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Hmm. Where is it? How to Win Friends and Influence People know the seven habits? Ah, ah, okay how to improve your memory how many times have you shook somebody's hand and two seconds later. You're looking at them and you don't remember their name. That's Ron White.
He's a memory expert with courses seminars and a YouTube channel on how to improve your memory, which is good news. If like me, you've ever met someone at a party and forgotten their name in the middle of talking to them. It's not because you got a bad memory your brain is not hearing a name and forgetting it two seconds later because you have a bad memory.
It's a problem of focus. You're not listening. You're thinking about what do they think about me? What do I think about them? Have I seen them before and you got all this chatter who are around in your brain. Ron has some quick advice for getting past that party pooping faux pas whenever you're meeting somebody before they say hello. Ask yourself the question. What is their name? What is their name? What is their name? What is their name?
Now don't say that out loud, cause you're going to think you're a
weirdo
but ask yourself the question. Why because it's going to focus your brain. The reason we remember a face and not a name as because we saw the face. We never saw the name the Mind remembers what it sees so visualize everything that you want to see if their name is Lisa visualize the Mona Lisa.
If you want to memorize it's the War of 1812 imagine a dozen eggs in the soldiers are fighting with eggs.
But Ron himself can do a little better than putting faces to names at a work mixer or High School reunions. He's been training for 30 years. He's memorized the entire US Constitution. He once held the record for memorizing a randomized deck of cards in one minute 27 seconds. He even created a system to beat the Simon memory game you remember Simon the memory game that looks like a flying saucer from the 1970s.
I have a YouTube channel where I put out memory training videos all the time.
I thought what does everybody understand about memory? They understand the Simon game where it flashes colors red yellow blue green and then you have to try to see how many colors you can memorize.
If you want to know how to do that find Ron White memory expert on YouTube, but Ron hasn't devoted his life to improving his memory just for the sake of parlor tricks. I'm a veteran of the war in Afghanistan when I got back from Afghanistan. I memorized everybody who died in the order of their death and I travel around and I ride it out on a wall. It's 7,000 words. It's 52 feet long. It takes 10 hours to write out these seven thousand words.
And whenever people hear those things one of the natural assumptions that they make is wow. This guy must be a genius.
Or he must be born with a special ability that I don't have and nothing is further from the truth. I could not be more of a normal brain normal IQ. Normal average guy. Everybody thinks everybody thinks I have a terrible memory. I am no good at names. I am no good at study and I can't remember. Well, everybody thinks that but everybody can get better.
And Ron wants everyone to get better. He's mastered the art of turning casual viewers in the eager students by giving them a reason to believe. Somebody said to me yesterday Ron. Do you have a special gift I said, well if you're talking about memory, no, I don't have a special gift. If I have a special gift. It is disciplined. It's the discipline that I sat down and actually mastered this system. But if anybody will sit down and do it, they can get great results from their brain. So one of the greatest things for me for
onboarding and kind of building a following was making it fun. Give them a challenge letting them see the end. You probably know onboarding as a sort of dry HR term for adding new employees to a company if you're in software, you might know it as adding new users to your platform onboarding is those things but it goes much deeper. I believe that onboarding is a hidden key to Lasting success. It starts with quick wins and result in long-term buy-in and it isn't
for employees
You got to have incredible Talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going home.
This is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy
ways. So so it's do I have no idea what to
do. Sorry. I made a mistake. Would you
have to time it right?
This is masters of scale.
We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our sponsor Deloitte good operators over time will become so attune with their machines that they might say, you know just doesn't sound right. That's at a muscle Mellie who eats the smart Factory initiative at Deloitte. He spends a lot of time on Factory floors looking for places where technology can help human operators. The challenge of course is by the time in operator understand something.
Hang on. It's probably going to be a bit of an expensive problem
as American companies
upgrade or restore their manufacturing. They're looking for smart Factory Solutions. Here's one augmenting a factory workers senses. My youngest son has a cochlear implant. It's picking up vibrations and turning it into sound that algorithm that helps my son. Listen can oh, so listen to that machine and start to spot differences in the
operations pattern listening to machines. It's one way smart Factory Solutions are transforming manufacturing. Well here how they do it and what they can do with the data later in the show for more smart Factory insights from Deloitte visitdetroit.com u.s. / smart Factory.
