up with quite a lot of ma if they have these peak moments and experiences. Now, the things that you remember looking at. Got it. Uh, generally the things that were really bad, like a terrible experience or the things that were really amazing and they other things that stand out.

And so the premise of the book is the place to actually focus. If you want to create great experiences on moments is on creating peak moments. And there's one example in the book that I really, really love, which is about this hotel in Los Angeles, it's called like the magic castle for a long time. It was like number two or three on TripAdvisor.

So it was one of the most highly ranked hotels. And you look at the photos and you think like, what's that doing there? It's sort of just. All David hotel, but in the book, it unpacks this story and it says there was all this magic around the hotel that really made it a really unique place to stay. You know, you'd get into the foyer and there'd be a magician doing tricks.

As you're checking in with the kids, there'd be this big library of DVDs and games and everything. You could imagine. There's a Popsicle hotline by the pool and you press a button. And within a couple of minutes, you've got, you know, a Butler with a silver tray with all of the different colored popsicles for, for you to choose from.

And I just think. Such a good metaphor for how, how to think about experiences, whether it's, how you onboard your team and create moments of celebration for people's milestones, whether it's their first or second or third anniversary, how do you make those special, that onboarding experience, doing a celebration to graduate them, or, you know, when you think about your, uh, your community that are using your product, how do you create those moments of magic?

And whether it's a moment like resizing, a design with one click, or even the fond that we've injected, you know, if you upload an imaging kava, I think it's like one in a hundred people will say as the water's filling up the bucket in the UI. If you're very lucky, you'll say that Robert ducky cruise across and putting those moments into experiences and creating those peaks.

Brett Berson: So that's a great place to end Zach. Thank you so much for spending this 

Zach Kitschke: time with us. It's been great. So activate here with you. Thanks for having me.