 Hello, Andre. How are you? I'm doing good. Thank you. Andre, as you know, is the CEO and founder of Miro, the online collaboration platform. Especially during COVID, the company went through an enormous growth spurt. It is now serving 45 million users a month. Andre, Miro clearly has been a product-led growth success story. For the people in the room. What are the secrets to building a product-led growth company? Yeah, my pleasure to share those insights with you folks here. So we started in 2011 and we shipped our first product in 2012. And since then, it was a lot of iteration towards today's success of the business and of the product. And from day one, we were focused on our users. And this is the key for me in terms of product-led growth. When you understand your user, when you understand your user behavior in the product, when you understand the problem your user is trying to solve with your product, you can iterate toward better solution for them, better fit for them. So we took away initial cohorts of users back in the day. And we had all different users from education, from product, from engineering, from marketing, from different departments. And even some users were using the product for their personal goals. So we took all of them and we started to iterate toward what resonates with the key cohorts and where we see the best retention. And once we found those users and once we found where retention is flattening over time, we started to build around that. And we started to iterate the onboarding, we started to iterate product value around that and start to iterate how we can drive the virality. So that's what took several years to actually figure out and build. And once we optimized all these user journeys and build the best LikUX for them, it started to grow organically really fast. And as some people say, like when you hit product market fit, you feel it. And we actually remember this time when we sent service to our users and asked, like, hey, how would you feel about Mira would not be there anymore? At that time, it was real-time board actually. We asked, like, how would you feel if real-time board is not available anymore? And people were strongly disappointed about that. So as well, we saw, like, pretty, pretty strong, organic word of mouse around the product. So at that time, we clearly understood that this is happening now, the product market fit is happening. And we started to layer marketing and sales, which was also layered in a product-led growth way, where marketing and sales were connected with the product signals, with usage, and tried to extend the journey and bring bigger customers on a journey where they need help and support. So that's what we did. And to summarize, I think that key for product-led growth is understanding your user, their behavior, building best-in-class user experience, and advancing that through marketing and sales, which is working as the same engine. Were there particular features in the product or aspects to the product that made the product-led growth model particularly viable? Yeah, I mean, in terms of functions, we had a bunch of things that we focused on. For example, we organized our product in a way where we create value and distribute value. And a lot of teams, like product teams, they just do both. And we separated that. One team was focused on creating value, and the second team was focused on how they optimized the journey, how they optimized the conversion rates on the journey. And that was one of the decisions that we made early in the day, which was pretty successful for us. And there are a bunch of other things that we did. Like, for example, our growth organization consists of growth marketing and growth product, and they work together. It's a tribe. While product reports to product organization, growth marketing reports to marketing organization, they work together. They have shared goals. They have shared KPIs, and they work toward those goals together. So this is another organizational decision, organizational architecture that we did to support this dynamics and to build truly product-led growth. We see our organization not in silos where product is working separately, success separately, marketing separately, or other functions. We see it as a consistent journey, and the organization is built around the journey of the user and the customer. There are a lot of things to improve as an ever-organization, but that's the foundational kind of philosophy around how we organize it. Got it. COVID hit. Suddenly, organizations needed a tool like Miro to run their business. There was no way around it. They needed something like this, and you were in the market at the right time and at the right place. Your organization grew dramatically. How did you manage that, and how did you manage to have what is still a very consistent culture across all the offices and across all the employees that you have? It was hard. The last couple of years were really difficult for us. When the COVID started, we were around 240 people organization, and today we are almost 1,800 people organization. We were around 3, 4 million users on our platform, and today we are around 50 million users on our platform, so we had tremendous growth in the last several years. The biggest kind of challenge was, to what you say, to find the right people for the organization, onboard them properly and make them successful with the business. What we did was before COVID, but we codified our values. We did it in 2017 when we as a leadership team came up together and tried to realize what is shared values we have here and what makes us to the point where we are in the journey. We codified all those values, and then, especially when we started the hyper-scaled organization, we integrated those values in every touch point of a new employee's journey from surfacing them on the website and attracting people who share those values to have value-based interviews during every interview with every new employee to having two weeks' culture onboarding and to having performance management focused not just on what people deliver but also on how they did it and how was also and is also reflecting the values that people live or not. So, all of those touch points were built in and they helped us to scale the organization where we still feel like this size of the organization is one company. Again, there's a lot of things to do. One of our key values is iteration. I don't believe there is something that is at the top of the performance. I think there are a lot of things that we can do better as an organization, but I think we have very strong foundations to iterate on top. In a way to grow from 3.5 million users to 50 million users today in just a matter of two or three years, it's the definition of