I'm Reid Hoffman co founder of LinkedIn partner acrylic and your host and I believe that onboarding is a hidden key to Lasting success. It starts with quick wins and result in long-term buy-in and it isn't just for employees. I want you to take a moment and think back back to the very first time you listen to this show and if it's your very first episode welcome.
It was probably a moment when you realize our format is a little different each show is organized around a theory of how company scale each guest shares stories to bring that theory to life additional Cameo guest appear to help cement the theory in your mind and sometimes just sometimes we break into song If this is your 78 episode these things are now pretty obvious but a brand new listener might have a few questions.
Why doesn't he just let the guests talking Wizards?
So it even about I was listening to One
gas, but then all of a sudden it's another stop with the sound
effects already. We know what the Simon game sounds like. There's a reason we structure our show the way we do our mission is to democratize entrepreneurship for leaders at every stage from student to CEO. And we know that people learn in different ways some learn through ideas and the more concrete we make the ideas the more they'll stick most people learn best through human stories and the more visual or
Sensory we make the stories the more they'll stick like Ron White the memory expert pointed out the Mind remembers what it sees. So all this the music the metaphors me talking to you right now. It's all a way to frame the content so you can use it in your own life, but be honest it kind of helps to know that right it helps to know right at the beginning what to expect so you can feel smart instead of stupid or bewildered and
Creating this episode it occurred to us that it might have been useful. If we had just told you all that up front seventy eight episodes ago, but like all the products we talked about on the show Master the scale is a work in progress and this leads us back to onboarding the process of laying out expectations getting rid of confusion giving someone a quick win because now they get it that's all onboarding and it really doesn't get the attention. It deserves.
So it's how customers learn to use your product it's how employees learn the ropes and how everyone from investors Defenders learn your mission and culture and it's steadily Progressive just like a game of Simon people don't just stay on boarded at the same level forever. If you do it, right, they'll go deeper and deeper and they'll stay with you maybe for life.
I wanted to talk to Melanie Perkins about this because as the co-founder and CEO of canva successful onboarding of every kind has been Corridor hermitian canva is an online design platform with 40 million monthly active users and over 3 billion designs created. That's 80 new designs every second Melanie co-founded the company with her partner Cliff obrecht specifically because of how painful it was to get on border to the popular design software of the late.
S if the phrase scalable Vector graphic strikes fear in your heart, you may already know what I mean. I reached Melanie remotely the way every interview has been conducted during the pandemic Melanie's in Australia marking Master the scales first ever Zoom across the Pacific. So I hear from masters of scale with Melanie
Perkins. Thank you so much for having me on it's very exciting to be joining you from Down Under
Melanie grew up in Perth on Australia's western coast. It was there that she and her
Siblings got their first taste of
Entrepreneurship. I was about 15 and I made some scarves and I sold them at Women's boutiques and I would get incredibly nervous and call up these shops and sell these scarves. I've handmade and I put little handmade tags on them because I thought if I had a tag it would help them to forgive any of these little difficulties of the little arrows that I'd made
Melanie's mom had urged her to start this small business and she had a bigger plan.
Man behind
it. My mom. She encouraged us three kids to start our own teeny little businesses, even though it didn't make a lot of money. I learnt firstly that I could take on something that was really scary and then succeed and it also meant that I could make a business myself rather than having to just purely work for someone else
what I love about this teeny business was the way it on-boarded Melanie to the ins and outs of running a business her mother knew that the success or failure of the scarf trade.
Really didn't matter. It was the confidence and experience that would stick for Melanie. It was the first step in a lifelong journey of Entrepreneurship. She started her next business while a student at the University of Western Australia. She tutored her peers and design programs like Photoshop and the program's proved hard for students to crack.
I didn't mind the complexity of the programs. But the change was seeing other students struggling they were really really complicated that would take a whole semester just to learn the very basics of
How to use the software where the buttons were it would take an absurd number of clicks to learn to do the most simple of things and it seemed completely ridiculous and at the same time Facebook was taking off and it was like, why is it so complicated to create a design? Why do people have to study for such a long time to be able to do the basics? Whereas on Facebook people could just jump on Facebook and start using it straight away without having to have gone through this incredibly long period of learning ahead of
that. This Insight would be Melanie.
