120: Miro's Founder on Reinventing a 100-Million-User Company | Andrey Khusid, Founder of Miro

If we look at the stages of the organization, at the beginning it was not polite. We care about each other, but we were very direct and we were focused on the mission and we were focused on pushing things together and winning together. And then at a certain point when we scaled the organization quite a lot, we got into this mode where some people were avoiding saying what they think and not giving feedback. And I was myself not providing the right feedback at the right time because I didn't want to hurt someone's feelings in the org and whatnot. But I don't think it's productive. I don't believe it's productive. And we are now, not the whole organization, but at least in the leadership, we are mining for productive conflicts. We are giving feedback directly in the shared setting, in personal one-on-ones. There are real conversations that are happening and helps so much more to move things forward. It's just you move it at a speed of trust, correct? And to be able to say what you think and to challenge each other while you care about each other is so important. And that's, that's organization that I believe in and that we are bringing back. I can't say it's like 1,600-people organization is operating that way, but it all starts with myself and other leaders. And the check for me is, do I have something that I wish I say, but I didn't say because of whatever reason? And if I have the answer yes, then it's a problem. If I have the answer no, I actually say everything when I want to say and in any setting, like with a leadership team, broader leadership team, then we're in a good spot. And I ask the same for other people, like how they feel. If we all feel good to say what we think, this is great place to be.

Welcome back. This is From Startup to Grownup. My name is Alisa Cohn, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Andrej Koussid to the podcast. Andrej is the founder and CEO of Miro, the company he started in 2011 to bring the whiteboard into the browser. It's since grown into a platform used by more than 100 million people worldwide and is now evolving into a space where teams can create together with AI. Andre and I talked about what it really takes to reinvent a company while you're still running it at scale. He shared how he thinks about staying in what he calls day one thinking, why experimentation looks different when you're reinventing a product, not just optimizing it, and how a founder can bring a team along when the vision is still more instinct than plan. We also talked about switching between founder mode and CEO mode, what he learned about building small entrepreneurial teams inside a much bigger organization, and why trust, direct feedback, and the right team chemistry matters so much when the company is changing fast. It's a very honest conversation about adaptation, leadership, and staying on the journey even when the path keeps shifting. Please enjoy my fantastic conversation with Andrej Kucic, founder of Miro. Andrej, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Thank you, Alisa. Great to be here.

Great to see you. And I wanna just maybe set the Just context for everybody, you created Miro in 2011 to bring the whiteboard into the browser. You have over 100 million users worldwide, and now you're building an AI innovation space. A lot has happened since 2011. What was the process of pivoting? And I guess I'm just curious, like what has happened in the past few years that got you to this next iteration?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we call it evolution rather than pivoting because we are building on top of the fundamentals that we have as a business, as a company. So we started our journey with this whiteboard in a browser. After that, we introduced to the world visual collaboration category. And obviously last several years are all about AI. And we were thinking how Miro can help teams to co-create with AI together. And we moved from being just a whiteboard, just visual collaboration to the platform that help teams to discover, define, and deliver end-to-end, but not just do it in a human-to-human collaboration, but do it in a human-human agent collaboration way. So that's the major evolution of our platform. And it's quite different. There is the same part of it, which is canvas, but there are different ways how people interact with the canvas now. Before it was just humans to humans collaborating together. Now you bring in agents, you visualize workflows, agents do them on your behalf. There is a moment where a human can lead. There is a moment where a human is in the loop. So all of those interactions significantly evolved since our simple whiteboard.

That's amazing. And I mean, to say the obvious, a massive sort of innovation, obviously alongside the massive innovation of AI. Can you put us back in the room with you when you were realizing, first of all, this AI thing is real, we have to adapt. And second of all, maybe what are we going to do uniquely that's going to help us figure out this, new thing can be with AI and with agents. Like, put us back in the room with yourself and with your leadership team.

Yeah, it's been a couple years ago when we saw that this technology is transformative. And the principle that I have is always this day one thinking. And it means like, if I start the company today, what the problem should solve, how the product should look like, how we should interact with our customers, and so on. So when we were in the room a few years ago, we were looking at technology and saying, okay, where we have permissions to where we have permissions to win, how the technology transforms our existing core versus how it adds to our future state. And we just not started from scratch, but the idea is that you take the technology, you take the market dynamics and what people looking for, and you combine that in terms of what the new problems you can solve or old problems in a new way. So that's what we were thinking through. And we shipped a bunch of very transformative capabilities over the last year. But I think even more is coming, which will completely transform how we innovate.

