Finding Opps in Every Challenge: From Humble Beginnings to 30 Million Users with Miro CEO

We are in an era of digital-first collaboration. Our mission as a company is to empower teams to create the next big thing. Feels like you're in the same room near the whiteboard together. We want Miro to be an extension of your brain. If you have a blank canvas, you can solve any problem. You should be able to dump everything in and then work through it with your team. We have 25 million people using our platform across the world. Zoom allows you to see the body language, to hear each other, but Mira allows you to understand each other. I was in the office with 200 people before pandemic, and now we are 1,100 people. We understand that this is a long journey. It will take us next several years to build platform that we're envisioning. Hello everyone, uh, great to be here at Stage of Saastr. Thank you for joining our session. This is Matt Jacobson, Iconic Growth, and my name is Andrei Husid, CEO at Mira. Um, yeah, you may think that Matt will interview myself today, but we plan to do opposite. So maybe I'll kick it off with you, Matt. So I'd like to learn from you how you make decisions in terms of investments, like what companies you pick up and why you led our Series B, Series C. It was a huge pleasure to partner with you, but I'm curious in general how you pick up companies.

I thought I was interviewing you, but, you know, it's, it's very easy. We just look for companies like, like Miro. No, we focus on, you know, teams first. And so, you know, we work with many product-obsessed founders that we, we like that people who have kind of a deep passion for a problem they're solving, real clarity way of thought in terms of what they're bringing to the table and the ability to hire, you know, really strong early team. We spent a lot of time looking at, you know, market. Either you're creating the wave or riding the wave, but the wave is, is really important. Most companies don't, you know, find a massive market that's unexplored right away, but they usually win in a niche. But that niche, you know, maybe like sneakily large, or it might be strategic high ground to, to something larger as they continue to expand out. And that kind of goes to the third point, which is we're We're investing at the growth stage today and so really focused on companies that have momentum in terms of really effusive customer feedback and just a history of building great products. When we look across our portfolio of 120 companies, probably 70-80% of those in software, product velocity, Miro being a perfect example of that, is one of the defining characteristics of success. And so it's hard to kind of quantify that, but we look at a lot of qualitative and quantitative measures in terms of, you know, how quickly the product's moving is a key milestone in terms of that momentum. So those are the 3 things that we would capture in terms of what we're looking at. But, you know, I'm excited to dive in and kind of ask you a question, then we'll open it up to Q&A. Would love questions from the audience. But, you know, much more than revenue or valuation or big headline things that people get excited about, you know, you measure the company's success in terms of kind of customer love and actually like user love as like the defining characteristic. Right now you've got, I think, 35 million total users and still growing at a very fast clip. Certainly you're doing something right, but how do you nail the user experience across such a horizontal group of people?

Yeah, it's a great question. So happy to share our experience. Like from the very beginning, we were focused on data points that were coming from our users and customers. And I mean, like we look at data points at scale, we get hundreds of thousands of support tickets. We got like tens of thousands of lines of feedback through the product, and of course we interview our customers, uh, to learn more how they're using the product and what they're looking at the product. So we do all of those things, and historically we are iterating on that feedback a lot, and we did a lot of small pivots along the journey to make sure that our product, um, reflect what people are looking in the company. And also I think that it's extremely important not just to build the right product but to build the right service around the product, because people really care not just how the product works but actually how they interact with, with a company, uh, when they have a support ticket, when they need some help in terms of adoption, and anything that might be of their interest. You need to serve that really well. And from day one, we were really obsessed about support, making sure that everything that comes our way is answered in a timely fashion, and also that we provide helpful tips in our kind of ecosystem that we built around the product. We kind of invested a lot in in-product education. We invested a lot in the community and self-service community where people can help each other, answer questions, and learn different use cases. So all of those things help to scale the community really broad and make sure that, yeah, that people love it at the end of the day.

It's amazing intentionally you've been. You know, Andrei, I think, you know, Miro is one of the fastest-growing companies in the world at scale. And Miro, you know, was founded in 2011. So like there's this Silicon Valley legend of blitzscaling, but your model has been very different. So why did it take so long to scale? And, you know, how's that been an advantage in terms of building a durable business?