Aha moment how had Facebook made it so easy for new users to get on board and why couldn't it graphic design program do the same because a long frustrating ramp up to proficiency isn't just inefficient. It's actually discouraging when someone has a bad onboarding experience. It can turn them off not to just that one piece of software but to an entire creative
path and to time I think it's $1,200 to purchase software, which was
lately absurd and out of the reach of pretty much most people and certainly students and nonprofits and so many small businesses that desperately needed it and I was like Shirley in my futuristic World in my head people are not using this archaic software people are using things that are seamless and enable them to achieve their goals really quickly and efficiently it was really apparent that the entire design industry was going to be different in the future. It was going to be online and simple and collaborative and that was going to apply to absolutely every design type.
Melanie expected that someone else was going to design that future. She envisioned any minute the software. She pictured would make user onboarding painless and fast, so when it didn't happen she decided to create it herself
once I had an incredibly clear in my mind's eye that this is where the world was headed. It seemed logical step to start the business, but at that point in time, I was 19 and I had very little business experience other than my scarves and very little marketing
experience.
Melanie recruited a boyfriend Cliff obrecht to help her
I actually went in an inventor competition because that was a lot more popular than startup competitions in Perth in 2008. And my entry was called the world's most sophisticated multi-user online publishing system. So I was trying to sound very inventory at the time
Melanie and Cliff wanted to take on the entire design Market, but with no software Engineers not a lot of capital. They took a page from onboarding 101.
Start simple and work your way up. So they did with the
yearbook. We intentionally tackled vineeth Market of school yearbooks because we didn't have the resources or experience to tackle the entire Market at the start enabling schools to create their yearbooks and getting them printed and delivered to the school dorm.
Melanie and Cliff founded the first company together Fusion books as proof of concept for the most important tent poles of Melanie's design
philosophy. It was going to be online and simple
collaborative
but early on melon Cliff also recognize that making the tool simple wouldn't be enough. They would have to make it so intuitive the user learning curve all but disappeared
when we launched Fusion for the first time the whole point was it was drag and drop you can drag and drop everything onto your page, but we noticed a lot of people clicked and so of course, it was really critical that we enable people to click things and for it to land on their
page. They owed this inside too intense observation of their customers and Tents.
As in one-on-one
every time we would give someone a new account and actually call the customer and give them a walk through all my partner Cliff would do the same and so it meant we spoke to hundreds of people and got a really really deep insight into what it was that they needed questions that they had things that didn't make sense a button that didn't make perfect sense. The first time they saw
it this handcrafted focus on customer onboarding didn't just make their product better. It made the users more.
Klee to stick with it speed to productivity is the key metric and onboarding the faster your users get good at your product. The more likely they are to stay on the other hand if they start feeling a lost or annoyed they might just say this isn't for me onboarding Isn't just here's how you use the thing. It's all so here's why it's the right tool for you
a couple of minutes. We wanted to make sure people felt confident and smart and empowered and that they could totally design
Melanie and cliffs other customers gaining confidence in the platform and in their own abilities this led Fusion books to take off and soon customers wanted to use it to tackle new
challenges. We started to grow and people kept asking us. Can we use this for other things? Can we use your software to design our school newsletter? Can we use it to design our student portfolios and all sorts of other things we had such deep insights into the customer experience that we really wanted to take that to the bigger Market in to enable everyone to see
design everything
but to reach that bigger Market Fusion would need startup capital and eventually a new name.
We thought Fusion books was a perfect name over the years afterwards. We realized it was a terrible name for a whole host of reasons. Like everything was called Fusion books was very limiting and we didn't get the.com. So we spent a whole year trying to find a name. I love the idea of canvas and I like the idea of canvas Chef because I'll sort of like you do all of these high-quality fresh.
Gradients and be able to throw them in the pan and be able to create something wonderful really quickly. I like that name. I got feedback from other people's little dorky eventually. We're sitting there and we had a French engineer or like what's canvas in French and he was like
canva. So now you're doing this other thing which is well don't have a market will learn how to Market don't know how to build Global software will learn how to do it. What were the first steps in pulling canva together.