Amazing. I can't wait to hear about that. You know, when you were shipping, one core value that I hear about a lot from you is around experimentation. So I'm just curious how specifically you built experimentation into the process of rebuild or rethinking or reimagining Miro. And also in particular, what worked when you were experimenting? Like, yes, that totally worked. And then what was like an experiment that went wrong?

Yeah, it depends actually on what stage of of the company evolution you are, because we experimented a lot when we had this previous product market fit. We had a vision, and then once we got it into the market, we experimented on all different stages of the product funnel. We experimented with certain capabilities. Now it's a moment where you rethink some of the things from scratch and you need to lead with a point of view. And yes, when we decide on how the product should look like, we come up with different concepts and we discuss them and we put them in front of the customers. But it's less about operationalized experimentation, it's more about kind of taste and conviction, which we're building that next horizon. And then once you see the retention, once you see that this resonates with the audience, you can start experimenting with certain things around the core value that you created. So It all depends. If you are in zero to one as a founder, you need to have that point of view and you need to lead with a conviction, but you have to keep your strong opinions loosely held. So you put it in front of your users, you put it in front of your customers, you listen and you adapt and you iterate fast. But once you figured out something that's working, then you build experimentation engine around it and do macro and micro optimizations around this. So that's how I think about it in general.

Yeah. When you're going Zero to One, you know, there are so many founders who are dealing with this right now because they are, of course, reinventing their companies. If you have a vision in your head as a founder and it's more like instinct and your team may not fully see it because you're the founder and you kind of have this vision of the way it should be, or you have an inkling, how can you bring people along or get them to, let's say, do that thing even though it's actually kind of hard to articulate and a lot of it comes from the founder's instinct?

It's a great, great question because I was figuring out it for myself recently. Obviously we have quite big organization of product managers, designers, engineers, and very talented people. And at the same time, you may have some ideas, insights. And I was curious and I was learning from founders from very different scale of companies, like very small to very big, how they navigate this. And what I learned is a lot of founders, CEOs sit down with those teams of 3-5 people and craft that new product together. Sometimes there are great ideas and great visions coming from the teams, but sometimes you know what can be the next thing, or you have a strong hypothesis, and you should not try to completely delegate that. You can go and build it together with the team. So what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to give the context, the what and the why, and then I'll give a space to the team to come up and propose what Do they agree? Do they not agree? Do they have a better what and why? And once we aligned on what and why, what can be the solution to that? And then I lean in and like we brainstorm, we discuss, we diverge, we converge. And if it aligns with my original intuition, we go, we put it in front of customers, we test it. If I have some other ideas, we will go and craft the solution together and we'll spend few days to co-design it and then again test it because no one knows the right answer. It's just more about intuitions and everyone can come with their intuitions, test it with the customers and users and whatever wins, uh, that should be scaled.

Yeah. It sounds like what you're saying is you start with an initial what and why and then bring the team together to kind of interrogate the what and why, and then maybe they have other ideas or maybe, maybe they don't, but one way or the other, you have to figure out what you're gonna test in the marketplace.

Exactly. Like you need to have a strong point of view on what and why. Why. It doesn't matter where that point of view comes. It comes from product leaders who are interacting with the customers, it comes from marketing, it comes from sales, it comes from CEO, it doesn't matter. What matters is that what and why, what's important is that this is grounded into customer insights and is grounded into broader observation of the world and opinion on how the world should look like in the future and what should exist that doesn't exist today. And once you have those hypotheses, you shape them up with UX, with some packaging, and then you put them in front of users and customers and see what resonates, what not.

Yeah, that is such a good process for experimentation. I'm just reflecting that what you said was when you had product market fit and then you had to obviously find product market fit again, again, was something that so many startups are really just grappling with. And I guess I'm curious, what was that journey like for you when you had massive scale in sort of probably 2020 to 2022, let's say. And then surely you had to make some changes and had to, as you say, refine product-market fit. What was that like for you? Can you sort of like give us some experience of what that was like inside your head and inside the company?

