Canva’s Lachlan Andrews on Going From Intern to Global Comms Leader
Mixing Board Studio Session
Lachlan Andrews leads the corporate and internal communications function at Canva, a $40 billion startup working to empower the world to design. He joined the company as the second communications hire and has overseen massive growth as the company scaled to nearly 5,000 employees, over 185 million monthly active users, and more than $2.3 billion in annualized revenue. Today, Lachlan’s team of ten is made up of strategic storytellers and trusted business partners responsible for shaping the way Canva shows up in the world while crafting communications strategies around the company's most important moments.
In this Studio Session, Lachlan and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about how being based in Australia has forced them to think beyond the typical Silicon Valley playbooks; why internal communications teams shouldn’t be responsible for drafting every email; how to build tools that make every employee a good communicator; hiring people that are smarter than you; giving away LEGO blocks as you scale; managing through changing narrative cycles; and, the importance of learning from people who’ve walked in your shoes.
SG: What are you up to now and how did you find yourself in the seat you're in?
LA: I look after the corporate and internal communications team at Canva. We’re a global online visual communication platform empowering more than 185 million people to create everything from documents to presentations, websites and videos. These days, I look after an incredible team of ten responsible for shaping how our brand is seen by audiences spanning journalists, policymakers, customers and our employees.
On the corporate side, we cover everything from our business story to major product launches, executive communications and tentpole events, like Canva Create, which we’re gearing up for as we speak. On the internal side, our work is centered around connecting, inspiring and aligning our global team of nearly 5,000 people while ensuring everyone has the information and context they need to help meaningfully contribute towards our mission and goals. In short, no two days are ever quite the same!
I joined Canva back in 2019 when we had around 400 employees, so we’ve 10x’d in that amount of time. I actually joined the company as an intern. It’s a long story, but in short, I applied for the role and was fortunate enough to get an interview, which then led to being invited to come in for a week as a bit of a trial run. I worked on a whole bunch of things from writing blog posts to creating media releases and brainstorming different ideas for getting some early press coverage. That was the first week in a nutshell, and then I never left! My average week looks a bit different today, but there’s still a whole lot of learning, testing different ideas and working across a very wide range of projects. There were definitely lots of overwhelming moments as the intern learned all of this on the go.
My first year was really focused on building our profile as a company with the goal of attracting incredible engineering talent. We’re an Australian company, and while we’re fortunate to have amazing talent here, the talent pool isn’t quite as big as Silicon Valley. This meant we had to put a lot of work into “Great Place to Work” awards, fun broadcast stories about how we had free lunches as a team in the office, folks that brought their dogs to work – really just building out the early talent brand narrative. There were very few companies in Australia, if any at all, that had those sorts of perks, so it was lots of fun for local media.
We then went through a few additional funding rounds and product launches and so we switched gears to think more about the business story. We knew our funding rounds would always be covered in the press, so rather than have a story just focused on how much money we’d raised, we also used those moments as opportunities to tell stories about our new products. We were very intentional about combining product launches into funding stories as a bit of a trojan horse, and that also marked our foray into starting to do more international media with a focus on the US.
We’re fortunate that we’ve been able to build out a really incredible team over time which has meant we’ve been able to explore new areas including consumer media, internal communications, more international communications.
SG: How many people are on the comms team now and when did the first comms person join?
LA: Our Chief Marketing Officer, Zach Kitschke, was actually our first Head of Communications and has taught me a huge amount of what I know today and has been a great mentor to me – especially as I was getting started as an intern.
Zach was the fifth employee to join Canva, so I think that’s a testament to the importance we placed on the role of communications right from the start. There are now 16 of us in communications spanning everything from corporate and internal communications to product, consumer, enterprise and international communications. Communication has always been a function I feel we’ve really valued as a company which has without a doubt made our jobs much easier, and much more interesting too.
SG: As you’ve evolved from two full-time comms folks to 16, you've seen people who had previously worn multiple hats begin to give them away to other people. For some people it's like, great, I get to focus on what I really care about. Other people feel like you're taking away my power because I used to do all these things and now I only do this one thing. How has that evolved and how do you best manage that?