I think that what you just
it is what I like to call Just in Time learning. I feel like every single lesson that you learn in to start up is just in time or sometimes just after you needed to know it we had already built Fusion, but when we want to tackle the bigger Market we needed to firstly get investment and we also needed to find a tech team that had the technical capacity to be able to build it
out this just in time learning Melanie describes its part of the classic entrepreneurial Journey when you have an idea that you want to make the foundation of your company you can
Afford to spend 20 years prepping for the job you want one day by the time you're ready to start someone else has long since taken your idea and run with it instead. You need to learn as you go solving more and more complex problems, which in Melanie's case meant trying to get
funded the first time that I met a vc-1 had flown over from Silicon Valley to Perth built. I and I had a little conversation with him after a conference build tie Silicon Valley venture.
capitalist
Built I had come to Perth for the innovator of the Year Awards conference afterwards. Melanie grabbed a moment to get in front of
him. He said if I went to San Francisco, he'd be happy to meet with me. So I went over to San Francisco. I met with him. I presented my vision which was the feature of publishing
Melanie's first meeting with belt. I would be a perfect example of the just-in-time learning new entrepreneurs find themselves doing Melanie had learned how to onboard users to a new platform and learn a new skill set now.
He was the student learning how to onboard investors and there was a bit of self teaching going
on.
I happened to learn apparently if you mimic someone's body language, they'll like you more.
And I was doing absolutely every single thing I possibly could to get to like me and like my business and like my vision for the future of publishing. And so while I had my ridiculous paper pitch deck sitting there in the cafe trying to explain how we're going to beat all these big companies and really make a difference here. I thought that I also should mimic his body language to help him think that, you know, I was more on the same page.
He kind of leaned forward and you lean forward.
You lean back and lean back.
It seems like you're totally cool and totally nailing it.
And then he put his arm behind his chair. And while I'm trying to like eat my lunch and flip my paper pitch day. I just couldn't I could not put my arm behind my chair. It was the most awkward thing in the whole world.
I don't know if it helped.
As someone who's been on the other side of those meetings I can tell you that these attempts don't usually work though. There are often taught in sales in negotiation classes. It depends a lot on the intent behind them. I'll share with you a related story. I recently told one of our producers his name is Jordan bunch of people go to these Dale Carnegie classes about how to win friends and influence people and one of the things that they tend to teach in the Dale Carnegie classes use the person's name, so I would be like hey Jordan your feedback.
Is really good today and Jordan. I actually think that the trim that you've given on your beard as well. And the problem is when people do this very simply they tend to go one Jordan. Let me talk to about this again and Jordan and whoa, right and one of the probably most entertaining exchanges I've had is entrepreneur who had clearly gone to a Dale Carnegie class or read a Dale Carnegie book was using my name and every third sentence or so like read that it at read that it so I said,
Oh, so you like Dale Carnegie's? I guess I really do you like you didn't understand why I was telling you the natural question would be why did you ask me that question right because if you like because you're saying my name too much Melanie wasn't making that mistake, even if her mirroring felt a bit awkward actually some natural mirroring does establish Rapport because it allows you to be in sync with the other person's mood and that can create the feeling of a shared experience. It actually can trigger some by enough.
The right circumstances unfortunately, in this case it didn't look like it was
working. He seemed to be on his phone texting the whole time. I felt like an absolute disaster after the meeting. I got home and seen that he was actually making introductions to a lot of other people which was pretty damn cool.
This was a key moment in canvas journey and it brings us to a kind of onboarding. We don't always talk about in this way. And that is onboarding investors. Your pitch is actually your first piece of on
boarding frequently before you have a single customer. It's your job to make it easy for them to understand the problem. You're trying to solve and the solution you're
offering in the early days investors very much self-selected early investors that believed in our vision would actually invest everyone else would reject us. We really just came in were like we have this wonderful plan this wonderful solution, but because investors didn't know anything about design they didn't care about the market. They didn't think it was a big market and so we realized quite quickly that we couldn't just go in and tell them
Wonderful solution that I didn't care about it was really critical to have a big build-up. This is a huge Market that affects so many people and we have the solution to this problem that you didn't know one minute ago that you cared about
it matters that your pitch to investors on boards them not just to the what of your company but the why start by giving them a quick win make your investment thesis clear present the most compelling hook of your business as soon as you possibly can and it's important to understand
how investors think as Melanie
learned even though we'd been a startup. We didn't know anything much about startups or venture capital or that there was this whole world. I I didn't really understand when someone says I will find you that didn't mean that they were going to fund your entire company that for the rest of its life time what it actually meant was that I would be interested to participate as an angel in a larger round that you need to put together
what I love about that story.