Yeah, few people know that actually we started in 2011 and the first name of the company was Realtime Board. So we launched Realtime Board in 2012, and we renamed, rebranded the company into Miro in 2019. Are there any people in the room who use Realtime Board? Okay, there are a few of people here who know us from those days, which is cool. So yeah, we, we built initially a B2C product, and, um, as I mentioned in the previous, uh, answer, we were focused on data points that were coming from our community, and we realized that a a lot of people use this product actually for productivity goals. So we did a small pivot over the productivity and product engineering design teams and relaunched the product, um, HTML version of the product actually in 2015, and start to build a self-service motion. And then all in 2018, when we were around $5 million ARR, we start to build our go-to-market team. We start to bring sales, marketing, uh, to our organization. So actually just like 5 years of established established team and established company that scaled the product. Before, there was a lot of experimentation and building as a self-serve adoption engine. And of course, those things helped us a lot to scale through recent years because we nailed down the viral mechanics, viral loops, and those viral mechanics and viral loops accelerated us significantly in the last several years. But just before pandemic, we were growing 3x year over year, which is pretty normal growth. Uh, but I think everybody here would agree. Yeah. Of course, the majority of people learn about us in the last kind of 3 years or so.

And in terms of that, you know, insane hypergrowth that you've experienced more recently, I think you referred to growing through the pandemic like, you know, building a plane while, while flying. Yeah. What did you mean by that? And what were the biggest learnings of that hypergrowth period?

Yeah, we entered the pandemic with 240 people in a team and we were lacking senior leadership a lot of areas. We were lacking middle management in a lot of areas. And through pandemic, we hired more than 50 heads of different parts of the business, which is pretty crazy. I remember like first year of pandemic, I was just like working, I don't know, like 14 hours a day, like 6, 7 days a week, just hiring, hiring, firing, firing and building the team. And it's not only about bringing right people, it's also about onboarding them into the company, building processes that support the scale of the organization. Well, You know, making sure that everything you do are the right bets and actually accelerate you and not slow down you. A lot of people may think that when you scale the company, every net new employee, net new process can accelerate you, but in a lot of cases, it actually slows down us. So we need to be really conscious about what really speeds up and where we can slow down the organization. So it's also extremely important to make sure that when we add this weight to our organization, we don't break some— agile processes and we don't break our overall agility of the organization. So that's what I call like building a plane while flying. You want to get to point B, but you need to build a plane while you are traveling to that state.

The, um, you know, in, in recent years I think it's become very topical, but like many software companies have grown very quickly selling to startups, which in many ways have been kind of cutting-edge, you know, customers. But, uh, you know, what were the benefits of you building Miro kind of working with a broader and sometimes more traditional customer universe versus only startups?

Yeah, we historically have customers from all different industries, but what I can, what I can say is that the difference is actually in type of users who are coming to the product. So we, before pandemic, like almost everyone in our user base was early adopter. So those people people who had their own need to kind of adopt the product, who were eager to find it, who were kind of, you know, who knew how to work with the canvas-based products because they may come from other products with canvases like Adobe or, or Sketch or anything like that. And, um, you know, they were curious, like, this is early adopters. And then, um, during pandemic, we start to see a lot of this early majority type of users who had some kind of need in our type of product but who had to adopt it and had to figure out how to use it actually. And then recently when we start to sell wall-to-wall to enterprises with a lot of knowledge workers who are hesitant to actually adopt new technology, it's very different dynamics. It's late majority where you need to have all different enablement to make those people be successful with any product they adopt. So when we think about these 3 cohorts, we need to make sure that we have right tools and right strategies to make this cohort successful. And when it's the first cohort, you just make the product easy, easy to explore on your own. When it's the second cohort, you actually need to bring in some enablement so people can learn through knowledge base, through learning center. Like, we organized lunch and learn sessions with our customers when we did it online or came to their offices right before pandemic. And now when we have this late majority, when we can scale the product to almost every knowledge worker in big, uh, thousands of people organizations, we actually need to drive this adoption through more sophisticated customer success plays. And this is very different dynamics from like early adopters that we had before. But what is kind of universal to all of those cohorts is that as more simple your product is, it's easier to adopt it. Like, if we look at the best-in-class products who grew the fastest in the world, like Trello and Slack and Zoom and Dropbox and Canva, like, and Miro, of course, like, all of those products have similarity in how simple they are. And this is the foundation for a flywheel that can be created if you do it right.