LA: This is actually really hard – it’s definitely something I grappled with, and it’s often still something I catch myself needing to think about. When I first joined Canva I made an effort to read lots about the culture of startups, and besides the lean startup idea, one of the most recurring topics was the notion of how giving away your responsibilities (or your lego) as you grow can be really hard. I remember thinking that sounded ridiculous. I was in the trenches wearing lots of hats and thought I’d be more than happy to give away all of my LEGO to be able to start working on the ideas we hadn’t yet gotten to. As anyone who has done this will know, it sounded much easier than it was.
Fast forward a couple of years to when we started growing the team and giving away LEGO was definitely one of the things I struggled with the most. It’s great to be able to take on new responsibilities and to see others step up and grow, but it’s equally hard not being across everything in such detail. It can be tricky when you go from writing every media release and pitching every journalist to then needing to delegate those responsibilities. There were also lots of things I had worked on that had gotten to a point where I wasn’t learning as much as someone new would have the chance to learn, and those things were tricky to give away too. Molly Graham, who coined the term around giving away LEGO, actually wrote a really great blog post about this.
We’re fortunate to have a great team of full-time internal coaches at Canva, who act a bit like executive coaches and are available to work with anyone across the company. I spent a lot of time with Sarah Nanclares who leads our coaching team working on this, and ultimately making the mindset shift that giving away LEGO isn’t about someone taking your job or what you’re not going to get to do as much as it is about what you now have time to do. You simply can’t do everything at once, and if you hold onto the same LEGO for too long, you’ll never get a chance to explore new areas. For example, building out an internal communications function is something that took a huge amount of time – it’s not something I would’ve been able to do if I was still insistent on pitching every journalist and writing every media release.
We’ve thought about this the same way as we’ve grown our team and expanded into new markets and verticals.
SG: I'm assuming Canva focuses on verticals in a pretty significant way?
LA: Yeah, it has been an interesting journey in terms of figuring out the right timing for splitting into verticals as our team has grown. From 0-5 people, we had everyone doing a bit of everything. It was a matter of figuring out what was most important that week, then delegating it out depending on who has capacity. As we got past the five-person mark, we started building the first version of what verticals might look like with the goal of getting each of them to a point where it would make sense for someone to then continue running with that program.
We spent a lot of time testing different ideas and story angles to see what resonated the most. Our talent brand and culture narrative took off quite quickly, as did our product storytelling, so it made sense for those to become verticals quite early on. These days, everyone on our team is focused on a vertical – whether it’s social impact, education, enterprise, etc – which makes up about 70% of their time. It’s been a helpful model to ensure everyone has a space they’re accountable for, but also the opportunity to carve out their own programs and to evolve an area of work over time. In a way, and on the topic of my previous answer, each of their verticals has become its own little LEGO tower.
SG: You mentioned that you wear the internal comms hat as well now too. It must be such an interesting time to be at a company that has 10x’d in size, where you're also a global company based in Australia, and then going through three-plus years of Covid during that time. How did the development of the function play out during this time?
LA: Internal communications has been such a fun and interesting function as it’s another area we got to build from scratch. Like a lot of companies, it was owned by different parts of Canva for the first few years. Workplace experience pitched into parts of it, HR looked after other parts, and comms jumped in every now and then. This model works well if you’re a small company, but there comes a point where it doesn’t really sit anywhere. We hadn’t defined a vision for what communicating with 3,000 or 5,000 employees would eventually look like in a few year's time.
When the pandemic hit, we suddenly needed to transition the entire company from spending five days a week in an office to working completely remotely. That meant thinking through remote hiring and onboarding, remote culture building, remote collaboration and alignment. This was really the catalyst for needing to bring in more dedicated internal communications craft skills and to build more of a strategy around what employee communications could look like. We brought in our first hire just as the pandemic started and we spent a good portion of that year on pandemic-related comms – updates to office closures, switching to a virtual all hands, sharing the latest local restrictions, thinking about a virtual manifestation of our culture, supporting the mental health and wellbeing of our team, all of those things. By nature of that, the first year had to be spent very reactively.