Yeah, of course. First of all, I think this challenge is not just a challenge for early-stage companies now in today's world with all the AI disruption. It's a challenge for every company at every scale. Because the speed of iteration, speed of product delivery significantly shrinks. So you can deliver so much more in such a short period of time so that everyone is exposed, to be honest, especially those who are part of digital economy. And this means that every company needs to find that way of continuous iteration and find the product-market fit. Now for us, it's been an interesting journey because it's been the first time when I faced this challenge within the scaled company. I was doing it multiple times when everyone can fit into one room with original idea of Miro, but also with a couple other startups, but I never faced it at the scale of 1,600-people organization. And that's a very different dynamics because you obviously need to run the organization. It's a big successful organization that serves many, many customers and At the same time, you need to invent the next horizon of the business. So my biggest learning is actually about people with who you create the company is not necessarily the same people with who you scale and operate the company. And I was trying to create a lot of those kind of early products and horizons with the people who are very successful in running the company and scaling the company. And through the hierarchy of the organization, through bringing everyone up to speed and through the management layers of the organization, but it's not necessarily the best way to do it because you need to arrange the team who is the team you would start the company, like 5 people team and build the initial product with. And that's a big learning. So for 0 to 1, you have to put the right people in the right mix and go together as you would start the company versus try to run it through the organizational hierarchy and operational layers and all the other mechanisms that you have in a bigger organization. That's the biggest one that I had to learn. And I was observing if I can do it through organizational hierarchy. And once we figured out that we need to find another path, we changed the approach.

Right. That's such an important learning and quite painful actually to learn. What was that like for you?

I mean, for me it was fine. I just lost a bit of time trying to do it in that way. But I think what's more important is for people who are working in organizations. So for example, your management layers are not adaptive to this approach where, you know, CEO can turn on the hat of the founder and go and find a small startup within the company, that's quite painful. You need to navigate that. But I'm lucky because a lot of people in the company just get it and they're supportive and they are actually assembling the teams to build those zero-to-one products and advise on certain things. So this is actually more about the management, how management is adaptive to those new realities versus founder CEOs. Because once founder, always founder. I don't think you can unlearn that. But you obviously, what you need to learn when the organization is scaling, you should not operate like just a founder, correct? Like you need to operate in different way when you scale organization, building mechanisms, all that good stuff. But then when you need to invent next horizon, you may take on the hat of the founder and go and do it together with the teams again. So I mean, switching modes.

Yeah. What's that leg-switching mode? So as I'm sure you know, there was that whole brouhaha from Paul Graham about founder mode that really came from that Brian Chesky talk. And to say the obvious, a founder, as you grow, has to turn more into so-called CEO. But then to your point, situations change and the founder has to adapt from CEO back to founder. But there are probably parts of the company that you're still really operating as a CEO. And so How do you personally think about that switch and about that context switch back and forth, and how do you manage to do that?

I think the reality is that regardless if you are a founder of the company or you're just professional CEO who is running the company today, to survive in the world, you need to be really in details. You need to be entrepreneurial. It's not anymore a situation where you can just scale the product market fit that the company got 10, 50 years ago. I spoke with one CEO of a very big company across Europe and he said that several years ago they were planning 10 years ahead and now they're planning 10 months ahead the best. And this is not a digital native company, it's a traditional business. And that's impressive. This is happening to all companies then with the physical AI, with other things that will significantly impact the dynamics, the competitive advantages that companies gained over time. Every CEO, every founder have to be in details and have to run company in an entrepreneurial way. It's not about stability anymore in general, how the companies are being run now. Now with AI, the company is operating on intersection of humans and agents, and you need to understand in details what's the work is done. How it's done, because you need to zoom out on the operating level of the company and see where agents would be better positioned to deliver impact and where humans are better positioned to deliver impact and how those together operate. And without being in deep details and understanding end-to-end processes and the technology as well as human potential, it's very hard to transform. Those who will not transform in the next few years they will be out of the game. That's quite clear as well. So my belief is that it's a skill, like founder mode is a skill as well as a kind of CEO who run the big company is a skill. And you just need to apply the right skill at the right time for the right problem.