Thank you for, uh, for, for walking through That, you know, had another question that's I think on the top of mind for a lot of people here, you know, which is like 2022 is definitely a time for serious volatility in terms of, you know, markets and challenges facing a lot of founders and teams. Was there ever a point in Miro's journey where, you know, you thought you weren't going to like sustain or survive? And how did you manage through that?

Yeah, I was pretty positive about the future of the company and along the journey. I can't imagine at all like that one day I can be on this stage speaking with you, having you as our board member. But I thought that we will survive and we can be a 20-people company. So that's what I was positive about. So I was building from day one the company that can pay salaries for 20 people. So, and then when we start to grow, I thought, okay, maybe we'll get 1,500 people, or now it's 1,500 people, almost 1,600. I think we're growing as we're speaking. So, but, um, in general, like, from day one I was thinking about building sustainable company. And Miro is profitable, and Miro was profitable from almost day one of when we launched the product. So like, what I can think of is like, make sure that you are not dependent on externality. And that's kind of really important because I remember when pandemic started, we had several discussions with VCs, and some of them were trying to invest in the company for quite, quite some time. When pandemic started, they all started to think, oh, maybe we should wait, we don't know how all these things will evolve. And we were not dependent on those decisions because we were profitable before pandemic. And yeah, we were lucky that you came regardless of the pandemic and just, uh, doubled down on our growth and accelerated the growth. But in general, like, I— as, as long as I remember myself and the company, um, and any fundraise we had, we were not dependent on the decision of the investors. Uh, and, uh, this is where you can really own your own destiny. So So I recommend you to focus on customers, to make sure your customers see the value in your product, get to the product-market fit in the initial segment that you potentially can scale, and go for that segment. So when we build the company, we build it for profit, and investors can accelerate that business, but they can't kind of be the only source of that business. So that's my philosophy, and that's how we survived through all these times.

It's been a pure approach, and, you know, nowadays very, very fashionable. You know, talking about those early days in that early team, my understanding is that you launched Miro with like a core team of 10 people or so, and all of them remain with, you know, Miro today. Like, how did you, you know, build and retain a team like that over the long term?

Yeah, one of our Miro values is collaboration. Another is empathy. And I think that when we kind of, when we build relations with people, we should be guided by those values. And this is what each other inside the company. And from, from very early days, I personally believe that those people who are excited about what they're building, why they're in this company, about the mission, they will be engaged. And if we treat them properly, they will stay with us for a long time. Of course, we now kind of scale the organization and we bring a lot of new people outside, but what we care about is also like how we can create opportunities for internal team to grow with the company and play their best game. I call it that way. And, um, yeah, those 10 people with who we started, uh, like, they all with the company and they all contribute to the company's success. Another trick, or I think that I didn't consider at the very beginning, I thought that the company maybe will be worth $50 million or $10 million, so we gave some good, uh, stock options. So, you know, now the company valuation is a little bit bigger than that, so people are also pretty happy with the upside. So they're committed to the success. In the long term, and they're kind of doing their best to make the company really successful and thrive through all times. And also they're culture carriers, so they kind of create this culture, they share stories, they make this glue of new employees who are joining the company and kind of navigating those people around different parts of the organization. Especially in a pandemic, it's extremely hard to onboard people. We scaled from 240 to like almost 1,600 now, and just all those people never met each other. They all work through Zoom. So those early employees help, you know, new joiners onboard. And that's another thing why we're thankful to them, but they also kind of recognized in the company. And a small fun fact, when we started, um, the company, we start to, uh, give every new employee a t-shirt with a number. So we thought about our first t-shirt, and there was MVP MVP sign in front. Uh, you know, MVP is the most valuable player, but it was also our first t-shirt. We thought it's an MVP of t-shirt, and on the back, like on a jersey, you had a sign. So all these early employees have the number when they joined the company— number 1, number 5, number 10, number 50— and they all wear these t-shirts, and people inside the company recognize these are first guys who build it, who contribute to this. It's also a lot of recognition for those early joiners. So there are a lot of things why they jersey in the company, but the one thing is like we care about them.