hyperscaling. What are the secrets to hyperscaling and what are the three things that really made a difference? Yeah. Different companies have different situations where they kind of accelerated. We were growing pretty fast before pandemic, so we were doing like almost 3X year-over-year in terms of the business. The pandemic boosted us even more, and one of the things that I personally learned through all this hyperscale journey is how we can make decisions fast. Because you have to hire 50 heads and leaders in your organization. You have to change your organization like multiple times every month. You work as a CEO in different organizations every quarter because your job also changes. It's the same name, but it's a very different job. All of those things kind of impact my performance, but if it's my performance, it's the organization's performance. What I understood is I need to make fast and high-quality decisions, and that's what you have to learn, that's what you have to develop. I do it in a way where I have a bunch of advisors where I can go and validate my assumptions and my insights. I also try to triangulate anything I want to decide on, like I'm trying to bring different perspectives on every decision, and I'm trying to do it fast. You need to build a network that helps you to make those things fast because once you need to decide on something and once you only start to build a network around that decision, it can go a long way. So what I learned is fast decision-making, high-quality decision-making, and bringing people who share the values of the company, who share the mission of the company, and we live our mission. I personally wake up every day, and I think that my biggest motivation to continue around and develop the company is the excitement around the mission. Miro's mission is to empower teams to create the next big thing, and when I think about Miro being behind all positive changes in the world, I'm really motivated. I'm fulfilled by that mission, and that also helped us to survive and grow through the pandemic because this is the story you tell to your team, to your customers, to your users, and this is the story that you find people who it will resonate with, and if you have a lot of people with who it resonates, they will be engaged, and if they will be engaged, you move the business and the problem that you are trying to solve forward. So these are a bunch of lessons I learned through the pandemic, so strong values, mission-driven organization, fast decision-making, high-quality decisions, having a strong network, triangulate insights, and, yeah, act fast upon them. What ended up being easier than you thought it would be, and what ended up being harder in this journey? I think the hardest part of our business is people, so it's the most fulfilling part because we all come together to co-create. We all are creative preachers who are trying to change the school, who are trying to come up with something new, but at the same time, we are all humans. We have our emotions, we have reactions, we have our disappointments, excitements, and challenging times, and the hardest thing is to keep motivation going. It all starts with us as a leader, but it's also necessary to make sure that the team feels that they are in the right place, that they are heard, that they are included, because if we don't walk the walk inside the business, our customers would not feel that, and we as a company, we as a product, we provide this platform for empowering teams to create the next big thing, and our customer as a team is a group of people who come together to create something, and we need to charge them with an energy, not just to ship the software to them. So that's what I think is the hardest thing in terms of kind of hyper growth and leading the company, but also on the easier side, I don't know, the easiest side is to make, you know, the easiest side is to let things go, like being a bit of a passenger seat, and I'm speaking about that because I've been in a lot of situations where I let myself to be in a passenger seat in some decisions, and I regret that in a bunch of them, I would kind of be more in a driver's seat where I had this initial gut feel, I need to be in a driver's seat. So that's the easiest, like to be in a passenger seat and see how it goes. So for many software companies to be number one in the world, you've got to be number one in the US, and actually the hardest bit for software companies to land in the US, not only with customers, but also with employees. How did that work at Miro? Yeah, definitely. We started a company in Europe and we have our product engineering in Europe, while our users and customers were across the world. We are spread pretty evenly between Europe and the US in terms of revenue and usage, and I was intentional when I was thinking of hiring GoToMarket that it should be in the US. And if we look today at the organization, the majority of the leadership of the business is in the US, and especially GoToMarket leadership. And that helped us to balance our kind of leadership focus across all regions. So our chief revenue officer is in the US, chief customer officer in the US, chief marketing officer in the US, chief sales officer in the US, and a bunch of other leaders are in the US, while in Europe we have a chief product officer, chief technology officer, myself, ahead of self-serve business and growth. So we balance this team between two continents to make sure that we are growing fast in both regions and that we are making global decisions that serves all regions at the same time. We added Japan, we added Australia, we strengthened our European presence in the last couple of years, and the idea was to make sure that the leadership is evenly spread to make all markets a success. So you have enough people to make it a success, but you also have enough balance for those people in other regions not to gravitate toward one market. So that's what we did, and worked pretty well for us so far. We're happy with the distribution of our customers and users across regions. And yeah, if you are kind of organically starting in Europe and your product engineer is here, maybe your hires should be there to go after that market. Even if you do it in Europe, I would definitely go with the talent that saw how to grow the business in the US. It's a very different, in a way, operational cadence that I noticed in the US, and in some positions in Europe, we bring people from the US to fill those positions because they know how to hyperscale and how to support the business through this growth stage. So yeah, that's what I would think of. Was it hard to attract great people in the US early on? Because typically people don't know the product, people don't know the company, they're