That is, I think, very wise. And I'm curious, as you said, founders and CEOs have to learn that skill. What is your specific suggestions about how they can learn that skill? Because for quote unquote founder mode and being in the details is really about being able to shift back and forth and about appropriately being in the details and leading their teams and dealing with pushback. There's a cluster of skills around that. How do you learn that? What advice do you have?

First of all, you need to be passionate about what you are doing, because if you are not passionate about what you are doing, you will not spend the extra mile. You will not go into details of what's going on in the business. If you are passionate about that, then you kind of find the ways to learn certain things. So for example, we are evolving some of our capabilities, for example, how we do creative and marketing. And for me personally, it's very interesting. My background is in a creative studio that I founded before finding Miro. And I was looking for who is the best in class among creative agencies who already transformed and delivering their creative work better than anyone else. And start to learn from those leaders in those companies. And just today, one of those leaders shared with us how they operate their creative business. And for me, this is the opportunity to learn from the fundamentals, what the best company in class doing in this space. Same I do with other areas of the business. So for example, I'm thinking about what's the go-to-market engine in the AI-first world looks like. And to learn was looking around who may made some major progress in this space. And I figured out one of my friends who runs the 30 People Company, he built a very, very impressive GTM engine. So I did a session, 1 hour and a half to go deep in how his go-to-market engine works with just a very few people in terms of lead capturing, lead progressing, creating all the enablement materials and so on. So I can learn from people like him to understand what's the art of possible today from someone who dedicated a lot of time to build it best in class. So I try to go into the fundamentals and I try to find people who significantly progressed in a specific area that I'd like to learn and see what that art of possible looks like, inspire my team, show what's that art of possible. Is, and then we start to kind of catch up towards at least that state. But obviously the objective is to evolve it over time into even better solution. So that's how I stay grounded and I try and find best in the industry in our specific space and the area that I want to learn and just go deep and ask endless number of questions.

Yeah, I love that. It sounds like what you really do is when you find the people who are doing it well, you go and just interrogate them and then you maybe bring your team along. And I love what you said, like to inspire them, not to tell them, this is how you should do it. What's wrong with you dummies? Not that you would say that, but the idea is that we, you can all be inspired together with a different view and a view of what's possible and how other ideas are to do it. Not just the way we've always done it.

Exactly. I always do it with my team. I remember in 2017 when we were a very small company, I think it was like 40 people or I organized this Culture Growth Trips. So I picked up 7 companies, I took my team and we went and met CEOs of different companies. I think there were 8 or 9 people on our side and we met the 7 CEOs of different companies and their leaders and we were asking them questions to get inspired. So that was Culture Growth Trip in 2017. So I'm doing exactly the same now in 2026, but with a different purpose. It's about how you can reinvent your core operating pieces of the business.

What a great process. I love that culture growth team.

Culture growth trips.

Culture growth trips. Got it. And as we're talking about the team, you've said in the past that if you were starting Miro again, you'd optimize more for founder team fit. What did you mean by that?

Founder team fit. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to have long-term passion about what you're doing, and you need to have the right skills to do this. So for example, if I need to run a heavy operational business, logistics, delivery, I would not be the best founder for that because it's not my kind of primary skill. It's not my passion area. But my passion area, for example, is user experience. My passion area is about innovation of the solutions that doesn't exist and whatnot. So I love doing that. And this is where I get energy from. I got energy from this like 10 years ago. I get energy from this now. I'm sure I will get energy from this 10 years from now because that's who I am. And whenever you do a company, you should figure out what your unique skills are and what's the passion area you have. And then you bet on it because you have to run it for 10 years, for 20 years and more. If you ever have a doubt, like, should I continue, should I not, this will help you to make the right decision because you're not just doing the business or running the company, you're on the journey of your life. And that's what's, what keeps you going.

That's great. So that's you as a founder. How does that relate to you and the team and how the fit, how that fit should be the right fit?

I think it's also about the team because if people are passionate about specific area, about problems to solve, then there is way more energy going into the system. If people are just coming to do a job, then it's less. And I think whenever you do a company, you need to have a strong mission and you need to spread that mission as much as possible. So almost every conversation I have with the customers or with the new potential employees, I start with the mission of the company. I reinforce the mission of the company because that's what I want people to hear and to see if that resonates with them or not.