I never knew that in terms of the jersey. That's amazing. You know, now you've built out a world-class management team to complement, you know, the team that you've retained all these years. You know, any secrets in terms of building out that team? How has your approach changed from those early days as you thought about management?

Yeah, for a long, long time we were growing our kind of internal talent, and as I mentioned, only in 2018 we start to bring external executives to the company. And we had first two hires in 2018. Also, sorry, one hire was actually LA, like head of sales. He joined us in 2016, and then— and but he had just 2-3 people, so it was not like a scaled motion at that time. And then first CMO joined us in 2018. And when I started to hire senior leadership executives, I started to learn what's the best way to do it, because these people can actually help you to go and scale your organization, go through hypergrowth. I did it through my network initially. I was also looking through AngelList, through LinkedIn, but then I learned that the best way to build a leadership team is to bring on board an executive search firm. And when Accel joined us with the round A, they actually advised us to hire executive search firm and go and search for our first kind of exec— first executives went to hire together through these professional firms. I think it was like a real success. And since then, every hire I make, I engage executive search firm. And almost for every new hire, we hire a different executive search firm because we are trying to find the one that specializes on specific area and who have a strong track record in that. I think it's also important to do extreme references on executives when you bring them in. ForEntrepreneurs.com, David Skok has an amazing article on how to do extreme references on your executives. I'm a huge fan. Every time I'm hiring an executive, I'm rereading the whole article to make sure I do all the necessary steps.

That's an endorsement.

Yeah, to validate, to validate the leader, because your company is so much dependent on that person who is joining your company, because everyone else is reporting to that person. Like, this person is accountable for the whole organization, for the culture. It's critical for the success success. And then, uh, you know, it's just— it's important to make sure you take it extremely seriously. I personally do kind of a lot of outreaches myself, uh, simultaneously with Executive Search. I do reference calls, I do back channels, I do proper onboarding. I like— I invest a lot of time and effort into bringing top people who know what awesome looks like, who did— who did— who did it before, who saw it before, who needed in the best-in-class companies, but who have, who have beginner's mindset. Because if you bring executives who just want to bring you a playbook from their previous workplace, it will not work out. Every company is to a degree different, and you need to see if they have beginner's mindset to make sure they properly evaluate your company and properly design the place that will be most effective and efficient in this type of company. So this is also extremely important to make sure that those people have this beginner's mindset when they join your company, especially early days, because they can make it or break it.

I love that beginner's mindset. You know, Andrej, speaking about Europe, you've got distributed—

Maybe before we go there, I'll ask you. You also have a lot of experience with building these leadership teams and bringing on board executives to the companies you invested in. So I'm curious to learn from you what you guys see, what are those best practices and to build a leadership team and executive team.

I think you talked about it, like, this onboarding and enablement in terms of setting them up for success is something that people kind of underappreciate a lot. And we see the very best founders, like, really, you know, engaging. It's a long process to recruit somebody great, and then, you know, getting them off to a successful start is a massive, massive investment. And we've seen, you know, people over, overinvest in that function and see real success, and some other people kind of undervalue that and, and learn along the journey. I think that the other thing that I would share is like, even when you're not hiring for a role, you know, it's always great to just cultivate your network. And I know a lot of people have talked about this, but I can't underscore this enough. Just like being out there, meeting with people, like learning what great is in terms of certain scale, in terms of, you know, CRO or CFO or anything else, and building out that network over time. Because, you know, the very best, most critical hires are oftentimes like years of relationship and and learning and, you know, building a model of what great looks like can really help inform those strengths. So those are two things that I would—

Yeah, I can echo network thing, and Iconiq team was extremely helpful on bringing some top candidates to us in the last couple of years. And it's also super helpful when you have strong investors who introduce you to kind of two great candidates and can also help to to, you know, backchannel some of those candidates. So it's extremely important to have strong networks, and you investors are really kind of instrumental to that.