At the same time, we were also starting to think more about our growth and what it would look like to communicate with 3,000 or even 5,000 people over time. We met with a lot of different internal communications leaders and heard about their different models and structures. We took some of the best bits from those conversations, but at the same time, we really wanted to build it in a way that felt unique. Our mission as an internal communications team is to set a new standard for the function that is distinctly Canva, and that’s been a huge part of how we’ve spent our time post-pandemic. These days, we think about internal communications in two ways: the first is empowering and upskilling everyone to be great communicators, and the second is scaling fun, engaging and effective company-wide communication.
SG: Tell me more about empowering everyone in the organization to communicate and making skillful company-wide communication pillars of internal comms. How does this come to life day-to-day?
LA: We didn’t want to build a team of internal communications specialists who would become writers for every email being sent across the company. Our team doesn’t exist to write emails about software updates or office updates – we’re intentionally a strategic function responsible for connecting and aligning our team across the globe. Instead of acting as writers, the first half of our work is spent building resources that teach everyone across Canva how to be effective communicators. We see this as an essential part of everyone’s role – it might not be to the extent of someone who specializes in the craft day to day, but being able to write an effective email or concise document to move a decision forward, that’s something we really believe everyone should be empowered to do themselves.
We built a bunch of internal tools and templates that help folks with this – so there’s a template for sending an email to the whole company and how to format and structure that; there’s a checklist to mirror as you’re creating an internal announcement; there’s an inclusive language guide. We of course use Canva for all of this. All of those things exist to ensure our team can get out of the weeds while also helping everyone at Canva to communicate with impact. We figured if folks can get their drafts 80% of the way there, our team can then support the final 20% by helping figure out how we can add a creative approach, what’s the right channel for this message, how does it fit into the internal communications calendar, what groups of people need to know about this, what are the key messages here – that sort of thing.
The second half of our work is spent scaling fun, creative and engaging company-wide communications. Our goal is to ensure everyone has the information they need to understand how their work connects to the bigger picture while also knowing how to meaningfully contribute to our mission and goals. So, as an example, we’ve turned our company all-hands into a TV show format to add a creative touch. We figured we’re all sitting in meetings as it is, and oftentimes, the last thing people want to do is to go to another standard meeting to hear a presentation – so we built a studio in our office and called it Canva TV. The whole thing is scripted for an hour and it’s hosted in a studio like a morning talk show – there’s a news desk, a panel couch, all that stuff. Our team can register to join the live audience adn then we also stream it across all of our offices. It’s a really quirky format, but it’s a very strategic hour for us to share the most important company updates, answer questions and showcase the great work happening across the globe.
Outside of things like a talk show all hands, we’ve now grown our internal communications team to the point where we have pillars across the function – we split it out across company-wide communications; channels and content; special projects and change management; and then events and campaigns. We’re still a very nimble team but we’re able to cover a lot of ground having spent time empowering folks across the company to feel confident with their own internal communications, so rather than writing software update emails, we’re able to spend time working with leaders on what great context sharing looks like, or bringing fun and creative events to life.
SG: Given the fact that you have extreme time zone issues and all the complexities that you're working through, how do you best use internal comms to not only be a channel out, but a channel in? As a listening device?
LA: Both sides of that equation are incredibly important, so it’s a really good question. Let me answer in two parts – I’ll touch on your question about managing the time zones first, and then I’ll get to how we think about internal communications as a channel in both directions.
In terms of the complexity around time zones, we’re based in Sydney which means things like our all hands happen in local time when other teams around the world might be offline. We have to be creative about producing content in a way that works really well in a recorded format. If you ask people to watch a recording of a standard presentation when they’ve already got a busy day, chances are, you’re going to see really low engagement. If you instead have a monthly recorded talk show style all-hands with a lot of fun creative energy that feels different to a regular meeting, people engage with that content, and we’re still communicating the exact same messages.
We’re also quite intentional about reducing noise as a company which has been a big priority as we’ve scaled. Before we had an internal communications function, our company-wide mailing list and Slack channel was open to everyone. This works well when you’re a small company, but you pretty quickly end up with a sea of information where important updates get lost in the noise. Our job is to help people tune the signal, so we’ve spent a lot of time mapping out all of our channels, cadences and the framework for what kind of content goes where. We now have something called the Canva Wrap which is a monthly website we create and share through Canva containing all of the important information that month, and we have a similar version for all of our people managers. Consolidating standalone updates into these channels really helped to reduce noise which is immensely helpful if you’re on the other side of the world and waking up to 100 messages overnight.
