Why we took our 100-person startup team on a trip around the Philippines
In March 2016, the whole Canva team went on an adventure. It was wonderful, chaotic and an incredible opportunity to spend time together as a full team.
The Sydney team (about 50 people) flew to the Philippines to join the 50 or so team members based in Manila.
They planned to work together for a week in the office, and then all go on a trip together to one of the most beautiful places in the world: El Nido.
I realised after the trip that it was almost a perfect metaphor for startup life. The thrill, the adventure, the challenges, the lessons. In both there were times when I think it’s all going to go horribly wrong, and then there is also the elation when things actually work out.
Below is a video that captures many of those perfect, magical moments. Below are some more details about the trip, and the thinking behind it.
So the vision was beautiful. The highlight reel looks amazing. When you see the beautiful fire lanterns floating off into the distance, we all remember the teamwork preparing to launch the lanterns.
But we all know reality is never as neat and picturesque as the highlight reel.
Taking one hundred people on an intrepid adventure to another country was always going to come with its challenges. As we voyaged on boats and buses, across islands and into caves — we all learnt a lot about ourselves and each other.
We embarked on the trip as Canva entered its next stage of evolution: our team had grown to 100 people and more than 10 million people had signed up to use Canva from across the globe. We’re about to turn three years old and have rapidly transformed from a tiny startup with a huge outlandish vision to hyper-growth company that’s starting to see some of that dream turn into reality. Though we still have such an incredibly long way to go.
As we grow — we need to make very conscious decisions of the type of company we want to become. We have always given this a lot of consideration, but perhaps it’s even more important as things are moving at an increasingly rapid rate.
Late in 2015 as our team continued to grow and our ambitions didn’t slow down — we decided to move into a structure of ‘little startups’: where every team has their own strong mission, goals and timelines.
This has been incredibly successful so far, as it’s become apparent that as a company we can continue to grow and maintain the things that we love about startup life — where everyone feels empowered to achieve great things.
With offices in two countries, it’s a rare opportunity to get the whole team together under one roof — to share best practices, standardise processes across teams and to learn from one another. The time together also provided us with the opportunity to get to know each other well and build strong bonds, which helps everyone to work together more smoothly and efficiently.
One highlight of this for me was the hackathon we ran in Manila. People spent 24 hours creating something cool and Canva-related, either in small teams or by themselves. People created a range of incredible projects, some of which we hope to get online in the next few months while others were more futuristic and we’ll hopefully launch over the months and years to come.
Canva’s amazing customers from across the globe are the entire reason Canva exists. We spent time as a company reading their lovely feedback and looking through their suggestions and working as part of our customer happiness team.
We had a bug-a-thon focused on designing and building solutions to the most common user reported issues. And another workshop where our customer happiness team could ask our engineering team questions. While we always encourage a very transparent environment where anyone can ask anyone else questions, designing a space specifically to learn from each other is very important as our company continues to grow rapidly.
Having the team work together and hang out was incredibly valuable. Creating a great inclusive environment is one of our key priorities as a company and a major part of our culture. That’s also one of the reasons we have team lunches together every day, to make sure that everyone feels included. And why we went on a ten-day trip filled with adventures.
There’s always so much more to learn and so many challenges along the path as we attempt to build out a pretty outlandish vision. I couldn’t feel luckier to have such an incredibly talented and motivated team to work alongside on this crazy journey of startup life.
I hope that in years to come our team looks back on this crazy adventure and the many others we’ve had together and feels proud of what we have created.