You know, it was a little bit like we saw things exploding and we were like, wow, you know, we talked about this and we're like, if we need to build in a lot of management structure that usually happened over years in a very short period of time, you know, with Miro to really enable the success that's been driven. It's just been incredible having a bird's eye view and watching you build out this team. You know, shifting a little bit, you've got a hub strategy in Europe and you built in a bunch of different locations. Like, what is your thought process around, you know, M&A? And is that something that you're open to and thinking about in terms of Teams encounters?

Yeah, we built our company as a distributed company across 12 different offices. So we have 5 offices in Europe, we have 4 offices in the US, 1 office in Armenia and a couple offices in Asia Pacific, so in Tokyo and Sydney. And when we were building those offices, our vision was to make every office in the company a primary office. So we wanted to have executives in every other location in the world and to make sure that people feel they're kind of first-class citizens. They can influence the company strategy. They influence the company brand. They influence the company kind of culture. And that's extremely important. And with people who we hire across all different regions, we really hear that sentiment that it's extremely, extremely valuable to have that approach. Because when the company is gravitating toward one area, like somewhere in Europe or somewhere in the US, everyone else follows. While when the company is distributed, at least the leadership is distributed, it's more integrated, it's more inclusive. And while we have this kind of spread across all different regions, we try to focus and concentrate our product engineering in Europe because we historically built it out of Europe, and we've built the kind of biggest productivity collaboration company out of Europe ever. And today we are thinking how to expand further in Europe and how to bring more of, uh, kind of this community power, how to bring more of the value of the customer value to our product. And we started to do M&As, and of course our core focus on M&As is in Europe today because, as I said, like, product engineering is, is here, and all our M&As are focused on, on product engineering. And, uh, we did a couple already, like, uh, we closed one last year, we closed one earlier this year, we're going through another couple right now. So, and the ambition here is to build and to scale, uh, kind of this biggest productivity collaboration company out of Europe ever. Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah, and I know you guys also are Recently scaled to Europe. Congrats with opening London office. Thank you. Really happy to have you closer to us. And I'm curious, like, why you guys moved here and what you see in terms of European venture landscape. Like, I know you invested in a couple companies before Mira also that are based out of Europe, and now it seems like it's time to double down. So I'm curious, well, what your expectations for Europe are.

We actually invested in 10 companies in Europe in In addition to Yamiro, we led investments in Miro and Adyen and Calibra, Dataiku, Intercom, Motorway, Primer, a variety of others. And, you know, we just, we love it. It's like super vibrant. The quality of technical talent is literally just exploding. You know, it's unbelievable. The founders are, are super humble and have generally had to do a lot more with, with less, which has just created amazing durability in terms of the companies. So just really impressive capital allocation. And the companies, you know, many of these companies have have had like a global mindset from day one because like Adyen, for example, you know, the market in terms of digital payments in the Netherlands was not, you know, the end-all be-all in terms of market size. So the company had a global mindset from day one, one that they borrowed from a previous company, but it just, it really strengthens and hardens the companies in ways that sometimes we don't see in the US. So that's been, you know, exciting. We opened an office in London and brought on Seth Pierpont to help lead that effort and moved over a bunch of our team members because culture is so critical to us, including Ritika, who's sitting here in the, in the audience and is a total rock star and somebody that you will read and hear about in Europe over time in terms of partnering with Founders. So we are very excited to be here and to be closer to you.

Cool, cool. Welcome to Europe.

Thank you. And, you know, I think wanted to ask one last question and then hopefully drive some Q&A from the audience. You know, I'd love to ask what advice you give to, you know, other founders who are just now beginning their journeys, like, like you were in, you know, 2011, uh, and seeking investment? Like, what should they look for in a partner?