How upfront Melanie is about what you didn't know she admits what many first-time Founders try to hide that they knew almost nothing about fundraising before they started they have to onboard themselves to the world of Finance at the same time their onboarding investors to their mission for Melanie. Her next learning moment was finding a chief technology officer Melanie and her team were working with a high-powered advisor Lars Rasmussen co-founder of Google Maps if Lars.
Has signed off on the new hire so with investors like built,
I mean you that we need to have a very high technical bar what that actually eventuated was a whole year of him rejecting every single candidate that I brought him because no one was up to the standard that we needed every time he would reject someone I would be like, okay. I'm going to go to another conference. I'm going to go speak here. I'm going to email someone when I go to a hackathon weekend just literally doing anything. I possibly could to try and find the right people and then he be like, nope. They're just not up to scratch
I by the way,
Large so I totally understand how this conversation goes. This was a frustrating cycle to be sure but it was also necessary a strong CTO is so foundational to creating a technology company that investors will buy into and it's important even if funding isn't on the line think back to what we said about onboarding users. You're not just educating them your enticing them. Well, that's true tenfold when onboarding a core team member you're asking someone to believe so
so much in Your Vision that they're willing to commit the next years of their life to it. The amount of buy-in is huge eventually that person appeared and Cameron Adams became canvas Chief product officer and third co-founder. It was the acceleration they needed to get buy-in from the other investors and more and more got on board
enzyme. It was actually we end up with like 20 or 30 investors in that first round
including Melanie's first Target investor Bill
tie.
Quite far into the round then bill was like, okay. I'm actually going to invest now.
We'll be back in a moment after a word from our sponsor Deloitte.
Think of a sheet of rigid plastic that needs to be reground you're throwing it into a machine much like a paper shredder and just shred it up. So you can feed it back into a manufacturing process. Well as you can imagine over time those blades were down. We're back with Adam, uh sommelier of Deloitte he's been telling us how technology that powers hearing devices can also detect problems on a factory floor like when worn down blades start giving off warning vibrations
fixing
Which you know may take the machine down for 15 minutes.
It doesn't get to the point of oh now we've actually ruined some tool in that particular machine which gets expensive over the course of a year. We're talking millions of dollars depending on the particular manufacturing facility and what they might be making sensors attached to machines can hear warning signs earlier than humans and the earlier you detect a problem the less it costs to repair, but it's not just the human ear that can be Amplified.
If I'd you can augment the human eye with a computer vision system. It's a camera which is the sensor and then you know, it feeds into computer using AI it's able to spot problems and understand not only what's happening now, but what might happen moving forward what happens when you bring all these Technologies onto the shop floor and let them talk to each other. We'll find out when Adam returns later in the show to learn more about
smart Factory initiatives visit Deloitte.com Us / smart Factory
We're back with Melanie Perkins when we last left our she's secured her first round of funding for canva. They're small but growing team was developing canvas software to deliver on a central promise make design easy collaborative and online which is another way of saying make it easy for new users to get on
board. We had been developing cans of for a year and we had spent all this time and effort trying to make sure that the product is as perfect as we possibly
To get it and that was a year after all the other years of trying to get investors and feces and team members to join. So this has been a long time in the making and we're thinking okay. We're almost ready to
launch. But Melanie our team were about to hit a new level jump in difficulty.
We watched user testers use the product and all of a sudden we realized people were scared to touch buttons people were scared to drag and drop.
This was a surprise to me when I heard it.