Yeah, that's great. And something else that really brings up is this idea of culture and the idea of mission and culture and what we're about over here. And one thing that you've said in the past is that culture is a reflection of the founder. And I'm just curious, what does that mean for Muro right now?

It's a great question. Uh, we were very hardcore culture for a long, long time. When we started the company, we tried to survive. We tried to find that product market fit. We were very lean and we were very very hardcore building this. And then once we start to scale, we start to look at companies around us and how they operate. And we picked up different things. Some things were good, some things were not good for us in terms of how you operate and how you run the company. Now we are actually changing it back in terms of approach. We believe that in today's world you have to continuously earn earn, earn, earn trust from your customers, trust from the broader marketplace. And you have to be very humble where you don't know how things would evolve. You only control how much effort you put into it. And this is what I'm communicating to my team is that we're not in a position where we earn it all. We're not in a position where we know how to do a big scale business. The landscape is changing dramatically and we have to every day learn and then relearn, earn and re-earn, and that will lead to some results. Without that, you can't get any results. So it's actually been an interesting journey because I know how it was at the beginning. I know like through pandemic and all this success that came to the company, it changed and people expected more established company. People established more structured approach to things, but we are bringing it back. We are startup and we again on the journey to earn our next horizon.

So what does that look like tactically or tangibly inside of the company? Sort of moving from this more structured or even I'm kind of interpreting what you're saying, even slightly more entitled, like we're all set, we got it already as now compared to, oh my gosh, world has changed. So it's both less structure and then to some extent less, I don't want to say confidence, that's not right, but like definitely less something that's already there, like in some ways predictable. That's a good way to put it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how it looks like, I'll give you a couple examples. In a more established company, you would have very specific job descriptions and roles and people operate within those boxes. And we got to that point and now we are changing that where We say, hey, you take the whole ownership end to end, and the roles are more T-shaped, like in an early-stage startup where you come and you do everything that requires to win, correct? You learn new skills, you operate under high uncertainty, and you go left and right from what you are hired for. This is one of the examples, and we communicate that, that this is beneficial for both individuals inside the company as well as the company because Because in a new world where AI enables so many things, T-shaped career is super important. So you need to understand the broader set of business processes and be able to navigate the broader landscape of challenges. For company, it's also beneficial because people own things end to end and they're focused on outcomes rather than they're part of the process. So this is one of the examples that we communicate and we give opportunity to the team members to pick up what they want to own and drive that. And I see some amazing results. I get some Slack messages from time to time when people say, hey, this is our OKRs, this is the strategy. I was thinking about this. It might not immediately fit into it, but this is how I would think about this problem. I'm like, great, I love this. So people take ownership, they come up with a proposal, and then we see that and we recognize that and we give people more opportunities to drive decisions forward. That would be just one example. Another example would be that we expect that managers, all level of managers, are way more hands-on. So that's a big change that we're making now. So with AI, I expect that people managers are less just managing humans or managing the workloads. They're also building, managing agents. In engineering, it's agents that deliver code. In marketing, it's working with agents that deliver some creative work or distribution, and so on and so on. So the idea is that the organization is flattening from the perspective of every individual inside the organization is delivering work rather than just managing people. And it's like, for managers, it's both managing people and delivering work through agentic leverage. That's a big change that we are pushing through.

That's very powerful. And I'm just curious, I think that you've implemented something called Growth Pods in your company. And if that's accurate, maybe tell us a little bit more about the Growth Pods and how that kind of relates to what you're talking about now in terms of the organizational structure.

Growth Pods is something that we established at the very beginning when we figured out this first product. So we put Growth Pods alongside the product to drive distribution, retention, monetization, and whatnot. So it's focused on the product. Product distribution specifically, it didn't change. So we have growth pods, especially with all the new products. We are now scaling that model and helping those new products to be successful. So growth pods support them. In terms of broad organizational structure, we are now establishing some teams capabilities to rapid experiment with internal tooling through wipe coding and through rapid automations and building some AI work workflows so that every team can, even if they haven't seen Art of Possible, they have an access to people who can help them think about Art of Possible, how to deliver the work. So it's not necessarily growth pods, but I would say it's like this plugged in AI engineers model where we take our existing roles and just changing them from the first principles of what's possible today.

