Cameron Adams: recommendation

Transcript context

…That makes so much sense. We're talking about cultural elements and so I have one more question around culture. I saw a video interview you did once about how you love this concept of giving away your Legos, that's part of your culture and the culture at Canva broadly potentially, and this was originally popularized by Molly Graham in this first round review article. That's something you still believe in and if so, can you just describe that concept briefly because a lot of people haven't actually heard about this? Yeah, Molly wrote a great article, which I actually refer everyone who joins Canva to in the cultural onboarding session, which I give them. So I run everyone through the culture at Canva and what they can expect over the next few years as they work here, and one of those sections is on giving away your Lego, and it's really important to us because part of being in a startup is scaling, when you're scaling from zero users to a million to a hundred million, and when you're scaling from three founders to 10 employees to 100 employees to 4,000 employees. You're scaling everything from the product to the internal processes you have, the finance team paying people how you deal with user feedback. Everything's just constantly growing, growing, growing. And I think this is slightly different to a traditional job where you get good at the thing that you always do and you try and turn that into a process that just continually works all the time. As a startup, you just have to be changing and we want people who are flexible, you can bring new ideas, you can go to that next level. You can think about not just a million people, but 10 million people, 100 million people, a billion people using the product, and to constantly ratchet up that multiplier, you need to change yourself, which means that you probably need to give away some of the stuff that you're doing now in order to get to that next level. If you're the first email copywriter at Canva, you can get away from writing all the emails for the first year maybe, but when you're writing emails for 100 million people in 190 different countries, in 100 different languages, all at different stages of their journey through using Canva from beginners to intermediates to experts, that just massively multiplies the complexity of the job that you have to do. And if you're trying to write every single one of those emails, you have no chance of scaling. So you need to think about who you're going to bring in to help you, what systems you're going to introduce, what are the processes needed to get 100 different languages translated every time you send out an email and that requires you to hand off that stuff. You need to maybe stop writing every single email, give that to someone else, be comfortable with doing that because you often build up a lot of self-identity and doing that and you get a lot of joy out of it. That's why you're a writer in the first place. But finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering is really what giving away your Lego is about. And we still encourage everyone to do that, to think about those moments where they need to level up in their impact, how they can bring their team along with them, how they can pass on their experience and help everyone really have a tremendous impact with the skills that they have. I think a lot of people and a lot of companies struggle with this idea, and I'm curious if there's something you've learned about how to actually implement this. Is it just like, "Hey, go read this article and then I might bring it up sometimes when things are changing and there's a reorg."? Or is there anything even deeper of just this is a cultural element of we are constantly giving up our Lego's giving things that we own?…

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