It with a brand new design product. I might expect some user frustration but scared is a strong reaction when you're talking about slide decks and fonts, why would a design platform cause not just confusion but fear but to Melanie this reaction made
sense people had been told their entire lives. They weren't creative that I didn't have a design vote in their body and all of a sudden they'll put with this tool and they were scared to actually use it. And so we had to spend a lot of time refining that
User experience when people first jumped into the product to ensure that when people came in within a couple of minutes, they were having fun. They felt playful. They felt that they could actually do this and then very importantly they would share it with their friends and their social networks
bringing users from a state of fear to a state of play. This is a great way to think of the user onboarding experience. We often think of user onboarding as a way bringing them up to a Target level of competence because you
You can't really unlock a products benefits until you know how to use it. But that process has to at some level feel fun. Otherwise, you'll get user churn as they leave as frustrated as the college students Melanie used to tutor Melanie knew that our team needed to find a fix
asked the more something called the five started challenges and those were really simple things like change the color of the circle to read put a hat on a monkey all these tiny little games.
Get us but every time someone did it they felt confident and they got a little spark of joy and I like I can do this and then move to the next one and I'd feel a little bit more confident each time. And so, you know just a couple of minutes. I'd be sharing it on social media and also feeling a lot more confident in their own ability
that little spark of joy is super important to onboarding users. Successfully. It's a bit of over gamification and that's okay getting to a state of play should feel more like a game.
Mmmmm and users tend to expect it in their experience of a new platform. You can actually see this kind of innocent gamification on LinkedIn with the profile completeness status bar the more sections of your profile you fill in the closer to a hundred percent you score. It's a simple way to get users to find and use all of the profile features without putting them through a tutorial. There's a feeling of satisfaction we get and seeing our status bar reach a hundred percent. Is it gamification? Yes.
And that's fine because it benefits the user it teaches them how to use the platform in a joyful way. We're on white the memory expert we heard from at the top of the show uses them gamification to I do martial arts. I am a purple belt in Jujitsu. I've taken other styles of karate. So I gamified memory training and I call it becoming a black belt in memory. So they take the first couple of lessons the most basic stuff. It's the white belt level.
And then when they learn a little bit more than I tell them hey, this is yellow about level stuff. Hey, this is orange belt level stuff. This is purple belt. This is brown Bell. Ah, you are now a black belt in memory and I even give people a certificate when they finish you got your black belt memory certificate. So one of the greatest things for me for onboarding and kind of building a following was making it fun. Give them a challenge letting them see the end with the same kind of playful approach to onboarding Canvas user base has
You'll quickly sends its official launch in 2013 By 2014 canva reached a million users today. They have 40 million monthly active users across a hundred ninety countries, but they still user test a lot.
We've had over a million piece of customer feedback which gives us a lot of insights and then we have a whole team of people that are just reading this feedback and then reporting it back into our team's I spend a great deal of time reading that myself. I spend an incredible.
Double amount of time user testing our product so actually watching people and listening to people use the product if they click a button and they expect that button to work in a certain way. We want that button to work in that way that someone expected because the person is never wrong. It's always the
software remember at Fusion books Melanie. Our team had learned to make an object clickable and draggable because that's what the customer intuited was right at canva the same rules apply.
It's about more than getting to a better product design. It's about making sure the product design is having its intended effect. If it's getting users to buy in stick around and learn the platform broadly speaking Melanie is right. The user is never wrong. It's always the software but you could also say the users Instinct change with their expertise. You can almost go to the classic medieval Guild structure for an analogy.
Apprentice journeyman and master
You want your users to get to master status, but you obviously can't start there. So it's a unique challenge to build something that lets The Apprentice by in right at the beginning and keeps the master user engaged to do this. You'll have to scale your Workforce which introduces another type of onboarding all together.
We had a thousand people now at Cavern more than half of that. He's in our product or alone. And so we have them user testing their products every day.
Every week trying to make sure that we're continuously refining that
experience. I think there are some parallels between how you onboard customers in the product and how you on board employees because you think a lot about the kind of what's the simplest of ways that you can get started that you can get a line with a design capabilities for everybody. How do you do that on terms of onboarding employees?
One of the critical things is to get them to be really deeply across that our vision and where we're trying to go so
Actually take our new team members through our future pitch deck the same Decks that we're taking our investors through. So everyone has a really clear picture of where we're going.
We said earlier that a key metric is speed productivity. That's something that onboarding users and onboarding employees have in common training new employees is typically one of the most expensive process has a company will ever take on the longer. It takes the more costly it becomes and like in user onboarding.