In terms of the second part of your question about listening, we have a company-wide culture survey which we share twice a year. There are a number of questions in there that we see as key indicators for the effectiveness of our internal communications, for example, how people rate having access to the information and context to do their job, or how connected they feel to our mission. This has been a really helpful listening channel which we’ve combined with things like Q&As at our all hands and a company-wide form called the “Fix It Form” which exists for folks to flag things that are broken, aren’t scaling, or where they see a better way of doing things.
SG: As we're having this conversation, you're about to have your big annual user event. Given the sophistication of your internal comms effort, how do you best leverage that audience to create a resonant external message for customers, investors, and other audiences?
LA: We see internal communications as a channel we activate just in the same way as channels like email and paid social. For every major event, we create a campaign toolkit which also includes an internal communications element. So in terms of Canva Create, we’ve created a whole bunch of customizable social templates and frames which we’ve shared with our team to use. Once the event happens and our announcements are out in the world, we also share these with our team along with templates for sharing. These are all made with Canva so folks can easily customize while staying on brand. It’s a great way for our employees to share their hard work on all of our newest products, and this has a massive network effect from a talent brand perspective too.
The other half of this equation is thinking about these external events as internal events too. It’s a tricky balancing act between making sure events like this are interesting and engaging for both our customers and our team, so we do make small tweaks internally. For example, we might have an internal video that plays at the top of the recorded external event to add some extra internal context. We'll usually coordinate watch parties and celebrations in different offices as well.
SG: What's it like being a big unicorn Australian brand? I know Canva from three different ways, one as a user and knowing the actual product, knowing of your CEO, and then three, the fact that you guys are based in Australia, which is interesting and unique. I'm curious how you've used that as an asset and also how it's worked against you? You’ve so seamlessly transcended from Australia into the U.S in a way that feels very natural, it doesn't feel like you’re this company that's coming from this different place. Just as a passive observer, you've done a really good job of integrating into the technology landscape. Did it always feel that comfortable on the inside?
LA: It's definitely been a fun challenge. We view being based here in Australia as a really big asset. Being outside of what can become a Silicon Valley echo-chamber has meant we haven’t just copied and pasted the approach other companies might take from a communications or culture point of view. There aren't too many examples for us to look at in Australia, so we’ve had to forge our own path in many ways. Whether it's how we've scaled our culture, how we've built our team, how we've approached communications, or how we’ve launched in new markets, we’ve always just approached it in the way that feels right for us.
That said, being in Australia can feel a little remote from the rest of the world, so we also had to expand internationally as quickly as we could. Being an international product from the start was really important for our growth. We launched Spanish as our first language in 2015 and then quickly expanded from there. Today we’re available in more than 90 languages, including the harder right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Urdu. We also invest heavily in a truly localized experience – so not just translating our product but also having great local content. If you log into Canva from Brazil, it’s important to us that you'll see templates created by Brazilian creators, you'll see templates that are relevant to local holidays, you’ll have local payment and billing options, all of those things. It feels like a really authentic local experience.
On the communications side, we started picking off markets one by one. Australia was certainly first and remains our homebase and a very important market. From a business perspective we’re the second largest technology company here, so day-to-day media interest is quite high. The US was the next frontier, particularly from a customer point of view. We used a lot of our early funding stories to build relationships with reporters over there and then slowly started telling more product and community stories too.
Every market is quite different, but there are similarities too. It’s always been a bit difficult to get the first few feature articles, but once the snowball starts, it’s much easier to keep it rolling down the hill. We’re now starting to do that in markets like India and the United Kingdom where we’re building relationships with local media and telling local customer stories too.
SG: Having been through all this, what are your reflections on this journey and things you've learned along the way?
LA: That’s a tough question! I mean, I certainly didn’t expect to be here when I was first interviewing as an intern. I joined to do PR for a design company that had five million users and a team of 400 people. Today we have more than 185 million users, and nearly 5,000 employees, and you can design anything from a website to a video or a presentation. I think the main thing is that learning never stops and I don’t think I’ll ever feel fully comfortable, or like I’ve figured everything out. There have been a few great lessons and I could write an essay on this alone – but let me share four of them.