reluctant to join something that they haven't really heard about. Was it hard in the beginning and did it become easier later on? I think it's every time hard. So it's a thing that you should appreciate, it's a hard thing to hire best-in-class people. And what I do, I try to understand, I try to benchmark what awesome looks like in every role, in every job. Before I go into hiring, I actually start to dig into my network and ask people who are best-in-class operators in this or that role, what they accomplished, do they know how to do zero to one or they are more kind of operators of the scale when they can scale things. So that's what I start with. I start with understanding who are best-in-class people out there. I learn from them, I calibrate against them and then I start search and I don't give up until I find the best-in-class person for the business. And yeah, we have some searches going for almost two years, but it's worth it because the time you onboard the person to the business, the time you give the person to build their organizations, to develop a culture, it's huge. And if you do something wrong, it will cost you way more than the cost of delayed hire. And of course, hiring is one of my key priorities as a CEO. Like I run all the leadership searches myself, people who report to me like I'm trying to be on top of those things and it's a lot of work to make it right. But that's definitely not the work you will fully delegate someone. You definitely can have people who help you in this. I'm pretty lucky to have those people in my team who help me with this, but it's my job to hire right leaders for the company. You sometimes talk about managers who can do zero to one and other managers who can do one to infinity. Can you explain what you mean by that and how it's as relevant to you today? Sure, yeah. So for those who are in a product world, you know that iteration from zero to one before you got into product market feed is very different from when you scale things when they can hit the customer, hit the relevant usage. Same as with the rest of the business, you have a bunch of things that you have to build in the business. You have to build policies and you don't want these policies to be just formal, operational kind of papers. You want these things to enable people to make faster decisions, to have more autonomy, to be empowered. You need to build a culture and it also requires leadership skills. You need to build your go-to-market machine and you have to iterate through your inbound engine or you have to iterate through your sales pitch at scale, especially when you move from one persona to another at scale. You have to iterate on, I don't know, even financial reporting. I was really surprised to see financial reporting from one of the companies that I'm following, how smart they are in their financial reporting and what metrics they actually look and maybe we need to adjust 20% of our financial reporting to look at the right numbers and then as a result to incentivize the organization around those numbers. So all those things require builder skills and what I mean under builder skills you have to identify opportunities. You have to validate a bunch of hypotheses. You actually have to grab a bunch of hypotheses from your network of people who report to you or who are peers in similar companies. You have to validate those hypotheses against each other. You have to test them with your potential users and then if something works scale, if something doesn't work scale, scale back and iterate further. So it all requires like this 0-1 mindset an iterative mindset and a lot of great operators they never did it because they didn't build companies from scratch. So what I look at when I interview people is do they actually zoom in into details? Do they actually come up from fast principles while they have iterative approach to things that they do? And it's hard to find those people out there but at least you have to find people who can be coachable and who can iterate with you together on those things. So that's what I mean when I say 0-1. You're now the CEO of a business with 1,800 employees. What are the things that you like doing and how do you make sure that you can still do some of those things? Yeah, I love doing products. I love being engaged with the product design and my biggest passion is when I see we deliver the value and that value being consumed. That's my biggest passion. So my favorite channel in Slack is product news. So this is the channel that I read first every morning. I read it like every evening first when I go into Slack because that tells me about what's our velocity as a business in terms of delivering value, how we package that value, what are the learnings, what are the insights we're getting and then checking if this value resonates with our audience or not. That's kind of what I love learning and being involved with. I try to be involved in several strategic product explorations, product design explorations and contribute to the team. I'm definitely not the driver for those, but I consider myself as a part of the team and people might be surprised at what the CEO is doing here. We're discussing this small thing, but I'm kind of positioned myself as one of the people on the team and you can pick up my brain, you can pick up my inside, you can skip it, it's up to you. But I'm here to contribute and bring kind of my 10 years inside being in this space. But there are a lot of other things that you have to do as a CEO and I'm trying to spread my time, not equally but kind of in a way where I'm on top of things in all other parts of the organization. It's definitely hard and I don't know way more than I know these days, but as a CEO I think it's a responsibility to make sure you are staying on top of things in the business and helping the business move forward in any way possible. What are the things that stress you and how do you deal with it? Yeah. Things that are stressful and, you know, I had this moment recently a couple months ago when we all came together after pandemic and there were like 1600 people in front of me and I had to deliver the next organizational evolution kind of where we go and how we go as a company, as a culture and it was pretty stressful to be back in front of the room of people with a lot of them I never met before and I did it and then I was pretty relieved after that but in terms of work I'm not stressed much so I think as long as you understand the problem as long as you pick it up and act quickly and see things are moving forward as a business it's a part of the job so it doesn't stress me out. Cool. On that note Andre it was a true pleasure to chat and onwards we go. Thank you Hari. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.