A slow and frustrating climb to proficiency can hurt the employee experience. You don't need to fight to get buy-in with employees the same way you do with users because new employees tend to already be motivated. They want to succeed. They want to get paid and they want to advance within the company. But if you thwart this natural enthusiasm with a bad onboarding process it can Wayne and suddenly your employee is wondering whether this is the right place for them.
After all for a perfect example of this think of a new waiter at a restaurant learning the menu the specials of the day our pasta Lobster ravioli pasta primavera, and sorry, it's my first day some restaurants make the wait staff learn the entire menu before they even allowed on the floor others throw them into the deep end on their first
shift.
Are the eggs farm-raised is the salmon cruelty-free does the pasta have gluten actually does anything of gluten?
I I'm sorry. Just let me ask my manager canva has tried to strike the perfect Goldilocks balance of onboarding that's challenging inviting and fun.
So we spend a lot of time trying to Perfect The onboarding Experience for our team members when they go to their desk we have their laptop set up a balloon.
Une set up on the chair. We have all sorts of like little gifts and swag to try and make that very first moment a really wonderful experience for them. We have an onboarding boot camp to couple of weeks. You meet Specialties across the organization. Our vision talk is part of the boot camp
Melanie and her co-founders have taken their handcrafted approach to onboarding users and applied it to employees
to we go through a little bit of cover history. And then we Deep dive into the investor pitch decks. That's not the Royal way. That's Cliff Mako.
And I cannot either co-founder runs a different sessions though.
This reminded me of when cliff and Melanie would call each new users of fusion books personally. It's time-consuming work that's often delegated down the chain, but the hands on personalized approach to onboarding works for employees
to We Do It monthly and then we sometimes do it more frequently depending on how many people there are as well. I've done that protect thousands of times I think and then at the end they actually have a ceremony and it's
I used a little bit of fun
in the end getting workers to full productivity is only the first part of employee onboarding. The second part is giving them a feeling that they are fully integrated into the team. This is where good cultural practices and good onboarding practices
meet starting a new organization or any company is often quite intimidating and filled with a lot of emotion. And so we want to help people to feel part of the team straight away to really get to know our culture.
There's also another practice Melanie told me about the combines onboarding with ongoing investment in good culture.
Every three months to do something called a season opener. We get the entire company together for the entire day. And we get each of the group's we talking about the big goals that they're driving towards they often show you a feature mocks future designs and really paint the picture of where they're going.
I talked to other guests before about the value of frequent celebrations to strengthen teams.
But I found these quarterly session or openers really interesting. It reminded me of Y combinator Demos in the sense of showing off here are bigger ideas and what we're thinking
about one of my values is just that crazy be goals make them happen and then when they happen, we have a hilarious celebration. So when we launched our paid product for the first time, we released doves like literal dubs, it was hilarious when we launched in Spanish, which was the first International Market that we launched in.
I had a little La Tomatina Festival wherever and threw Tomatoes
like most other social activities these season openers have had to adjust to covid times.
It used to be in person in HR offices. But now we do it online and we send over on a box there is always very clear labels on the outside that says do not open and so everyone has these boxes that they're not allowed to open there are sitting in their home and everyone's always like what's in the box and then these nobody comes and we have this moment. Where the whole
Whole company unboxes their box and then there's often envelopes inside or secret Clues and then throughout the presentation. We'll have an announcement. We like so we just hit this really exciting Milestone and then Milestone is open envelope. Number one people over the envelope which is a bit of fun and then we'll have some treats in there for people to eat throughout the day last time we had an origami challenge. So the whole company was doing an origami Challenge and posting it on Fleck. It's just like little fun things that help bring the company together.
I think that that element of physicality is quite wonderful because it is everyone's feeling distant. You don't want to feel like another Zoom call
this may sound like gamification and the employee experience but I actually think it's a bit different because you don't really want to gamify employee onboarding in an obvious way. It can make the employee mistrust your intentions or even alienate them instead you want to do things that make them feel like they are included inside the tent versus being acted upon
incentive eyeing progress with celebrations as fine tomato throwing an origami folding and all as long as the incentives make the employee feel like a more integrated part of the team.