It seems overall, in general, you have a more kind of cross-functional way of of leading and of managing and of working inside the company. Is that accurate?

It's where we are going because again, when we scaled organization, we've built as a traditional company functions and those functions have their lanes and swim lanes and everyone stayed inside those lanes. And now we are blending it all together. So we are blending it all together because at the end of the day, you create value, you distribute value, you capture value. That's how I'm thinking about the business. I'm not thinking about the business as like engineering or product or design or marketing or sales. Like you create the value, you distribute the value, you capture the value. It's like everything that you do inside the business. And that's, that's how we try to structure. First, it's a mindset. So first, leaders in organizations should see it the same way. And we're on the journey. We did some good progress there, but it's still a journey. And then you operationalize those things where teams are super cross-functional. They have shared missions and they focused on those missions and those teams are quite small because they are powered by AI to achieve those missions.

Yeah, I love that. I love especially the topic of the mindset. I'm just curious if I sort of shift gears again to you and your leadership. I was intrigued to find that a few years ago you had a coach at an offsite and the coach facilitated, it sounds like, spontaneously, your team kind of throwing a bunch of feedback at you.

Yeah, it's been not a couple years ago, it's been 2016, 2017.

Oh wow, that was quite a while ago.

Yeah, yeah, it's been quite a while ago. Yeah, that's true. And that was first time when I invited the coach for our offsite, and that was a big aha moment for me because I thought I have all the good intentions and I was driving the team towards the big win, which actually we didn't know will happen in 2016, 2017, it was before we got visibility and got scale. Actually, my intentions, they materialized together with the team, but the journey was quite bumpy. And I learned that people in my team didn't understand that this is why we're doing this. This is the prize we can take. This is the mission we're on. So I had to learn that I have to be way more communicative about the why behind things that I'm doing. It still doesn't help in all cases, but the more explicit you are, the better. That's what I learned big time.

Yeah. Have you since then done any 360 feedback or brought a coach in? Oh yeah.

Yeah. I was working and iterating with different coaches over the last several years, and it's been great because of a couple of things. One, I had to understand myself better. There were things that I was getting feedback from some people and I was working with the coaches and they were helping me to evolve. But then I figured out in certain cases it was actually where I didn't have a proper fit with another person. So I learned a lot in those interactions. I learned how my behaviors, how my words can impact some people. But I also learned that there are people with who I work really well., and there are people with who I don't work well. And I start to find people with who this work together is not something that you would notice, it just flows, it's just super easy versus try to change the mindset on both sides and adjust because we're all different as humans and there is this natural chemistry in the ways how we operate, in the way how we think and whatnot. And I can work with pretty much every person, but the outcomes and the effectiveness would be different. So I never had an issue to work with this type of person or that type of person. Actually can find a way to work, but depends on the person, you will still do work together, but the natural dynamics, the outcomes would be quite bad because of that chemistry or whatever we would call it that can happen between people. What I learned over time is that I can work with pretty much anyone and I'm naturally connecting with different people, but still effectiveness, dynamic outcomes would be different because of opportunity to understand each other without words, like be on the same wave and whatnot. I think that's important. I didn't realize how important that is back in the day and I changed my mind about this and I'm trying to build the team that we can just not talk, but we still move the same direction. It's not about being fully aligned on all topics, but it's about how you engage with each other. Can I get direct feedback from someone? Can I give direct feedback to someone? Would that person be offended or not? Would I be offended or not? That's the most important thing because sometimes I had to help people to understand that I'm not commenting how they do things, I'm commenting their work, but they may take it personal and interpret this as how they do things. And this is a thing that you need to go and coach and evolve and whatnot. And I don't have time. I also can maybe be in certain ways not productive. I know some growth opportunities for myself. But if that's compensated by my team members and then they kind of bring the right solutions to the table, it's not an issue. So I think like the whole work with the coaches was super helpful to understand who I am, what's my strengths, what my weaknesses, to drive way more self-awareness. And then based on that, assemble the right team and assemble the right community and ways of working to kind of achieve more with less. That's my biggest takeaway.

