If we look at the stages of the organization, at the beginning it was not polite. We cared 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 organization or 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 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 it 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 the organization that I believe in and that we are bringing back. I can't say it's like a 1,600-person 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 said 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 it in any setting, like with a leadership team or broader leadership team, then we're in a good spot. And I ask the same for other people, like how they feel. And if we all feel good to say what we think, this is a great place to be.
Welcome back. This is From Startup to Grownup. My name is Alyssa Con and today I'm thrilled to welcome Andrey Khusid to the podcast. Andrey 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. Andrey 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 Andrey Khusid, founder of Miro. Andrey, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.
Thank you, Alyssa. Great to be here. Great to see you.
And I want to just maybe set this 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 the visual collaboration category. And obviously the 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 helps 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 human can lead. There is a moment where 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? So 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 problem should it 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 play, 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 are looking for, and you combine that in terms of what 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 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 are 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 an 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 question because I was figuring out that for myself recently. Obviously we have quite a 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 scales of companies, like very small to very big, how they navigate this. And what I learned is a lot of founder CEOs sit down with those teams of three, five 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 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 align on what and why, what can be the solution to that? And then I lean in and 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 a 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, 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 they don't. But one way or the other you have to figure out what you're going to test in the marketplace.
Exactly. Like you need to have a strong point of view on what and 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 it's 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 with 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 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 has significantly shrunk. 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 the digital economy. And this means that every company needs to find that way of continuous iteration and finding 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 a scaled company. I was doing it multiple times when everyone can fit into one room with the original idea of Miro, but also with a couple other startups. But I never faced it at the scale of a 1,600-person 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 whom you create the companies, not necessarily the same people with whom 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 with, like a five-person team, and build the initial product with. And that's a big learning. So for zero to one, 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. Can I 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 the 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 gather 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 a founder, always a founder. I don't think you can unlearn that. But you obviously what you need to learn when your organization is scaling is you should not operate like just a founder, correctly. Like you need to operate in a different way when you scale, building mechanisms, all that good stuff. But then when you need to invent the next horizon, you may take on the hat of the founder and go and do it together with the teams again. So it's switching modes.
Yeah. What's that like switching mode? So as you, 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 are just a professional CEO who is running the company today, to survive in the world you need to be real 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 playing 10 years ahead, and now they're playing 10 months ahead at best. And this is not a digital native company. It's a traditional business. And that's impressive. This is happening to all companies. And 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 has to be in details and has to run the company in an entrepreneurial way. It's not about stability anymore in general how the companies are being run now. With AI, the company is operating on the intersection of humans and agents. And you need to understand in details what 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 will be out of the game. That's quite clear as well. So my belief is that it's a skill. Founder mode is a skill, as well as a kind of CEO who runs 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 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're doing. Because if you're not passionate about what you're 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 can 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 founding 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 started 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 is doing in this space. Same I do with other areas of the business. So for example, I'm thinking about what the go-to-market engine in the AI-first world looks like. And to learn, I was looking around who made some major progress in this space. And I figured out one of my friends who runs a 30-person company, he built a very, very impressive GTM engine. So I did a session, one 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 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 an even better solution. So that's how I stay grounded, and I try to find best in the industry in our specific space in the area that I want to learn, and just go deep and ask an 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 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 so. I organized these culture growth trips. So I picked up seven companies. I took my team and we went and met CEOs of different companies. I think there were eight or nine people on our side, and we met the seven CEOs of different companies and their leaders, and we were asking them questions to get inspired. So that was a 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. 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 not, this will help you to make the right decision because you're not just doing a business or running the company. You're on the journey of your life, and that'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 a 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 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 Miro right now?
It's a great question. 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 started to scale, we started 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 trust from your customers, trust from the broader marketplace, and you have to be in a very humble way 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: that we are not in a position where we earned it all. We are 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 relearn, 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 a more established company, a more structured approach to things. But we are bringing it back. We are a startup, and we are 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 the 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 less 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 this is beneficial for both individuals inside the company as well as the company, because in a new world where AI enables so many things, a 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. It's also beneficial for the company because people own things end to end and they are focused on the outcomes rather than they are 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 business forward. That would be just one example. Another example would be that we expect that managers at all levels of management 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 and 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 delivering work rather than just managing people. And for managers, it's both managing people and delivering work through agentic leverage. That's a big change that we are pushing through.