I think that trying to create that shape and create that your little moment of Pride for people when they join a new company is a lot of fun and really critical I think
and that's why I was interested to learn that these season openers are not just for employees there for investors
to we onboard investors in a
The way of seeing the pitch deck and coming to our season openers the joining in and watching our team. It gets quite elaborate. One of my favorite quotes in the world is Happiness is when what'd you do? What'd you think of what you say are in harmony? We're selling the investors the same thing as we're telling our team as we're telling everyone else. I think that that really helps to make sure that things are moving in
alignment. If you look at your company's growth through the lens of onboarding it becomes so clear how important it is for scale.
An entrepreneur bring on investors that can help in the want to stay till the product
do it. Well and your company will
ask the markets you moving toward you gotta Gotta Get on Board. You gotta get on board bring everybody to the situation. It's a / progress with
a
Shin integrate into the fruit before you get a reward user experience from end to end is the key what will be the feeling smart and confident tweet-worthy that special moment in the customers dream is an investor use a partner or even employees which yourself unplugging the cord you gotta Gotta Get on Board. You gotta get one bowl.
First you onboard yourself to the entrepreneurial process. Next you onboard investors that can help you get started next build a great product that does a great job of onboarding users fast do that. Well and your company grows, so you must onboard many new employees and new investors to do that. Well, and you can do things like onboard new features new corporate Partners or even New Market sectors.
We're tackling 20 different industries that canva trying to combine them all together make a simple integrated experience that feels like one unified experience for the customer at the same time as each of the different Industries. We are tackling our in their own right a really large industry. So we're trying to tackle design products and collaboration products and stock photography and illustrations and templates and trying to take all of that and put it together
canvas now onboarding partners that will help realize
Eli's that 20 industry
goal. So there's many places on the internet now. Well, they've got the canva button and so you click the button it pops up canva they can create a design and they click publish and it goes directly back to their site and it takes about five seconds and you'll be seeing that rolling out on some very well-known sites in the not-too-distant future
ultimately onboarding Partners. It's about creating an end to end user experience that will make their customers happy as well as yours.
I mentioned before about onboarding for a couple of minutes. We wanted to make sure people felt confident and smart and empowered and that they could totally design but we also apply that to our packaging. So when you get a print product delivered to your door as we just hit 500,000 people have had their print printed and had it delivered to their door wanted to ensure that it's a really exciting moment for people. So when they open it, there's a beautiful quote in it and it's really designed to be tweet-worthy. So people take a photo and then tweet about it or share it on social media.
Yeah, and so trying to create that really special moment. That is a exciting elevated moment has been something that we've been really working on with our customers and then really working on with our team
at its best onboarding whether its users employees investors Partners or even yourself goes far beyond that first quick win. It's a discipline Act of continually reaffirming buy-in when you get it, that's when you know, you've truly on-boarded them for the Long Haul.
Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening. And now a final word from our sponsor Deloitte.
These machines are really islands of information. So what we want to do is get everything out of the machines and interconnected. We're back one more time with Adam muslim-led of Deloitte. He's been telling us how sensors attached to machines on the factory floor or detecting problems before the human eye and ear can the challenge is getting these machines to listen to each other. What you want to be able to do is understand what's happening end-to-end. You need materials to come in you need them to move across the shop floor.
Or and be converted you need workers and operators to help convert those materials and then ultimately you need to be able to take that product and get it out the door when you can visualize that whole manufacturing process from end to end you can find ways to make it more efficient where those materials are and what a machine might be doing to them and we're an operator maybe are all disparate pockets of information. So one of the more exciting
use cases is the ability to bring all of these pockets of information together so you can then start to think about how you flow materials and people across your shop floor in order to create the outcome that your customers want. And that's exciting. We're smart factories get even more exciting is you can expand that concept to be hey and I can now do this not just in a factory but across a network of factories.
Explore these Network possibilities at Deloitte smart Factory at Wichita an immersive industry 4.0 experience slated to open early next year to learn more and schedule your visit go to Deloitte.com u.s. / smart Factory.
Mash it up scale is a wait what original the show is recorded remotely with sanitized audio gear. Our executive producers are June Cohen and daren't riff are supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producers are crisp MacLeod Adam skews Jenna Cataldo, Jordan MacLeod Catherine Clark gray, Holly Bondi, Christina Gonzalez and been Manila. Our editor large is Bob saffy original music and sound design by Ryan holiday.
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