I love that. That's so true. And I think, you know, I'm just reflecting on my own experience as a coach. Like, I think often coaches think, oh, you have to change and adapt. And it's true. Everyone has to change and adapt. I have to, you have to, we all have to. But I think it's so important to recognize, yes, yes, I have to change and adapt, but really it's very helpful to have the right people around me who won't be so triggered by my weaknesses.

Exactly.

For example.

Exactly. For example, the thing that we discussed just before about me going and working with the teams directly, for some leaders around me, it can be triggering, correct? Like, why he is bypassing us and work and collaborate with teams directly? We want to be in the loop. We want to control this thing. And for some people, it can be totally fine. And if my strength is to figure out things on 0 to 1, I'd better to apply that strength rather than I just to the people who don't feel comfortable, and then the business is not progressing. Our relationship are okay, but not okay, because I'm keeping myself in the boundaries and they are not progressing the thing that we're trying to progress. So it's like, it's more about what's the strengths and what's the weaknesses and how we support each other on the journey and create a team that compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses, but also being very transparent, direct. Have a very clear communication feedback loops with each other. So there is nothing left unspoken.

Yeah, I love that. You've said that in the past your team was actually maybe too polite, that you felt like you had a polite culture, and maybe now you feel like people are more open with each other and with you, and you can be more open. What was that journey like to get rid of that politeness?

I think it's just in general me who was maybe too harsh at the beginning. And I saw it impacted some people, but then I adjusted and I thought I will better not say something, whatnot. So I actually at the end kind of cultivated that culture for a while, but then I realized that for some people other way of communication is not natural or acceptable. So with some people we parted ways, we keep relations, it's all great people, but it's still where you need to have the people people who will be willing to engage in the conflict, but that conflict should be productive, correct? But some people are avoiding conflicts, and it's not in my control to help them engage in the conflict if their natural behavior is avoiding conflict. Well, I'm a CEO, I'm a founder, I'm trying a little bit to coach here and there, but I'm not professional in all those things. And for some people it may take one conversation, for some people it may take their life to go and change some of their behaviors and you need to be real about that. And sometimes you just say, hey, maybe it's not the environment that you will thrive in and it's better for you to be in other environment and the same for ourselves. So I mean, what I did, I helped to see it for myself and for the rest of the team, but I also had to part with, with some people who were not naturally leaning towards this culture of directness. Challenging each other, driving productive conflicts and whatnot. And now we have a lot of that actually on the leadership team where we just literally engage and we are uncomfortable to each other, but at the same time everyone loves it. It's interesting. Politeness sometimes comes with a big cost, I would say.

Yeah. I must say that whenever I say politeness, it is an insult. And how has that changed your style or your behaviors around hiring people?

A few things. One is I'm looking today at way more entrepreneurial talent to run the business rather than I was looking before. So before I was looking for talent that have done it, have seen it, and have their experience. Now I'm looking obviously at people who understand the space, who have the experience of running organizations and whatnot. But the most important is the mindset, the curiosity and entrepreneurial approach, because as we discussed before, no one knows how the market will look like 6, 12, 24 months from now. And I'm trying to assemble the team who can continuously evolve, pivot, change direction left, right, see the opportunities, capture those opportunities. And we've made quite the progress there. We have a bunch of entrepreneurs in our extended leadership team. We have more than 30 entrepreneurs in our product engineering org already. And it's been quite a great journey so far where we bring people who want to figure out things, not who need a stable job or who need a place where everything is defined and they just run it. But you bring people who can figure it out together with you. And drive it from first principles. And then obviously for leaders, I'm trying to understand the motivation and like why they want to work together. And in many cases, people are trying to find the place where they can grow their career and grow some other things, which is okay, which is the right thing to do. But I'm trying to find people who want to be partners on the journey, who want to have fun, who want to explore things, who want to figure out how our industry, how our specific space will evolve, and who have that intrinsic motivation to do it regardless if one month there will be salary and another month will not. I'm not saying that we don't pay salaries, of course we pay salaries, we are profitable business, but you know, when you organize a startup, you have those people. And when you run the company in today's world, I think you need to have the same team. Who will be committed to the journey. And one day that journey will evolve into something bigger. But in the first place, you want to be passionate about what you're doing rather than anything else.

