In the 43rd episode of our Unicorn Leaders series, hosts Russell Goldsmith and Debbie West were joined online from Salt Lake City, Utah by Dave Grow, CEO of Lucid Software.
Founded in 2010, Lucid Software is a leader in visual collaboration tools, providing products including Lucidchart and Lucidspark that are used by some of the world’s top businesses.
The company raised over $103 million across various funding rounds and reached unicorn status in 2021.
Lucid Software provides visual collaboration software with more than 70 million users around the globe.
Dave explained their mission is to help teams see and build the future because there’s countless business problems and opportunities and issues and initiatives and projects that are just much better understood and collaborate around and align on as a team when you can actually see and visualize them together. It drives better and faster alignment, collaboration, communication, and ultimately execution. They do this through a visual collaboration suite that consists of Lucidchart, an intelligent diagramming application, and Lucidspark, a virtual whiteboard, to help teams see and build the future better and faster.
Dave joined the company’s founders Ben Dilts and Karl Sun in 2010. They started in a basement, essentially with no customers, and no revenue.
At the time he was a consultant at Bain, one of the large management consulting firms. And while there had worked with a Fortune 500 aerospace and defense company, helping them essentially document, understand, and then redesign their manufacturing process for helicopters. He had done all of that on PowerPoint slides because that was the only tool that he was given to do it – a complex process. The first time he saw Lucidchart, he thought about how many hours could have been saved if he had had it previously. He thought about how much more collaborative and engaging that process could have been with the key stakeholders along the way. So, he immediately caught the vision of what Karl and Ben were building and decided to join them in the basement.
Dave saw this as an opportunity to build something, especially having been a consultant previously where you’re suggesting and telling people a lot about what they should consider doing with their business. This was an opportunity to actually get in and build himself. They talked about how they could reach a billion users and how that should be their goal.
Dave has had I relatively unique experience to build and grow just about every function at Lucid outside of engineering, including marketing and sales, product operations. It’s been a fantastic way to build, also learn the business inside and out, to deeply understand and appreciate their customers and their needs, to empathize with various members of the team and what they experience on a day-to-day basis. He has done just about every role in the company, other than writing code!
He told a story or someone who had helped scale Google and then Facebook and other startups where the author gave an analogy that building a company was like sitting in front of a table of Legos. And you start to piece those together, building towards your vision, but you realize to go faster and better, you ultimately need to invite people to the table with you to build alongside you. And so in a startup, you hire people, but to make them successful, you actually have to give away some of your Legos to them. You have to give away some of your responsibilities and the projects and initiatives that you’ve led to that point, or the teams that you’ve recruited and built so that they can ultimately start being successful and build with you. And as you go through that process, you ask yourself a lot of questions. You ask questions like, well, what if they can’t do it as well as I’ve done it? Or maybe more insightfully. What if they do it far better than I’ve done it? What does that mean? And so that’s been a little bit the model that he has followed over a long period is to build something to a certain point but then ultimately find people who are smarter and more talented and sometimes more specialized than he is to come in and take things to the next level and so, ultimately that led to a point where he became president and COO for a number of years.
Karl and Dave then started that conversation and continued it over a long time around when that transition to CEO might come. And fortunately, by the time it did come, they had worked side by side for nearly 11 years. And so, when that time came, it was relatively smooth, given that time together and understanding of what they were trying to accomplish.
They had established their core values very early as a company when they were about 25 or 30 people. They actually gathered together, a number of the key leaders at those early stages to articulate what are core values? Who are they? What do they want to be? And those core values have remained a very integral part of their culture throughout. Dave thinks that if you have the right mission and if you have that persisting culture and core values and the commitment of leaders to it, companies can successfully transition from one leader to the next.
He still has the close involvement of both the founders in the business. Karl and Dave speak nearly every week about various topics where he looks for his feedback and advice. And Ben is still day to day in the business.
Dave said they have always been fiscally disciplined at Lucid. That’s been part of their culture from the very beginning. They wanted to build a business that is self-sustaining. And really, that’s all backed on delivering great value to customers.
First and foremost, investment has gone into the product. In 2020, they launched Lucidspark, their virtual whiteboard, given a lot of pull and demand from their customers when they were looking for new ways to work, as a result of everyone automatically going remote or hybrid very quickly. They spent a lot of effort developing their AI capabilities, enhancing security options, adding over a hundred integrations with key platforms to really streamline those workflows for customers.
They have also made significant investments in other parts of the business. One of those has been global expansion. And so around that same time, as they raised that funding, they launched their EMEA headquarters in Amsterdam. They now have more than a hundred employees there, helping serve customers throughout that region. A year later, they opened their APAC headquarters in Australia and serving those customers there as well. They have also opened additional offices throughout the United States and so on to attract great talent.
The vast majority of their employees are around one of their hubs but they do have some remote employees. Some of those are in field with customers in various locations. And then others are those that they have attracted over the last few years, given their specialties and unique talents, and therefore looked for those remote opportunities as well.
Dave attributes these wins to the people. From the beginning, they had a focus on finding the best and the right people to build with them. Great people want to work with great people. And so if you never lower the bar in hiring that nucleus of great people has a magnetic pole then for other great people. He said the first 10 people you hire will determine your next 50. First 50 will determine your next 500 and so on. And it’s not always easy to hold those standards where they need to be to find the best and the right people in terms of exceptional talent and also those who fit with their culture.
Dave said that they are the best users of their product.
Also, as CEO, Dave said one of the most important responsibilities is to be the chief storyteller. He thinks that is certainly true with customers and to the market, but especially true to employees. One of the ways they do that is simply through a company all hands every couple of weeks. But they are very intentional about how they construct those meetings, where they highlight a customer in every single one of those meetings to really reinforce how they are helping that customer, and their team see and build the future better and faster. They then often will go to their strategy and talk about a couple of initiatives across the company and how they’re doing what they are learning and ultimately how they’re driving forward the strategy and their mission. They highlight a couple employees who have been called out by other employees in their Slack fist bumps channel, given exceptional work or going above and beyond or living their core values. And so, they’re very carefully designed meetings to make sure they are reinforcing the mission, strategy and culture.
They also run two way communication opportunities. One of those is, every few months, they run a companywide survey and it’s anonymous. and a lot of good quantitative insights coming out of that, but a lot of good, great qualitative as well. With a thousand employees, they get a few thousand comments every single time. And it’s Dave’s habit and intention to read every single one of them.
They’ve focused a lot on AI and released a number of things really focused on seamlessly accelerating their customers’ workflows. For example, when you’re brainstorming together a team, maybe you hit a roadblock and maybe you need more ideas. AI can help to reignite the conversation. Or maybe you did a brainstorm with 10 or 50 or even a hundred people. You’ve probably got hundreds of ideas now. They can help you automatically sort and synthesize those ideas in a process that would have previously taken hours. Or if you have to redesign a process or system, again, rather than starting from a blank canvas, you can use their text to diagram capabilities to go from nothing to something that’s probably 50, 60, 70 % of the way there.
Even though they’ve reached 70 million users today, and work with many of the world’s best companies, he still wants to make Lucid and visual collaboration everywhere? How do they reach those billion users around the world? And the opportunity is there because those similar pain points and use cases are there. Every team needs to brainstorm an idea. Every team needs to plan and replan. Every team needs to understand and sometimes change their processes or their systems and so on. Every team needs to move from idea to reality better and faster. And so that’s Lucid’s focus over the next 12 to 18 months. And for the many years ahead is how do they deliver better and faster on our mission to help teams see and build the future.