So I think just the first focus is a product, like the value that you create. And if the value is there, uh, investors will find you. So I, I, I had a chance—

it's like the frictionless—

uh, yeah, it's just like my, my whole idea is to build things that scale and that roll on its own. If you build the right product, the customers will If customers will come, investors will come. If investors will come, like, executives will come. Like, all these things are super connected. So the only thing that, like, I care and, like, I believe, like, best-in-class companies did is just building the right product, building the right value, and making sure that this value is distributed across your target audiences. Like, if you nail down that value, if you polish that value, if you make it, like, really viral, you will have all the other things inbound. And of course, like, it takes some time, like, to build that value, and you need to have strategic patience. It will not happen overnight. You will iterate, you will pivot, you will change your audiences. But the thing is, like, if you have that strategic patience, if you believe that you can change the way how people operate, how the market kind of operate, you will find that product-market fit. And once you find product-market fit, just, yeah, your investors and your leaders will join you and scale the company with you. So be patient, but also be extremely focused on iteration around the customer's needs. So that's simple but powerful thing to focus on.

A very powerful thing, and echoes the way that you built the product as well. We'd love to take questions from the audience. I don't know if there are folks.

I think there's a couple people walking around.

Congratulations on your success so far, phenomenal.

At the size that you are, typically then competition comes into play because you get a lot of attention. Are you afraid of competition? No, we are afraid that we will not be relevant for our customers. That's the only thing that we are afraid of because if we are relevant in terms of the product value, in terms of the service, in terms of the price, in terms of all of those things, we should continue growing scale. Like, we are the market leader today and And of course, like, there are more players who want to get into this space, and of course they are trying to copy us or bring some different angle to what we're building. But I think that, like, this continuous product-market fit and continuous, you know, like, you know, pricing fit is what I, what I care about. Because if you, if you're successful with that, things will follow. If you kind of fail something, then the rest doesn't matter because the competition only can get into our space, like, and overcompete us if we become less relevant for our customers. So, and that's what we care is like focus on, on customers as much as possible. But you are absolutely right, there's everyone who is trying to enter our space, and of course there is some usage that is getting out, but some other new customers and expansions happening with us.

Hi, uh, thank you for your presentation. Uh, I am a Miro user, first of all. Uh, I want to ask you something about your early days. Uh, you said that you started almost 10 years ago, probably more than 10 years ago, when remote work was not such a thing as it is now. How did you find back then your ideal customer? What kind of companies or users were your users back then?

Yeah, it's a great Great question. So a few of you may know that, but historically we were building the product for non-remote work. And now with the pandemic, a lot of people start to associate us with the remote work, but actually more than 70% of our workflows were asynchronous. And now with the pandemic hopefully over, we see this trend getting back and like we see more and more of this workflows happen asynchronously, which is great because, um, uh, We, we are a product that supports all different workflows when you are at the same time want to brainstorm on something, or when you need to do work in different time zones through different offices, through different teams. So at the beginning, uh, we had this product managers, designers, program managers, project managers, engineers who just need to do visual collaboration. And as I say, in the majority of cases it was asynchronous and continue to be today also a part of our usage is asynchronous. So remote was just, you know, a trend that happened in the last couple years that was accelerated actually in the last couple years because of pandemic. And we just positioned our product to support the trend and to get the most juice out of it. And now we can position it for hybrid work, which will stay with us for, I believe, ages from now. So yeah, it's also about your message market fit. Like at different stages of the market development, you have different message that resonates most, and it's also very important to see what resonates and what's the biggest growth lever in terms of this message-market fit at a certain stage of the company. So if you look at Salesforce, um, I don't know, like in a couple, uh, recent years, but historically they were changing their message pretty frequently. At every Salesforce event, they came up with a new message, with a new positioning because you try to engage with the audience from a different angle, from a different value perspective, so which makes a ton of sense. So yeah, just keep in mind that, and it's also super helpful when you scale the company.

Hi, my name is Megan Murphy from Hotjar, and I have a question for both of you. Um, can you share a recent example in which you've lived up to your expectations on displaying a beginner mindset?

You want to start?

Sorry, we've gone above our expectations.

And now, like, when you've lived up to your own expectations recently of displaying a beginner's mindset.

Yeah. So from, from my perspective, you know, the, the investment landscape and the growth landscape has changed quite a bit in terms of, you know, 2020 and 2021. It was, you know, extremely active and the market was was vibrant, and, you know, there were companies in our portfolio that were raising capital, you know, every, every 6 months in some cases, and, and the world was awash with, with capital. The landscape has shifted quite a bit, and, you know, we've adapted. Our team is now, you know, 65 people and really adapted the way that we've engaged with companies, supported our portfolio companies, invested more in terms of, you know, different services in terms of supporting them. And so that's been a very meaningful shift, and it was a very different motion than we'd taken in the past. So for me, it's felt like a beginner's mindset in starting many of our practices anew and kind of rebuilding them from scratch.