The first is that I have to pay tribute to so many incredible communications leaders at other companies who have been so generous with their time as I’ve learned in this role. I love that our industry is so generous with sharing time, tips and learnings. Whether it was learning about different team structures, market nuances, or getting a sounding board on an idea, my journey wouldn’t have been possible without many great minds and perspectives. The same applies internally here at Canva – there are so many people who have made a profound impact on my journey. From our CMO Zach, who was our first communications hire and taught me a huge amount of what I know, to people like Jennie our Head of People; and then of course Melanie, Ciff and Cameron for their trust, and for taking a bet on a fresh-faced 19-year-old to tell their story.
The second lesson has been the importance of backing yourself and leaning into just-in-time learning. What I mean by this, is that for every milestone or challenge we’ve been through, I think I’ve learned what I needed to know just in time to face it. It has also been helpful to keep perspective as we’ve grown. The challenges that seemed insurmountable in week one, year one, or even year two, I look back on now as very small things. It’s harder to keep that perspective in the moment, but as you look back on things, it’s a helpful reminder that every challenge is a lesson, and the next one is always so much easier.
The third lesson has been the importance of hiring as many smart people as possible, and to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. We’re lucky to have an incredible team at Canva, and I’ll never be able to be an expert on every topic, but I am lucky to now know lots on experts on lots of topics. Investing in those relationships is really critical, and having a sounding board of people you can go to makes such a big difference.
The fourth and final lesson I’ll share, as otherwise I’ll speak forever, is to have fun with things. As an example, getting early press wasn’t easy for us outside of Australia – it was lots of cold emails to journalists and trying to come up with different ways to get our name out there. I remember we launched Zoom Backgrounds at the start of the pandemic, and while we could’ve written a media release and sent it to 100 reporters with no response, we decided to have a bit of fun with it instead. We made a list of 20 or 30 journalists, went to LinkedIn and got their profile photos, then removed the backgrounds and placed them on custom Canva Zoom Backgrounds we had made for them. We then emailed it to each reporter with a subject line along the lines of “Lachlan’s New Zoom Background”, and pasted the image into the email. We ended up getting a lot of coverage from something that was fun and quirky like that.
SG: What advice would you give someone who is coming out of university and trying to forge their way thinking, “I would love to work for the next Canva.” What advice do you have for them?
LA: We actually removed all university degree requirements from our jobs at Canva. Students often ask me whether it’s worth spending the time to study communications. I did go to university, but I joined just as I started my internship at Canva and then ended up leaving after a year as things got too busy. While it’s certainly helpful for the theory, there’s so much more you can learn on the job.
In terms of advice, when I’m interviewing people now, I’m not looking at their education or their university scores. We’re looking for people who are innately curious, passionate and creative. A big part of our job is curiosity – what stories are interesting this week, what’s trending in the news, what’s our product roadmap looking like, what’s most important to our employees – these are questions we’re always asking, and the more curious we are, the easier it makes our jobs. When we’re interviewing, we’re looking for people with this same curiosity as those are people who can ask lots of questions to get to the root of a problem quickly, and who have a good way of seeing around corners.
Passion and enthusiasm stand out as well, especially in an early startup. If you’re going into a startup the size of Canva a few years ago, you’re going to be wearing many different hats and jumping into different things. My advice is to give everything a go – be the person to lend a hand wherever extra help is needed. It’s the fastest way to gain new context, build new relationships, and figure out what you like working on most.
Finally, like most industries, relationships are incredibly important. Spend time building good relationships, whether it’s with journalists or other comms folks, it’s a fast way to learn and to hear different perspectives. Joining communities like Mixing Board, or attending networking events, has been a helpful way to do this. To be able to turn to someone else in our industry when I need a sounding board has been immensely helpful and isn’t something you can read in a book.
Interested in learning more about how to engage with the Mixing Board community of comms and brand marketing experts? Curious on how to become a member? Feel free to reach out via the “Get in Touch” button on our site.