I love that. How do you specifically test for that in interviews besides, oh, were you a founder? Great. How do you test for that in interviews?

I'm listening. I'm listening what words people use, what questions they ask, what's the letter originally they sent to me to engage in the conversation. The whys and the whats. And obviously I'm trying to spend time and understand why they would even take this job. I'm trying to talk out from the job, so I'm trying to say, hey, you know how hard it is, we're working so much time, like we're spread across continents, we have all these challenges, like all those things. And like, would the person still continue to be engaged in this conversation, or are they like, yeah, maybe there's a better opportunity for me.

You try to scare them away, basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because it's not an easy journey for anyone. It's not like a rocket that you ride. It's a company, it's a business that you have to build and then rebuild and rebuild. So you need to have that kind of courage and intrinsic motivation to build something, rebuild and rebuild, rather than come, it's all successful, ride a couple years, jump on another rocket ship. No, It's not that. And I'm trying just to be very transparent and also listen what motivations people have.

I love it. That's so great. Just a few more questions, Andrei. Have you experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt?

Not really. And I know for some people think it's a problem. Not really. I mean, look, like I'm trying to be grounded. I know what I don't know. I'm trying to understand my blind spots all the time and meet the people who are way smarter, way more successful than I am. But I also know that if you put the right effort into something, you can learn it and you can achieve it. I've done it several times. You put the right effort, you go deep, you surround yourself with the best people, and you can get there. So I don't have that imposter syndrome, just saying, hey, I don't know why I deserve this or whatever. It's more about I don't know what I don't know. Like I have this belief that you can learn pretty much everything if you want to learn that, and you just go on the journey and you commit yourself, your time, your energy to make that journey. And then it might be successful, might be not, nothing is guaranteed. But if you don't try and if you don't push hard, you will never get it. That's my belief. And you just go on the journey and you figure it out as you go.

That's great. That's so realistic. I love that. And also just recognizing it is It is a journey and that I think helps keep you grounded, right?

It's a journey and I never think about, hey, there is a milestone. Of course, there are goals that we as a company are trying to follow and there are some ambitions that we have, but I believe that the most important thing is what's your day-to-day journey? What's your learning on that journey? With who you are on the journey? Do you enjoy that journey? And I think it's important. It's important for me. I know it's important for people working at Miro and I'm trying to be very grounded and say like, hey, this is our opportunity. This is our ambition. This is our goals. But what's most important is like how we're going there and like how much energy we're getting together.

Yeah. And what do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

How hard it is to evolve company and transform company because as I mentioned, it's been the first experience for me to go through transformation. When you start a company with 5, 10 people, you're in in the same room, you can pivot 20 times, everyone understands the why and the what and the context. When you run a company with like 1,600 people, it's really hard because some people may get it, some may not, some people have certain motivations, others have different motivations, and you need to bring everyone on the journey. And I personally care that everyone is on that journey together, but eventually you can't get 100% people on the journey. And that's painful for me personally because I wish you can get to that state, but I never met any CEO or senior leader who says, I know at scale how to get 100% of people on the journey. I never met someone, maybe, you know, but I haven't heard from anyone so far. And that's for me personally painful because I'm trying to drive the energy, drive the team towards something that we can all benefit from. Again, no one knows will it happen will not happen, but at least there is an opportunity to go and get it. And it's really, really hard to bring everyone on that journey. Like for a lot of people, they want to see it first and then they will believe, or then they will believe and then, and then they will see.

So true. It's so realistic. I know. And last question, what advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

Just keep going. I think that's the most important thing. There are so many reasons and things why you would just stop or don't believe. I think it's important if you put the right effort, if you have the energy, if you love what you're doing. There are ups and downs on the journey, and obviously when everything is great, you're just riding that wave. But when things start to change, it's hard. It's extremely hard. And you need to ask yourself, hey, just why, why I started in the first place. And it was adventure. Now it's a part of the adventure. You just keep going on that adventure, and sometimes it's sunny and sometimes it's rainy, but it's still an adventure.

I love it. Andrei, I could talk to you all day. Thank you so much for this great conversation. It is so helpful, and I know it's going to help a lot of other founders. So thanks for joining me today.

Thank you. Thank you, Alisa Cohn. It's been great.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.