Yeah, for me, it's just very recently, we are kind of now in this exit pandemic mode. And also, the markets are changing, the demand might be changing. And we are looking from scratch at how our customers think about us, how they consume us, what they expect in the future. So I think that company now entering absolutely new phase, and I need to reevaluate all assumptions we have around every aspect of the company in terms of like headcount, in terms of value that we are offering, in terms of messaging, in terms of pricing, in terms of way we servicing customers. Like all of those things I'm reevaluating from scratch right now because I believe that at this stage we need to think very differently, uh, to how we thought about that a year ago when we was— we were at the peak of pandemic, 2 years ago when we entered pandemic, and 3 years ago when we were kind of— for me it was business as usual for several years. So now it's absolutely new phase and I'm kind of rebuilding my data set to make sure that we are designing the company for for being generational in the next several years.

Hi, my name is Jaya. He's looking elsewhere. My question is, you said don't be VC dependent or investors dependent, right? Especially especially if someone wants to scale. Not everyone is in a fortunate place like Miro was. So how do we become non-dependent on VCs and investors?

Uh, revenue first. Uh, yeah, I mean, like, Miro— I— yeah, Miro is successful in a certain way, but as I said, like, every round we raised since Series Seed, uh, we were profitable. So just focus on revenue, focus on customers, focus on building value your customers would pay for, uh, bring in people who, uh, kind of at the beginning of the company who will be more excited about equity rather than high cash salary, uh, to make sure that they have on one hand enough motivation and skin in the game, but on the other hand you don't burn cash, um, on super expensive people. Uh, try to be lean as much as possible. I know It's all general things like, well, no, but we are trying to ask ourselves even now, it's like, what is nice to have and what is critical to have? And if we see things that are critical to have, nice to have, we're just cutting them down like as much as possible. Because even with our existing scale, I want us to be extremely lean and extremely down to earth in terms of how we spend, what we spend, on what we spend. I can tell you I'll tell you, like, we're almost 1,600 people. I review every job offer that comes out in the company. It's like, and I'm extremely focused on making sure that in the first place the job description is in the right place, and then the job offer is coming out to right people. And of course we sometimes do mistakes or, or kind of do things that we can do differently, but at the same time it's extremely important to be heads down and see what's going on in organization to make sure you make most out of every step you do. Some can argue that it's not scalable, but I spend maybe 5 minutes total on this exercise a day. But when you hire 5, 10 people a day, it's like a million dollars a day. It's pretty valuable to take a look what's going on there.

Hi, Xenios. Great talk. Thank you very much for the very insightful information. You talk about value of your product, which is obviously something that all of us are obsessed with. How do you measure it is my question. We found it to be one of the hardest things to quantify when it comes down to what value you give your customers.

Yeah, we have different measures. We have North Star metric. It's a value metric as how much we see collaboration with our product because our product is focused on collaboration and value metric is built around that. We measure, of course, like some Uh, it's not vanity metrics, but like it's scale metrics like weekly active usage, um, which shows like the breadth of usage. We measure depth of usage of individual usage. We call it engaged users, and we have certain measures behind that. Um, of course we kind of measure, uh, ratios between our usage and prices per seat. Sorry, price per seat. So we call it like engaged user per like seed ratio. Um, so we try to measure all of those things and see how the trends evolve to make sure that we are not missing out some major external or internal things that happens. But in general, we have pretty big and strong like analytics team both on go-to-market and product. And yeah, measures for almost everything we do. Like we have strong data-informed culture, um, and it's pretty important to build it day one because you can't improve it if you are not measuring that. And for sure, like, to set up like ambitious goals to grow some numbers, you just need to have baselines and understand the root causes for those baselines. I mean, we can, we can go into a deeper discussion because I believe every product has kind of specific type of measures, but I'm a big, big believer in building strong data-informed foundation Jason M. Lemkin.